Main : Timeline

There’s something to these house-at-night works that I’m still trying to settle my mind upon. It’s a tension between how utterly tranquil the image is, and the fact you’re viewing the outside of a house, in which someone is asleep, blissfully unaware of the photographer outside.

Some images from Kurobe Gorge.

Quiet night in Unazukionsen.

Shin-Kurobe Station, intersecting with Kurobe-Unazukionsen Station. Awaiting a train up the valley on the Toyama Chiho Railway, to Unazukionsen.

Itoigawa Staton, Itoigawa. Transitioning from a single-car train to the elevated Hokuriku-Shinkansen line, before proceeding to Kurobe-Unazukionsen Station.

Naoetsu Station skybridge, after leaving an intercity train to board a coastal village connection with the Echigo Tokimeki Railway Nihonkai-Hisui Line, on a single-car train to Itoigawa Staton in Omachi.

These amazing little trains were courtesy of typhoons, which had flooded the Shinkansen holding yards, and their new trains, servicing a leg of our journey.

My latest residency project with Noosa Library Service.

The overall goal was to get multiple artists, starting with me, to recreate their favourite places in Noosa, purely from memory. Each artist will create the location within Virtual Reality, using an application called Tilt Brush, from Google.

Once the places were all created, the goal is to incorporate all of them into a single read-only VR environment, which will have its default state as a 3D topographical map of Noosa.

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Creation of a real location (on New Year’s Eve), entirely from memory, for my Noosa Mnemonic project. VR allows one to work at 1:1 scale, to recreate places at the size you remember them being, relative to your own body.

A year in retrospect. It’s been all over the place – a year in which there was no silver lining that couldn’t tarnish.

The big events of the year, the project for Rent, my VR residency with the library, and the death of my father, all in quick succession in the first half of the year, cast a pall over the second half.

In technology, this was the year in which everything broke.

I came into the year with a Mac that could post directly to Facebook from its share sheet, and with third-party Twitter clients that made Twitter a truly powerful platform for connectivity, and with Twitter able to post directly to my Facebook feed.

By the end of the year, my Mac couldn’t post directly to Facebook, and neither could my Twitter account. My third-party Twitter apps were smoking ruins of their former selves, and the best outlet I had to connect to the outside world from my regional town, had been effectively ruined.

I started on a TIG welding course, and got a few weeks in, before it became apparent that being the one TIG student in a MIG class, that was being run without any semblance of professionalism, meant I spent half a 3 hour class waiting for my non-working machine (which I had told the tutor about at the beginning of the class), and ended up in a shouting match with the tutor, who tried to blame me for not spending hours chasing him around an OH&S-unsafe workshop to get him to come fix my machine.

I build some nestled table workbenches for my room, with the hope they’d be something I could show my father, that he might get some joy seeing me making. But he died from his cancer while I was in the process, and so I don’t know if he ever really saw them.

I built a huge sculpture that went on stage at QPAC. It was a project from hell, marked primarily by a department lead who wanted me for my talent, but didn’t credit me with any actual expertise to know what I was doing when it came to the technical side of things, and so didn’t listen to my specific technical demands. She alternated between being angry that I wan’t keeping her in the loop, and complaining that I was overwhelming her with pointless information when I actually tried to tell the the specific information that informed my technical requirements for what I needed the production to provide, and what the consequences of choices I needed her to make would be.

I had to do a huge cleanout at my father’s house in victoria, to get it on the market to sell. What a headfuck of a shitshow.

I did my first VR residency, learning about sculpting in VR, and 3D printing. The tools demonstrate great potential, but are also not fully baked.

My public outreach roles for the library continued – It’s a fun passtime.

I worked on a new project for the library, constructing racing gates and obstacles for their drone racing programme. It was fun, but the work was so intense, the deadlines so tight, the stress so high, that I caused my health to fuck up again, and gave myself some (so far) permanent neurological damage in my spine, with phantom sensation as a result.

All in all, not a great year.