Here’s the ever-thoughtful Justin Hoenke on conference presentations:
We’re thinking about similar things down under…last month, the State Library of Queensland experimented with a Presenterless Workshop format, as part of a wider campaign by science communicator David Robertson, called Beyond Panels.
I’ll be visiting the University of Southern Queensland next month to speak at their USQ Salon series.
If scholarship is a creative and critical conversation about the world, who are “we” having those conversations with?
What opportunities do institutions create for members of the public to have a go at what they do? And to fall in love with what they do?
From fringe scholarship to Fun Palaces, comic books and stone age megaliths to postcolonial controversy, we’ll be looking at what it means to share opportunities for learning, exploration, and adventure with the widest possible range of communities.
You can join me and the USQ team online from 11am AEST on Tuesday 7th June.
I just saw the Running Man Challenge video recorded by police in New Zealand Aotearoa this week.
The video is part of a drive by Kiwi cops to recruit more officers, especially from Maori, Asian, Middle Eastern, Pacific Island, and Indian backgrounds.
I did a double take, because the cop who closes out the routine is Sergeant Sonny Iosefo of South Auckland.
Sonny also starred in our 2013 zombie siege at Tupu Youth Library, as an officer who came in to protect a group of teens from an invasion of the living dead.
My belated Sunday morning read is this piece from the Guardian on London’s Secret Cinema, which blends movie screenings with theatrical experiences and themed activities:
I’m a big fan of participatory live-action storytelling and I’m fascinated by opportunities to blur the line between fiction and “real” experience, creating events where attendees shape the outcome of a story.
I went to a Secret Cinema event a few years back and was pretty disappointed – the set design and costumes were fancy, but the opportunities to get involved in the storytelling were minimal. I’d gone to see Casablanca and while it was cool to sing La Marseillaise at a bunch of actors in Nazi uniform, the rest of the “immersive experience” consisted of overpriced snacks and a “casino” barely worthy of a student union’s James Bond night. The Guardian piece captures the extent to which Secret Cinema events are now more about taking your money than letting you step into the world of a story.
I was expecting hokey gothic from my trip to Brisbane’s Doll Hospital.
Instead I got stories from the Greek Cypriot migration, and some thoughts on how Australian attitudes have changed.
Read more in this week’s Marvellous, Electrical.
Libraries have never been better at their mission of serving as your gateway to all human knowledge and culture…so why are they in greater danger than ever before? And what can we do about it?
Read my latest, for Australia’s The Vocal:
…the nonhuman entities with which we share the world – including, but not limited to, our tools – are active in their own right. They have their own powers, interests, and points of view. And if we engineer them, in various ways, they “engineer” us as well, nudging us to adapt to their demands. Automobiles, computers, and kidney dialysis machines were made to serve particular human needs; but in turn, they also induce human habits and behaviours to change. Nonhuman things must therefore be seen as…active agents with their own intentions and goals, and which affect one another, as well as affecting us…
…Things are creative. And again, one of the great potentialities of science fiction is to illuminate the positive, productive powers of things, of materials, and of technological apparatuses.
– Steven Shaviro, Discognition
This week, Marvellous, Electrical heads out to the fields of Queensland’s Darling Downs for a ride in a modern farming machine.
When you find yourself at the wheel of a self-driving harvester, just who’s steering who?
There have been great Queenslanders and famous Queenslanders, real ones and imaginary, but only one has been to the end of the universe and back.
This week’s Marvellous, Electrical is about Tegan from Doctor Who.
TEGAN: What’s a Zero Room anyway?[…]
NYSSA: I suppose it’s some sort of neutral environment. An isolated space cut off from the rest of the universe.
TEGAN: He should’ve told me that’s what he wanted. I could’ve shown him Brisbane.
Read Marvellous, Electrical: Mouth on Legs here.
I’m pleased to announce that I’ll be a keynote speaker at the New South Wales Public Libraries Association’s conference SWITCH 2016, 22-25 November in Ulladulla, NSW.
Here we are on the shore, on the edge of some adventure. Have we been deserted or let loose?
How do we move away from centralised, broadcast-based models of discussion, creation, and debate in favour of democratised, distributed approaches?
When libraries around the world are fighting to thrive and everyone has co-opted the language of innovation and community engagement, what does great public librarianship look like and how do we do it?
See you in November!
Are there still cultural backwaters in the digital age? Three months in to my year-long residency at the State Library of Queensland, I’ve written about Australian libraries, regional engagement, and digital literature for The Writing Platform.
I’m very interested in the vogue for locative literature, where texts are linked to physical spaces through digital or conventional media. But there are questions still to be asked: not just whether we add a virtual layer of story and literature to physical spaces, but who gets to create the content in that virtual layer.
If writers are having a creative and critical conversation about the world, and in the locative age we are venturing outside of traditional venues, we still need to ask: who are “we” having those conversations with? And how could a simple online comic maker start expanding that circle of storytelling, literary production, and critical discussion?
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 