The Edge in partnership with Portable and the Asia Pacific Design Library is proud to present Frank Chimero, one of America’s most influential thinkers in the design industry.

Based in New York, Frank Chimero is one of America’s preeminent thought leaders on design theory, practice and culture. He has worked as a designer, illustrator and strategist for brands such as the New York Times, Facebook and WIRED and his recent book The Shape of Design explores the notion that logic may not always to be the best way to solve design problems. His work often employs symbolism, concepts and storytelling simultaneously, creating pieces that both delight and provoke thought.

Frank will explore and reveal his innate understanding of design and its role within larger systems, discussing the patterns of good design, choices that we make in design and how it can influence change.

The series is suited to creative professionals working within a wide variety of design related industries including graphic design, web design, fashion, technology and industrial design. It consists of a keynote presentation, Q&A, along with networking drinks after the event.

When: 3-5:30pm, 5 Jun
Where: The Edge, State Library of Queensland
Cost: $85 conc./$95 adult +BF
Bookings: Online

Svenja Kratz – 15 May
Svenja Kratz is an interdisciplinary artist interested in the intersections and creative possibilities within art and science. Based in Brisbane, for the past three years she has produced an evolving series of exhibitions collectively titled The Absence of Alice. Her work maps the creative evolution and movement of this initial project into other areas of applied biology, including genetic engineering, and primary culture of human and fetal calf cells. She is currently completing a PhD in bio-media art, looking at of cell and tissue cultures at QUT in a creative partnership between the Creative Industries Faculty and Institute of Health and Biomedical Innovation (IHBI).
Can’t make it? Stream this session live online with Kondoot.

This century will we genetically modify food, pets, our children, ourselves? Information and sharing information is reaching immense speeds and saturation, but what happens to that grey area between public and private?  When are our bodies our own, and when are we the property of the global social corpus? Living in times where we rarely put ourselves in situations where we need to trust each other, and in most cases given more reason to distrust, will you trust me with your most intimate material? Your DNA? ONE cannot exist without you.

ONE is my durational performance, which I will be continuing while in residence at The Edge from April to June 2012.

Each week there will be performance times, all free, if you would like to come and participate in the work. Thanks to the The Edge, ONE will move into phase two of this work – the imaging of the DNA. There will be open studios and opportunities to chat and imagine what will evenuate into a bio-portrait of one million  people.

Keep your eyes peeled for exact times, locations and  opportunities to participate in this project. ONE’s progress will be posted on The Edge website and also the ONE site.

ONE – first performed on September 8, 2011 presented by  Brisbane Festival UNDER THE RADAR

Rebecca Cunningham - photo by Alyssa Lee Wilmott

$10 000 commission: Ben Hamley
Ben’s project, The Cloud, centres on the provocation, what if you could curate serendipity and control context? Ben’s installation is an experiment in cognitive psychology, memory, and place making that combines brain-computer interaction technology, contextually responsive environments and biomimicry to create a physical ‘cloud’ in the entrance of The Edge that will capture, remember and display memories of visitors.

$3000 commission: Kati Eyles and Kate Geck
Kate and Kati’s animated digital mural will embody the energy, vibrancy and potential of The Edge. This colourful, animated mural has both non digital and digital media and is designed to welcome The Edge users and to engage them in creating content for their space. Along the walls there will be a series of lenticular printed cards shimmering waves of colour and digital photo frames playing animated GIFs.

$150 commission: Erin Evanochko
Erin’s project, The Monster, has been inspired by the feelings of fear, despair and terror you can feel when faced with a monster and the thought of using the Adobe Production and Design Suite for the first time. Exploring this theme, she will create a series of works combining hand drawn elements with animations create in After Effects and Photoshop, make digital wallpaper for spaces around The Edge.

Keep an eye out over the next couple of months as these projects start to pop up around our building.

Joining us in the office for the next couple of weeks is Sandra Carluccio. She is pulling together an interactive, locative theatre piece for the Anywhere Theatre Festival, and I sat down with her to learn a little more about it.

Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?
I am a Brisbane based emerging performance artist. I studied Performance Studies at QUT with honours and graduated in 2010. This is around when I began my interest in outdoor, participatory, performance journeys. My first contact with this was from working as an artist’s assistant/audience guide with Melbourne based company One Step At A Time Like This and their piece called en route in 2010. Then I saved my money to complete an internship with world-renowned digital artists Blast Theory in Brighton for a few months last year. This year I was lucky enough to receive a JUMP mentorship to make my own participatory, technology and urban space driven performance piece and get some guidance from my chosen mentor, Steve Bull from the PVI Collective in Perth. The piece is titled This is Kansas City and will have its first public showing at the Anywhere Theatre Festival May 17-19.

How did you get involved with JUMP mentoring?
After getting some experience with more advanced artists, I decided it was time I put my learning into a consolidated project. I also wanted an outside eye to assist with the artistic shaping of the performance. I searched for companies with similar objectives to mine and got an idea of who to choose as a mentor. I was lucky enough to meet someone during my internship in the UK who was on the board of my mentor’s company – The PVI Collective, so she put me in contact with them. I approached Steve and put together an application of what I wanted to achieve with through the program.  With some of the grant money I took a short residency in March in the CIA studios to work on my piece and have daily contact with my mentor. As Steve lives in Perth we do a lot of remote mentorship. The Youth Arts Queensland team, who I seek support from for my state, help with marketing and organise other career development opportunities. The end result is really up to you though.

How did you become interested in performance?
Throughout highschool, Drama class was always a place where I expressed opinions, feelings, personal and meaningful stories, while at the same time having fun.  From then until now, my research, teachers, peers, and other artists have radically changed the way I view and create performances.

How did you end up at The Edge?
I approached Daniel Flood last year when I was still in the UK about possibly having some support for a performance I was creating when I returned home. The concept was driven by an interest in using mobile technology so The Edge seemed like the most appropriate place to put my feelers out.  At the start of this year when I was back in Australia,  I met with Daniel and explained that I wanted to do a location triggered performance journey with mobile technology. He suggested two wonderful people I should talk to, that were around on a Thursday night at an event called Hack The Evening. I met Luke Atherton, and Clinton Freeman (now a Catalyst at The Edge) and have been hanging out at The Edge and working with them since.

Tell us a little more about your show and what makes it different?
This is Kansas City asks participants to enter an augmented reality where a series of phone calls to their mobile phone direct their body, gaze, and imagination around the cultural centre to unravel the story of a criminal only known as The Monster. I would call this piece a performance experience. There are no performers, although audience members who opt to come to the show act as performers by carrying out actions, being involved in the fiction, and also witness the urban space around them with a heightened engagement. The piece guides solo participants through two voices, The Authorities (the voice of the city) and The Monster (the voice of the River, also known as a criminal) who pose moral obstacles, and deliver their versions of reality of Kansas City. The voices were chosen to personify natural, political, cultural, and social events that have occurred in Brisbane’s recent landscape of history.

A performance experience on a mobile phone is not a new form, but it is different because this fiction is my interpretation of this city and its story on a heightened level. I hope that by participants experiencing this story they will take away a new perspective of this city, either physically or imaginatively.

How did you go about pulling together the technology used in the show?
I had a vision, and then I asked the hackers Luke and Clinton to realise this vision. I had them create the location based trigger system for mobile devices. The program works by using the GPS coordinates where I would like key phone calls to occur. When a participant arrives with their phone at the programmed location, a server sends a pre-recorded phone call from “The Monster” or “The Authorities”. This is how the fiction is delivered.

How can people get a ticket?
This is Kansas City is part of the Anywhere Theatre Festival, and is on from the 17-19 of May. You can purchase a ticket through the website. The performance experience goes for approximately 30 minutes and each session is for a capacity of 6 participants.

Fast four:

First three tabs you open in a new browser window: Gmail, Facebook (just as important for communication as email these days), and ArtsHub for browsing the news articles and reviews.

First mobile phone you ever owned: Nokia for sure. Miss you, Snake game…

The one piece of technology you couldn’t live without: My phone! Basically it’s the handiest tool for creating a site responsive performance, as it is ‘mobile’. It is my Internet, my voice recorder, note taker, picture taker, video taker, locator, and people communicator.

Geekiest habit or hobby: I hang out at the Library far too much, or maybe not enough

In a previous post, I asked how my skin would keep up with my increasing waistline if I put myself on DrRiviera’s “window to weight-gain” diet. The details are something scientists and engineers are still working on, but the general answer is that skin grows when it’s stretched beyond a certain comfortable limit. Just as we feel pain if our arms are pulled too hard in opposite directions, the cells in skin also release a kind of alarm signal when over-loaded, but this signal shouts “grow!” And it keeps growing until it feels suitably relaxed again.

So what does “grow” mean in this case?

To answer this, let’s have a quick look at what tissues are and what they’re made of. Tissues are the materials that organs are made from, and include stuff like skin, bone, muscle and even blood. The main things that make up a tissue are cells and what we call extracellular matrix.

You can think of a cell as the basic living unit of a body. That is, they can survive and reproduce on their own if you give them the right conditions (note: this won’t produce a whole human body J). Different cells act as builders, repairers, sensors, controllers and communications teams: in short, they do the work. In some cases, they’re also part of the structure: your skin keeps out the rest of the world, and your blood vessels keep your blood inside, by cells holding tightly onto one another.

The extracellular matrix (ECM) is the stuff in between the cells. If cells were spiders, the ECM would be the web. When a palaeontologist digs up an ancient bone, the cells that built, maintained and lived in that bone have long gone, but the matrix remains. It’s a mix of proteins, fats and sugars (and tiny plates of mineral, in the case of bones and teeth) that are produced and organised by the cells. If this all seems a bit abstract, think of a bowl of jelly: that’s pretty much the stuff I’m talking about (the jelly more so than the bowl).

So when we talk about skin growing, we’re talking about more cells and more matrix. Cells divide and spit out a bunch more matrix such as collagen. The tricky bit is that they have to do this while still doing their job of holding together a tight seal against the outside world. Can you imagine how hard it would be to make a bridge longer while there are cars driving over it?

We still have a lot to learn about how this works, but surgeons have been putting the idea of mechanically-driven growth to work for a few decades now. Lengthening a bone was first attempted (as far as we know) in 1905 by Italian surgeon, Alessandro Codavilla, and the current method, known as distraction osteogenesis (used, for example, to replace large amounts of bone smashed by an accident), was pioneered in theUSSR by Gavriil Ilizarov in the 1940s or ’50s. Distraction osteogenesis involves letting the fracture (or cut) begin healing, but before it gets too far, to slowly move the two bone fragments apart – a rate somewhere around 1mm a day, if I remember rightly. The current procedure is reportedly painful enough, but I read that Codavilla tried to do the expansion all in one hit! Bone has not been the only target tissue. Also in the 1950s, Charles Neuman implanted a balloon beneath the skin to cause expansion as it was gradually inflated. Both of these methods have become widely used since the 1980s.

The great thing about skin expansion is that it lets the surgeon use the patient’s own skin to cover up defects, so you get the right amount of skin, it’s alive and fully functional already and won’t be rejected by the immune system. It’s challenging, though, for both clinician and patient: it’s hard to know exactly what size and shape of expander you need and how much to inflate it (because the elasticity of skin means it will shrink once the extra tension is removed), and the patient has to put up with having a huge bubble under their skin for a few weeks. But it works beautifully.

Getting back to how… Both the matrix and the cells of skin are under constant tension, like the rubber of an inflated balloon. Skin has to be pretty flexible to let us move, but once it’s stretched past this normal range of movement, the cells have to get busy to avoid the skin breaking.

There are a few different ways by which cells detect stretch, and that’s probably getting a bit too technical. But the effects on the cell are basically these: the cell gets set to divide (the process is called mitosis, and results in one cell becoming two of the same), it produces more extracellular matrix like collagen, and it gives out signals to encourage other cells around it to do the same. Not all of this goes on in any one cell at one time, but the end effect is, as mentioned above, more cells and more matrix. In the outer layer (the epidermis), we need more cells to cover the increasing surface area. Beneath this (in the dermis), we need more cells to build and maintain the tissue, and they need more matrix to hang on to and to carry the load.

To divide, a cell has to first detach from its surroundings and shrink back into a ball. So when a tissue grows, only a small proportion of its cells can divide, while the others go on holding everything in place. Likewise, when new matrix is produced, the existing structure needs to be disrupted somewhat to jostle it into place. It’s these processes that particularly fascinate me at present. I hope to have a lot more to tell you about them in the coming months!

An interesting aside: cells divide along the line of maximum tension. This is handy for skin growth, because it means a cell doubles in the direction of stretch. But the cartilage of growing bones is under a compressive load – that is, it’s being pushed rather than pulled. When you squeeze something elastic, you’ll notice it spreads out to the sides. So when the cartilage in the growth plate gets compressed, the cells are stretched sideways, which means they also divide sideways. For the bone to get longer, then, the newly divided cells have to do a little tumble so they’re both lined up with the axis of the bone (and load).

I am less convinced about my alternative pumping system, using the venturi effect instead of lifting water with bubbles. It works, but takes a lot of tuning to get the right flow rate, and at present, isn’t working very efficiently. Still, the plants are surviving, so it’ll do for now…

More pictures to come…

Alex busy at work in The Edge foyer space

Local artist Alex Jack is a familiar face here at The Edge, whether she is doing a workshop or refining her skills in Photoshop.

Tell us a bit about who you are and what you do?
Who I am is a tricky one to answer without a specific frame of reference, so I’ll put it in terms of what I do. I am a hybrid (mutant?) of artist, biologist and mechanical engineer, now with a twist of science communicator. Working as a Bioscience Catalyst lets me bring all these together for the first time, so I’m a bit excited about it and have been grinning a lot.

Since 2001 I’ve been working on various medical engineering research projects to do with bone repair and implant integration. Most of it has been based in cell culture labs, and I still get a buzz from seeing what’s going on down the microscope. Last year, I took time away from the sciencing to work on a novel (still in progress) and make music (mostly in collaborations). I’m currently working up a couple of new project proposals, focusing on growing organised tissues and functional blood vessel systems in the lab. There will be more about these endeavours in my blog posts over the coming months.

How did you become interested in your field of practice?
It probably started because many of my closest friends studied in biology-related fields when we left school. Then, when my first job as a research engineer with Comalco ended, I started looking at biomedical engineering as an alternative direction that sparked my curiosity. That career direction didn’t bear fruit immediately, but the seed had been sown.

The BHP Wildscience exhibition at Melbourne’s Scienceworks was my introduction to biomimetics – engineering and technology swiping ideas from biology (I’ll be talking more about this, too). The things I remember most strongly from it were the pneumatic-powered elephant and models showing how a fish’s swimming motion is immensely more efficient than a propeller (that is, it gets more motion for a given amount of energy).

Restless in my mechanical engineering job, I went back to biomimetics around 2000, found a mailing list on the internet, and via that, got in touch with Professor John Evans at the Queensland University of Technology. Talking to him was my introduction to bone biology and how implants integrate into the body, and things just rolled along from there. The more I got to talk with people, the more I learned, the more excited I got, so I climbed aboard and started a new career in medical engineering research the next year.

Why did you choose to bring your skills to The Edge?
For starters, the timing was perfect, with me getting set to return to Australia when the call went out. The Catalyst position was a chance to share my enthusiasm for science, but more than that, I was delighted at how The Edge promotes the kind of experimentation and play that is as much part of scientific research as it is art. Yes, I reckon play is a critical part of science! Here I’m not talking about “pin the tail on the lab-rat” or suchlike, but rather, the joy of imagining possibilities and trying things just to see what happens; that often seems to get lost among the mad scramble of grant applications, experiments not working and trying to publish results. I also reckon that, the more engaged our society is with science, the better we’ll get at communicating it, setting policies and priorities and even carrying out research. So what better place than The Edge to bring a bit of bioscience to Brisbaners AND see if I can wriggle a little more playful creativity into bioscience?

What will you be doing during your time as a Catalyst at The Edge?
To start with, I’m eager to get bioscience out of the lab. Even ignoring the fact that we’re living things that need other living things to live (oh dear… and I fancy myself as a writer at times!), biology and biotechnology have been strongly affecting our lives in one way or another since the dawn of agriculture. So I’d like to show how bioscience isn’t just something that happens in gleaming labs (like the “Ponds Institute” in the old ads on TV), carried out by people in white coats: some of it needs nothing more “sciency” than a kitchen or a garden.

DIY Catalyst, Clinton Freeman, and I have started out with a window farm: an open-source hydroponic set-up that means even a tiny home can have a productive garden. I’m aiming to use this as a test system for a few experiments, looking at environmental changes like salt levels in water, and (just because I’m curious) how plants respond to the directions of light and gravity.

Then we get down to some seriously tasty biotechnology: using micro-organisms to transform and preserve food. Again, we’re talking bioscience that goes back thousands of years, but that still plays a big role today. I’m planning a workshop on a couple of different forms of fermentation, and the first couple of ginger beer test-brews have passed the taste test

But all that aside, I am a researcher, after all: I’ll be taking you all with me as I learn about how tissues are formed in a body, and look at the ways we might be able to rebuild them when the body can’t manage it.

And I’m keen to explore how science might draw on art for inspiration, rather than just the other way around. There is a history of technologies being inspired by science fiction, and I read once about how Dr Philip Kilner‘s giving up his research and taking up sculpture showed him how blood-flow shapes the human heart. Art and science are both experimental, both uncertain, and both ways of understanding the world, so it make sense to me that they can work together. I have an idea for a foray into this direction, but because it needs a little luck in getting supplies and facilities, I’m not going to reveal anything about it just now.

How can Edge users get involved?
Now that we’ve run the workshop on building a window farm, we would love for participants to play with the design at home, experiment with plants, nutrients and growing conditions, and share their discoveries with us. Because window farming is an open source technology, the more people share their experiences, the better the designs and methods get. Anyone interested can get involved in the global collaboration here.

In the fermentation workshop, if all goes to plan (dangerous words in experimental sciences!), we’ll be learning how to make ginger beer and kimchi (kind of a Korean version of sauerkraut). Although with food and drink, safety limits how much we can experiment, we’ll also be discussing here how certain changes in the recipes and techniques might affect the products – things you can try, and things you should definitely avoid!

In both these cases, I’m hoping Edge users will be inspired to find more information and try things for themselves, to know that you don’t have to spend 4-10 years in a university to indulge in a little biotechnology.

But I would also love to see scientists at The Edge and getting involved! When time and funding are always tight, it’s easy for a researcher to lose that delight of wild imaginings, so I’d like to provide scientists opportunities to come together in a playful environment and “dream big”. I want to see Edge users unleashing their inner mad scientist (or rad scientist), to come up with outrageous solutions to bioscience problems big and small (there is an article in a medical journal about ice-cream headaches, after all). And this isn’t purely for fun: letting ideas stray into the realm of “a bit silly” can be a great way of cracking a hard problem, and sometimes even just explaining a problem to someone who knows nothing about it can open up a way to solve it. And that’s one of the exciting things about working at the interface between scientific and other disciplines. Ultimately, my aim in this area is about community: if I can even just plant the seed of a creative community of emerging scientists and interested non-scientists, I’ll be beaming lasers of delight from my eyes.

Do Edge users need any special skills to be involved?
No – mostly just an eagerness to try things, observe and, I hope, to share what they find. I’d love to have people with special skills and knowledge involved, though, to build up a strong community and to keep us all challenged with new questions.

If those playing along at home want to know more about the sort of things that you do, where should they go to learn? (books, websites, specific artists etc)
There are lots of great resources across all media, and I’ll be referring to a few more of these in workshops and my blog posts. But here are a few to get things rolling along nicely, even for the far-flung:

http://www.windowfarms.org/ - the online community whose design we used (more or less) in our window farm workshop.

http://www.bottlebiology.org/ - lots of great biology experiments you can try at home / school / office cubicle… including a combined land & water ecosystem and making kimchi (there’s also a book on kimchi in the State Library: The kimchee cookbook - Open Access, level 2 (G 641.59519 1999).

The ABC’s Gardening Australia magazine for March 2012 has a nice, authentic recipe for ginger beer (that’s the one I’m currently trialling).

My favourite art-science project to date is this: http://www.lighthouse.org.uk/programme/laboratory-life

and I’m particularly intrigued by Andy Gracie’s efforts to interface living things with robotics. There are also some amazing new technologies emerging on this front, as featured in episode one of “Brave New World” on SBS (can be viewed online here: http://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/video/2208013170/).

For those of a scientific bent, interested to know where I’m heading, Frederick Grinnell is one name to seek out – in particular his work around 30 years ago on the effects of ascorbate (vitamin C) in cultures of fibroblasts (cells that build soft tissues and play key roles in healing and scarring). He wasn’t the first to report the effect, but has been one of the major players in bringing cell culture into three dimensions.

Also, there is some good stuff on the electric television at the moment: Australia – The Time-Traveller’s Guide (ABC, Sunday 7:30pm), Brave New World (SBS, Sunday 8:30pm), and of course the old standard, Catalyst (ABC, Thursday 8pm). And The Science Show on Radio National (Saturdays at noon, last time I listened in) often has great stuff. Most of these are also accessible online.

Internet gold: CSIRO and ABC. For some more “hard-core” bioscience, stay tuned to The Edge blog!

Fast four:

First three tabs you open in a new browser window
Almost always GMail first; the others depend on time of day and/or what I logged on for (if I can remember). Often it’s Translink, Facebook, Leo (English/German dictionary site) or the (Australian) ABC next, or, if I’m looking for something specific, Google, PubMed or Wikipedia.

First mobile phone you ever owned
My current one! A Samsung S3110. I still feel vaguely embarrassed to have a mobile after so long resisting.

The one piece of technology you couldn’t live without
I was going to say agriculture, because I don’t think I’d last all that long as a hunter-gatherer, but I couldn’t say that without language, and writing in particular: those are technologies I’d be very sad without. So I’m going to go for writing.

Geekiest habit or hobby
I haven’t for a while, but I occasionally get obsessive about computer programming or mathematics – often, but not always, stemming from my work, but going way beyond what was necessary, either because I want it to be perfect or just because I get a bit carried away. Although the complexities of certain operating systems defy logic often enough, the delightful thing about programming is that it is purely logical, as pretty well nothing else is. And I guess using Homestar Runner quotes in conversation probably counts as quite geeky, too, yes?

Intro to After Effects CS5
This intense one day course delivers a detailed introduction to desktop compositing for moving images using Adobe After Effects CS5. After Effects is a program that allows new levels of creative freedom for designers, animators, art directors and editors. Participants will gain an understanding of the desktop digital compositing environment.

This course is suitable for practitioners who use desktop systems such as AVID or Final Cut Pro including titles and broadcast designers, interactive media producers, graphic designers or art directors wanting creative control over production prototypes. This is a hands-on course and each student will be allocated an Apple computer for the course duration.

The course will consist of lectures, demonstrations, question and answer sessions and intensive practical production exercises.

Facilitator: Dave Scotland
When: 9-5pm, 7 May
Where: Lab 1, The Edge
Cost: $295
Bookings: Online via the AFTRS website
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Final Cut Pro v7 (The Basics)
Final Cut Pro is Apple’s most popular and powerful video editing application, and is widely used by industry professionals around the world.

This course covers everything needed to get started including capturing material, editing, trimming, adding dissolves and effects, working in the timeline window, mixing audio, managing projects and media. With a hands-on approach, participants will work with several styles of footage and produce a video for output.

Facilitator: Michael Mier
When: 9-5pm, 18 June
Where: Lab 1, The Edge
Cost: $295 – Fee includes the Apple Final Cut Pro 7 textbook required for the course
Bookings: Online via the AFTRS website

New technology needs to be slow and bulky, the consumables costing a small fortune and the ripples that the device has in the wider world will not be apparent until they are firmly out of control.

To follow through the above commenced case in point; music CDs. When first launched the music industry felt assured it was the ultimate step in copy protection. You could dub the content to tape but there was quality loss. You had to purchase the disk to hear the music in all its post LP glory, with the technology required to circumvent the protection costing millions of dollars.

With the advent of CD burners and some dodgy software in the late nineties, that all changed and the new age of piracy commenced. Gone were the days of selling cassettes at the local thrift markets, replaced by the arcane art of decryption, ripping and forty-five minute disk burns. A small fortune was made in the distribution of duplicated objects off of list servers, out of swaps meets and secure circles of physical distribution. The companies tried to wage war, the pirates moved around a lot and no one really won out as the problem shifted from the hands centralised organised crime into a decentralised mass of children, teenagers and house wives.

Then there was the MP3, the compressed bundle of aural joy that lacked the high fidelity of the CD quality sound but was small enough to distribute over dial up modems and the beginnings of the high speed internet. The rise of the peer-to-peer networks, bit torrent protocols and Usenet servers providing the methods of distribution that provided for piracy. You could illegally distribute in (relative) anonymity to a faceless audience without a disk changing hands. This was the shift from the object orientated economy to a content economy. It happened so fast and so quietly that the industry (largely) did not notice and when they did, could not kill it fast enough. The model eventuated into the industry standard, and in little over ten years the war was over and a multi-billion dollar distribution platform was (largely) destroyed.

This was the industrial revolution for the entertainment industry and these lessons are about to be taught all over again.

My 3D printer – still in pieces – cost me less than $500. Once built, it will print replacement Ikea parts, model components, and game pieces for my fortnightly Pathfinder role playing game, models possibly lifted from World of Warcraft using Open GL 3D model ripping software. If it fits on the print bed and the extrusion head has sufficient resolution, anything is printable, including (to reference Horst Hortner of Ars Electronica’s Future Lab) Lego parts.

I can (not to say that I will) model 3D replicas of my favourite Lego bricks and distribute the .stl files via bit torrent, Usenet or whatever the newly minted method of decentralised distribution of pirated materials ends up being.

De ja vu, all over again.

Copyrighted materials digitised and distributed before the rights holder have the opportunity to kill the idea. How long will it be before a 13 year old living in Brisbane will be able to download a full Lego kit and print the thing on the 3D printer they built from salvaged parts?

How long before we see the first instance of legal action between Lego and the self-same 13 year old?

About: A nerd with first class honours, Daniel loves to indulge in digital tom foolery and hacktavist activity. In his spare time he makes theatre with young people, writes for stage/screen /comic books on the train.

Start making interactive music with Scratch as part of MIT’s Scratch Day. This workshop will take you through coding musical riffs, creating interactive music for video games and working with the IchiBoard sensor interface to create new musical controllers. No prior experience with music or computing is necessary. This workshop is family friendly and open to anyone curious to learn more about Scratch.

About the facilitators:
S. Alex Ruthmann is a music & media educator and researcher currently on sabbatical in Australia from his position as a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell near Boston, USA. Alex has worked with the Scratch development team at the MIT Media Lab in extending the musical capabilities of Scratch, and is a Co-PI on a National Science Foundation grant exploring computational and musical thinking. He regularly teaches courses and presents workshops on music, computing, and the digital arts. You can follow him online via Twitter @alexruthmann.

Andrew R. Brown is Professor of Digital Arts at the Queensland Conservatorium of Music. Andrew is an active computer musician, computational artist, a builder of software tools that support creativity, and supervisor of research students. His current research activities focus on the aesthetics of computational processes and generative and interactive audiovisuals.You can view and follow his work through his website and through Twitter as @thejmc and @algomusic.

When: 1-4pm, 19 May
Where: Lab 1, The Edge
Cost: Free
Bookings: Email book.it@edgeqld.org.au with your name and contact phone number

This week State Library launched a channel on Historypin, a photo sharing site with a difference. Historypin aims to get as many people as possible taking part in the history of their family, street, and country by pinning photos to a map of the world and telling stories about the people and places in the photographs.

State Library is one of the first libraries in Australia to have a channel on Historypin, which went live on 27^th March, and staff from the library have been busy pinning pictures from all over Queensland to the Historypin map.

Historypin has been developed by We are what we do, a UK based not-for-profit that created ways for millions of people to do more, small, good things, helping address social and environmental issues. Historypin wants to build stronger communities by bringing neigbourhoods together around their local history and getting people from different generations talking and sharing more.

Do you have some photographs that you could contribute to this project? Help to get Queensland on the map.

It started out as a bit of fun. Typical teenagers, Lij and Jye enjoyed pulling pranks and having a laugh, at themselves and occasionally at the antics of others. With the Gen Y mantra in mind, the pair ensured they had vids, or it didn’t happen.

“Starting out we had no experience in shooting or editing video. Our gear wasn’t great and neither were our skills,” recalls Jye.

“We experimented with a couple of different You Tube channels. Our first managed to interest 80 subscribers, which at the time we thought was great.

“As we realised that this was an easy way for us to get an audience for our opinions, we had a rethink on the topic and format of our videos and started investing a little more time into the footage we were creating.

After asking the locals where one goes to edit video in Brisbane, the duo ended up at The Edge. Now regulars in our Mac lab, Lij and Jye travel from Maleny a couple of times a week to shoot and edit content for SloshTV.

“We got slightly better camera gear and started using the computers at The Edge for editing, instead of Movie Maker on our PCs at home. It’s no great surprise that as the quality of our pieces improved, so did the number of people watching them.”

From the early days of excitement over 80 subscribers, the pair has now learnt to have slightly different expectations. Their current channel has been up for around two months and has had over 80 000 views of its content.

“We tend not to think too hard about what we are trying to do. Once you get us in front of a camera, our minds just go crazy.”

SloshTV is gathering a loyal following of teenage fans. Both Lij and Jye have had moments when their online popularity has collided with their real world reality.

“I was walking down a street in Mackay and I had people I’d never met before waving to me, calling out my name,” said Jye.

“I was in South Bank a little while ago and was mobbed by a group of teenage girls, all wanting photos with me. I freaked out at first, I couldn’t work out what was going on, but it’s not a bad situation to be in,” chuckles Lij.

Currently, the pair is turning their attentions to capitalising on their unexpected success and turning this playful pastime into a paying profession. Theirs is sure to be an interesting career to watch.