marcus westbury

What follows is the text of the speech i gave at the Sydney Opera House’s Festival of Dangerous Ideas. This is pretty much a straight cut and paste of my speech notes so it may not read all that well on the screen to others and is inevitably full of typos, poor punctuation and general [...]

Classic TINA program from 2002 – my last year in charge. The 1st-5th of October is the time to be in Newcastle. Renew Newcastle is working up a series of events that will take place over the This Is Not Art Festival weekend. We’ll be running tours, talking about and showing off the project for [...]

A video looking back on the Creative Sydney fesitval that i did some of the programming work on. The festival took place in May and June and this is a nice wrap up. I’m glad that it acknowledges some of the tensions that were clearly apparent. This apparently the last video from Jonathon Rogers’ excellent [...]

Just a quick heads up that i am speaking at the Brisbane Ideas Festival on Friday of this week. New Operating Systems for Creativity New York arts worker Liz Slagus, arts commentator Marcus Westbury and Urban Informatics consultant Dan Hill discuss how technology and new media are rearranging our creative lives. Liz, Dan and I [...]

In 2006 I directed my second and last Next Wave Festival. The festival was themed Empire Games and coincided with the 2006 Commonwealth Games in Melbourne. In parallel Next Wave presented a major Program of Festival Melbourne2006, the cultural program of the Commonwealth Games. Empire Games, as theme, was both an ironic nod to the [...]

In 2004 I took on the gig of Artistic Director and of Melbourne’s Next Wave Festival. Next Wave is Australia’s leading festival whose brief is to develop the works of young emerging artists and one of Victoria’s handful of major festivals. Next Wave involved coordinating projects involving Australia’s best young artists and most of Victoria’s [...]

Free Play is Australia’s largest independent computer game developer’s event. It took place for the first time in 2004 in a low fi converted former Karate dojo in inner city Melbourne before growing up and moving into the Australian Centre for the Moving Image where it took place again in 2005 and 2007. Free Play [...]

This Is Not Art (or TINA as it affectionately known) was the ultimate evolution of the event that began life as the National Young Writers’ Festival. Between 1998 and 2002 TINA evolved from a small, underfunded regional cultural festival into one of Australia’s most distinctive and most significant cultural events. This Is Not Art has [...]

The first National Young Writers Festival was designed to be a writers’ festival with a different dynamic and value set. It aimed to value writing and publishing outside the literary mainstream of the capital city literature festivals. The festival had a strong emphasis of zine makers, self publishers, troublemakers and web publishers (long before anyone [...]

LOUD was Australia’s first national “Media Festival of Youth Culture and the Arts.” It took place across print, television, radio and online way back in January 1998. I was the person responsible for all the Internet projects including a collaborative online magazine and an online short film festival that brought the big wigs out from [...]