From Aug 15-20 Straight Out Of Brisbane offers up it’s wintery festival goodness to the sunshine deprived. Aside from a mammoth gigs, art and new-media program, special guests glitch-pop queen Kevin Blechdom & net-artist Kenneth Hung, AV scratching by Collapsicon(.net), robot wars and much more – it also features a ‘festival of ideas’ – a series of forums crisply curated by Qld JJJ reporter Fiona Hogg.
What inspired the ‘Ideas’ component of SOOB 2006, and the theme of urban futures?
A committed stance against the three ‘w’s of forums; waffle, whinge & wank… so to give the program a purpose & direction was a start. As a 20-something born’n’bred Brisbanite, my living memory of the city is nothing but concrete, construction & cranes; on the other hand I have an elderly father who points out where the barley-fields were as we drive through zone2 suburbia. It’s not the norm to grow up going on holiday for two-weeks and returning to see so many changes in a city…. so there was this strong theme of BRI$CRANE.
We are increasingly urban creatures, more than half the world living in cities this century. If Brisbane is the 2nd fastest growing city in the world, what king of impacts is this having for local life?
Brisbane has until now been a big country town; a CBD and then immediately suburbia. The city identity is based on the Queenslander & the quarter acre. Brisbane is really now experiencing the development of the first of what you could call an ‘urban’ environment. Part of the Ideas program is the SOOB Site Survey which is a mapping experiment designed to ask this question of ‘what is public space’ in relation to a central city map of Brisbane. It will explore how built form reinforces social relationships as well as connections between property ownership, privatisation and public space. It’ll be launched at the ?public? space forum and published online… so I’d say go there for maybe a more considered answer.
If there can be a ‘soul of the city’, what were you hoping for by bringing together a raelian, an indigenous architect and a priest to discuss it?
It sounds like a bad joke; ‘a raelian priest, an indigenous architect and a catholic priest walk into a bar…’ At a recent artist talk Luke Roberts emphasised that for some ancient cultures the sacred geometry in architecture was thought to transmit spiritual messages even more potently than text/scripture. Indigenous cultures too often have a very important link between territory, geometry and spirituality. As one of 6 Indigenous Architecture graduates in the country I’m really glad that Kevin O’Brien will join the discussion. Father Bob Maguire will be able to give a longer term perspective on religion in Australian society… no doubt he’ll keep the discussion grounded with a dogged sense of pragmatism.
Given the heightening Middle East dramas, climate change and human appetite, the ‘what if’ major energy crisis scenario being explored seems almost ominously well timed. Who pitched the idea, and who will be debating the possible outcomes?
According to Ian Lowe who wrote the scenarios it wouldn’t take much to knock the power our of Brisbane… we’re dependent on one station so if the wires went there we’d be literally powerless for about 2 weeks. On the other hand an Oil price rise above $10/litre would it put it out of the reach of most… which would be interesting in Brisbane because public transport runs of natural gas and electricity so it would be about crowd issues. Wendy Sarkissian is an internationally respected social planner who was based in Brisbane for many years so I’m really looking forward to her perspective. Jago Dodson is a younger urban planner who recently published a paper with Neil Sipe on ‘Oil Vulnerability in Australian Cities’ and Richard Mochelle is an urban planner with an interest in ‘rurban’ development which will be interesting to hear about in the second part of the panel which of course asks the question how can we design ourselves out of such a situation.
What is transhumanism and how does this strand of thinking wish to help us?
I’ve barely a clue to be honest, something to do with exteme biotech body-modification facilitating going off-planet? Every time I’ve come across the forum speaker Mitchell Porter I’ve learnt something… so I asked if he’d speak for an hour or so on whatever he wanted and that was it.
â€Imminent Federal cross-media ownership laws could mean one media-mogul can own newspapers, TV and radio stations in the same city, so local ratbags 4ZzZfm have adopted the attitude ‘if you can’t beat them, join them!’â€. Can you explain some more about this project?
It’s a fairly gallant attempt by the 4ZzZfm newsroom to engage with the current potential of online news distribution. The project will generate TV, radio and print content available online to any registered community services who are interested. Given the logistics of volunteer-based efforts it’s going to be no mean feat.
Massively Multiplayer Online Games almost seem like another distinct phase of wiring our population, in what way are you exploring them in the program?
MMOGs are so powerfully immersive because of the community-building that their design engenders… they are built to encourage the players to interact and this keeps people online long after they’ve mastered the actual game-play. But, these communities exist in territory ostensibly privately owned by the publisher in which players wave almost all of their rights by clicking ‘agree’ on the opening contract. Sal Humphreys will be looking at the politics of MMOGs as online spaces, so it’ll probably dovetail with the ?public? space forum really well.