Music video by Alex Ryan. On his facebook page, he says to watch out for the director’s cut, but I quite like this version, especially my tiny appearances, as at 2:10:
On Friday night we caught the bus to Circular Quay for the start of Vivid. To tell the truth, I’ve had only the vaguest idea of what Vivid is until now. Brian Eno, Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed have featured in past years, and I’ve heard that the Opera house has been lit spectacularly. I’ve meant to have a look, but never managed the trip to town. I’m not sure I’ve completely grasped the concept yet, but it’s at least partly a festival of light-related art.
The animated illuminations of the Opera House are wonderful. The Customs House, if anything, is even more wonderful. For gee-whiz technical brilliance and stuff you can’t take your eyes off, they’d both be hard to beat. There’s a reason so many people were lugging proper cameras with tripods around the Quay area. I won’t embarrass myself by uploading any of what I managed to capture on my iPhone. Vivid have a photostream on Flickr, and here’s someone else’s take on Customs House from You Tube:
Apart from the two big items, there are more than 40 ‘light sculptures‘ scattered around the Quay and the Rocks. Number 23, Social Firefly, was the big drawcard for us. Created by Jason McDermott, Liam Ryan & Frank Maguire, the second of whom is one of my two brilliant sons, it’s a medium sized fig tree near the MCA that’s full of gizmos. Here’s a phone shot of one gizmo in captivity:
The tails of these gizmos (at the bottom of the one in the photo) light up firefly green when light shines on them, and they also move in response to light. So a beam of light from, say, the torch tethered to the tree, will make one of the ‘fireflies’ light up, and set it swinging back and forth. When its light hits another, that one is animated in turn, and soon the whole tree is full of dancing green lights. It’s not the only interactive sculpture, and it’s certainly not the easiest to photograph or film (as the Art Student and I demonstrated to our own satisfaction), but it’s fascinating, and gets the paternal pride cells swelling
So there you are, that’s a glimpse of this Vivid thing that fills the weeks between the Writers’ Festival and the Film Festival in Sydney.
The Sydney Writers’ Festival is over, and Vivid is about to light the town up. In this house we’ve been aware of a Vivid project that looks very interesting, and the Sydney Morning Herald site put up a teaser for it on the weekend:
They buzz like fireflies, light up like fireflies, but forget about calling them insects. Social Firefly is the latest installation to be announced as part of the Vivid festival, and is made up of a smattering of interactive robots flying around the fig tree at the Overseas Passenger Terminal.
The creatures are a collaboration between designers Liam Ryan and Jason McDermott from the firm Arup and Frank Maguire.
They have been programmed to respond to light, and to each other.
‘When light is shone on one of these little creatures, it will react and change the way it is moving and shine light around its immediate neighbourhood,’ McDermott said.
Visitors to the installation will be able to shine torches on the ‘fireflies’ to provoke a response, and see the ripple effect of that on the community in the tree.
Vivid starts of Friday, and Fireflies is scheduled to be switched on at 6 o’clock.
Jebediah is back. I admit I didn’t know they’d been gone, but evidently their many fans have missed them and are delighted to have them back. Here’s one of the videos from their new album Kosciuszko.
Nicely directed, I thought, by one who recently completed the postgraduate directing course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School, who happens to be a close relation of mine and recent commenter on this blog. I was quietly pleased to see that the video had more than a thousand hits on YouTube after two days.
The Inner West Courier has noticed the little man:
Longtime resident David Lawrence tends to the roadside garden regularly and is mystified as to who placed the statue there.
‘It can be put down as a true Annandale mystery,’ Mr Lawrence said. ‘He seems to be collecting something, maybe it’s part of a bigger theme, who knows.
He said locals have largely welcomed the new addition, and would like to know who created the work of public art.
Well, as regular readers of this blog know, it’s an open secret. It’s nice to see it become a mystery.
Later addition: Two things have happened in the hours since I posted that.
The Art Student identified herself as the sculptor on the Inner West Courier site (over my objection that by doing so she was depriving the Inner West readers of the pleasure of a mystery).
We found a copy of the paper and discovered that the front page photo is much more impressive than the one reproduced on the web (both by Danny Aarons). Here’s part of the front page, for those unfortunate enough not to have the Inner West Courier delivered to their door.
Today’s Inner West Courier has 
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