reallybigroadtrip | A geek, a bus, many guests & a huge country to explore.

dearCanberra

As I mentioned in my last post, I have been commissioned to make an artwork, called hAbitAt, for the Canberra Centennial Birthday celebrations on March 11th. The event will take place between 12-7pm, where I will host a “maker’s tea party” on the lawns by the side of the lake. Some people will simply be there to drink tea and chat, others will bring their own crafts projects. But the main idea is to create a shared hAbitAt, a collaborative crowdsourced artwork that literally spells out our relationship to location and community as the day progresses. Join the Facebook Event here!

The artwork

The day will start with the reallybigroadtrip bus, “home, James” and some tents set up around the lawns and draped within the trees. This is our hAbitAt; a blank canvas homepage which will evolve as it becomes occupied throughout the day. My guests will be the communities I have been hanging out with, their friends and families, and the people passing by as they walk round the lake.

home, James at Milkwood Farm, Mudgee, NSW

This is a shared, open hAbitAt; whoever happens to come along becomes part of the community and can leave their mark by attaching words to the tents. Words can be made from existing letters, or they can be knitted or sewn from a basket of materials right there and then.

In true crowdsourcing my life fashion, I need your help for this to work. That help can either come in the form of physical participation on the day or contributing materials and words (from near or far) to become part of the artwork on the day.

Physical Participation

In advance: I would love to hear about people/places I should meet while I’m in Canberra.
I’m spending the next couple of weeks pottering around the city hanging out with knitting and sewing communities. I’m especially keen to meet more mature age groups who can give me a personal perspective of the city over its comparatively young history.

On the day: Join the “maker’s tea party” on the lawns at any time between 12-7pm on March 11th – and make your mark.
Tea and biscuits, a sewing machine and a variety of fabrics, yarns and pre-made letters will be provided. There will be a whole host of delightful maker types to play with, plus all the other wonderful birthday events for you to go off and explore (but please come back again afterward!). Bring your own deck chair or blanket and spend a few hours or the whole day watching or bringing the artwork to life.

Contributing Materials

Every item that is donated to the project will be tagged and documented on site and online so you can see how your contribution has become part of the whole experience.

Materials we require are:
* Fabric and yarn (which can be used to make the letters).
* Completed sewn / crocheted or knitted letters (which can be used to make up the words) – or even the whole words if you really wanted to go for it.

We want every size, shape, colour or combination you can come up with – blow our minds! All material contributions should be sent to me by Friday 8th March or brought along on the day (contact me directly for the postal address).

Your words:
As the name would suggest, the birthday day celebrations “Canberra in so many words” are all about words. As I meet the older members of Canberra’s community I will be asking them what words describe their relationship to the city and the people who occupy it. These will become the words that we hang on the tents.

You are invited to also contribute your own words that represent your connection to Canberra as a place (especially if you are from there but have moved away). Each word will be tagged with the names and locations of the people who contribute to them. You don’t need to be physically present to add yours to the collection, just contact me directly to let me know who you are, where you’re from and what word you want to be included and we will do our best to incorporate them all.

I’ll be posting photos of the materials, work-in-progress during the day and of the finished artwork after the event via my usual social media spaces, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter using the hashtag #hAbitAt100 so you can follow online too.

So, please help me spread the call so we can build a crowdsourced collaborative Canberra together x

UPDATE: A couple more cool things have come up since I first wrote this post…

reallybigroadtrip’s first Nomad in Residence!

I am CRAZY excited to announce that this event will now feature my first ever Nomad in Residence! The idea with the Nomads is that they are special guests who bring their talents and vision to the trip. They might share their networks or be brought along to meet new people, exchanging skills and experiences along the way. Sometimes they will be with me for a day or two, sometimes a few weeks. I have had one guest on the bus already (my dear friend Elliott Bledsoe who was mostly there for a weekend roadtrip!) but now I get to officially host a professional Nomad in Residence.

Sayraphim Lothian has been a dedicated supporter of reallybigroadtrip since I first started trying to turn it into a reality. She contributed to the crowdfunding campaign, shared my constant bleats for help, sent random words of encouragement and even designed the ‘knitted bus logo’, making her design/process freely available here on this blog for everyone to follow. It will be an absolute pleasure to host her in #homeJames (which is especially brave of her since we haven’t done the interior build yet!).

Sayraphim will be spending the day with us, sharing her vast passion for textiles and random acts of kindness. You can follow her via http://twitter.com/sayraphim, and http://facebook.com/SayraphimLothian and here’s a little bio:

Sayraphim Lothian is a public artist who uses craft to facilitate meaningful connections between people.
Her participatory work creates bridges between participants, allowing moments of loveliness to flow between strangers. They are about the sharing of experiences and the fleeting but meaningful connections made. They are about rediscovering joy in oneself and realising it abounds in other people.

Sayraphim and her work can be found in a number of books and publications including Garth Johnson’s 1000 Ideas for Creative Reuse, Vickie Howell’s Craft Corps and Heads On and We Shoot: The Making of Where The Wild Things Are from McSweeny’s Publishing.

Her work is held in MOMA in New York, the archives of the National Gallery of Victoria, in the Monash Heart Art collection as well as in private collections and on the streets in cities around the world.

She holds a Bachelor of Arts with Honours in photography, a Graduate Diploma in Primary Teaching from La Trobe University and is currently undertaking her Masters in Art in a Public Space at RMIT, Melbourne.

http://sayraphimlothian.com

Location

While I’m on updates, some clever people have asked about the location (since there are many lawns around what is an extremely large lake ;P). I have set up a Facebook Event to help manage these details (thanks Sayraphim for that very smart suggestion!). And here’s a Google Map (our location is where the green arrow is pointing right by the end of Anzac Parade; ignore the red ‘A’).

View Larger Map

Also – turns out there will be a free bus shuttling people around the city – now you have no excuse to not come along :)

LINKS:

http://SayraphimLothian.com
http://www.oneverybigday.com.au
http://canberra100.com.au

TWITTER HANDLES:
@feesable
@sayraphim
@CentenaryofCanb

TWITTER HASHTAGS:
#hAbitAt100
#canberra100

Update: check hAbitAt – my first solo/Australian arts commission for info on the commission and hAbitAt – in pictures for the outcome.

hAbitAt – my first solo/Australian arts commission

Canberra in so many words, March 11th 2013

I’m extremely chuffed (and a little nervous) to announce that I have been commissioned to make an artwork for the Canberra Centennial Birthday celebrations, “Canberra in so many words” on March 11th 2013.

The day’s events occupy the entirety of Lake Burley Griffin, with a myriad of communities represented in a wide range of artforms all celebrating the city through words. The Event Director is Geoff Cobham who has worked closely with Centenary of Canberra Creative Director Robyn Archer.

This is my very first commission as a solo artist, as well as being my first Australian commission – hence the nerves! My piece for the event is called “hAbitAt” and (like most of my work this year) explores how people relate to the locations they inhabit. I’m using this as an opportunity to get much better acquainted with my new creative hobby, textiles.

For the next couple of weeks I’ll be over in Canberra meeting & learning from the older community via their knitting and sewing clubs. I’ll be talking to them about how they feel about Canberra as a city, how long they have been there, where they come from if they are diaspora and what they think about how their city has changed in the last hundred years. I’ve always loved the older generation and the wealth of stories and insights they possess, so I’m very much looking forward to this part of the process.

I’ll then be making textile works (knitting, sewing and crochet) based on the words they use, inviting crowdsourced contributions to add to the collection, and hanging them via a series of tent-like shapes occupying the trees and grass areas by the lake. Home, James will of course be parked up nearby – my own personal habitat, officially open for business for the first time! My section of the day is from 12-7pm, so I shall be hosting a little tea party during the day itself where makers are invited to bring their sewing/knitting projects and mingle with the crowd.

I’ll blog more about the work nearer the time, especially the crowdsourcing call, but for now please check out the shiny new website http://www.oneverybigday.com.au which will tell you more about all the events happening on the day. I must say I’m especially excited about The World’s Longest Bubbly Bar (even though they positioned me on the other side of the lake from it, the meanies!) and the Canberra Symphony Orchestra playing the world premiere of Symphony No 3 – Century (2013, Opus 91) by Andrew Schultz, with live-drawing by the unstoppable Thom Buchanan (who was a “Subject” with me in the recent Sleep Residency). It’s going to be quite a day – I do hope you’ll join us!

Update: check dearCanberra for info on the artwork and hAbitAt – in pictures for the outcome.

Solar Sponsor!

A geek living in a bus is all well and good until the batteries run out. I’m DELIGHTED to announce that this (quite substantial) problem has now been solved thanks to a very lovely bunch of folk over at Off-Grid Energy.

Off-Grid Energy: http://www.offgridenergy.com.au

Yes, it’s true – reallybigroadtrip has its very first official sponsor! And once again it’s a James Mellor related connection. I first met James through a short film community called KINO (who have hubs all over the world but this one was in Adelaide). At the same time I met a lovely lady called Emily and both soon became firm friends. At James’ funeral last year I caught back up with Emily & met her fella Hugh. They were starting a new company, Off-Grid Energy, who (as the name suggests) specialise in providing standalone solar energy solutions to people and places that are too far away from standard electricity supplies, or who simply want a more sustainable ecological solution. Of course we talked about this project, the plans I have for my own ecological sustainability and how life on the bus would be.

Since then we have continued conversations – in fact Emily & Hugh were one of my couchsurfing hosts last year over Adelaide Festival time. A few months ago, Hugh contacted me to say they had developed a prototype portable solar generator (the Shakpak :) that they were using for their own power supply during on-site installations. He figured that this – or something like it – might help me with my electrical needs on the bus. So a couple of days ago I drove out to meet them and came away with my very own rig.

Hugh & Randal from Off-grid installing the rig

Now these guys are far from a major corporation, so their generosity in supporting reallybigroadtrip means EVEN MORE to me. I’m essentially taking their new product (which they, like, actually need to do their jobs) and in return will provide feedback on how it works in different contexts (for example how long do the batteries last in a Tasmanian winter versus how long it takes to charge up in an Alice Spring summer) and of course promote this awesome new system to people that I meet on my journey.

At the moment I have two portable solar panels but the system is designed to take three. When I come back from my next gig we’ll install a couple of solar panels on the roof of the bus and work out how to attach it to the distributor so it can trickle charge from the engine battery while I’m on long drives. It’s currently strapped to the passenger seats, but we’ll fix it properly and generally continue to tweak things as we go.

the “shakpak” rig

This will COMPLETELY CHANGE MY QUALITY OF LIFE IN THE BUS! I can’t tell you how tricky it’s been not having my own source of power. My laptop battery is pretty shonky and of course I have a number of devices that all need regular recharging. The bus has a 24v battery system and while I can recharge from that it’s not a terribly reliable system (after all, who wants to push-start a bus?!). I’ve been spending a lot of time hanging out in cafes working & recharging things, whereas right now I’m happily sitting in a park working from my bus drawing free energy from the sun – HEAVEN!

I’ll be updating on the system and its progress as the journey evolves and Emily is helping me track and analyse my carbon footprint around the project in general. But for now I just want to say a HUGE thank you to Emily, Hugh, Sean & Randal and update my blog so it now has a “Sponsor” section – #squee!

Oh & since I know a bunch of you are serious nerds, here’s some data on the rig…

You can follow them on Facebook and Twitter too.

this is a brief status post in case anyone is looking for me between Feb 9th-16th. If you haven’t heard from me for a while don’t worry I haven’t got lost in the bus(h), I’m on a sleep residency. see y’all on the flip-side x

The Subjects

And now for something completely different…

For a week in February (9th-16th), I will be one of “The Subjects” in an experiment investigating the impact of disruptive sleep patterns on creativity.

During “the protocol” we will be required to produce a piece of creative work daily and, at the completion of the experiment, a larger work made individually or in groups addressing the theme ‘Storytelling in Extreme Environments’.

There will be a panel talk during Writers’ Week at the 2013 Adelaide Festival where we will present our outcomes. For more on the residency as we undertake our challenges, read the project blog http://thesubjects.anat.org.au.

I’ve never been one for reality TV shows, but I have always been one for disrupted sleep patterns. Having worked with ANAT for several years I’m generally up to speed with their projects. When this one came up I thought “oooh, that sounds interesting” even more than usual. And this time I knew I could actually apply as an artist for a change. I then – as you do – got distracted and almost forgot the deadline. Until I had a dream which reminded me. The below story, pasted verbatim, was my subsequent proposal which should give you an insight into why I’m doing this. (Why they chose me as a participant, however, I can’t answer!).

Unfortunately the timing on this got pushed back so what was going to be a nice little creative segue before Christmas (& before #rbrtOZ got underway) has now become somewhat cramped into an already tight schedule. The next few months include Mini Maker Faire Adelaide (which I’m working on) and Byron Bay Bluesfest (which was going to be my first time, but I think will now sadly have to be sacrificed in the name of ‘art’…) plus a couple of other things that are still under embargo – crazy times!

Still – this isn’t a directly-related reallybigroadtrip project but it will have me completely offline and out of reach for seven days from Feb 9th-16th. During that time if you need to contact me urgently for anything (providing it isn’t an RT, update to a blog post or anything that requires being anywhere near a device that tells the time) you can contact the residency organisers on 08 8378 4523 or 0425 137 532.

“Turn the lens on yourself, become your own subject; experience total surveillance and authoritarianism in a controlled environment” they said. “OK”, I said.

This’ll be interesting…

…

The Subjects ANAT Sleep Residency 2012

To sleep, perchance to stream

*stands up* *straightens dress* *clears throat* *smiles, awkwardly*

Good Morning. My name is Fee Plumley and I am a technoevangelist. I have used this ‘career choice’ as an excuse, a cover to conceal my addiction, for nearly seventeen years now. It’s time that I was honest with everyone – and myself – and admit that… I Have A Problem.

I go online via whatever internet-enabled device is closest to hand at that moment. I’m not fussy; I’ll even use an iPhone if my Android isn’t nearby.

I rarely sleep, the mobile screen glaring against my eyes in the dark as I curl up in bed pretending to rest. On a good night I may steal an hour or two of erratic REM cycle, infused with vivid and complex dreams that reflect the madness of my soul.

On waking, the first thing I grab is my phone. Not to call for help, I rarely use the telephone for its original purpose. No, my dependency cycle starts with email (because it takes longer to download), then twitter, then facebook (my profile and my page), then back to email (which by then is ready for me). More recently I have added Instagram to this list – it posts to five platforms now, you know!

At that point any normal person would sensibly put down the device and proceed with their morning ablutions (assuming coffee and a wee hadn’t already started their day). My morning ritual sees me simply, and without pause, to return to the start of the cycle. Perhaps another tweet has come in. Perhaps there is a follow-up to the comment I just posted on facebook. Oh and I really should reply to the email I received at 4am when I was too embarrassed to admit I was still awake.

Awake and online. Because no one must know, no one can ever know that it is this bad. I would be Letting The Internet Down. The Internet relies on me to spread the word of geek, to share my life with the world at all times. It is my destiny. I must obey its demands, fulfil its hunger for stories, searches, memes, viral explosions of political scandal and… *holds head in shame* … lolcats.

This morning I awoke from another insomniac dream. This time I had shaved my head. Grade 0.

They were rechargeable clippers & the battery kept running out. I was wandering round with long/short/dark/coloured bits for a while. I woke up wondering what it meant, if it was true… and, as my hand reached up to my multicoloured locks, I realised once and for all… that this has to stop.

It was at that moment that I remembered the sleep residency. Can you help me?

*sits* *grabs phone* …

#internetaddictsanonymous

… *sends*