creativity/machine

1.

As the disaster deepens and the concerned try to mobilise aid where none has been received, or search desperately for the missing, Flickr proves to be much more than a cool photo-sharing thingy.

There is plenty more detail about how online networks (especially blogs) are being mobilised in service of aid for the region in this post at preoccupations .

But, while sympathising with those in the West who are searching for holidaying relatives, I also think of the millions whose access to these information networks has never existed or has now been destroyed along with their homes or the local internet cafe.

2.

I’ve posted the press release below on behalf of a friend. Please circulate widely and help out if you can.

Australian Volunteer worker, Penny Boddington, 28, expected to be challenged when she set off to work in war torn Sri Lanka with a local aid agency. 18 months later, she, and other Australian Volunteers International are lucky to be alive. They cancelled their beachside holiday at Unawatuna on the South East Coast at the last minute. Now they are working around the clock to provide shelter, food, water and medical supplies for the communities hit hardest by the Tsunami. Like hundreds of local and international development workers in the country she has little opportunity to mourn the impact and loss caused by the Tsunami.

“At the moment, I’m just working to try and make sure that immediate relief aid is getting to as many people as possible, as fast as possible? said Penny from Colombo. ?Sometimes I can’t help but to think about the people in villages I work with and whether or not they are alive. But I can’t allow myself to think about this. That is a luxury that I can only give myself next week or the week after.”

Penny works for Sewalanka Foundation, a national Sri Lankan aid agency with offices in all of the coastal districts hit by Sunday’s Tsunami. Sewalanka have been working with poverty stricken and war affected communities for over a decade.

During that time, the organisation has played an important role in responding to conflict borne and natural disasters. Penny explains, “We have strong grassroots networks within the communities affected. This means that aid is getting where it is needed and fast, as we are immediately aware of the most critical needs. No one is unaffected by this tragedy. It has been a honour to work with dedicated and committed colleagues who are responding to a disaster that is beyond all of our comprehension.”

Sewalanka are appealing to people worldwide to give to their national Tsunami appeal. The organisation is already working with foreign relief agencies to administer emergency aid.

However, it is urgently seeking direct funds to assist quickly and efficiently with Sri Lankan people?s immediate needs, particularly those in the severely struck Eastern Coast who have received little or no aid.

Penny says “Yesterday, our Ampara office in the East of Sri Lanka sent word that they had visited a remote and isolated village where no assistance had been provided. Our field staff entered by foot to deliver food as the roads are destroyed. Sadly they arrived to see bloated dead bodies still floating in the water. Whole areas where I used to work are completely destroyed; there are no houses, no trees and no people for at least one kilometre from the shore.”

“I urge all Australians to donate money. My organisation has started an appeal which I manage, but to donate to any worthwhile organisation is critical as funds are desperately needed to meet the increasing food, medical and housing needs.”

Details on how to assist Sewalanka in their emergency relief efforts can be found on their website: www.sewalanka.org

To speak with Penny Boddington in Sri Lanka: +94 777 576 100, sewaweu@sri.lanka.net

To speak with Sewalanka staff on the East Coast of Sri Lanka:
+ 94 777 576 100, sewaweu@sri.lanka.net

To speak with the Australian coordinator of the appeal and awareness campaign: Tanya Notley: 0423 352 534, t.notley@qut.edu.au

Whatever autotranslator the spammers are using creates the most beautifully proximate language. Got this one this morning, and since it’s the first example I’ve had for ages that wasn’t about viagara, I thought I’d post it.

Our late sight displays that it requires usually of just 2.4 boozings to induce a hang-over. But this pills succours you avoid katzenjammers and awake sensitive immense from head to abdomen and all over else.

I reckon i would quite like to awake “sensitive immense from head to abdomen and all over else” - you’d really know you were alive, wouldn’t you. Especially after 2.4 boozings.

All hail, Christian, who really knows how to get some spiritual bang for his livejournal buck:

2005 is the year great things are built. From the waves, iron and rock will emerge, vaulted into being by our ability and willingness to swallow pride and cough up roses. We will be known. Certain in our doubt, and incandescent in everything else.

Summer holidays require a lot of conscious allocation of time. A list like this one from found magazine might help:

This kind of reads like one of those spamquotes that the purveyours of levitra were flooding my blog with a while back. But it’s a great quote all the same, and coming from one of my favourite utilitarians, it’s a hint towards proof that pragmatism can coexist with creative dissonance and the will to individuality:

“Eccentricity has always abounded where and when strength of character has abounded: and the amount of eccentricity in a society has generally been proportional to the amount of genius, mental vigor and moral courage it contained. That so few dare to be eccentric marks the chief danger of the time”

–John Stuart Mill

I’m feeling a bit serious about music today.

This is the christmas playlist I put together on a whim yesterday morning, when I woke up and realised I had free rein over the construction of christmas day for the first time in years.

Which, thank god, got me thinking again about the ways in which available cultural resources are mapped, remixed and reused by ordinary people in the service of creative cultural agency. This eclectic playlist does not demonstrate that I can use technology to endlessly “customize” my everyday life according to my “tastes”, but that I can reach out to an invisible, absent, but very real imagined public with a mixture of values that, in different ways and at different levels, I share. And secondly, that even from a position of isolation, I can participate in affective alliances that predate and proliferate far beyond my own existence. What I get back is much more than “pleasure” - it is a stake in the possible futures called into being by the timbre of sincere human voices, clarion calls to the sublime (yes, I DO like Celine) and celebrations of the warmth of the mundane. And, especially, a good laugh (please, do yourself a favour, and seek out Cartman’s O Holy Night).

Well the grass is mowed at my place, we’re stocked up on culinary cliches, we have cold beer (good, because it’s HOT) and the right kind of DVDs (i.e. the direct inverse of the scary plastic christmas cheer that Television insists we must want), I’m armed with damien rice and jeanette winterson thanks to a surprise parcel from one of my greatest and oldest friends, and best of all I don’t have to drive anywhere in the scorching heat without airconditioning. So it could be worse. But Christian, you’ve put something in more than a few people’s eggnog, dude.

If your festive season is likely to be non-crap, well, good on you, and I’d advise you to consider cloning your loved ones as soon as possible for the greater good of humanity.

And with my last ounce of conviviality, may I say, if you can, hug everyone you meet until they let go, and drive everyone crazy with your relentlessly positive and imaginative monologues about the beauty of this world and the even greater beauty of the one you’re busy making.

So, this is what I hope will be the final compromise in my long and bloody battle against comment spam: I found a plugin for MT called mt-close2 which allows you to close off comments on entries older than a specified no. of days, and in particular categories - I am so grateful to the person who made this script I could kiss him/her. A lot.

So all current posts are now open slather for comments.

Last week we completed a digital storytelling workshop for the Kelvin Grove Urban Village Sharing Stories project - a QUT/Qld Dept of Housing project mainly involving oral histories of the area. The KGUV, including the spot where the QUT Creative Industries Precinct now stands, and where I work every day, used to be an army barracks but has a rich and still emerging unofficial cultural history that I have loved hearing about all week. When the official website is launched I’ll make sure I link to it, but in the meantime…

Tanya and Matt working in Photoshop with two of our older participants, both of whom were an absolute hoot and knew exactly what they wanted - they just didn’t really want to drive the computer.

Two more participants working together to get their images scanned in - what with the constant banter back and forth it was hard to know how they’d get anything done, but they did.

I need to write about the digital storytelling workshop I just finished, working with both young and very much older people on stories about the history of the Kelvin Grove Urban Village (most of which used to be a bloody big army parade ground). I also need to write about the CSAA conference, which has left quite a glow on me, and where I sensed a seismic shift away from distanced, black skivvy critique, and towards a renewal of genuine engagement and non-cynical pragmatism.

But it’s RAINING…after days of heat that feels like a solid, malevolent presence, sitting on your head, making you squint and gasp for air, finally the thunder is rolling, and there are sheets of cool water pouring onto the roof. I feel like running into the street, sinking to my knees and drinking it in…I’ve done that before but become quite rightly scared of the threat of being struck by lightning. How ironic that would be (in an Alanis sense, although slightly more so than a fly in your chardonnay) - an extremely rare moment of prayer cut short by the most cliched death in the Bible.

Apparently I should also have the computer turned off and unplugged.