This week’s Marvellous, Electrical explores the Brisbane suburb of West End and its annual Kurilpa Derby, street art, social justice, censorship, and the ways communities get inside your head – for good and ill.
Tag: Brisbane
Giant Robots Need Therapy Too
I say giant: these were the ten-dollar Transformers you can get from K-Mart or Toys ‘R’ Us.
I spent Friday working with third-year Occupational Therapy (OT) students at Griffith University’s School of Allied Health Sciences.
The Kinder Way To Enjoy Hacking
This morning I gave the opening address at the annual conference of ALIA Queensland. The theme this year was “Library Hacks”.
Hacking’s such a funny term, still threatening and techy and futuristic, and yet also so familiar; the stuff of cheesy mid-90s techno-thrillers as much as today’s headlines about Wikileaks and massive DNS attacks.
The New Yorker tells us that the word originates in the house slang of MIT, way back in the 1950s:
The minutes of an April, 1955, meeting of the Tech Model Railroad Club state that “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.”
Taking “hack” to mean tinkering with machines and procedures, not following the manual, I wanted to both hack the keynote and offer attendees an opportunity that wouldn’t exist at M.I.T.
So, we gave them craft materials, tinfoil and paperclips, food decorating kits, a basic electronics set…
…and Kinder Surprise Eggs.
What are you playing at? Digital comics at the Writing Platform
Why would an Aussie library get its designers to build a drag and drop comics website?
Aren’t there already plenty of free comic makers online?
What are you even playing at?
The Writing Platform, a joint venture by Bath Spa University in the UK and QUT in Australia, has my latest piece, on the new remixable comic maker from State Library of Queensland.
Read more about the State Library’s Comic Maker at The Writing Platform.
Marvellous, Electrical and the Black Prince
What does a man have to do to be accepted as a true Australian?
We took a walk through the suburbs to Brisbane’s Toowong Cemetery, exploring the legacy of the 19th century champion boxer – and adopted Aussie – Peter Jackson.
Revenge of the Model Railway Club
I’ll be speaking at ALIA Queensland‘s mini-conference “Library Hacks” in a couple of weeks.
American-style model railway. Photo by Graham Causer, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 Licence
My keynote’s called Revenge of the Model Railway Club and it takes the form of a hands-on workshop. It should be fun – if you’re in the area, you should come!
Library Hacks runs 9am to 5pm at Brisbane Square Library on Wednesday 26th October.
Marvellous, Electrical: Forms of Myth
This week, in Marvellous, Electrical: storytelling, town planning, sculpture, and the smell of first rain on dry stone.
Queensland Fun Palaces 1-2 October
The long-awaited Fun Palaces weekend has arrived.
After months of planning and preparation, communities across Queensland are gearing up to celebrate the arts and sciences in all their forms, partnered with a range of libraries and other institutions.
From the islands of the Torres Strait to the cotton fields of the Darling Downs, plus every library in the city of Brisbane, and of course our own State Library on the city’s South Bank, the first weekend in October will see a swathe of venues open their doors for community-led events celebrating the Fun Palace motto “everyone an artist, everyone a scientist.”
We’ve come along way since Parkes Library hosted Australia’s first ever Fun Palace back in 2014.
I’ll be with the State Library team on Saturday, supporting events including our Scrub Turkey Sessions devised with urban ecologist Professor Darryl Jones of Griffith University.
Wherever you are in the world, check the Fun Palaces website for your nearest event, or join in online with the Comic Maker built for Fun Palaces by the State Library. (We’ve also put the code behind the site online, if you feel like a bit of digital tinkering).
Memory Squad!
What does it mean to have a creative relationship with the past?
How do 21st century institutions manage our cultural heritage?
I asked Jacinta Sutton, Gavin Bannerman, and Laura Daenke of the State Library of Queensland.
Call them the Memory Squad.
Banned Books Week: Love Illustrated, Rona’s War, and Hansard 37
I’m working in a library at the moment, so here’s three quick stories for Banned Books Week, the US-led celebration of our freedom to read what we want.
These all come from the research of the State Library of Queensland’s resident banned book specialist, Joan Bruce. Read more
matt finch / mechanical dolphin 
