Sea Green

Ephemera etc.

Thursday, March 26, 2009

conferring

Ooh went to a conference today and it was borderline punishing. Useful, but exhausting. I tried to stay focused but a combination of factors - low blood sugar due to having forgotten to take healthy snacks for morning tea and avoiding the cake, whirring fan noise, borderline relevant to me talks, disciplinary short hand that went over my head sometimes, too many factoids to follow after a few hours of concentrated listening, and one hard to hear and slightly annoying presenter left me running for the hills sometime after lunch. Which was a shame because I think the better speakers were on this afternoon. Not one to be easily deterred I do plan to trundle back tomorrow and hope for the best. Meanwhile, here is what I scrawled in my notebook when feeling particularly belligerent and unengaged - as an indicator of how I felt about the presenter at the time:

Jug of cream skinned face
with pleased smile
chin jerking backwards
grimace talking
with gash mouth puffing
reedy thin German sounds
voluminous hair, rising upwards
toward laureate heights
forearms jut towards us, with clenched hands
swinging in small circles
flapping, dinosaur, baby bird
hoping to explain
His chin a sail,
raised to the wind, a keel
a stern

Tough audience.


But all was not lost
While sitting and listening, I made up a joke. Yes, truly. And it's borderline terrible, but hey. I was bored.

It goes like this:

"Q. What do you call philosophers wearing frilly shirts, eyeliner and doing robot dancing to eighties synth?
A. The new semantics.

dya get it? dya get it? Semantics! Like romantics! Aaaah hah ha ha ha"

See? Told you it was bad.
Someone mentioned the new semantics in a talk, and I had no idea what that was (or what the old semantics were), and instantly thought of frilly shirts instead.

Mingled
I also mingled. Beelined straight over to someone sitting by themselves and struck up conversation. A well scrubbed, fresh faced, North American man who seems to be doing similar work to what I do - but he is being the interface between policy makers and technical specialists, whereas we often try to be technical expert, interface and policy maker all rolled into one. We had an interesting a passionate discussion about whether entomologists (for example, based on a conference he went to last week) were physically able to give super simple policy advice or whether the languages and needs and drivers of the two groups are so different they can not help but piss each other off and think the other is being unreasonable in their demands. That is a quick sum up, but it was a conversation I found much more interesting than the speaker beforehand.

To do list(en)ing
I did find some great ideas triggered by various aspects of the talks, and jotted down outlines for new publication ideas and reminders for things that had slipped off the immediate to do list. I find conferences especially good for stirring things up, thinking wise - the unexpected aspect I suppose, where it is such a lucky dip what ideas / people/ topics you'll be subjected to, it feels like a random idea generator, which is really useful. That plus the 'nothing else to do but sit and ruminate' which makes day dreaming and ideas noting a legitimate activity for hours on end.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Creative but not all that common

Interesting project here that relates to representation for visual artists, and ownership.

"One for the Commons is an initiative to bring open licensing, such as
Creative Commons, into the fine arts and design community. The idea of
sharing culture, Open Source software, and a DIY ethos of sharing pervade
much of the communities built around computing and creating. Like the music
industry, and soon the publishing industry, the fine arts and design
community has resisted this epistemic shift as a threat to their control
over intellectual property. This resistance relegates the arts and design to
a position outside the cultural transformation that has lead to the rise of
user generated culture, citizen journalists, and TV shows that are built
entirely around reporting on what is hot on the Internet. Fine arts have the
opportunity to embrace this possibility, or suffer even more marginalization
than the culture wars provided.

We are asking living artists to declare at least one image Creative
Commons-Attribution, or Public Domain. These images will be include in a
book published at the end of the year, entitled "400 For the Commons" or
"534 for the Commons" or however many images we generate in that period of
time. The following year a new book will be published."

Monday, March 09, 2009

heart of darkness

Oooh that's dramatic. Not really. I just thought I'd share this pic of a bromeliad in honour of the gardening I did on the weekend. Re potted, unpotted, transplated, worm spotted, got dirt under nails, did happy little dances for the ginger plants which have now sprouted through the soil. Admired sweet potato vine. Sweet talked lemongrass. Resuscitated gardenia. Glad I took advantage of the sun before it got all cold and gloomy thanks to cyclones further north.

Friday, March 06, 2009

Event - hyperbolic crochet workshop


OK so this is tomorrow, which isn't much notice, but how much fun does this sound?

"Come with your crocheting skills to help create part of a hyperbolic crochet coral reef. This workshop will be facilitated by Clair Conroy, Michaela Davies, and Charlotte Haywood of In Stitches. The trio has a background in performance, installation and education.

The project is the first Australian addition to the global crochet coral reef phenomena conceived by sisters Mararet and Christina Wertheimer founders of the US based Institute for Figuring, an organisation dedicated to the poetic and aesthetic dimensions of science and mathematics.

Saturday 7 March
11am-5pm
Meroogal
Cost $35 per person includes lunch and afternoon tea
Bring: Crochet hooks and scrap wool."

See www.bundanon.com.au
or phone (02) 4422 2100 for details

(Image: In Stitches)

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Thursday, March 05, 2009

Diagrams, curry sauce, kittens and coffee

Spent the afternoon discussing phone hook ups and questionnaire design and then had a nebulous discussion about ecosystem function versus biodiversity – which was a better measure of what and which made more sense to focus on - we ended up drawing a multicoloured scribbly systems drawing that we then realized looked a little like a little robot creature so I put some claw hands and legs on him and realized it was definitely time to go home. One of those days when after lunch you think “what?? No nap time?? This is inhumane!”. When your eyes ache and you think ‘really? All the way till home time?’. The morning was super productive though, I followed a colleague’s lead and hunkered down in a café with a laptop and finished something and submitted it – very satisfying way to start the day away from emails and chit chat and interruptions. Then workshopped a paper with a colleague and amazingly we cracked it – the whole thing, ,the structure, the evidence base, the paragraphs even. All the other thinking we’d done before today kind of went out the window but it was also somehow the necessary substep to what we did today. Maybe that was my problem – maybe I peaked too soon. Used up all my brain energy too early in the day.

Went out for lunch today, by myself, wandered around Chinatown looking for the perfect jar of sauce for dinner. A few weeks back I visited Angel and Mr J in Marrickville and found a Vietnamese family run grocer and found the best (seriously the best) chili and basil sauce. No artificial anything, vego and super tasty (but no MSG). Anyway, no such luck today – everything had shrimp or cod or anchovy or MSG or sodium benzoate. Settled on a curry paste instead. Yeas, I know I could just have bought chilis and basil and palm sugar and done some dodgy imitation of it myself, but you know those days when you just want the satisfaction of plonking something out of a jar, and having it take responsibility for transforming the raw chunks of things you’ve chopped up into a meal? Then ate lunch at a nice hole in the wall Japanese place and had tofu don. Tried to read my book but realized by brain was too tired and the noise was intense and distracting, so I settled for eavesdropping on the guys sitting next to me, without looking like I was. I think they were in advertising, and they were young and fresh faced and talking about how the things that they would like never ever compromise in work was their relationships with other people, and the quality of their work. I tried not to smile a pained and winsome smile at their naivety, snort derisively, or raise my eyebrows. They also talked about where to get good bonito, and historical trends in tea cup love in Japan. There are worse conversations to be squished in next too, in the bento box style seating plan.

Didn’t quite do all the things I needed to do this week. Do you ever find that the big important single task that’s going to take 4 hours gets nudged compared to all the other smaller 1 hour tasks? Partly because you keep getting interrupted by meetings and partly because you can’t bear to have all those little ones lurking there and partly because it’s not due just quite yet? Yes I know about the time management doodads, the quadrants of urgent and important. But still. This often happens.

Went to a cool cultural event yesterday with Miss Snapdragon. Was a fundraiser/ showcase of an indigenous art residency program, she got invited through work, I was her plus one. One of the performers was dressed in a silky dress that to clung her and had a tired look on her face and sang in a slightly wavery voice but when she sang I got tingles all down my arms and body, skin tingles. Do you ever get that? I get it only occasionally when someone’s telling me something very sad or personal, or in performance when someone is very convincingly wailing or doing something else particularly raw – usually to do with grief. In those moments when the artifice seems stripped back and the true exposed unprotected self is revealed. That one I never experience from books or in relation to things I read. Body reactions. Another one is that hot flush and then prickly tears feeling that can come from listening to someone else’s painful story. Today on the bus I had an involuntary physical reaction to what I was reading – in the middle of an otherwise benign chapter on aspects of brain structure and function it talked about an experiment where a kitten’s eyelids were sewn shut (sewn shut! A kitten! Yuck!). I grimaced and pulled my head back and turned my head away, as if the stitches and kitten were right in front of me. I only noticed it because I was on a bus and aware that the person next to me might have noticed my sudden movement. I felt offended like I’d witnessed a violation. I had to pause and think about it for a bit before I felt like reading on. Then I kept reading and found out that they ended up unstitching the eyelids but the kitten was then blind in that eye for the rest of its life (demonstrating that certain brain functions require stimulation in infancy to develop). I found my lips go tight and disapproving. Funny old body does its own thing. Funny old me, me the body, I react without running it past my conscious mind.

In the return to work this year I have been trying to be much more aware of my body, and its responses to things. Responses to things like stress, outrage, tiredness, boredom. I have several times noticed my shoulders creeping up tight and thought ‘oh, I’m feeling stressed, look at my shoulders’ and then just relaxed them and spent some time thinking about what I’m feeling stressed about and why it feels stressful. Trying for mindfulness, rather than identifying with the stress, or repressing the feeling (my old response of ‘whatever, feelings schmeelings, just get on with it!’).

And finally, reflections on today – coffee. Had four. Each different, different taste and different place. Black plunger coffee at home with housemates. Café coffee made by someone whose expertise is really in sandwich making, my excuse to claim a table and squirrel myself away in the back corner of a quiet room of the cafeteria. Unexpected kitchen windfall coffee offered and made by colleague while chatting at the coffee machine, taken back and sipped through a meeting. Late afternoon tranquil coffee had in leafy surrounds in the local neighbourhood with peaceful murmurs to muster energy for errands and the walk home. Quite a lot of coffees really, but all lovely.

Monday, March 02, 2009

Briefly Brisbane

Just got back from a quick weekend trip to visit my relatives in sunny Queensland. Occasion was my little brother's 5th birthday and just that I was free that weekend and could. Whole trip totally worth it for even just one of the many funny moments - such as busting him sitting at the kitchen table having carefully removed each of the fancy 'letter' birthday candles from the cake (they spelt out 'happy birthday' all together) and sucked the base clean of chocolate. This before they had been lit, song sung or cake cut and after many previous efforts of us recuing the cakefrom his sneaky poking fingers. (the higgeldy piggeldy lettering of his efforts to pop them back on the cake was esepcially cute. hpbir yahdpayt to you too). Silly games on the trampoline (baby teradactil being born from an egg only to chase each other round in circles was the fave), splashing in water, dragging a wonky old go-cart to the park, reading comic books out loud as bed time stories and having to point to each speech bubble to show where we were up to, hearing serious and detailed explanations of cartoon characters and story lines - all lovely. Great to see my mum too and have cups of tea and chats without feeling like it was a special holiday that needed any extra effort.

Probably one of my quickest trips up there ever - only two days - but greenhousegas emission guilt aside (yes I did offset, but still...) it was good. I figure that the casual drop by visit (as opposed to the long, extended holiday) is what you really miss out on when you live interstate from your family, and is one of the pleasures of sharing life together, so have been thinking that a sprinkling of visits of this kind now and then would be a good idea.