Category : ArtStart Diary

A frustrating week of trying to get the computer motherboards from the local repair guy. After multiple trips around the block to his shop, the effort finally netted a grand total of 3. I need to find a better and more efficient way of doing this, though I suspect going to the computer shops is still going to be the way to get the materials I need.

With a little over 2 months left to complete the work, I think I’m going to stop working on Surfing The Deathline 4 for a bit, and get the UWS sculpture out of the way, at least so that I’m not worrying about it.

So the plan for now is:

1. Get Circuit boards.
2. Mock up the sculpture, possibly in cardboard or foamcore.
3. Build the armature.
4. Locate braided hose.
5. Finish construction.

Once that’s done, I’m thinking that I’ll start releasing an episode of Surfing The Deathline every month, which would give me 3 months to get book 4 finished, and take me through to the end of the ArtStart grant.

The other big news is that I’m going to New Zealand  in April for 3 days, to visit Gibbs Farm, one of the largest private outdoor sculpture collections in the world.

A productive week. Work has continued on Surfing The Deathline book 4, and I put a submission in to Allen & Unwin to publish a print version of The Metaning.

Unfortunately, the recycling company I was talking to about getting computer motherboards didn’t have any available, however my local computer repair shop does have some. So, I’m going to be able to pick a bunch up from him next week. I also hauled all my leftover boards up from the garage, and was shocked at the treasure trove I forgot I had. In addition to a bunch of dark green, I’ve got a couple of gold, some orangish-black with gold tracery, and 4 in iridescent pinkish-purple, as well as a whole bunch of little cards. I also managed to snag a couple of metres of heavy duty multi-strand solid core copper wire, which I’ll be able to use for the anchors at the base of the pipes making up the tree.

It’s like christmas. So, theres a bunch of cleaning to do on them, and I can start with arranging to figure out the basic shape for the work.

Progress made this week on the eWaste issue. I may have a line with a supplier who asked me to send them a list of what I needed, and they would see what was possible up the line. Hopefully that’ll yield something.

Most of the week has been spent on Surfing The Deathine cleanups on the large roughs, which has seen a lot of progress after laying fallow for ages.

I got most of the things done I had planned for this week, though sadly not with the results I’d hoped.

My source for eWaste has gotten out of that line of business, and it seems there are going to be some difficulties in finding a reliable supply for the UWS Sculpture exhibition piece. The national and state libraries turned out to be dead ends regarding exhibiting The Metaning, so I may have to start thinking of alternate options, which is problematic given the non-saleability of the works. I put in a request for a quote for a print version of The Metaning, and if it turns out to be manageable, there’s always the option of doing a short fine-art print run, and maybe thinking of doing SupaNova Sydney.

I didn’t get around to checking for sponsorships for SbtS, but to make up, I got a bunch of drawing done on Surfing The Deathline book 4. I’m going to put my nose to the grindstone on this, and concentrate on getting this done before losing sleep on publicising The Metaning.

Gear update, I bought a Copper Hill camera cleaning kit, to try to deal with the dust spots which have developed again on my Nikon D800 when I put the aperture up above f12.

It’s been a quiet week:

• my review for an iPad case went up online
• I started publicising The Metaning via twitter. The results were pretty good insofar as the Australia Council retweeted the announcement, and then it was retweeted again by another couple of organisations, with 20,000 odd followers in total. On the downside, there’s only been a couple of sales total, which has been a tad demoralising.

The plan for next week is to gear up for all the major events for 2014:

• Contact my e-waste provider, to source materials for the UWS exhibition.
• Contact steel and perspex providers to source materials for Sculpture By The Sea.
• Contact National Library and NSW State Library about exhibiting The Metaning.
• Obtain printing quotes for doing a short run of The Metaning as a large format premium print book.

The week was mostly spent on the road trip from Brisbane to Sydney, however before leaving I put the iPad through its paces in building a small single page website for The Metaning. The app I used was Textastic, which has both HTML editing and FTP uploading built in. It’s a pretty nice piece of work. Having bought quite a few productivity apps for iPad of late, I have to say that the pricing structure of under $10 makes the “full fledged” mac apps seem vastly overpriced.

It’s the Xmas / new year break, and I’ve done a road trip from Sydney to Noosa. Key to this was adopting a new bit of software for password management – 1password from Agilebits. This package plugs a major hole in the MacOS X / iOS ecosystem, namely the lack of a mobile version of the Mac’s Keychain Access app. While iCloud passwords seems to be the solution Apple is offering, it doesn’t address all the multitude of secure things you need to have with you, that aren’t used via a web browser.

The big news from this week, is that The Metaning is now available on the iTunes / iBooks stores. This was one of my major goals for the ArtStart year, and so it’s nice to be able to check that off the list in the final days of the first half of the grant.

This week has seen yet another momentous achievement – The Metaning has been submitted to the iBookstore. Hopefully it’ll be approved before the end of the year.

The iPad keyboard cover I was sent to review arrived, but not before a warehouse mess up sent me someone else’s order, a whole bunch of samsung accessories. Then, a day or so later, another package arrived with the actual review unit.

The week ended with a road trip from Sydney to Brisbane for the Xmas break. Next week will be dedicated to reviews of that keyboard.

A momentous week this one. My first book has gone live on the iTunes Store. This was a major achievement in terms of my ArtStart year, and means I’ve got the entire process bedded down. The Metaning ebook version continues to develop, with just a little fine tuning required to get it finished.

Another interesting occurrence this week – I was contacted out of the blue by an Australian online tablet & phone accessory company enquiring if I was interested in doing reviews of their products. There’s a bit of a bonus in that I get to keep whatever I’m reviewing, but seemingly only need to link to them, rather than putting it on their website. I’ve got drafts for pretty scathing reviews of a number of products I use, being a fairly critical person, but never quite finished them. This might give me a more solid goal to work towards, and make the other reviews more relevant and publishable.

This week saw processing of all The Metaning pages – adding scanned text boxes, tweaking rotation of the images, and setting up the exporting process to build the final retina quality images.

The originals of these are around 50mb out of the camera, and then converted to photoshop files at full size, with text boxes added, they come in at a round 450mb, per page. It’s a lot of process to set up, but once done the actual construction of the ePub is more or less automated.

I’m still playing the waiting game on the Nervous Spaces ePub, but hopefully that will be sorted soon. Once this is out of the way, I can get the final part of Surfing The Deathline done, and then the bulk of the final half of my grant year will be dedicated to sculpture.