Week 2 has seen highs and lows, but ended reasonably well. Things started with my ordering the final piece of furniture for my studio fit out – one that I’ve been procrastinating on for a while. What I needed was a work bench that could fit under a set of shelves, and over my filing cabinet & mobile air conditioner. I had originally planned on a stainless steel skin, but quotes were up around $400. With a switch to melamine, the cost dropped to $85, and since it’s still water sealed, I can work on it with wet media, like clay. As a worst case scenario I can afford to replace 4 or 5 before I get to the price of stainless.

With that table in, and a larger one that had been in its place removed, my studio is now MUCH larger in terms of the largest continuous rectangle.

On the software and systems front, the week saw a long battle with my main production machine, in which I ended up removing iTunes 11 and replacing it with 10.7, as well as completely disengaging from Apple’s iCloud service. All in an effort to get my iPhone to start syncing automatically when plugged in – a behaviour it had lost somewhere in the upgrade. There’s a whole rant stewing away on this topic, but for the life of me I can’t understand why two devices that can have a physical cable plugged between them, should require a connection to a server on the other side of the world to exchange data with each other. So, now I have everything removed from iCloud, everything is local to my system, or synced through my own servers, except Reminders, which are stupidly tied to Calendar syncing.

The up side of the digital front, has been Aperture, from Apple. It’s the photo management software the new camera will be using, and it’s a pretty nifty piece of kit. I’ve also been checking out iBooks Author, and trying to figure out how to translate my existing graphic novels to iPad format. This is proving a lot harder than I thought, since iBooks Author seems almost specifically designed to prevent the creation of graphical storybooks. Every tool for the presentation of images, for example, prevents them from being zoomed larger than full screen. The HTML widget, similarly limits zooming that is fully achievable in the actual browser. My last option is to see if I can use an external javascript library to take over zooming, and see if that will get around the iBooks Author limits. The last option is perhaps a lateral move and reprocess my InDesign pages as pdfs or graphics, and go with standard ePub files.

One major bright point of the week has been the actual use of the new camera. On Wednesday, I did my first shoot. This was done with some improvised lights, as the Elinchroms aren’t up and running yet. The shoot was of a 1/10 scale miniature set a prop making student had built. This is the first step towards my ArtStart goal of having a photographic practice & service that I can offer to other artists.

All these have had done to them, is the filesize reduced from 7.5k to 1k pixels wide, and a single sharpen filter in photoshop, followed by a save to web in jpeg format. Aside from that, they’re more or less untouched. Lighting was with a standard home spotlight, a fluorescent articulated desk lamp, and a mini Maglite for spot highlighting. Colour was with folded sheets of cellophane, held over the lights to give different levels of colour & darkness. All in a all, a successful week.

Week 1 of the ArtStart programme has been busy and a tad traumatic. I was in Melbourne for most of it, where I checked out the NGV. There’s some interesting work there – I spent some time enjoying Rothko’s Untitled (Red) from 1956. One of the highlights of the trip was getting to finally spend a bit of time interacting with Ron Robertson-Swann’s Vault. Ron was head of sculpture at The National Art School during my studies, and to finally encounter this work, whose history of controversy is, frankly, startling, was a great way to begin.

The trauma side of things is the discomfort that goes with all change in a comfortable work environment. Due to the photography and digital comics stuff I’m planning to do this year, I needed to upgrade my work mac to Mac OS 10.8 Mountain Lion. After 4 years of a stable 10.6 Snow Leopard system, the changes have been disconcerting. Some things are a definite step back, the Mail and Calendar apps especially. Some are a step forward, such as the Mission Control system for replacing Expose & Spaces, especially with a trackpad to drive everything with gestures.

The bad I can live with, the good I’m really enjoying, so a net positive.

My camera setup is coming together, a pair of Elinchrom RX4 monoblocs with soft boxes, a Nikon D800 with 60mm Macro lens, and mains power adapters. The gear’s insured, and I’ve got training booked for both photography, and SketchUp 3d / Architectural modelling.

The past month has seen some interesting developments on the “professional” artist path I began walking a few years ago when I started my Fine Art degree. So, it seemed like a good time to take stock, and write a few things about them.

I started my degree in 2007, initially thinking I’d study painting to improve my comic art skills. One of my goals was to come close to the sort of work Jon J Muth & Kent Williams achieved with books like Moonshadow and Meltdown. Around that time, the fact I’d released the first two parts of Surfing The Deathline lead to me doing a bunch of rough pencils and page & layout designs for a company pitching comics as a reading aid. That lead to me delivering studio session workshops to school groups at the Art Gallery of NSW, as a part of the Osamu Tezuka exhibition. Something had to give, and so I switched my degree to part-time. In 2008 I got my first chance to get into the studios for specialist disciplines, with rotations through painting, sculpture, ceramics, printmaking and photography.

To my surprise, I absolutely fell in love with ceramics, sculpture and photography, and loathed painting. In photography, I was able to dive deep into serious art-making almost straight away, and over that first 4 weeks, created the Cages series of images. In the second 5 week rotation, the Flight / Fight images were produced, and I started thinking sculpturally in terms of photographing things I’d constructed. While I enjoyed ceramics a great deal, it turned out that it was sculpture which truly captured my heart.

Three years later, I completed my sculpture major, and had my end of year show. A few months after that, I had my first piece in a large outdoor exhibition, and now a year later, and 6.5 years after starting my degree, I’ve had my graduation. Oh yeah, more importantly, I’ve had a yet-to-be-made work accepted for the 2014 Sculpture By The Sea exhibition at Bondi.

That leaves a year and a half to fill, so what am I going to do with the time? Well, in the same week of my graduation, I received word that I’d been awarded my first grant by the Australia Council – Australia’s main public arts funding body.

The grant itself is called ArtStart, and is for a pretty tidy sum – $10k. Now, it’s not free money to do with as I please, rather, it’s specifically for business development and training. Every cent had to be budgeted and money couldn’t be used for living expenses, making or exhibiting work, or paying oneself a salary. So, the final outcome is that I’m going to buy a rather fancy camera setup, and do a bunch of training in what amounts to product photography, as well as some accredited SketchUp 3D / Architectural design classes.

So, over the course of less than a month I got into one of the most important sculpture exhibitions in Australia, received my Bachelor’s degree, and got a nice big arts grant. Right at the moment, I seem to be making this thing work.

This exhibition was held in conjunction with heritage and architecture awards.

Exhibited Works:

• Stairs
• Up / Stairs
• Tunnel
• Planet Enmore
• Planet Newtown

The little planet of Enmore.

It’s often said of newtown residents, their horizons coincide with the suburb’s borders. Taking the new little planet software for a run.

Re-orienting the stairs panorama upwards, reveals even more interesting geometry.

This is a living list of the glitches and bugs, and general “this is not a fit and proper product for sale” nonsense I’ve had while playing the Far Cry 3 multiplayer mode on Xbox Live.

• Can’t find servers – 5-10 minute waits to get into a team deathmatch game at times.
• Lag.
• Killed and shown hits in a place I had been seconds earlier, where there hadn’t been any gunfire.
• the bug where another player is raining from the sky as they run along.
• button unresponsiveness – crouch button not working until I’ve jumped
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, requiring a jump to be able to move.
• spawning in places where you’re caught on the collision map, and jumping doesn’t work, leaving suicide as the only option.
• stuck in aim mode after using and releasing a mounted weapon.
• “committed suicide” while randomly walking or running along a flat piece of ground with no weapons fire.
• killed in one place, then magically teleported to the other side of the map to bleed out.
• reloading a half full weapon empties it of all but 1 round.
• killed and told I couldn’t be revived because I had been revived already, despite this having not happened.
• had my view wrenched in un-commanded directions while shooting at enemies.
• reloaded a weapon, then immediately revived someone, then find the reload has unhappened after the revive animation is complete.
• get killed and then fall through the map, plummeting through empty space as the terrain disappears into the distance above me.
• get killed, have my body catch fire, respawn on fire and lose all my health.
• get killed, respawn and immediately die again in a secluded area with no enemy present.
• unbalanced numbers on teams. One occasion playing on a team of 2 against 10.
• reload a weapon, attempt to shoot with a full magazine, reload sequence is triggered again, get killed by the person I was attempting to shoot.
• kicked from server due to being idle, while running around on the map looking for someone to kill.
• Spawn into the beginning of the game, with no weapons.
• everyone else frozen while I can still run around, and kill all the opposing players, and keep killing them when they’re on the ground.
• Falling off the ship and getting stuck a foot deep into the deck below.

With 2013 upon us, we’re in the window in which Apple CEO Tim Cook had promised that there’d be something new for Pro customers. Many people interpret this as code for a new Mac Pro which would in some way resemble the current behemoth.

I’m not so sure. I wonder if we’re in for an FCPX-style paradigm shift. Back when Apple introduced the first G3 PowerMac, there were two models of machine serving the Pro desktop market – the Powermac 8600, and 9600. The only difference was that one had three PCI slots, the other had six. The replacement G3 had 3 slots. Apple’s answer to those complaining, was to suggest that many of the previous two-card solutions had consolidated onto single cards, alleviating much of the need for six slots. Further, they suggested that the small fraction of the user base who needed more slots could go buy a PCI expansion chassis, which would plug into an existing slot and provide up to six more.

I hope we’re in for a similar shift on the Mac Pro.

(more…)

The Metaning is an art project by Matt Godden – a 22 page (including covers) gallery wall scale graphic novel, with pages approximately 113x82cm in size.

To the best of our knowledge, having spoken with creators, publishers and academics specialising in Australian comics, this is the first work of this nature created in Australia, though we’re happy to hear of preceeding works, especially anyone interested in group exhibiting large format works like this.

The work was created as a response to the difficulty faced when trying to come up with a project acceptable to the drawing department of a traditional art school.

Narratively, The Metaning is an autobiographical journey through the events and decisions that lead to the creation of the work itself.

This book is published in DRM-Free Fixed-Layout EPUB format.

Preview / Buy.