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 the hordes who converge in Newcastle over the weekend.

I’m really looking forward to it. It will be a convergence of two of the best things i’ve ever been associated with: Renew Newcastle and TINA and a chance to show the results of the Renew efforts to many of my friends who only tend to make it to Newcastle once a year.

If you’re making plans for TINA trying and make sure you get there in time for friday night.The friday night is shaping up to be quite a celebration of all that we’ve managed to achieve with Renew thus far. The Renew shops will be open, many of the galleries will be launching, and many special TINA, Electrofringe and NYWF events will be taking place in many of our venues and empty spaces we’ve managed to broker acces to. Sound Summit has organised for Seattle’s Tiny Vipers to play at our daggy 70s church headquarters – softly christening it as what may turn into a semi regular performace venue.

It’s funny to think that at TINA this time last year Marni Jackson (now Renew Newcastle’s General Manager but then the manager of TINA) did me the huge favour of squeezing a session about my highly specualtive plans to reinvigourate the city well after the program deadline had closed. It was a pivotal event in hindsight. I also managed to pin down while she was far too distracted to realise what she was getting in for somewhere in the heat of all the TINA work and get her to agree to “help out” when her commitments with TINA were over. I doubt either of us knew what we were getting in for. 12 months, 36 projects and 24 no longer empty buildings later it looks like it just might work.

I’ve just booked my accomodation for This Is Not Art in Newcastle and my advice to others who are thinking of doing the same is to get in early! TINA is Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event. By last week it had become tricky to find accomodation by the end of September it threatens to become impossible.

Also, if any of you journo, blogger, media maker types converging on Newcastle for TINA are interested in writing or making something about Renew don’t hesitate to drop Marni or myself a line.

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 Make:Do series. An earlier one featured Renew Newcastle.  I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

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 are working together on setting up a major project called The Edge for the State Library of Queensland. I haven’t seen Liz speak before a crowd before but Dan (who is the man behind the awesome City of Sound blog) will inevitably have an awesome visual presentation while I will stumble through some barely prepared notes that will probably suck.

Anyhow, it’s on at: 6-7pm, Fri 27 March 2009 at the State Library of Queensland should you want to come along.

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 Commonwealth Games’ own history and a way to position the festival at the cutting edge of both art form development and contemporary cultural issues. Work for this festival embraced the detail of the city – alleyways, outdoor spaces, bars and more conventional arts settings, as well as new and innovative presentation in regional centres.

For more information about how Next Wave has kicked on without me visit the Next Wave web site.

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 leading arts institutions.

Theme for the 2004 Festival was Unpopular Culture. The festival consciously moved away from Melbourne’s flashy arts infrastructure and embraced Melbourne’s inner-city laneways, old Dojos and empty buildings. 600 artists participated in 90 projects that attracted massive audiences and showed off the talent of a new generation of Next Wave participants.

For more information about what Next Wave is up to now visit the Next Wave web site.

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 caters for independent and DIY game developers, creatively frustrated professionals, game development students, digital artists and new media academics.

Free Play is the game equivalent of hand-held, no budget, lo-fi, 4-track DIY and it’s probably one of the best and most vibrant areas of Australian culture. Free Play began as the result of a shared frustration with Katharine Neil about the inability of independent voices to be taken seriously and gain traction in both the games industry and Australian culture more generally. We put our heads together and came up with the concept of an event that continues to this day.

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 variously been comprised of the National Young Writers Festival, Electrofringe, Sound Summit, The National Student Media Conference and Critical Animals and has grown over the years to become Newcastle’s largest annual tourism event. This Is Not Art provides workshops, panels, performances, speakers and exhibitions on a wide variety of frivolous and important topics.

According to Wikipedia, people who have appeared at TINA over the years include Kevin Blechdom, Sage Francis, Cold Cut, The Light Surgeons, Caribou, Concord Dawn, Mad Professor, anticon., Fat Cat Records, b(if)tek, The Herd, Hrvatski, Thomas Frank, John Safran, Stephen Mayne, Margo Kingston, Nasenbluten, and many more. Although i am pretty confident i could come up with a better and much more comprehensive list when I get some spare time.

Any suggestions for TINA highlights over the years list are welcome via the comments.

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 coined the term bloggers). It also had a healthy dose of critical non-fiction and literary outsiders.

The festival’s rather conservative and boring name was chosen because it was the most conservative and boring name I could think of for what was always intended to be a very non-conservative events. The festival was organised on about $6,000 scrounged from the NSW Ministry for the Arts for “workshops” and $10,000 from the Australia Council that was technically supposed to be spent on a web site (that never really eventuated).

Some quotes from the time rediscovered in my digging around:

“The National Young Writers Festival is the Dean Martin of Australian literary festivals — savvy, elegant, hip and extremely well lubricated.”
| Catherine Lumby

“when the organisers of the other, more staid festivals finally realise what happened in Newcastle last year, it will change the face of these sorts of events throughout Australia.”
| Linda Jaivin

“fun, challenging, different, unexpected and smart”
| Sophie Cunningham

“I had such a top time at that I started to bleed from the eyeballs. The panels were cool, the audience really clued in and I liked the way so much of it seemed to happen in pubs. Or was that just me?”
| John Birmingham

“if you have a sneaking suspicion that there is actually some interesting creative stuff going on somewhere, then look no further than Newcastle and the young writer’s festival!”
| Matthew Arnison

“Don’t think, just go!”
| Matthew Reilly

“full of collaborative ideas, productive argument and energy. It’s unique in Australia.”
| Bernard Cohen

“at lit fests i usually sit near the door so i can exit as soon as the often excrutiating question time starts, but audience interaction at the NYWF went far beyond the usual “do you work with pencil or pc?” Audiences were fearless in that they weren’t averse to a little confrontation”
| Dallas McMaugh, The Australia Council

“I’ll definitely haul buns there again this year for a couple of days, and bring some more people with me.”
| Susan Burchill, Channel V

“The best little writer’s festival on the continent.”
| McKenzie Wark

“the best writer’s festival held in Australia… There’s just no sign of that syndrome you get at the mainstream festivals, where you get the feeling writers are merely going through the motions, saying the same things they’ve said dozens of times before. At Newcastle the audiences simply won’t put up with it.”
| Mark Davis

A decade later and the National Young Writers Festival is still going strong. It is still plucky, provocative, under-funded and yet it has somehow evolved into what some might actually call an institution. The festival will be celebrating it’s tenth birthday in 2008 and it has spawned the much larger multi headed media monster that it is This Is Not Art. It remains my favourite weekend of the year.

I recently dredged up an old promotional list of participants that included KATHY BAIL, ELISA BERG, MELITA BERNDT, JAMES BRADLEY, BERNARD COHEN, ROSIE CROSS, SOPHIE CUNNINGHAM, JANE CURTIS, HELEN DARVILE, MARK DAVIS, MILISSA DEITZ, CRAIG GARRETT, SEAN HEALY, DEAN KILEY, CATHARINE LUMBY, MARDI McCONNOCHIE, MARK MORDUE, MATTHEW THOMPSON and McKENZIE WARK. You can use google to find out what those people are all doing now or have a look at this old pre-promotional list of participants to find out what they were all doing then.

Also, you can visit The National Young Writers Festival web site for more information about what it became when it grew up.

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 Real Media in the United States because, “no one has ever done anything like this before.”

Back in 1998, the LOUD web site was described by The Sydney Morning Herald as “pixel for pixel, the LOUD site is as good as anything that has been achieved on the Web in Australia, and probably better. It crackles with life, showering sparks of creativity in all directions.” Of course, today it just looks incredibly dated..