marcus westbury

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 [...]

This is from text of an “artist talk” speech i gave to the folks at Tape Projects in Northcote a few weeks back. Strictly speaking, I am not an “artist” – so it probably makes sense that I have never been asked to do an “artist talk” before. I wasn’t really sure of what I should [...]

Not Quite Art was my first attempt at writing and presenting a TV series. It was named as one of the best shows on Australian TV in 2007 according to the Sydney Morning Herald and described by The Age as “the freshest, most illuminating, thoughtful and funny locally made arts program in years.” From the [...]

My contribution to the 2007 Australian Federal Election was to develop and project manage a web site called howshouldivote.com.au. The site allowed each user to enter their postcode and take the same quiz about topical issues as the candidates in their local electorate. The site then compared the users with participating candidates and ranked them [...]

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 [...]