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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.

A few days ago I wrote a Python script to cull old entries from my Twitter timeline. I have now released it: It’s called twexpire. It is linked from my new projects page.

Because dichro told me to.

Instructions:
Take a picture of yourself right now.
Don’t change your clothes, don’t fix your hair – just take a picture.
Post that picture with NO editing.
Post these instructions with the picture. 

Most boring blog post ever.

Warp Records has just released the latest Squarepusher album through their award-winning mp3 store, Bleep. (click this link to go straight to the album) Warp have been releasing their artists’ music in this way for years, but this is the first mp3 release I’ve bought that felt like more than just a rip of a CD, for these reasons:

• It’s been released in this format well in advance of the CD/Vinyl releases (which are due on October 27th),
• The package contains a beautifully produced four-page PDF in traditional “album sleeve” style (complete with Squarepusher’s little story as to how he came to produce the album),
• Each of the (320kbit, DRM-free) mp3s contains its own unique variation on the cover art (as the album plays on my iPhone I can see the visual progression).

With a package like this, I feel as if I’m getting a well formed product,as opposed to an afterthought. The album stands out amongst the others on my mp3 player like a shiny, perfectly formed jewel. If other record companies would put this much care into their mp3 releases, I would spend a great deal more on music online.

Again, kudos to Bleep’s ordering system. It makes purchasing music just as easy as pirating it. I did actually download the album via a BitTorrent community before purchasing it through Bleep. The only advantage there was the sustained download rate of 1mb/sec, about 10x faster than Bleep’s apparent 100kb/sec limit. I’m not sure why they do that, and it can be frustrating when you’ve bought a few albums at once and have to wait an hour for them to download. The faster I get the product, the more satisfied I will be with my purchase. Perhaps it’s a legacy decision from when they launched the store in 2004. 4 years later, our pipes are fatter and bandwidth is cheaper than ever. Fix the speed issues, Bleep, and you’re likely to get more custom from me.

As for the cover art variations for each track, I can’t help but think how fitting this would be for Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II which uses photographs in place of track names in the liner notes. I’ll have to get my copy scanned sometime. (Or perhaps Warp will do it and re-release it through Bleep, and I’ll buy the album again out of sheer laziness.)

Oh, yeah, and as for the actual music: Not bad. There’s a couple of stormers on there. It has the “live” instrumentation of his Hard Normal Daddy-era work with the production of Ultravisitor and Hello Everything. I’m sure it’ll grow on me.

On Saturday afternoon I dropped in on StartupCamp in Sydney. It was a hive of activity, and I quickly found that one of the teams could use my JavaScript skills. By 9pm that evening, we had created LinkViz.com, a unique way of visualising and navigating the sites that people are talking about on Twitter and other social networks: 

It is still very much in beta form, and no doubt there are a few bugs here and there, but we have plenty of exciting functionality planned so please keep an eye on it.

The other two teams also produced some very impressive projects:

TrafficHawk.com.au is a useful Google Maps mashup that displays realtime traffic condition information over a map of Sydney.

uT.ag is a unique URL shortening service that allows bloggers and others to monetise the links they share around.

The quality and maturity of these projects is truly astounding given they were thrown together in much less than 48 hours.

A big thanks to Bart and Kim from Tjoos.com for their excellent work in organising the event. Also a big thanks to my teammate (and now business partner!) Ian Naylor for graciously hosting us at GeekDom.

There’s another StartupCamp happening in January next year. If you’re looking for enthusiastic, talented people to embark on an exciting project, I advise you to sign up. I’ll be there.

I don’t actually expect you to be excited, but I am at least. I’m writing the new backend for this site in Python, using CherryPy as a FastCGI wrapper and request handler, and Cheetah as a template engine. Python is awesome. As you can see from the screenshot, I will be aggregating my various “net presences” into the one site, and providing a single RSS feed for everything “me”.

I’m getting really sick of Wordpress being so crap. I am in the process of returning to my roots, and building my own web site from scratch. This will hopefully include my entire Flickr back archive (as I am tired of Flickr also), and essentially consolidate my online presence into the one site.

With luck this will also make it easier to just post one-liners or put up stuff I’ve been working on, so expect more content.

All the best.

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?

This photograph, taken by the Mars Exploration Rover a couple of years ago, just came to my attention. I find it absolutely amazing on so many levels. That we have been able to send a remote-controllable robot to another world is incredible. That it should send back such beautifully composed images is unexpected to say the least.