First I shall offer you a few pictures to set the stage for the end of this act....  where the last shred of my sanity was torn from my fumbling grasp and released upon the wind....

the clown

the shed

.......the extreme make over

  the kitchen...

..the front yard

back yard

....my installation art, I call it "Turd Cemetery"

So I come to the end of the first 12 months of my journey. The first chapter of my odyssey defined by something as grotesque as the financial year.  It makes me ponder... how best to describe this time, for although it was a time of productivity, to create music, it became much more.... a kind of revelation.... as to the utter absurdity of it all.

But let me start with one of those moments when we meet people and they share a story of such pain and love.... of such strength, that it justifies all the fascination that we pile upon ourselves in our narcissistic anthropocentricity.

Imagine yourself as a 13 year old girl, brutally gang raped... the perpetrators never brought to justice... imagine later then having the fortune to meet and marry your soul mate.... to enjoy the bliss of seven beautiful years of happiness... and for it to be tragically torn away by suicide while you are pregnant with your first child.... first your husband... then your best friend.... and then your brother....who you yourself find after weeks of rotting decay.... all within 18 months.

Imagine that through all the turmoil of this pain you still managed to fill your life with an abundance of creative and professional adventures, and enough care and energy to give yourself to a calling in the service of assisting others in need.... all the while  raising a daughter on your own with a love and wisdom that could so easily have become a listless resignation..... This is a life that makes you want to celebrate the strength and versatility of the individual to overcome adversity.... how can you not admire what people are capable of.

What a story like that does is make you reflect on your own circumstances, and provokes you into examining  how well you have managed this blip of time you possess on this planet, your own strengths and weaknesses, your motivations and ambitions.

And in a most boring and repetitive  twist I found myself mimicking the archetypical artist....again... who in a fit of tormented soul searching discovers that the greatest inspiration for survival, for giving, for caring, the inspiration for all our strength needed to overcome adversity during our brief fumbling on this planet, is love.

I mean, what a cliche. 

And where did that gem of a revelation come from..... from being slapped in the face with its most beguiling manifestation, romantic love....

Love,  how  bitter sweet. What a great crashing roller coaster ride it is. It has an intensity I will never forget. The highs, oh so high, the lows dismal.  Love.... it totally fucks with your head.  And I, what the fuck got into my head....glorious love!...  a hope I might just once taste the nectar of the gods!?!

I became obsessed with a beautiful woman, how weak a man am I. There is nothing as blessedly beautiful as love, and nothing as wickedly cruel as love... yet all I was in love with was a fantasy. A few pixels on a screen, backed up by a few encouraging scribbles.... how I wanted to believe.... it seemed as if there was a woman who was made for me, whose sensuality was moulded by the goddess herself,  just for me.... and it seemed as if I fit perfectly into the glove she had sown, all those things she was seeking I had........ I made love to her thru my words, moulded out of the passion in my heart.... she responded to me... as if  she was touched by me.... as if there just might be the possibility the gods had crafted us for each other.... yet somehow... it all disappeared in one sudden puff of silence.....

Was I cursed... All my ambition, drive, determination... my dreams and aspirations were torn open, exposed as  merely a clever ruse.... to be worthy of the perfect love...

Perhaps this was my destiny.... the gods  toying with the likes of me... maybe they  decided  that this pain was what I needed to create my art.... they sit on their heavenly thrones, their laughter rumbling across my weakness like thunder.... it begs the question, what do I get out of any of this, this fool that gets tossed around by the vicissitudes of fate......

Yet my rational brain came to the rescue and reminded me that I am only victim to my raging dopamine levels.... love, the drug..... just say no. Yes, science did a fabulous job of stomping onto the scene like a pissed giraffe holding a magnifying glass, ostentatiously declaring these emotions as a phenomenon evolved to assist in the successful propagation of  more little humans.. don't worry, it only ever lasts for about a year, if you have the fortune of spending a year with the object of your desires that is.... then sanity returns.... in all its hungry, screaming, sleepless, demanding, exhaustion....

How useful then, and I hang my head in shame, for as  I looked closely in the mirror with that bloody magnifying glass, I only saw a man with the temperance of a  monkey in a cage,  jumping up and down at the picture of a banana....

Life was never meant to be a path of roses....

So there I was, sitting in the middle of nowhere with the shattered remains of any integrity I had strewn across the ground like vomit after a real boozy night..... a dopamine junky hangover from a potent hit of  love. I had to give it to science, it came to the rescue by totally destroying  any mystery in it, reducing me to nothing more than a complex cauldron of biochemical reactions. So how do I salvage some integrity from such a banal situation... after all, some of the most exquisite works of art were inspired by love.... how many great things were achieved, inspired by love....  how much sacrifice made , for love.... such accomplished and profound  human endeavours,   mere artefacts of a few spurts of dopamine...

The annoyingly useful thing with science is that its reductionist, mechanistic evaluation of the human condition exposes the underlying processes that determine our behaviour.  When you start to examine these processes and begin to piece together these hidden influences it also brings our moral compass under scrutiny.... you become confronted with the challenge that our decisions about what is "good" and what is "bad", "right" or "wrong" may just be an arbitrary emergent phenomenon from a complex subset of neurological processes designed to differentiate only between what feels good, and that which doesn't, the criteria of which is evolved and determined exclusively by  the drive for survival.

So it comes back to dopamine...  the only drug of addiction....we seek to pump the levels up to flush away our cares, expose us for a few fleeting moments to that elusive  bliss.... and then the homeostatic balancing of our bodies drags us back down to remind us to eat, shit and kill....

The terrifying thing is that our technological culture has evolved far more rapidly than our primitive physiology. So now we have instant access to a plethora of stimulants, physical and social,  that give us the opportunity to relentlessly pump up our dopamine time and time again.... from food, internet porn and easy sex, to gambling,  drugs, celebrity, consumerism, power....... and wealth. 

Yes, wealth, the culturally defined benchmark of personal worth.... those who strive to appropriate personal  wealth beyond their needs are only  addicted to the dopamine hit they receive from the social status it endows.... increase the feel good factor, just add money and stir... unfortunately, like all addictions, the hit doesn't last and we always find ourselves seeking  a stronger fix....where do you think all that monstrous global debt came from.....

They did it with rats,  shoved electrodes into their brains and let them push a lever that tickled their dopamine receptors,  they didn't eat, or drink, they just pushed that lever until they died....

Indeed,  it is not a pleasant thought, to view  this current generation of humans as merely  a horde of lab rats in a vast unconscious  experiment,  sophisticated digital signals shoved into our little skulls stimulating those dopamine receptors with surround sound 3D technicoloured promises of wealth, sex and happiness, and us, madly pushing that little lever  over and over again.... so obsessed we don't notice we are destroying everything around us in the process... what more confronting example of addiction do you need.

There is  what is called the dopaminergic mind hypothesis, which argues that a;

"dopaminergic society" is an extremely goal-oriented, fast-paced, and even manic society, "given that dopamine is known to increase activity levels, speed up our internal clocks and create a preference for novel over unchanging environments." In the same way that high-dopamine individuals lack empathy and exhibit a more masculine behavioral style, dopaminergic societies are "typified by more conquest, competition, and aggression than nurturance and communality."

This extract from wikipedia theorises that the adaption to a carnivorous, high protein diet caused a surge in dopamine production in our distant ancestors, leading to the evolution of civilisation as we now know it. It's description  doesn't even take into account the proliferation of dopamine stimulating sources within our modern technological environment. 

So take a good look around, we are a manic, insane and destructive civilisation.... and if you listen closely, you can here it constantly chanting its diabolically psychotic mantra... "growth, wealth, growth, wealth......" if you don't believe me, just watch the news.... read a newspaper... watch a few commercials....

 All this manic activity undertaken by our insane civilisation is carried out within a conceptual framework that, every financial year, only results in  a net loss to the environment.  Unless that framework changes to one that only results in a net gain, we are doomed to destruction.  Simple, undeniable logic.

But what do you care, with lots of luck, the consequences  might be something only your children and grandchildren and every later generation for thousands of years will have to deal with, not you..... if they don't become extinct that is.

So your moral compass is spinning in a dopamine induced neurological whirlpool, how do you get your bearings.... is it possible to pull away from those electrodes and stop pushing that bloody lever. Well.... that brings us back to me sitting in a puddle of my own emotional vomit, contemplating the meaning of love.  Because it can be rather embarrassing to consider how pathetic it is to go on such a roller coaster ride just over a few pixels and some squiggles on a computer screen.... fortunately for me I am well versed in denial so my mind got feverishly to work at constructing a feasible justification for such idiocy.... and hey presto... I am hit with a fabulous fix of ecological  truism lathered in  tangy Jungian metaphysical insight.

I had fallen in love with the goddess.

Yes, the goddess, the manifestation of  that profound procreative force that flows through all of nature... from her springs all life...  she feeds us with her produce.... she nurtures  us through the care of our mothers, she seduces us through our lovers.... she perpetuates life... she embeds herself in our collective mind as a metaphor....  the nurturing source of all life, the perfect woman.... the goddess.

The gods had taken my pathetic loneliness, tossed in a few crumbs of temptation and with their divine skills crafted a path for me to stumble blindly along until my brain was saturated... I wept, I laughed, I roared... they teased me to a point of bliss, then they instructed me to open my eyes... and there I was, alone in the wilderness...... cradled in the arms of the goddess... the object of my desires evaporated.....  a mere rainbow, a  fleeting vision of beauty that had guided me to a higher state of consciousness.

You see, the beautiful, yet in many ways unremarkable thing about human consciousness, is that it is merely an expansion of our awareness. We have all been endowed with the capacity to extrapolate and recognise that we are, in all our narcissistic  perfection,  ultimately a direct product of the natural world. That amazing biochemical factory we call nature , that has been pumping out endless life-form products for millions of years, recently  released  the latest upgraded human model, now with enhanced conscious awareness.... introducing ....you.

The relevance being that we have been exquisitely crafted by nature to love, and through our conscious awareness, recognise and love the hand that crafted us..... Unfortunately that mechanism which opens us to such profound experience has been hijacked and flooded by the neurotic malediction of modern civilisation. We have become hopelessly confused by the many fraudulent paths to bliss....

So love pumps up our dopamine, what makes it any different from the other stimulants that do the same.... there is a qualitative difference, for it is the ultimate survival tool. Love motivates us to protect,  to protect our children, our partners, our friendships, and from there it isn't difficult to extrapolate to all the other things that nurture us and keep us alive, like fresh water, healthy food, clean air.... healthy environment.......and the defining quality that differentiates love from all things, is that it achieves this not  through taking, but giving....

And in the balance of things, we can only survive if we give more than we take....

Which is why, of all of them, love has evolved as the most powerful stimulant..... it has such a profound positive impact on our survival, for imagine yourself, gifted by the gods of possessing the perfect love, if it were wounded and weak, would you not sacrifice all to protect it against the avarice, hatred and weakness in the world, so it may survive and grow and spread its beauty across all things.....

But real people fart, smell and do stupid, ignorant and destructive things....that is the role of the goddess.... to help us see beyond our  fallibility and gather her threads that are woven through all things and weave them into an image of perfection that so inspires us as to rally to her protection.....

But how do we hear, let alone be convinced by a call to arms in a  world deafened by an endless sea of neurotic voices. Voices  echoing out from billions of struggling little egos, that essential yet dangerously malleable neurological subroutine that through all our formative educational years learnt to define itself through its relationship with others....  carving out the shonky foundations for all our future perceptions of self worth...... only  too often driven to dysfunction by the unconscious and malevolent influences  at work in our modern society....  yes, take a breath.... ego, the bane of everybody's life.....

This is why I retreat to these beautiful isolated places, to silence the voices of the ego, that-merry go-round infested with crowds of manic monkeys all scrambling over the top of each other screaming for attention as they swing past.  An unruly, noisy and inherently self absorbed circus act, exclusively  trained to respond to a never ending barrage of evolving  social situations....

If you are lucky, you may recognise that one little monkey that stands aside in silence and just watches it all.... she is the gateway to your salvation.

And when that little monkey steps away from all the cacophonous madness, into the stillness of  the  wilderness.... after that roundabout has slowed to a halt.... and all aboard fall silent... following the gaze of that one silent monkey..... across the forests... and the rivers..... at nothing more than a sunset..... then the beauty of the goddess reaches out to you and captures your heart.....

The one truly defining characteristic of love..... our ability to see beauty... and when you see beauty, how can you in all conscience partake in its destruction....

So my psychoanalytical joy ride came to an end with a profound affirmation of something that countless poets and musicians have been bleating about for generations....

Love

Embrace love and you will only give to the world,

For in its absence, you will only rape it....

Once upon a time the goddess led me into her  crumbling temple.... until she is healed,  I will forever remain her guardian.

Love, the financial year ends with the absurdity of this cliche.....

This is denial.

Indeed it has me rolling on the floor as well. So wipe away those tears of laughter and let me conclude that salvation will never come from a single entity, a saviour, or a hero. Even if God were to appear before the grovelling masses on this overcrowded little planet and offer a path to its restitution, it would still require your  own choice to agree to follow, you and all those around you. Most of you wait, hoping that such an intervention will relieve you of your obligation to act, because the niggling realisation that the essence of real change lies within the constructs of your own psyche scares the fuck out of you.  Embedded and manifest in the now global socio-political philosophy of individualism, the only path towards a globally secure future is one of personal choice.... the irony is that everybody needs to make the same decision at the same time..... welcome to  the ultimate contradiction......

So where does that leave denial?.... do you care?... What does it mean that a man pursues a dream he knows he can never realise? After all, the world is full of fools. So let me whisper ever so softly in your ear that..... I know you have no idea what I am talking about.

So revel in your denial, for I have cobbled together a chill out  trance track to distract you from these uncomfortable accusations. Especially formulated to wrap you up in a soft gentle  ambience, penetrate your lethargy and dissolve your guilt like a fart in a hurricane......

Does this not seem like anger

Over 200 years we have plundered this land

Torn all the life from her  ancient  soils

Tortured her with thirst as we drank to excess

Carelessly Rubbed salt into her wounds

Infected her with an infestation of clumsy ruminants

Scratching at her dry parched skin

Until she bleeds red soil from her collapsing veins

So when she turns

And tosses all her dust into the sea

Can you not hear her saying

“If you value this so little,

what use do you have for it.....”

Catastrophic failure during the September dust storms brings my dome, shredded and  quaking to its knees. After major repairs I relocated to the more sheltered space on the opposite bank of the creek.

Welcome dear reader. Seeking a voyeuristic fix? A dose of alternative reality  thru the eyes of another, a brief interlude from the drudgery that makes up too much of your life...?  I am only too happy to titillate your existential boredom with my tragic tale.

Consider that it just might be possible that the only reason I am out here is because I am too dissociated from society to conform to routine 9-5 work. My drive to  build my security through wealth by hard work so lacking that,  like an enlarged financial prostate,  only an intermittent dribble of money makes it through at a time. And even that hurts.

In other words, I am a pathologically  lazy shit.

With such complete denial of the civil responsibility to work for a living, I am forced into a state of poverty entirely of my own making. After my marriage dissolved my solution to the dilemma of financing the resources needed to survive  was only provided by the providence of some capital gain made on the sale of the house. In my determination to avoid the soul festering burden of meaningless employment I endeavour to minimise my financial liabilities. So, having a  complete disdain for having to pay bills, I would rather personally invest in the effort of cobbling together a stand alone solar array for my power. I slap those panels onto a trailer, which in the spirit of being a total tight arse, I myself have outfitted with the barest requisites for a functioning kitchen, all built in  such a manner that could bring the DIY market to it’s knees with litigation.   And because I choose not to pay rent (read can’t afford) myself and my little circus tent, filled with all the demons of my undoing,  go off to find all the free places I can camp around Australia.

In order to dampen the frustrated grumblings of my ego at being such a social fuckup, I justify it all through a quest to create a great work of art, something to awaken and mobilise the sleeping masses against our dire predicament as a species, a work of art  so appropriately ambitious in it’s conception as to balance out the deep scarring awareness of my own impotent incompetence. Starting to make sense?

To convince the more  perceptive of you out there, my deception is laced with legitimacy by cleverly managing to negotiate funding for this great artistic lead balloon. A significant amount by arts funding standards, a poultry amount to sustain expenses in a cosmopolitan environment, enough if you drink from smelly puddles, shit into a hole and sleep under a glorified tarpaulin somewhere where people can’t find you.

My conscience has a fond way to describe all this... conscientiously parasitic...

So there, in that isolation, I do combat with my demons. The illusions I have spun, encircling me....... hungry.... choosing their moments carefully to interrogate this artistic master plan, patiently waiting to bear witness to it’s fraudulent exposure . And a bloody conflict it is. Strewn cross the battle field, countless musical themes, counter melodies, rhythmic motifs, chord progressions...... so much death.... each a sacrifice in the search for perfection, that indescribable quality that will allow this work to flow effortlessly and with utter conviction, a sensual blend of structural discipline and unbridled passion.... the ultimate accompaniment to a stunning and  provocative visualisation.  All fought while enduring the onslaught of  the elements. Wild gale force winds, monsoonal rains and stifling heat.... each paraded over the top of me in succession like a posse of vindictive elephants jumping up and down on that poor little circus act lying on the bed of nails...

The flood.... note the drainage ditches on either side of my dome..... I was sleeping on a water bed for a while there. The creek almost washed me away...

And then there are the legions of living things, as if  some bizarre alliance has been formed with those creatures banished from our toxic cities, they thirst for the opportunity to strike.... thick crowds of leeches which  have the audacity to infiltrate the sanctity of my plastic stronghold and attack me while I sleep, inching up my chest  seeking the tasty vulnerability of my eyes.... squadrons of flying ants battering my head with seemingly harmless ineffectuality, yet  their strategy of sleep deprivation viciously effective...... but the elite forces are now being deployed and the masters of stealth creep into my camp at night and with teeth as sharp as razor blades, chew thru anything that is not made of hardened steel, they deplete my stocks and sabotage my food supply with a bombardment of faecal shrapnel, preparing the way for the worst of all weapons... germ warfare.

Don't be deceived by the serene calm of this misty morning, these are killing fields....

All the while my mind wrestles with itself, my grand quest, born in virtue of  a deeper spiritual  purpose? .....provoked by the lingering question over our  integrity as a species shitting in its own global nest like some dangerously insane techno cult trying to commit collective suicide by overdosing on fossil fuelled laxatives? ...... or is this just my tragically compromised ego comically grasping at some absurd justification for my miserable inadequacies?

Certainly a pertinent question...... but following the precedent set by  that most psychologically constipated mob of all... American creationists.... denial is a wonderfully powerful tool. And so with  deft psychological counter manoeuvres I externalise my madness and the world becomes insane instead. My purpose is salvaged and my trajectory towards abject poverty a crusade of honour. It is indeed a convincing case.... very effective in the war of denial. After all, it’s not me who is now in denial. It’s you..... yes you... stayed tuned, for in my next post I will propose my case.

In the mean time, what do you think is really going on inside my head....add your vote in the comments section at the bottom of this post....  

Is Alex’s maladjusted ego running the show...

Or has he found GOD!!!!

Nothing like a jesus complex to stir up the mud......

... make up your own mind......

But what does it all mean..... perhaps only that I haven’t finished composing yet...

So let me reveal some of the artistic process, or should I say, my artistic process.... for those of you who are actually curious.... and why shouldn’t you be... what makes Alex tick? How does some of that manifestly idiotic stuff froth forth into that poor maladapted imagination of his? Indeed I’m glad you asked.  Let’s do a little experiment. First I want you to watch the following short clip and try to remember what your impression was......

This work  represents the conflict between man and the environment.... the driving pulse, screaming and distorted instrumental voices belonging to the modern ultra energised, frantically paced human experience are juxtaposed against the calm, meditative presence of the natural environment....which in turn is  twisted and abstracted into an electric psychedelic wash of pulsing colour and movement,  morphing clouds of darkness flow like smoke across and between the mayhem like malevolent shadows stealing something precious and hidden.... the ultimate source of this bizarre transformation revealed in the closing moment of the work.....

Shit! that even has me convinced......

It’s true, this is a piece inspired by a bush walk I made near my first camp spot. It was a beautiful day, I was walking on a remarkably well maintained track that wound down from a saddle, descending  through a pristine gully between two sandstone cliffs.... old growth forest on either side, magnificent old trees reaching for the sun in an ancient and timeless prayer, scratching their backs against the weathered cliffs. Originally I decided just to take some reference footage  to add to my video library..... so I innocently did a pan in a circle only to be confronted by the “shocking” evidence ...excuse the pun...  of  human technological invasion.... to which I had to respond.

So.... when I arrived at my second camp spot for my next stint of work, my goal was to record a short piece to match my experience with that video clip and edit the whole lot together into a crazy psychedelic little number before I packed up and moved on. It was an exercise to practice making a different style of music using my electric cello, and to explore some more creative video editing. Indeed, the finished product  in those regards accomplished  what I set out to do, but not in the way I wanted it to, oh no!

This piece caused me no end of frustration. I learnt to hate it, but I soldiered on like a politician with a catch phrase. The music was my first  abscess. I started by trying to be way too clever, penning a 3 part rhythm line, a toe tapping extravaganza that was to shock and awe with it’s cleverness..... then  against this rhythmic spine I would weave some chillingly quirky  atonal squealing that would have you on the edge of your seat drooling for some form of Wagnerian resolution..... none of that worked... it was dismal in fact,  and  after having waded far too deep into that ulceress swamp, a voice from within gargled “keep it simple, stupid”....

Well, you have heard the result of that.....

 I intended the relationship between the image and the music to have a similar type of correspondence as D-F-R (Discovery-Familiarisation-Recognition, which you can view on this site), considering it is the style of visualisation I am intent on developing further, however because the video material was taken without any consideration towards being set to music, and the music was created without any real consideration to the video clip other than the sentiment involved, matching the two up in such a structural fashion had about as much chance of success as me getting laid out here..... or at least the level of complexity involved to do it was so intense I didn’t have either the patience or the time to dedicate to it. I wanted individual trees to have streams of psychedelic colour move up their trunks and then jump to the next tree in relation to the individual musical voices.  I wanted the voices to follow the contours of the cliffs.... but I found isolating individual trees while the shonky camera work made them move with annoying irregularity across the screen was a headache, and when  I managed to get it to work with one tree, the effect was so mild it was difficult to discern it as having any relationship with the corresponding voice. Ultimately all my permutations to this notion of developing some form of structural representation of the music within the image failed dismally and with great sobs of humbleness, and relief, I conceded defeat, bandaged up my very bruised forehead and allowed the imagery to find its own abstracted relationship by building in a heap of randomness into the various moving components. Although I should note that I did not discard all the work I had done and if you look closely you can still see the creaking bones of what I was intending to achieve, and some pretty obvious compromises I made to include some form of syncopated imagery.  The morphing shadows are just an unintended artefact from the multiple shifting composites. At the end of the day, it was a good lesson in assessing  my source materials and understanding the limits of their potential. It was also a great effort in exploring the possibilities of composite editing by way of what can  be extracted  from a single  video file.

The question is, now that you know how much of a compromise the final result turned out to be, does it change the way you interpret what you see? Would you rather just have the arty spiel influence your interpretation of the work, let you believe that every nuance was planned and executed with meticulous detail? Does my struggle and dissatisfaction colour your own perception of the quality of the work, to my detriment? These are valid questions for an artist. You, the consumer of my art, do you feel as if you have had some of the mystery of the work diluted by my confessions? And if indeed this is so, than is it not within the interest of the artist never to divulge the true process of making their  art? If you feel compelled to respond to these questions in the comments section below, please do, I am most interested in some feedback concerning the issue.

By the way, it is still pretty cool when you can experience it on a bloody big screen in high definition.... these crappy low resolution internet vids just destroy the full impact.

I am now at my third camp spot, somewhere near Taree. I am now fully isolated on a property belonging to a friend of mine, who visits only a few days every fortnight. The nearest neighbour is a few kilometres away. It is wonderfully peaceful, calm, beautiful here. There is delicious silence..... aside from the brain piercing crickets and a hillbilly chorus of amorous frogs. I have cows to keep me company.... we have staring competitions......There is fresh water that trickles from various forested hills, it has an aromatically pungent taste of dung....

After sharpening my claws  it is now time to start the hard work on my major project. It is a daunting prospect. One tempered by this idyllic location....

And as my first toe dips in to test the waters.....  the dust storm.  Oh dear.....

Stay tuned..... if you get bored, read all the earlier posts.... put some perspective on this adventure...don’t whinge.... just   do it!

The unofficial reason for this journey is not at all about creating my artistic work, it is in fact an insidious opportunity for me to embark on  an insipid navel gazing opportunity of monumental proportions. Whoever said  art is a reflection of the soul was a  clever wanker and cleverly provided this  wanker  the opportunity to cleverly justify the worst of his narcissistic indulgences........ thinking. Utterly indulgent because as we all know, spending long periods of time thinking stops us from being productive and earning our way in the world, unless we get payed to think, and then, like all employment,  it’s just reduced to an  intellectual form of prostitution. I’m sure I am already irritating you, so read on, show some masochistic fortitude.

It was a remarkable few days, an engineer who had found god, a man who died several times over, a woman who everyday witnesses the excruciating ordeals of the diseased and the horribly broken, the finding and losing of god,  revelations....

So I have gone for an afternoon stroll beyond the other campground seeking a small orchard that had been planted there in the early 1900’s while the area was still a town,  on my way I innocently ask  a camper reading in a picnic chair if he gets a lot of wind where he is camped, the exchange is amiable, and what should have been  only a short conversation expands and begins to take turns into curious  and interesting directions, he’s an engineer, the coal seams in the la Trobe valley are 300 meters thick with absolutely no interspersed layers of  sediment , another separate brown coal deposit, being a lower grade of coal still retains the forms of some of the trees and vegetation within. It is astounding, it’s a huge load  of bloody coal waiting  to be dug up, burnt and asphyxiate the planet..... but what is even  more interesting is that the forms of the trees in the brown coal are all jumbled up as if they have all been just picked up and tossed into the mix, like diced broccoli in stir fry. You can walk along the open cut seams and see the chaos right in front of you, my curiosity is really peaked, fascinating, obviously they couldn’t have been ancient swamps as generally understood because there are no layers of sediment as you  get with other  sedimentary phenomenon  in geology, and because of the jumble of trees in the brown coal, it must have all been deposited in one single cataclysmic event........ like a great flood perhaps.....and then came the deluge.....  the rejection  of evolution,  species were designed as they are and don’t evolve,  nothing has been proven to actually evolve into a distinctly different species, there is only variation within species, tinkering with DNA  which is so infinitely complex ultimately results only in cancer, it can only be  intelligent design.  Carbon dioxide does not absorb heat so it can’t cause global warming, which the scientists have got all wrong,  Jews are constantly persecuted because they are the chosen people, we are facing Armageddon.......and more... it was a barrage, and most people would have bailed early with some lame excuse like a sudden, violent puncturing pain in the bowels and raced off in the vague direction of the pit toilets mumbling purposefully audible curses about the water in the creek. But this character was fascinating, I wanted to know what it was that gave someone like him the motivation to utterly reject the painstaking  investigation and hyper analysis  that our modern, rational and scientific perspectives have engaged to try and understand  the world.  

So I let him take me to his world with the mutiny by Satan,  the war in heaven, the fallen angles, the coming of the apocalypse, the resurrection of Jesus, the end of the world, Armageddon, and your admission into the presence of God thru the acceptance of Jesus Christ as your saviour. I allowed my disbelief to fade like shadow in twilight and imagined the profundity of all this were it actually true, and it is a colossal rock that shifts within you, the bedrock of your reality has to dissolve. The dark slimy places of my psyche were overwhelmed by the prospect of spending the terror of eternity rejected by God,  the creator  of all the beauty and majesty of life and the world it inhabits. God who is so full of love , God, who will forgive all your sins as long as you accept Jesus died for you on the cross. In this reality a simple lack of faith has an utterly unacceptable cost.......  after all, eternity is endless, infinite, there is no full stop, ever........ So to be amongst the saved, included, chosen  to remain beside God..... it becomes a relief of shattering proportions. Consider the emotions born from the reprieve of your condemned soul. I tasted it. And it is as addictive as heroin.

I didn’t confess my short spiritual experiment to my unwitting yet enthusiastic guide, and managed to extricate myself and continue my meandering in privacy with my new found saviour tagging along....... but there were some nagging inconsistencies.  A life time of influence by a modern civilisation, shaped by the forces of rational observation and investigation, trickled back into my  consciousness like  cool water in a forest stream .

My engineer had  told the story about how the tower of Babel was destroyed by God because man, in his arrogance, was trying to build a stairway to heaven and raise himself to the same level as Him. It was a calamitous act of destruction to remind us of our humble mortal stature in His world, a lesson  which our scientists and academics have assiduously ignored, which will incur the wrath of the Lord and lead all unbelievers into an eternity of damnation. Yet today our supposedly arrogant investigations into the origin of man do no better job at placing us at the most insignificant of levels. Star dust glued together by replicating slime. We are nothing more than ravenous worms that have evolved crunchy bits in order to try and stand up......

My engineer had said that if I accept Jesus as my saviour   before I die all my sins will be forgiven. Yet from a magnanimous offer of salvation, why did this seem to become like an ancient marketing ploy. To be accepted into heaven  after a life time of misdeeds merely on the confession of my sins and the acceptance of Jesus seemed to contradict the purpose of having all these biblical rules and commandments in the first place. I want to make the world a better place through the preservation of life in all its variety and abundance, I can’t imagine a more noble and spiritual path to tread, yet it seemed as if my little engineer was convinced that my deeds on this earth had no bearing on my admission to the afterlife as long as I confessed my sins and accepted Jesus.

So our God given dominion over the plants and the animals has become manifest in the endless destruction of natural ecosystems, the emptying of the seas of its fish, the hundreds of millions of animals that every year horribly suffer their way onto our dinner plates, the vast expanses of forest laid waste to feed our wants,  skies filled with poison and oceans turned to acid, as if we are the progenitors of Armageddon ourselves. And yet all the actions that drag us down into this madness will be forgiven if you confess your sins and accept Jesus before you die. There seems to be an abdication of responsibility here, like some cosmic escape clause that I just couldn’t reconcile. I resolved to read the bible, even if it was only to verify the evangelical claims of this fellow.

So that night I knelt on the ground like so many Muslims do and offered prayer to the lord to help me understand the interesting conflicts that my experiment had stirred up. And with that, the fantastic world inhabited by the armies of God slowly faded back into fantasy land. The next day was a stunningly beautiful, utterly appropriate day for having a reply in my prayer inbox.

Enter Pete and Zoey, what a cracker of a couple. We spent several evenings around the fire exchanging stories. Both Pete and Zoey told their tales with a down to earth humour and joy that lifted the spirits and warmed the chilly evening air with mirth and laughter. These were people who had both lived a tough life, rich in experience, raw in its beauty, a life worth telling.

They had found each other later in life.  Zoey, a medical assistant,  fed the steak knives to the surgeons as they made a meal of peoples ailments. With long scraggly black hair accenting her punctuations she would tell the stories of her life with a thick Greek accent that flew from a pair of lips never devoid of a cigarette. People dying in her arms, the endless flow of crumpled and diseased bodies, loves lost and found, pain and hardship, escape and abandonment.... and  Pete.... in the dark he looked like an emaciated drunk, his jeans were too big and saggy, his hair was a wild spray of thin orange that vibrantly burst forth from his completely reconstructed face.....  Pete had a tragic car accident when he was young, he died several times on his way to the hospital and  despite  his stories of all manner of mischief and vice, Pete was a clever bloke who’s memory was gallantly fending off the ravages of a lifetime of serious living.

He told of his near death experience, floating above his body watching the medical staff tinker with the slithering remains of his carcass..... meeting his deceased grandmother, following the tunnel towards the light and being enveloped by an unfathomable love which told him it wasn’t his time yet, and sent the bastard back.

It was an experience that drove Pete to reading the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud, investigate Taoism and Buddhism. And still he didn’t find the god he had already met..... he certainly believed in something, but it wasn’t the god he found lurking in the texts of the ancients. 

So here was a man who had come back from the dead, had visited the realm of the impenetrable and returned. A man who, by all accounts, had met God at the very gates themselves, he didn’t return clutching a bible to his chest.

It seemed as if my spiritual side trip had come full circle and I was back where I started. There is something inspiring, beautiful and profound about the universe and everything in it which will never have its secrets divulged through science alone. And any man brandishing whichever texts claiming he knows the mind of God is demonstrating utter hypocrisy and the greatest arrogance. The identity of god has through the ages  been endlessly reframed by our struggling little egos to such an extent we have forgotten how to believe in the unbelievable. And yes, the world is unbelievable. When you sit far away from the distraction of humanity, on a hill side and just watch the sun slide lazily under the horizon without having your thoughts raped and pillaged by the superficial trivialities that box our daily lives, if you cannot feel how sacred this life is at moments like this than perhaps you have lost god..... whatever that may mean.

It would indeed be the greatest irony if all the holy texts were the works of Satan. Feeding the weakness of man,  convincing us that with a few scribbles on a page we know the mind of God,  fuelling our stupidity and arrogance like it were an open and infected wound, inciting us to disagreement and hatred, violence and death.

And upon that happy note, let me introduce you to the trite little ditty I composed in the first phase of my artistic journey. I had purchased a lot of audio equipment to supplement my compositional aspirations and I still had to learn to use it, investigate it’s capabilities and potential. So below you will find a short music video of my 5 weeks in the “wilderness” conveniently distracting you from the shamefully happy clappyiness that oozed from my technical explorations. Except for the drum track, everything you hear was made using my electric cello, routed thru an analogue to midi converter and then into my laptop. It would indeed sound muuuuch more funky if it were played by a group of real people playing real instruments..... but hey, I was playing with myself, what can you expect...  

Stay tuned, there is more to come..... soon.

So, my friends, here I am, surrounded by magnificent rock cliffs towering like unfathomably  majestic sculptures, huge in their scale, ancient in their conception, clothed in a mantle of pristine forest, the wind  whispering  in seductive lethargy through the infinity of leaves and branches. My adventure, my journey into these wild, empty and stunningly beautiful places of Australia to cobble together my art, has begun.

You may be forgiven for feeling a tad envious, after all, how many of you would not love to leave the drab drudgery of the mundane day to day struggle behind and follow those romantic inspirations that every now and then burst into your consciousness, gasping for breath before ugly reality grabs that whimpering head and pushes those wistful emotions back deep into your subconscious. Indeed, what luck I have.

Yet not  all is as it seems, and this journey which seems so perfect, has already revealed its dark side. Let me explain.

Despite the splendour of my location, I sit here tapping out my tale a tired, worn and tortured soul. My enthusiasm for this project sucked to a desiccated crumple by  the endless expectation for an electric cello that just never turned up. A year and 2 months after the scheduled commencement of this project, the damn thing turns up and I finally manage to pack my gear and start driving, only to find the wheels of my trailer are rubbing against the sides because the bastards who built the damn thing made the axle  too short, so it can’t cope with the full weight of my gear. With Taoist patience I return to the clammy folds of Canberra’s suburbs in order to fix this engineering fuckup. Then I discover  it is still possible to receive the government’s $900 cash splash (god bless the Global Financial Crisis) as long as my 07/08 tax return is in before July 09. My poor accountant was no doubt stabbing pins into a doll with my name on it after receiving my late and terrifyingly disorganised financial slurry.

So another month later and again I pack and attempt to leave our consumer capitalist democracy behind. It is a grand day for all the strings have been tied, there are no loose ends and the trailer has two axles! nothing is getting in my bloody way! But fate is a bitch, and just to remind me how weak and feeble I am, I slice the tip off my pointer finger on my right hand while making “the last breakfast”. Half my finger nail is sawn off, dangling mockingly off the end of my finger, blood gushing out everywhere. I fold that flap back into place and hope to hell it will graft back onto itself as I wrap it up in metres of blood soaked bandage. Alas, as it turns out, over a week later my medical experiment in “ignore it and it will heal” fails miserably and I am forced to rip the now blackened and pustulating abomination off the end of my finger.

This wound, this farewell gift, however, had the striking capacity to bang against absolutely everything possible. Not helped by the fact that only 1km out from my destination  the right brake on my trailer (yes, my trailer has brakes) locks and the tire starts skidding along the road. One of the bolts holding the brake assembly to the axle shaft had come loose and fallen off, allowing it to swing down and clamp itself onto the disc, snapping the entire brake assembly like a twig in the process. So naturally my incapacitated hand had to confront some greasy undercarriage work in the middle of a dirt road, leaving behind trails of blood over the ground as if fresh road kill had been malevolently dragged around by a sadistic child,  splatter marks all over the disc of the offending wheel. Any forensic team would have had a field day with this scenario......

 Unfortunately it doesn’t end there, for shortly afterwards in the effort to cross what is by all accounts a pathetically weak and shallow stream to get to a special 4wd camp spot, I get bogged in the sand, smack bang in the middle of the piddley thing!! How is this possible with the monstrous 5 litre  V8  4wd fuel guzzling panzer tank I enlisted to stride over these insignificant obstacles?! I had the damn thing engaged in 4wd mode, front wheels locked.... but they weren’t turning, my heart sank as I confronted the real possibility that my drive train had failed, the machine was, after all, over 20 years old.  Not to let a challenge slip past, I grabbed my incurable optimism and hauled out  my winch cable thinking this was a prime opportunity to practice some good old winching.... and then 3 guys in a 4wd turned up from the other side wanting to cross, well my testicles shrank and my masculinity scuppered this stranded soul....  ran away and hid in a box.  My embarrassment was, however, well camouflaged behind the flawless assessment of the engineering failures causing the situation, to which they responded by suggesting connection of the winch to their ute and they would reverse while I winched and spun my rear wheels...........  the winch broke, with an almighty metallic clang of sheer stubbornness. The bastards didn’t even laugh, they probably thought I was mad, guffawing away like that, a man on the edge. I guess they weren’t privy to  my litany of woes, they just wanted to get across, I was just some amateur fool with annoyingly old and unreliable equipment getting in the way. Bless those lads tho, they had a hefty tow rope that got hooked up in place of the winch cable and eventually, with much spraying of sand, my circus was hauled out of its predicament. When I was securely on dry land, one fellow suggested I drop the pressure on my tyres to get more traction in the last of the sand, which I dutifully do, on the front wheels, which of course weren’t  working.....he did the rear....

It turns out my front wheels do work, my gears just hadn’t locked into place properly, and the winch has a security pin which shears off if the load is too great, the fault of being pulled by an impatient sack of testosterone. So there is some reassurance that I am not entirely to blame.  Yet I sit here in the cold, cloudy, rain pestered beauty of this place, fretting the day when I have to pack up, leave and renegotiate that stream. The mole hill has become a mountain.....

July 22 2009

Having just survived a rain storm, I tap this next entry with some relief. There weren’t too many leaks in this worn plastic bubble. And if it can survive the targeted urinations of a gang of spiteful possums, it can survive a tsunami. All furry on the outside, all fury on the inside. Those little buggers will crawl up your leg to get at something to eat,  those claws were so made for scratching on blackboards.....

So if you have read thru the earlier entries you may have noticed a gap of around two years.... well, life kind of gets in the way. I travelled to Europe in 2007 for some conferences related to my PrioritySpace work, my marriage dissolved, our house got sold and I spent a year twiddling my thumbs ever so slowly descending into madness as I waited for my electric cello. In the meantime I acquired my trailer, purchased some solar panels and bolted them to the top.

Built a small kitchenette on one side including a fold out table and a Waeco fridge (basically a large esky with a compressor), installed three back crushingly heavy  batteries and wired them up with all the associated paraphernalia to my photovoltaics.  

As I sit here the rain starts again, the spider’s web of tangled wires and audio equipment  around me glow with the gentle reassurance that all that power came directly from the glorious sun..... all precariously parked under a stretched, aging and  torn collection of overlapping plastic sheets held together with string and pvc tubing..... and it’s raining.....hmmmm.

Just as well I have the inside lined with thick polar fleece material. Being so horribly synthetic  any drops of water bead and run off rather than get absorbed, forming a wet patch. Nobody likes the wet patch....

So why am I actually here?  A question you may have been screaming to have answered as you read my collection of quaint little distractions. At this moment, as the fat rain drops pummel my delicate bubble like a million sperm laying siege to  an unwilling egg,  I am wondering the same thing. There are many reasons. I shall start with the official version.

In a nutshell, I’m travelling around the country, composing, recording and animating as I go. Drawing inspiration from the places I stay and the characters I meet on the way. This next work, and the journey of its creation is my response to the dire portent that is climate change. So in stark contrast to the wealth addicted consumer mania which so many are witless slaves to, I endeavour to live purchasing only what I need to survive and to maintain a functional studio. With any luck I can survive on less than $10,000 a year. Stay tuned, I will post my budget on  this site as it evolves. I will also be posting video vignettes and music as accompaniment to what will become a relentlessly odious  narrative. 

As far as my financial independence is concerned, I must confess, that I am to a significant degree sponsored by the ACT government through their arts funding. In fact I must give great credit to Helen at artsACT for showing such leniency and compassion when I had to request for an extension  on this grant because of one missing vital ingredient, that bloody electric cello. Bless her soul, on my first desperate attempt to escape the gravity well that is Canberra I found myself with all my gear strewn around a dirt car park trying to redistribute the weight from my trailer to my tank so I could limp back home to have the axles fixed, when Helen calls, and in my moment of darkness she shines a small ray of goodwill as she offers me that extension.

Today is Saturday the 8^th of August, I am in Lithgow. I have successfully replaced my broken brakes on the trailer. Tomorrow I stock up on supplies and push further north, where the warmth will thaw my frozen arse. What was I doing during the last 5 weeks? Learning to use all my equipment, exploring what my new instrument can do (and despite it's lateness, it is a quality piece of work) and building my library of videos and images, to be brief.   I will be posting the trite ditty I composed during this exploratory session in the coming few days when I have added some footage of my ordeal, so stay tuned.

So after a madly insane dash up to Brisbane, leaving a battle field of traumatised drivers and insurance claims in a sprawled wake behind us, we arrive at the promised land. It was raining.........

.........had been for ages, heavy thick relentless rain. My van hadn't been this clean since I bought it. I had wanted a sofa in my Dome, so I studiously researched where the nearest recycling depo to Woodford was so I could pick up an unloved sofa. And blessed be, there was a depo about 15 minutes away from the festival. But it was closed, despite assurances on their website. And it was raining. Heavily.

But I wanted a bloody sofa. So at the drop off zone we discovered a very large skip with lots of rubbish, perched on top of which was, glory be, a sofa. It was raining. The sofa was wet.

But hey, an opportunity not taken is an opportunity lost. So we annexed that wet baby and strapped her down to my bulging trailer.

We arrived at the festival sight with my heavy load straddled unceremoniously by a trussed, wet, used, sofa. "PrioritySpace?" yeah that's me. Very clean van though.

A few hours after deciphering the hieroglyphic directions to my site and digging the van out of a quagmire, we rolled onto the flat green little grass patch that would be my lair for the next week. Very square, flat despite being on a gentle hill, well drained, lush with growth, my own little meadow.

And as if it were a sign, the rain stopped falling and the sun punched a few holes in the clouds......... and screamed...... "GET THAT FUCKING TENT UP NOW!!!!!!.......".

Being wise and humble enough to know my place in things I obeyed this grand invitation to haste, my Dome and all its innards popped up as if an enormous kernel of popcorn had exploded.

Now my very good friend who so very unselfishly agreed to assist me on this little adventure, had in a rare moment of almost mystic clarity, suggested hiring some portable air conditioners to run in the dome. A stinking hot Dome, baking from the heat off a spiders web of electrical equipment, the accumulated contribution of a constantly replenishing source of hot sweaty bodies, a wet sofa and lots of very good insulation........ inspired images of a visciously unsubtle form of sick torture.

Now my good friend decided to contribute his engineering genius and skillful research to this problem by working out that the combined heat output of about 25 people, plus equipment, expressed in BTU's (British Thermal Units, one of the few measurements the British didn't concede to the French) could be handled by two condensing air conditioners. The idea of a wet sofa in those conditions actually terrified me. I imagined some vexing mold spore to evolve from that fetid and toxic concoction and, if not wipe out humanity, at least knock off a few of the public.... All my dreams, schemes, plans for an epic conquest of global proportions, slain by a virulent sofa ....

So in a wildly optimistic attempt to ignore this issue, I decided to invest in a barrage of drop sheets (used for painting indoors), and mercilessly wrap that sofa in great psychopathic sheets of choking plastic. Further covered the sofa with large drapes of spare black lining........ and wait, in hope, the public none the wiser they were reclining, ever so comfortably, on a violently asphyxiating lounge.

The festival started. "How much to go in?" the first question of the festival. "How much to go in?" the second question of the festival..... and third.... after many similar enquiries it became apparent people thought I was a stall of sorts. Perhaps selling some dark titillating thrill. I should have ridden this wave, teased the curious public with enigmatic hints designed to provoke their own salacious imaginations, then part them with their money as they seek to satisfy their voyeuristic urges by entering my little deception. But I declined the temptation of untold wealth, and instead employed the creative talents of two 12 year old girls to draw some "FREE" signs for me.

And the crowds grew, and the people started to ask questions about my work. And the response was just fantastic. I would have 5 people standing around waiting for one session to finish, and the moment people started to disgorge from my bubble, a great crowd of punters dissolve out of the crowd and jostle to find a place in the queue. I estimated between 5000 and 6000 people came through my Dome. It only holds around 20, max 25 people a session. I was very happy. It was very successful.

Which is probably why that sycophantic bastard friend of mine tried to poison me with off yoghurt. For simplicity, and security, we slept in the Dome at the end of the night. Now that I was out of commission for a whole day and evening, with a dome on a repetitive wash cycle for the masses, I was left, like some pathetic, groveling, vomiting worm, to endure my ordeal alone, on a nearby hill, somewhere in the festival.

But what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, Nietzsche was a con man.

The festival ended. I had few opportunities to experience it. But I was happy, everything had gone well, very well. But there was one thing left to do. Dismantle, then exhume the sofa. We decided to pack as much away as we could, before we released the hell that had been brewing in our make shift plastic sarcophagus. It was one of those moments, it had the tension of an Australian Idol winner announcement, or a big brother eviction.....

Peeling away the plastic..... great forests of green and mottled white, stretching like a fuzzy carpet sprouting with evil intent from the innards of this tomb, as if stretching for warm flesh, smelling it, seeking it........ well that didn't happen. In fact it was surprisingly dry, my theory being that the constant condensation of the moisture inside the Dome by these air conditioners accelerated the evaporation of the water in the sofa....... that's my story anyway, and my mate will corroborate it..........

On the way home from the festival we returned the sofa, drier than we took it..... it had been well loved by the punters....

I had a chance to redeem myself with plan A.1, the festival circuit. You can’t go wrong with a crowd of happy pissed and stoned people, rule of thumb…..

The first Festival I set up at was the Major’s Creek Folk Festival in November 2005. Small, intimate, and when the fog rolls in late at night it gives the place a special magic you just can’t find anywhere else. I set up as a stall, so I had to pay stall fees. It was easier to get into the festival that way, relying on being accepted as an artist was too unreliable, my artistic product too unusual, and considering I would be operating my Dome around 14 or 15 hours a day it made more economic sense to get people to pay rather than accept a flat artists fee. Entry fee was  not a lot, less than an ice cream, same as outside Questacon. It was a risk, maybe nobody would take the plunge into my dark womb  and I would just end up as a financial abortion, but my assessment of the festival atmosphere was pretty accurate and lots of people came. In fact the response was great, I had many, many returning punters. Often I was told it was the most unusual and original item of the festival, a comment repeated at every festival I went to subsequently.

In particular I attracted a cohort of kids who got addicted  to  my cosy digital wash cycle, endlessly trying to negotiate to get in for free. Pleading kids……god! how hard is that.

I met  a fellow, Mike Sarroff, who taught digital media studies at Crow’s Nest Tafe in Sydney, he was genuinely impressed by my work and asked me to adjudicate a competition of student animation works he was running.  Dave O’Neill,  program manager for the National Folk Festival in Canberra (which attracts around 27,000 people), unbeknownst to me, came through my Dome and asked me on the spot to be a part of the National Folk Festival  at Easter.

So I came away from a tiny festival in the middle of no where on the biggest high. It was a well needed affirmation.

After Majors Creek came the Illawara Folk Festival, where I was adopted by  the cutest little 11 year old girl who wanted to see my animation over and over again. I made a deal with her, every person she encouraged to come through my dome, she could join them and watch it for free. I had my own little spruiker, she did a fabulous job. Then came Cobargo Folk Festival and the National Folk Festival in April. Each was a success. The response from people was overwhelmingly positive. Interestingly though, there were still a large proportion of people who, because they couldn't smell, touch or see my product, were unwilling to part with the token amount it cost to enter my Dome.

Regardless,  my ambition was to set up at the Woodford Folk Festival just north of Brisbane, held over the new year. I had been to that festival a few years ago as the member of a band. It is an amazing festival, I would encourage everybody to experience this festival, it is a huge and remarkable event.

But how do I get invited to participate? Stall fees were too high for me to afford and I had missed the closing date for artists.

Ambition….. ingenious in its method, determined in its execution…....

My research had revealed to me that in August 2006, Folk Alliance Australia was running a conference for festival organizers where they get together and discuss all the issues involved in running a festival, AND, invited artists have the opportunity to showcase their work, AND it was being held in Canberra that year.   So I negotiated to turn up just with my laptop, desperately hoping that the organizers of the Woodford Folk Festival would be there to pass on their considerable experience in running large events. And they were. I hunted down the program manager, Michael Peterson, and dragged him in front of my laptop. Suffice to say that, despite  closing dates being 7 months passed, I was invited, and I was paid a fee as a participating artist, which also meant festival goers could enter my Dome for free. I was going to Woodford 06/07…….

And so it was. The Dome setup, like the entry to some bizarre space portal. Inside hung the polar fleece material like great dark veils inside some grand Mongolian nomadic Yurt. External sounds retreat into the background as you step into the tardis like space inside. The projector humming, the screen hanging precariously from the heights, cushions on the floor and a couple of folding chairs for the elderly and infirm. It was the colossal womb of a giant.

I also had an ezy-up at the entry, to give some protection from the weather for me, and those waiting to go in. Yes, the hordes, waiting to go in. My A-frames, with funky colourful graphics explaining the amazing world about to be experienced inside, stood sturdy, spruiking in silence. And the great white walls of Questacon towered above, like some ominous castle looking down over my dreams. And then the visitors started to arrive.

Pleasant hellos, "experience something marvelous", "the kids are anxious to get into Questacon, sure, when you come out". And again, "Come and check this out!, less than the cost of an icecream!", "Keen to get in." "On your way out, sure." And again.......and again.....

Then the families started to come out of Questacon, kids are screaming tired, the parents look haggard and irritated. "Come and experience the Dome!" "Sorry, the kids are too tired", "We've spent all our money," "We have to be somewhere else now, sorry."

So my first lessons in consumer behaviour came about. Kids who had been pestering parents to go to Questacon for ages were too keen to spare 10 minutes for some weirdo with some large globulous music ball tent thing. After spending substantial amounts of money on entry fees, food for the family, and then toys from the shop, when families left Questacon parents were reluctant to spend any more, regardless of how little it was. Kids were over stimulated and crying tired, parents were worn out by hours of managing their hypo kids in public. Everybody just wanted to go home. Neither did it help that I had first set up in winter when it was cold outside, and sometimes raining.

That's not to say there was nobody who wanted to go in, there were some. And those who braved the dark round world of the unknown loved what I had created and were impressed by its originality. But overall the numbers were bad, and it became clear pretty early on what kind of miscalculation I had made. And it hurt. This kind of experience effects your moods, your enthusiasm, drive, your relationships, everything goes sour. Self doubt settles in like some vile stench.

It was just as well I had exercised enough sense to have alternative plans for my Dome in case of exactly this scenario.

I finished my animation in early 2004. At around the same time I discovered that Questacon was developing an exhibition about the science of music, to be opened in 2005. Brilliant! I already worked there as a Gallery Assistant, so I lined up a meeting with the concepts department (who were in control of the exhibition's development) to show them my work. The meeting went well, they were impressed with my animation, however, it turned out that all the funding for the exhibition had been allocated in November the previous year. Too late! There was no money left to integrate my animation into the exhibition. But not wanting to miss out on such a good opportunity to have my work exposed through such an exhibition I decided to take matters into my own hands. I lobbied for support from management at Questacon and then negotiated all the appropriate approvals from the relevant government departments to erect a dome tent outside Questacon in which I could screen my work as an artist's contribution to the exhibition. I developed a business plan, researched, sourced and costed all the equipment I would need, dome tent, projector, screen, soundproofing, laptop and a host of other peripherals. I spent hours inside the galleries doing market research to gauge public interest and investigate appropriate pricing structures (ie entry fee, which incidentally, was set at $1 for kids, $2 for adults and $5 for families).

It all seemed to be going so well. Then I approached my local government arts funding body to see if I could get some financial support for my hair brained scheme. Now, our arts funding bodies have particular requirements (called key arts fund objectives, back in 2004 they were called something else ) to guarantee that the meager crumbs left over for arts funding are utilised to their maximum effect. My inquiries into the possibilities of funding were fruitless. I can understand the reluctance to fund an artist who has popped out of nowhere with some innocently naive claim to a great idea, however, I was told that my plan was too commercial because it was riding on the back of an exhibition in a major institution. Considering one of their key funding objectives at the time was for artists to develop means to be self sufficient, I would have thought that the whole idea was to engage in efforts to commercialise ones work in any way possible. Despite the fact that this was a self funded proposal with no financial commitment from Questacon, the contradiction introduced me to the wonderful world of arts funding.

So what now. To cut a long story short, I sold my soul to the underworld of debt and went ahead with the idea all on my lonesome. What is it that warrants such faith as to follow such a precarious path......

The result is what you see above, the Dome, setup outside Questacon. 2005

The first and most important consideration for any artist is time.....Without available time you can't produce work. So the struggle to find time, when the inevitable expense of living requires you find the funds to survive, is a consistent and endless conflict.

I work at Questacon, the National Science and Technology Center in Canberra (The Capital of Australia, for those of you who think its Sydney). I work as a casual gallery assistant, guiding the public to the nearest toilets, preventing hyperactive children from engaging in kamikaze missions hurtling down the ramps, and occasionally having intelligent discussions with the more awake members of the public. Usually I have around 5-6 shifts, it varies depending on the time of year, which takes up around 3 days of the working week.

On weekends I often (fortunately not always) have gigs for weddings or functions (If its only one 1hr gig, from leaving home to returning, the minimum time out of my day is 2 hours). During the Spring months, I can have up to 4 gigs a weekend. . With Pachelbel's Canon stained permanently on my memory, at least I can just sit, play, and watch those countless times as the bride slides down the isle in feverish anticipation at getting hitched. I am convinced that all brides take this one opportunity to force their bridesmaids into undersized, sickly coloured and frumpish costumes with hair plastered into what looks like some outlandish experiment by some teenage hairdresser still high from a night of gratuitous drug taking. Teetering on pin head heels ahead of the main event, these poor creatures are made to look as awful and uncomfortable as humanly possible, just so that the bride can look glorious......girls can be so cruel.

As a member of the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, CSO,
(a predominantly casual orchestra as Canberra is too small to support a full time symphony orchestra), there are around 8 concerts a year for which there are mostly night time rehearsals. All the members of the orchestra have other work, some as staff at the Music Faculty of the Australian National University, most as private music teachers, some are tertiary music students, and some have other professions. Seeing the haggard visage of many of these musicians, worn down by the relentless acoustic torture summonsed upon them by the Great God of the Beginner Instrumentalist, it still surprises me at how the orchestra manages to pull it together for the concerts. Perhaps the music offers solace, a small yet irresistible moment of joy.

Along side this are the one off musical productions by small local music organisations, the obligatory St. Matthews Passion, Opera Favourites and the occasional commissioned contemporary work, mixing piles of bricks, high flying trapeze with strange and bizarre music. On the rare occasion somebody rings me up wanting a backing cellist on a CD they are producing. They haven't written any music for it, but they like the idea. Some are good, they let me write what I think is worthy of the instrument, others just want a glorified synthesizer, loooong boring notes.........

This may seem amusing to you, but the reality is that all this frivolity, which regularly tallies to a full time working load, produces only about $20,000 a year. And of course, lets not forget the commitments to ones partner. The necessary periods of emotional grooming which keep us all feeling sane and loved. And of course, the house work, which stops war....

I have been disciplined enough to arrange 2 free days of the working week to produce my art. Can you produce work with only 2 days a week? I estimate had I been able to work on my visualisation, D-F-R, full time, it would have taken between 4-6 months to complete. It took around 16 months. So, in my case, somewhere in this mayhem something did finally get produced. What now?

You would like to think, "great, finished one work, lets start another". But of course, in order to justify the compromises, the art work must produce something in return, recognition, money, meaning? The ugly issue of the purpose of my art now permeates my day to day consciousness. Before, I could just hide behind the distraction of producing it, once it's finished, the difficulties really start.

Where does one go from here.

The first time I was inspired to bring the imagery inside my head into a more tangible form was during a wild intoxicated party in my dorm room at Burton and Garran Hall at the Australian National University. I had, true to my Dutch heritage, maximised my use of space by building a raised four poster queen sized bed, ontop of which sat a shelf which housed the speakers to my rather fancy stereo, which, along with my text books and tv was delegated to the shelving underneath.

The useful thing about this was that I could get utterly smashed, turn the music up, crawl onto my bed (this sometimes took several attempts) and let the sordid drug induced party antics happening below me slip into useful oblivion as the Brahms violin concerto washed over me. It was here, with Brahms, that the full grandeur and beauty of this work provoked an epiphany.

Who cares?

My navel gazing, that happens to most students after they finish university, wondering how the hell they are going to make the transition from their secure, stable learning environment, to a fulfilling professional career, manifest itself as is often the case, with a journey through Europe. Wow! did you count the commas in that sentence....A salacious trip into the hedonistic journey  of a lost artist searching for some sense of meaning. Those days are behind me...... for now. The telling of these tales, oooh.... naughty.