click here for my current blog

For the next two weeks you can see some of my new work at Kudos Gallery, as an auxiliary to the COFA Annual 2009. It’s a group show, exhibiting the work created by participants in the Porosity Studio this semester. My work is a piece about Shanghai, a computer program written for the in Z80 assembly for the ZX Spectrum 48k. Essentially it is an image slide show, with some simple transitions. The challenging parts were the conversion of the images to something that looks half-decent through the Spectrum’s limited colour palette, and compressing the image data to fit in the ~32k of usable RAM.

I was chuffed to actually install my Speccy in a gallery setting. It really is a beautiful machine, and one which is relatively unknown in Australia (in contrast to its contemporary, the Commodore 64). It’s concerning that a power interruption might cause the program to be lost from memory, and force me to come back in to re-load it from “tape” (ie, a DOS program that emulates a tape), but I think this volatility is part of the charm of the project.

If you’re interested, head down to Napier St in Paddington and check it out. Once the show has closed I will post some documentation and a TAP image of the program so that you may run it in an emulator, or on a real Speccy if you are lucky enough to own one. =)

I more or less finished my degree last year. All the major work is done. I had my grad show. I suppose I can go out there and be an an “artist” now.

However, technically I’m still two electives short of a BFA. I’ve decided to spread those two subjects out over the remainder of this year, in part to allow enough time to concentrate on work, and also to keep my toe in the water at COFA. I’ll still have borrowing privelges with the 4×5″ view camera (with which I produced my most recent work), even if I’m given the lowest possible priority.

For this semester I have enrolled in ‘Sound Construction 2‘, which is taught by Simon Hunt (possibly best-known for his work as Pauline Pantsdown in the mid 90’s). Since my teens I’d wanted to formally study sound and music, and in that sense it’s surprising that it’s taken me this long to do so. This particular class is part of the Master of Digital Media postgraduate degree, and is geared toward people with some experience in sound design.

The assessment is centred around a single free-form personal project, which suits me perfectly. My intention is to produce several ambient, musical works based on field recordings made at the industrial sites featured in my photographic work. To give an idea, some of my inspiration and references are: the music concrete work of Matthew Herbert (whose stunning Opera House performance I saw last month – the new album’s pretty great, too), the ambience of Stars of the Lid, and the tech/glitch aesthetic of Pan Sonic. I’ll post a more fleshed-out run down of my plans around the time my formal ‘proposal’ is due  in a week or so. More than anything I’m looking forward to working with recorded – as opposed to synthesized – sound, for the first time in a while.

Last weekend I flew down to Melbourne to attend Syntax Party 2008, one of the few Australian demoparties. It was a great day, with lots of great work presented. I was struck by amount and quality of it, considering the meagre size of the Australian scene.

On the day, my friend sh0ck and I hacked together a JavaScript demo called ‘Syntaxed’. I roped sh0ck in at the last minute to help out, and was impressed by his “coloured ball effect”, and at how quickly he picked up programming for the canvas element. Our demo ended up placing second in the newschool demo competition! This took me by surprise – I suspect the novelty value of platform itself was what attracted the votes.

You can view the “extreme party version” (ie very hacky and not cross-browser compatible) of the demo here. It will only run under Firefox 3. (This is because it uses Mozilla-specific text drawing routines. I have since written a much faster version of the mandelbrot zoomer, too.)

I’ll definitely be back next year, by which time I hope to have a better demo, and something to enter in the music and graphics compos. Big thanks to all the Syntax Party crew (especially Ript and cTrix) for their efforts.

Lots of stuff happening at once, a lot of long-standing commitments all coming to a close at the same time.

On Tuesday a show called CATAPULT opened at Kudos Gallery in Paddingon, included in which was a piece of my photographic work. It’s an award-based show for emerging artists, designers, and curators, and I was one of the finalists. I was really happy with how my light box worked out for the show – I’ll put some pictures of it up at some stage. The standard of work at the show was really great. A friend of mine won the first prize ($1,500) for her very impressive video piece. (Congrats again Amy!)

I’m having my second light box constructed over the next week, and have some Duratran 8×10″ tests waiting to be collected from the printers. Exciting stuff.

I just finished doing the sound design for a flash game being put together by some friends of mine. It’s all old school, “8-bit” style music and sound effects. I’m told the game should be released any day now, so I’ll be sure to link it when you can. (It’s part of a Facebook app called Coin Cans (or is it Cash Cans?), so you’ll need to have a FB account to play it AFAIK.) It was a fun and challenging project, and the first professional sound design job I’ve done. It’s definitely something I’d like to do more of in the future.

I’ve also been putting the final touches on a Python/Django-based Content Management System for artists, as part of a freelance job for another friend. It’s my first foray into web programming in Python and Django, and what I’ve experienced so far has been quite painless, if not enjoyable. Deployment is a bit of a pain – I wasn’t able to find a Debian package for mod_python, and didn’t much fancy trying to grapple with some documented MySQL concurrency weirdness between mod_python and mod_php – I ended up using FastCGI, which is “okay, I guess.”

I spend a lot of time writing JavaScript these days, so I was a bit irked by Python’s rigidity at times, but it certainly beats the hell out of PHP (plus I definitely prefer the Python syntax over JS).

Incidentally, I felt I needed to put up some sort of ‘artist’ web site, so I have put up something modest at andrewgerrand.com for the time being. I may or may not give it a bit of an overhaul before the COFA Annual at the end of next month.

I’m reading Italo Calvino’s If on a winter’s night a traveller at the moment, and it is incredible. (Thanks Viv!)

If you didn’t catch on from my end-of-semester update a few months ago, I’ve returned to phtographing industrial landscapes this year. The reasons for this are simple, really. I have always been attracted to the oft-overlooked and much maligned structures that allow us to live the way we do. It has been a real treat for me to spend so much time in and around cargo and air ports, oil refineries, and chemical treatment plants. While waiting for the right light (and most of my time is spent waiting), I like to scrutinise the various systems and machinery, trying to discern – with my limited knowledge of industrial engineering – what it is that they do, and why.

I am shooting on a Toyo View 4×5″ large format camera on FujiChrome Provia slide film. This medium yields some technically spectacular results in terms of detail and colour reproduction. It is a slow process, largely because there are many ways in which you can make mistakes. The film must be loaded manually in complete darkness, and the camera itself requires a great deal of attention in setting it up for a shot. (One can rotate and move the lens and back plate each in five ways.) You do get faster at it with practice, but I’m enjoying the fact that there’s no way I can take more than three or four shots on any particular outing. (Often I’ll just shoot two in an afternoon.) This is a huge leap from the Hasselblad 6×6cm medium format, which allows you 12 frames per roll, and an uninterrupted view of what you’re shooting before pressing the shutter. (To take a shot on the Toyo you must load the film, which then obscures the ground glass that is your “viewfinder”.) All this makes you put a lot more thought into each shot.

This semester I will complete my major studies in Photomedia, which means I will be part of the COFA Annual art exhibition. For the show (and for my assessment), I will be having two or three of my photographs printed as Duratrans and mounted in custom-built light boxes. This is like those ads that you see in bus shelters, except printed at much higher quality (and hopefully not defaced by graffiti). Today I sent the above photo to the printers, and commissioned a signmaker to build the lightbox. With luck they will be ready by next Wednesday. I’m both excited and anxious to see how it all turns out.

The COFA Annual opens on Wednesday the 26th of November, and will only be open for four days (closing in the afternoon on Sunday the 30th). This is because COFA is being drastically redeveloped over the summer and most of next year.  I have a lot more to say about this (traditionally the show is open for several weeks), but I will save it until I have time to write a fair account of my experience at art school. If you are in Sydney during this time then I encourage you to come down to Paddington to see the show.

And now, for my biannual end-of-semester summary. I have finished everything now, except I have an exam for my Compilers subject at the end of the month, and I am presenting my Photography work on Wednesday next week.

For my major work I have been taking photographs of industrial areas, particularly those related to supply of resources. I spent a lot of time trudging around in the bushes that surround the fences that keep people like me out of those sort of places, so I ended up taking a lot of photos of them, too. Below are the four that I’ve had lambda-printed to 70 x 70cm, and will present next week.

In unrelated news, I have installed OS X on my Core 2 Duo-based PC and it all seems to be running quite well. (It is much faster in Photoshop when using large files – it must be better at managing memory.) If it continues to perform well, I’ll nuke my Windows XP partition and pick up a couple more 500gb drives and set up an ZFS-based file store on this machine.

The only downside so far is that my external audio interface (ESI QuataFire 610) is unsupported. I think I’d rather get a new interface than keep running XP, though. Anyone have any suggestions?