verge arts festival

I’m blog­ging this as I sit just inside the glass wall of the East­ern Avenue com­plex, watch­ing the con­stant stream of people walk­ing past, both inside the build­ing, and out­side in the wintry con­di­tions, hands in pock­ets, clutch­ing a folder tightly, heads together, intensely gos­sip­ing. I’m like a fly in the corner, observing the move­ments of people as they go about their busi­ness at the uni­ver­sity. If only they’d just look up slightly…

I sus­pect that the loc­a­tion of the SUITS Com­puter Art­work Exhib­i­tion 2007, as part of the Uni­ver­sity of Sydney Union’s Verge Arts Fest­ival, while not dis­astrous, could be bet­ter. We had ori­gin­ally inten­ded for them to be hung up with fish­ing wire from the air con­di­tion­ing grate in the ceil­ing, but the build­ing man­ager told the fest­ival con­veners that that wasn’t allowed (des­pite their earlier assur­ances). We settled for sticky-​​taping it to the glass wall instead, which also meant that we had to have them higher up to deter van­dals and thieves.

So far, I’d say about 1 per­son in every 50 who walks past takes a glance upwards, pauses in moment­ary reflec­tion, and then con­tin­ues on their way. Part of the prob­lem is that because of the glare from the glass, if you’re walk­ing from the dir­ec­tion of Fisher, you won’t actu­ally notice that there’s any­thing com­ing up. But of course, as the exhib­i­tion coordin­ator, I am liable to over-​​estimate the beauty of the thing that I have created.

Finally, I’d like to pub­licly thank Edmund for his assist­ance in the pre­par­a­tion of the art­works, and Bal­int for his con­tri­bu­tion of his stun­ning particle sim­u­la­tion works.

Here are the PDF ver­sions of the files, if you’re too lazy to head over to see it for your­self (warn­ing: some of these files are BIG)

1. Inside: title, Out­side: auto­mata
2. Inside: balint-​​2, Out­side: dielec­tric
3. Inside: inter­net, Out­side: balint-​​3
4. Inside: apophysis-​​2, Out­side: apophysis-​​1
5. Inside: balint-​​1, Out­side: lorenz

The Microsoft Pub­lisher files can also be found here.

Update: I’ve uploaded them to my gal­lery as well.