Archive

I tried to get this finished before the end of the decade, but life intervened. And, you’ve probably already heard that Australia is on fire (and is likely to be for a while) and I’m bereft about our (lack of) national leadership. So here it is, a week late. If you’re in Australia at the moment, then think of it as distraction.

This one is in the spirit of those slightly odd summary letters that (mostly) Americans write and send out to their friends at the end of the year. I’ve done them every few years as a way of keeping track of things, and for later reflection.

As such it has fewer links than normal but will shortly be followed by Episode 34 in which the newsletter returns to normal service - commentary and hyperlinks.

Hello from a wet and cold Melbourne. It’s been a busy few weeks and thinking space has been compromised. However …

Continuing a thought from the last email on preservation, I’ve been enjoying The Bells of Old Tokyo (2019), a book that doubles as a history of how the Japanese have conceived of ‘time’, and also as an exploration of Tokyo’s different temples and suburban divisions and their histories. This exploration takes author Anna Sherman in search of the temple bells that used to, and sometimes still, ring out across different areas of Tokyo. At one point, she writes,

I was going to really try not to write about machine learning in this email series.

So I will keep it short. Recently there’s been a series of amusing micro-projects doing the rounds using nVidia’s StyleGAN and, well, museum people keep making a fuss about machine learning as if it is some magical thing.

This morning I got up at 430am to catch a 6am flight for a dental appointment in another city. Onboard that flight was where most of this was written. I’m rarely up to see the sunrise these days - the Sunday mornings marvelling at the sunrise from a dusty warehouse or forest clearing surrounded by massive speaker stacks and equally dusty people are a long lost memory.  Dental health matters, kids - but you don’t realize this until it’s too late. (Also, politicians, publicly funded dental health would save huge future public costs in chronic illness and disease).

I was out at at Monash this week and one of the academics asked me about whether ‘visitors’ is actually the right term for people who come to museums.

Back to a slightly longer piece this week. This one leads off in a number of directions and somehow avoids talking about copyright.

If you own a Playstation 4 then undoubtedly you’ve played (2016). A ‘Triple A’ big budget adventure celebrating pretty much cliche of both action adventure movies platform videogames, is a grand linear story of hunting pirate treasure. Not just any pirate’s treasure but the fabled pirate colony of ‘Libertalia’. In the game, by the time you get there, the pirates are long gone having argued amongst themselves and killed each other. Libertalia, beyond the rendered world of Uncharted, was for a long time rumoured to have actually been a place existing as a multi-racial, self-governed colony established by late 17th century pirates somewhere in Madagascar.

[This is the ‘permanent’ post - email subscribers get posts as they come out but not all posts will hang around online once they’ve been emailed. So far - and as of December 2019 - I’ve sent out thirty two emails - about 60,000 words, which are now only visible to patrons. So if you want to read future emails, sign up or subscribe to become a patron!]

Kung hei fat choi!

Just over a decade ago I started getting interested in the idea of ‘magic’ again - as well as its connection to ‘curiosity’. This interest had a combination of triggers - mostly caring for my small children and their attendant reading needs, and in so doing, discovering a box of my old how-to magic books from my childhood. Around the same time there was a resurgence of films set in and around the figure of the theatrical magician and magic show/performance. Christopher Nolan’s (2006) () which came out the same year as another (2006) are indicative of that resurgence. [I’m not linking to the trailer for because it does a real disservice to what is an adequate movie]. These were followed by their modern equivalent - the heist series (2013-), new TV magicians and the arrival of the YouTube magician.

I do like cats. But perhaps not a bathroom full of four kittens and a mother. That’s what the last few days have been thanks to the local cat rescue. Fortunately for my allergies, they go back on Friday.

Today’s email which is one of several that will be about music - which then has wide application to other fields from design to museums.

This one is about paper, books, and interfaces - the first of a few on this topic.

Lucie Paterson and I recently finished our academic paper for Museums and the Web. It isn’t online yet which is a shame - they usually go live a few weeks before the conference - because its about making a paper map that came to life inside an exhibition. At least you can read Lucie’s which formed the seed of it. MW is an annual conference that takes place in North America - my first one was way back in 2005 and it wasn’t until my second in 2007 that it became an annual fixture in my work calendar for ten consecutive years. I met so many good people at MW that each year it became as much about catching up with friends, schemeing new projects, as it was about being exposed to new ideas. This year is my first one since I moved back to Australia. For the last three years I’ve been sending other team members instead - just as it was when my former bosses made it possible for me to go. One of the notable things about MW was that every year it would collate it’s ‘best’ submissions into a printed book that came included with conference registration. Most of us never looked at the book but it would sit beside our desks for other people to come past and leaf through. It had an presence.

This missive is full of asides. Think of them as optional exit ramps off the motorway. The journey is the purpose, right?

So at the end of the last email I mentioned the excellent The Sound of Belgium documentary that is streaming (free) on Boiler Room’s . One of the key things that the documentary points out about Belgium is the network of motorways that has been at the heart of its club scene since the 1930s. Built with the proceeds of colonial conquest which continued in full view well into the 20th century - the horror of the genocidal Belgian pillaging of the Congo - these motorways have been the literal arteries transporting clubbers, and performers - jazz, soul, funk and later acid house, new beat, and rave - between venues.

One of the biggest changes moving from New York City to Melbourne at the end of 2015 wasn't the weather, nor the lack of subways, nor my kids current inability to find a satisfactory bagel. It was the ‘loss’ of Amazon Prime. The constant stream of consumer items delivered within 48 hours to your door by delivery staff paid as ‘independent contractors’ and thus not obliged to be paid a poorly enforced ‘minimum wage’. In fact on East 90th St where I lived - a short walk from Cooper Hewitt where I then worked - the street was often blocked by delivery trucks, full to the brim with Amazon parcels. And free returns (not all of which get resold). It is hard to imagine that it is cheaper to get light bulbs delivered from half way across the USA, than it was to walk to the hardware store one block away - but it was. Of course the full cost of those cheap light bulbs, once you include all of what economists call ‘externalities’, was far more.

Delivered light bulbs be cheaper.

Number 2 is out quicker than expected. Thanks to everyone who emailed me private comments on the last missive. I really liked that. Writing is feeling a bit easier this week. But no promises for next week. Perhaps the searing heat has loosened my typing muscles.

Earlier this week K and I made the most of a child-free week and headed off to see some music. It is a bit rare these days that we go by ourselves - we usually bring the kids because a) they are plenty old enough, b) it is good for them to be exposed to live music, and c) it is often equivalent or cheaper to buy tickets for them instead of a babysitter.

Well, hello everyone.

I’m a little shocked at how quick the take-up to this email thing has been. Watching the subscriptions come in over the past 48 hours has been fascinating and I’m perhaps a little too well aware of who is going to be reading this! Friends from all walks of life have come out of the woodwork - many of whom have given up on the once utopian promise of ‘connected social networking services’ as we used to quaintly call them. Try ‘surveillance capitalism’ instead now. Anyway, I’m trying not to let that get in the way of the original intention of this format - to be able to write in a more freeform, looser way, and about a range of topics that might seem, at first, unconnected. That, and liberal use of Oxford commas.

I’m experimenting with only text and not embedding videos or images. I encourage you to click the hyperlinks rather than skip past them as everyone usually does. I’m old enough to still feel there is life left in the notion of hypertext.

If you’ve followed my writing over the past 15 years or so, you might have noticed that its become a little sparser and more irregular. Scattered across several parts of the internet too. The short form ideas that I used to blog about have become reduced to tweets, or just not shared at all. At the same time the sheer volume and diversity of things that I have to talk about has vastly increased — my work in museums has grown and broadened, my music and art experiences similarly. And, as an ageing parent, there are all sorts of other new things I didn’t know I cared about too.

In my ‘unpublished drafts’ lie a stack of half written pieces — moments that still carry weight and meaning but are too long for social media but too unformulated for a fullscale article.

So, following the lead of some friends, I’m trying a new thing — a return to a semi-regular email newsletter. 

Sometimes this will be — a short essay; a series of thoughts about museums, music, art, life; a playlist; a set of links. And sometimes all of the above.