Just when i thought that my short lived TV career had gone to the great archive in the sky the fairfax web site currently has both series of Not Quite Art available on live streaming I’m not exactly sure how or why, but i’m not complaining. Unfortunately there is no function to embed them and from what i can tell from here they only work within Australia.

Both series are 3 episodes. Series one is essentially an exploration of the question where culture comes from – it’s essentially an argument that is also manifested practically in projects like Renew Newcastle and Renew Australia (coming soon – but more about that later). Series two is really about the impact of technology on culture – how it’s changing how it’s made, how it circulates, who the makers and audiences are – which, oddly enough – will probably be manifest in my other big project of the moment which is the gig as Director of ISEA 2013 (but more about that one soon too!).

Anyhow, if you are in Australia (or can convince the SMH web site that you are) and have an idle 3 hours to kill you can watch both series here.

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.

Given that I am someone who never studied art, never had a particular interest in art – at least as it is conventially defined – and never really intended to work in the arts it takes a bit of explaining as to how i came to be here.

To understand how I came to be standing here, i need to go back to Newcastle in the mid 1990s. At the time there was 40 plus percent youth unemployment – a figure that seems almost ludicrous now, particularly when you consider that people that were working even a couple of hours or week or studying part time made up the other 60 percent.

A group of friends and friends of frineds got together in 1996 – we were all unemployed. We mostly knew each other from university. We’d been involved in student politics, environmental activism, and various other on campus activities.

Sean Healy and myself in particular had a strong interest in media, media activism and media culture. We’d been flatmates for years and the co-editors of the student newspaper on campus the year before. In 1996 we were both former Communications Studies students. In Sean’s case he was graduating, in my case I was being kicked out for what I think was the second time. At the time we had no reasonable prospect of getting a job and were looking for some way to productively utilise our energy.

All up about 8 of us each went to the Department of Social Security and each told some lie about needing a camera, a computer, a new suit, or something for a job interview that resulted in us each getting a $500 dole loan. We pooled the funds and took out the lease on a warehouse in the back streets of Newcastle West. At the time, the warehouse was known as the “The Pod.”

Due to a subsequent threat of legal action, the name of the organisation eventually evolved into Octapod.

Today if you go to the Octapod web site it describes itself as:

“a not for profit independent arts and new media organisation based in the heart of Newcastle”

That is what happens when you get in consultants to help you write these things. The reality is that in 1996 we all had very different ideas about what the organisation should be, no consultants and not much in the way of planning.

In no particular order among the 8 or so of us that were involved variously thought the place would be:

• An anarchist bookshop
• A place to hold warehouse parties
• A Cafe – despite the rather obvious fact that the place was in an industrial area with zero passing traffic and failed every hygiene, cleanliness and number of toilets test you can imagine
• An art gallery – something not helped by the fact that we painted the walls in imposing splotches of red and brown and that it was almost immediately turned into a..
• A bicycle recycling centre – with about a hundred bikes and pieces of bikes spread around the main room
• Newcastle friends of the earth
• An activist conference and training centre
• A media collective that provided access to and training in this new fangled internet thing
• And a place where 3 of us thought we could live the bohemian warehouse lifestyle despite the fact it was NewCASTLE and not NEW YORK

Only in our imagination did these ideas coexist. Once we started actually doing them the obvious conflicts between them started to show.

Strangely, one of the things that was not on the agenda was the idea that the pod would become a hub for cultural festivals or events. That idea really only came about largely by accident

In months before we signed the lease on the warehouse I had broken up with my girlfriend and gone to the Adelaide Fringe Festival – where I’d done some volunteering with Dave Sag and Jesse Reynolds from Virtual Artists who were then running the Adelaide Fringe “Cyberfringe”. From there I’d also gone to Tasmania where I’d hung out with a crew of ex Newcastle people and inspiring feral hippie types who were involved in the DIY arts scene down there.

Actually the ONLY reason that the Octapod existed was because I went away for a couple of months.

We’d been talking about this for quite some time plans had often failed to move forward – mainly because of me. A main reason was that I had been playing the role of “practical guy.” I’d been pretty much the only one who thought we probably needed some sort of plan if we were going to attempt to pay the bills. The rest of the crew took advantage of my absence to basically just plunge straight in and do it anyway. A few days after i returned the others were going to sign a lease.

Coming back to Newcastle my main ambition was reconciling with my ex. I was going to tell her what an idiot I had been by breaking up with her. I was motivated enough to tell anyone who I thought would listen what a good idea it would be if someone – and by that I meant someone else – in Newcastle would start a fringe festival.

I returned to Newcastle from Hobart after about 2 days straight on a bus, ferry, bus, and train, went straight to her house to discover that she her with someone else. This is when I learnt THE INCREDIBLE POWER OF AVOIDING SOMETHING ELSE. I decided to channel my madness and frustration. Instead of simply telling everyone what a great idea starting a Newcaslte fringe festival would be, I decided to start a Newcastle fringe festival.

I was working from a very simple theory. If everyone in Newcastle who was doing something interesting did it at the same time we could call it a festival. I often find myself talking to people who want to start festivals and almost always they want to make it a lot more complicated than that. They have large ambitions and are impatient and insistent that they must achieve them all at once. Fortunately, at that time it hadn’t occurred to me to be anywhere near that ambitious. The amibition kind of took care of itself.

Over the next 8 weeks, I managed to round up a small team of people who were all active in some way in the local art, music, geek, and literature scenes. Together we put together a program that involved about 400 local artists, a 9 day program, converting about 20 of the empty shops in Newcastle to temporary art galleries, a couple of outdoor live stages, an internet and digital arts program and probably the biggest event in years for the local arts community.

A personal favourite event was the “art crawl”. Organised along with Damien Frost and seemingly half the artists in Newcastle at the time, it was a perfect combination of Newcastle traditions: empty buildings, a cheap but enthusiastic local arts community and a love of public drunkenness. We put free casks of wine in each of those 20 empty shop galleries, rounded up about 400 people and basically staged an art appreciation pub crawl on a scale that by the end of it had about half a dozen police officers accompanying the several hundred strong crowd along their merry way.

This Newcastle Fringe was inspired in roughly equal parts by the diversity of great stuff that had been happening locally and desperately needed an outlet, the stuff that I had seen in Adelaide and Hobart, and the fact that one of the key reasons my ex girlfriend had broken up in the first place was that i was lazy, unmotivated and uninspired to do very much.

We actually put the whole program together from inspiration to execution in about two months. Today I know that that is impossible but fortunately no one had told me that then. It must have been about early May when I first said aloud that a Newcastle Fringe Festival would be a good idea and July when the festival took place.

I got to the end of the Fringe Festival, having funded the whole thing with a small amount of cash and in kind support of the local business traders groups. At this point, someone far more experienced in the local arts scene than me took me aside and asked me “where the funding had come from?” I asked her exactly what she meant by funding and she explained that the government had grants programs where they funded arts, festivals and artists. Which was a concept that up until that point, I had genuinely never heard of.

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 ABC Press Kit:

NOT QUITE ART

The art show that believes there is life outside the galleries.

Host Marcus Westbury, founder of the This is Not Art Festival in Newcastle and the former director of Next Wave Festival in Melbourne takes on a tour of how the art world looks from the other side.

Ep. 1 ICONS AND OPPORTUNITIES
Tuesday October 16 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Why do we spend far more money building sterile palaces to dead artists and their artefacts than supporting living ones?

Presenter Marcus Westbury travels to his home town of Newcastle, Australia where the cultural vision looks a lot like a real estate development. He then takes a trip to the Scottish city of Glasgow, where DIY culture has transformed an post-industrial casualty to a hub of happening culture in Europe.

Marcus puts forward the question of whether you can buy culture by building an iconic building or even franchising a McLouvre or McGuggenheim? Or is culture a messy, dirty thing that comes from the bottom up, refuses to behave, is borderline illegal and breaks a lot of occupational health and safety rules?

This episode features a guest appearance by the Pasha Bulker.

Ep. 2 THE NEW FOLK ART
Tuesday October 23 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Is culture a set of elaborate and elaborately funded life support systems, or an infection that’s trying to attack us? What’s the difference between a Symphony Orchestra and a covers band (apart from about $40million dollars a year) and why does the Australia Council spend more money on A SINGLE opera company than all the visual artists and musicians (not including symphony orchestras) in the country combined?

This week presenter Marcus Westbury meets artists that have turned the laneways of Melbourne into one of Australia’s prime tourist attractions (whilst dodging the police), finds out what uncollectable art is, hangs out with multi media musicians The Herd and wonders why the computer games industry has so much money and so little content. Creator of the Australian game, Escape from Woomera, Katharine Neil has some ideas why, which she shares with Marcus.

WARNING: May contain traces of criminal activity!

Ep.3 THE BUSINESS OF CULTURE
Tuesday October 30 10pm, ABC TV Australia

Where does art stop and business begin? Is the difference between art and commerce whether you make money out of it or whether you are making it to make money? Why does Melbourne have laneway bars and NSW have poker machines and what the hell does that have to do with art?

Marcus Westbury ventures into a video art bar, meets an artist who sells ideas, reveals the angst of being a sneaker designer and comes across a magazine that you can only read on a wall. Along the way he asks if are artists are just the underpaid R&D guys for big fashion, design, music and business?

With sneakers on show at the National Gallery of Victoria and every new art movement the basis of an advertising campaign, as a society, are we just better consumers than art critics?

This episode features Marcus in a suit.

Writer/Presenter: Marcus Westbury
Director: Brendan Fletcher
Producer: Frank Haines
Editor: Melanie Annan
Design by Tin&Ed
Commissioning Editor: Megan Harding

You can still download the original series from the ABC TV ‘Not Quite Art’ page or read some reviews of the series here and here.

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 order of preference.

Over half the candidates in the election participated in the survey (despite some incredibly strategically stupid boycotting by the Liberal and National parties). In the two weeks the site was open howshouldivote.com.au generated over 151,000 unique How-To-Vote cards (over 1% of eligible voters in Australia) and over 3 million page impressions on the website.

Howshouldivote.com.au was developed in conjunction with the folks at GetUp! and promoted nationally by Yahoo7.

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.