Aussie censors?

There is a group of folk in the Australian Government who think censorship is a good idea. Others have set up a website to keep their fellow citizens informed about the issue.

Argillite seekers

Jewellery students climbing over the argillite outcrop at Colac Bay, west of Invercargill.

Our sexualised world

I was astonished to hear from a staff member that they found my video confronting. They are so used to semi-clad female forms dancing in time to techno music that they found the images in my video discomforting, singing mouths which panned back to show that the mouths belonged to small children.

Today I read in Sydney Morning Herald that the Bill Henson photos had lead to a push to disallow artist’s privilege for imagery with children which is pornographic. The problem, as writer David Marr points out, is with the “widespread notion that has been growing over the past decade that just about any image of a child naked or scantily or precociously dressed is pornographic.” If, like my lecturer, you associate techno music with scantily clad females, you could argue that my film of children in pyjamas is pornographic.

I dont go to American movies as I find them trite but also because they sexualise everything. Ironic really.

Stained glass not stadium

I asked the Stop the Stadium group if they minded me using their charter in my stained glass window. They didn’t mind at all; in fact they liked the window so much they put a copy on their website.

Perhaps this “worst financial crisis since the depression” will result in the plans for the stadium being dropped. Every cloud has a silver lining.

Stained glass window – changed image no 2.

This image is as Dunedin as Dunedin can be. It is the stained glass window in the Dunedin Railway Station (apparently the most photographed building in New Zealand) and one of the heritage objects in the city I like best. It is a heritage gem.

Dunedin is full of heritage gems but I doubt that the people who designed the proposed new rugby stadium were interested in integrating it into the character of the city as it looks like an overgrown oyster. A lot of people, even supporters of the stadium, are against council plans to provide tens of millions of dollars of rate-payers money for a new stadium. That includes me. I think the reputation of ‘ the House of Pain’ should be built on, not squandered and I would prefer to see Carisbrook Stadium spruced up.

For this project I photoshopped anti-stadium images into the Railway Station window. The opponents of council funding for the stadium have set up a group – Stop the Stadium and I used the charter from the ‘Stop the Stadium’ group (taken from the homepage of their website) and put it in (or behind actually) the train smoke. It is also inserted around the window in each of the edge panes.

Photos I took at the protest rally on 2 August 2008 are inserted into the center of the train and in the bottom panel.

I see the new image as a reminder to the council that heritage matters.

Adrenalentil’s progeny

The techno-musician Adrenalentil was active in the 1990’s. I have used one of Adrenalentil’s tracks ‘The Softest Thing’ in my mash up. The track is not changed – I just added videos of the musician’s children. I think it will be an interesting experience for the musician to see the music combined with images of children who were undreamt of at the time the track was made. If I wanted to get all philosophical about it I could wax lyrical about the bendability of time.