In the past 48 hours, Paypal, Visa, Mastercard, Switzerland Post Finance & the Swedish Prosecutor’s Office have all been taken offline to varying degrees by DDOS attacks.

This is a true seismic change we’re witnessing in activism. The entire protest culture from the 60s to the present has really had debatable achievements (civil rights being a notable, if slow exception), and in the post-September 11 era has been almost completely impotent. Some of the biggest protests in history were against the Iraq war, and they had not the slightest effect on the policies of elected leaders.

Now we are seeing real action. A distributed group of people in their bedrooms are able to wage information war against governments and major corporations, at zero cost to themselves, and with no reactionary-propaganda-friendly bloodied policemen or smashed plate glass.

More importantly, this has all been done with tools that are packed with memetic humour. I mean just look at it.

The thing that’s most amusing about this, is it proves yet again the most important rule on the internet. You don’t fuck with 4Chan. I suspect eventually, 4Chan will be appraised as one of the strongest influences of our era in Western, and indeed world culture.

Interesting times are ahead.

An attempt to capture the aesthetic of Bonsai, but using industrial / technological materials. It’s almost like some sort of weird cybernetic tubeworm colony.

Stainless braid for this work was courtesy of Convoluted Technologies Pty Ltd.

Details

• Raw steel, stainless steel, brass, copper, computer circuit boards.
• Dimensions h,w,d: 59, 70, 32 cm.
• Artist’s collection.

Well, finally another year of college is over, and the task of updating the site begins. For now, there’s a new gallery with all the lifedrawing from 2010 in chronological order.

At the end of the week I’ll put in posts for the individual drawings, as well as the sculpture from the past year.

Finally, with college out of the way, I can get back to work on finishing Surfing The Deathline.

This is my second attempt at welded metal sculpture. It was built out of scrap, and a length of bent rod.

Nervous Spaces was my first solo exhibition. Comprising two series of approximately 20×30″ black & white prints, the exhibition ran for a month in the Xavier artspace at St Vincent’s Hospital in Darlinghurst, Sydney.

Nervous Spaces website.

Exhibited Works:

• Cage 01
• Cage 02
• Cage 03
• Cage 04
• Cage 05
• Cage 06
• Flight 01
• Flight 02
• Flight 03
• Flight 04
• Flight 05
• Flight 06
• Fight 01
• Fight 02
• Fight 03
• Fight 04
• Fight 05

On June 22nd, my first solo show opens. It’s an exhibition of photography at St Vincent’s Hospital, in Darlinghurst, Sydney. Works on display are photographs in the 24×36″ range.

Heavy Metal was a group show from the bronzecasting class of 2009 at the National Art School.

I also made the flyer for this one.

Exhibited Works:

• Bronze 01
• Bronze 02

I’m in a bronzecasting exhibition, so check it out.

Opening night May 20th 6pm. National Art School, corner of Forbes & Burton St, Darlinghurst.

Steve Jobs’ clean, methodical takedown of Flash.

Everything about Adobe these days is summed up by this basic point.

Perhaps Adobe should focus more on creating great HTML5 tools for the future, and less on criticizing Apple for leaving the past behind.

Adobe has been obsessed for the past decade with the idea of becoming a platform vendor, rather than a tool vendor. As a maker of tools in the desktop publishing era, they were fantastic, but once Acrobat became something more than a convenient printing format, and especially once they were infected by Macromedia, this ridiculous notion of Adobe as a platform, Acrobat, Creative Suite and Flash, gained ascendancy.

We are all poorer for it, because innovative nimble companies can’t get the market share and finance to directly compete with, for example, Photoshop; instead relying on crumbs by making low end, budget “recreational” visions of Adobe apps. I haven’t used CS5, but CS4’s primary characteristic is that it feels old, as in “take that old dog out behind the woodshed and shoot it”.