Category: Art
What is Inevitable about UTS Library (Pt 3 of 3)
In The Inevitable, Kevin Kelly discusses every surface becoming a screen in the Screening chapter, but this technological force isn’t just about converting surfaces into screens. He also discusses the possibility for libraries to become platforms for cultural life within their communities and he writes of the importance of encouraging contemplation and how online activities can provoke action. I think we’ve done some of this with our Artist-in-Residence and Curations programs. They’ve both led to ongoing actions and we think they inspire contemplation and further thought with at least some of our users. These programs have certainly had Interactive elements, with the current Artist Timo Rissanen actually creating his work in the central library stairwell over several weeks. Our Artists have asked questions of us and what we do that we’d not have asked of ourselves. This has enabled some reflection on our part and led to improved services, including with our search and discovery platform and our way finding signage.
http://www.lib.uts.edu.au/about-us/artist-residence-program/shelf-life-exhibition
At UTS Library the influence of Chris Gaul (our first Artist) cannot be overstated. He has had a significant impact on how we view our collections and this has led to ongoing improvements to discovery as well as search interfaces. His pioneering Spectogram has been recognised and reflected upon by several of our subsequent artists. He played a significant part in establishing a design-led visual identity for UTS Library.
Elisa Lee and Adam Hinshaw were asked to artistically interpret the use of our new Library Retrieval System in 2014. This ambitious project resulted in a truly amazing live data visualisation of the requests and returns to this huge robotically served underground storage system. Their work was inspirational and playful. It also added an important dimension to our identity as experts in data at a time when UTS was focussing itself on the importance of data and data analysis.
http://cargocollective.com/thebookis
Zoë Sadokierski followed Elisa and Adam in 2015. She has been a long time collaborator with the Library through her design work on various experimental formats for ePRESS, in her artistic installations within the Library and by sharing her research on the intersection of print and screen technology (as opposed to the myth that circulates about these two being competitors). Her Residency explored the very nature of the book through research and by producing artist’s books. She also conducted a very interactive and collaborative production of a book live at the 2015 Sydney Writer’s Festival. Like previous artists her work has had a very significant impact on our visual and physical identity as a library.
Starting in late 2016, we added digital literacy kits to our collection. Including low cost technology like Sphero, Makey-Makey and basic VR, these kits have been incorporated into both our own staff development and our educational programs for academics and students. They represent a playful way to introduce technology literacies, expanding on our traditional role in developing information literacy skills.
What is Inevitable about UTS Library (Pt 2 of 3)
Open Access is something we strongly believe in at UTS Library. We have taken action in many dimensions: to improve our institutional repository; as an advocate for OA at UTS (& the sponsor of our institution’s OA policy); through our active OA publishing arm – UTS ePRESS; by participating in various OA related events and initiatives; and though our advice and assistance on all things OA to students, researchers and academics at UTS. UTS ePRESS has experimented with new forms of scholarly publishing that harness the potential of the web and digital communications and therefore question the very nature of traditional publishing. We’ve encouraged and modelled more open licensing to permit reuse and we continue to support the early days of the OA movement. Some examples of all of this are found in the following images.
Our institutional repository was substantially remodelled and fully integrated with the University’s research management system recently. We established new workflows to decrease or eliminate manual processes and the ingest outputs, made UTS research outputs far easier to find on the open web and have substantially increased our reach accordingly.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/anatomy-quizbook
The Anatomy Quizbook was our first OER. This was also our first experiment with interactive text and importantly we were learning while making this happen. We have more OERs planned and will build on this initial adventure.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/books/lace-narratives
Lace Narratives was an ambitious and complex publication: it incorporated multi-media and was a major experiment in offering several different formats for a creative and scholarly work. An artistic process was openly shared through this publication and in a very limited edition high-quality hard cover version we were able to offer fabric swatches of the author’s textile art. This was one of our first experiments with different business models and distribution methods.
http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/journals/index.php/pmrp
Project Management Research and Practice is a journal that is both unique in its field and which has evolved over time. The editorial board believes in OA research output and like our other journals have now achieved rigorous COPE and DOAJ standards. Their latest innovation is to publish as articles are submitted and reviewed. This “unbundling” of publishing containers reduces delays in research articles getting published and is much like the unbundling of albums on iTunes or the streaming of movies and series on demand like Netflix.
https://www.lib.uts.edu.au/open-access/learn
Our OA advocacy continues as suggested in the image above. We help others to understand OA, collaborate across boarders with like-minded people and organisations, and we raise awareness of the benefits and processes surrounding the OA movement.
End of Part 2. And Part 3 is right here. Don’t stop now.
What is Inevitable about UTS Library (Pt 1 of 3)
This is the guts of a presentation I gave at EduTECHAU on 9 June 2017. It’ll be a bunch of images, text to explain those images and a few links.
Thanks to my colleague Dr Belinda Tiffen for her assistance with this presentation: she is much smarter than me.
Last year I read Kevin Kelly’s book The Inevitable and I was struck by the way he described the 12 technological forces that he thinks will shape our future. The forces are named in the image above, but they’re not all that easy to understand. I’ve thought more about them and believe that at UTS Library we are actually making progress in all these areas, not always exactly as he describes, so I’ll outline what some of our initiatives are in the following images and text. For the sake of brevity, the only force I won’t be illustrating is Tracking, but rest assured that we are already doing some of that too and in fact you can see it in some of the examples I am using.
I am concentrating on three major areas: discovery and search; open access; and cultural and artistic stimulation.
For Discovery & Search I see our efforts are consistent with the four forces and examples illustrated above: Becoming; Accessing; Cognifying; and Filtering. We are in the process of completely redesigning our discovery interface on the basis of some in-depth UX research that we conducted ourselves. We have long taken an iterative approach to website and digital services development, and our latest work builds on that. In our UX work we have recognised that there is a spectrum of user needs and behaviours from search to discovery, so we are adding new features to aid and enhance discovery, but they are designed in a way that will not distract or delay those searching for known items and wanting to get out of there fast. Our collection development has seen major improvements with regard to collaborative borrowing arrangements and these options needed to be carefully included and distinguished in the search/discovery catalogue in order to increase the options available to our users, while not confusing them with respect to immediate availability. Finally as others like Amazon, Uber and Netflix have done we are introducing features that allow for a more personalised and tailored search and discovery experience, should the users opt in.
In response to our research insights and user feedback, the following slides outline the initial user interface concepts for UTS Library’s new search and discovery system. These solutions have been designed from the responses and feedback gathered from our previous wireframe prototypes.
The following design concepts will be developed into a working prototype where the new search engine can undergo further user testing in conjunction with the user interface.
Overall search page results in our catalogue. From left to right you see columns arranged to show search filter options; search results list and a new contextual discovery panel.
The addition of a contextual discovery side panel to provide the user with results that are personalized to the individual. This feature will assist the user in the discovery of information that the system believes will be helpful to them. Information will be displayed based on their search request and will provide related content matched to a logged in users profile.
Article results intergration: A common request amongst users of our current system is for the ability to combine Article results in a search with Books and Journals.
Using the default ‘All’ search, the new system will combine the top 3 Article results alongside Books and Journals.
This slide shows a few new features related to the item display within search results:
- Ribbon colour display: (LHS of record) Integrating the colour ribbon into the catalogue items establishes the direct link between the two. For users, this creates a better understanding of the search functionality the ribbon has. It also more directly displays the relationship between the search results and the items physical location within the library
- Shelf view: Shelf view button is located under the book cover display; this better suggests shelf views functionality to the user.
- Save item: Save item button enables a logged in user to quickly save an item of interest to a list.
- Item status: Improving the clarity of an items status means a user can quickly see an item’s availability and its location.
- Locate item: Simple and clear call to action buttons has been added to each item. This button describes the necessary action to preform in order to get the item.
- Call to action buttons (options are shown in the lower image above) The description on the call to action button indicates to the user where that item is located. For example, an item on the shelf will indicate where to “Locate item” or if an item is in the LRS it will indicate to “Request from LRS”. If an item is unavailable the call to action button describes to the user what further options are available to receive that item. When multiple resources are available for one item the button will display a drop down menu. This drop down will display the available recourse types to choose from.
Discovery of related items: The contextual discovery panel (“You may also like …” on RHS of full item page) will have the flexibility to provide related content to a particular item. On the Item page, the discovery panel can suggest related books by the same author or display items other people have viewed or borrowed.
It is of course fully responsive design, meaning the experience is fully optimised for mobile devices.
End of Part 1. Part 2 is here. Go there now. Do it. You know you want to.
Sydney Film Festival 2017 – My List
I’m going to the Sydney Film Festival again, despite the fact that Event Cinemas in George Street offer the most disgusting seats you can find. So here is my list of selections for 2017. There are many more I’d like to have seen, but one has to be realistic and make some choices.
The films below are offered in date order and usually I give you, dear reader, a brief reason for the film’s selection.
Ana, Mon Amour – European drama with bonus sex scenes
The Ornithologist – homoerotica from Europe!
Ellipsis – it’s about my home town, Sydney & stars Benedict Samuel (Australian)
Una – a drama from the UK, seems interesting
God’s Own Country – more homoerotica, this time from the UK (& I was taken in by these words “frank nudity, explicit sex scenes …”)
I Am Not Your Negro – yes, it is a documentary. I’ve read some of James Baldwin’s work.
Game of Death – no film festival can be complete without a decent splatterfest (from Canada & France)
Wind River – I love a good intelligent crime drama that is filled with action and violence (from the US)
Call Me By Your Name – a gay romance from Italy & France (What else does one need?)
Pulse – an intriguing mix of sci-fi, teen angst, queer drama and some body swap action thrown in for good measure (from Australia)
In The Fade – a thriller from German & France. Also, Diane Kruger was brilliant in the US TV series The Bridge.
Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films – 10 short films
Maliglutit – an Arctic thriller from Canada (a remake of John Ford’s classic western The Searchers)
Once again, I will write up some dreadful film reviews in due course (if so inspired).
Our Artist-in-Residence Program 2012-2016 & Beyond
I gave a talk to the VALA AGM earlier this week on our Artist-in-Residence Program: the thinking behind it, who has been involved, what has been produced and why we think it is a good thing. Below are the slides I used (29 MB PDF) and in many of the images there are links that take you much deeper into the works created by those artists.
I think my talk was very well summarised in one tweet by @StevenPChang (who is a Senior Research Advisor from La Trobe University Library). He said that I was “lauding the value of intuition, ambiguity, and aesthetics in a world obsessed with metrics and efficiency.” That is exactly what I was trying to do.
Closet Monster – review #SydFilmFest
Closet Monster was my final film for this festival and so it ended as it began, on a high. It is a wonderfully told queer coming of age story that apparently is based on writer/director Stephen Dunn’s own experience as a teenager.
There is a lot to enjoy in this film. Our hero Oscar, excellently played by the talented-beyond-his-years Connor Jessup, has a pet hamster called Buffy who provides companionship and dispenses wisdom (via the voice of Isabella Rossellini). Oscar’s interactions with Buffy are a delight every single time. Connor Jessup almost seems born to play this role, but I thought the same about his acting in the second series of American Crime. He’s simply brilliant.
Stephen Dunn brings so much imagination to his story telling. He drops magical moments throughout the film to light up the tale and to bring Oscar’s lingering childhood horror to life. And he perfectly balances the emotional core of the film with his amusing and refreshingly different creative style. This could so easily have failed.
It is all so well done. As well, it is beautifully shot in several memorable scenes that serve to underline Oscar’s journey in life, his relationships and his developing sexuality.
I hope that both Stephen Dunn and Connor Jessup keep making films. Talents like theirs keep us going to the cinema.
My Bruce McAvaney Specialness Rating*: 4+/5 (Most people would think this to be very special.)
Teenage Kicks – review #sydfilmfest @TeenageKicksMov
Teenage Kicks is probably the best made and most memorable queer movie that I’ve seen in a long time. I’m not saying this because it comes from Australia. I didn’t like the film Holding the Man at all. It just didn’t do the book any justice. Writer/Director Craig Boreham’s film is very well put together. It is an ambitious and complex story that is very well told.
The beautiful and very talented Miles Szanto stars as Miklós Varga a young man from a migrant family who thinks he is in love with his best friend Dan (Daniel Webber). Mik is also carrying around the guilt associated with the recent death of his brother Tomi (Nadim Kobeissi) and even more baggage from a complex family history. His mate Dan has just found a girlfriend and this greatly disappoints Mik because he was hoping to escape to the North soon with Dan and their surfboards.
Mik, however, faces even more complex challenges as he starts to develop his own sexual identity. There is Dan’s new girlfriend Phaedra (Charlotte Best) who confronts him about his love for Dan and then tempts him in a park. Tomi’s very pregnant partner Annuska (Shari Sebbens) seems to transfer her affection and love to Mik, and Shari Sebbens portrays this with much skill and sensitivity. Then the many issues he is dealing with come to a head when he almost drowns in a pool at Phaedra’s home but he is saved by Dan who later rejects Mik’s drunken confession of his love very violently. As he starts to burn some bridges to his family and friends, Mik explores his gay sexuality, with some gay web-cam boys he meets in Kings Cross and a blow-job in a park from Sam (played by the gorgeously sensual Joshua Longhurst). More dangerously, he also experiments with some strong drugs. It all looks to be heading towards an inevitable cluster-fuck …
The acting is all very good, particularly from Miles Szanto who does carry the major load. Mik’s character is a very challenging role and it could easily have been either over-played, stilted or degenerated into that of a good looking soap opera character. Along with this, there is some beautiful cinematography of Sydney’s stunning southern coastline and of some close and genuinely tender moments between Mik and several other cast members.
I have just the one criticism of the film. I didn’t find Miles convincing as a teenager, let alone as a school aged boy. The actor is actually 24. I don’t think the film needed Mik to be a teenager or at school and it isn’t a critical element of the story. One’s sexual immaturity isn’t limited to defined by a school uniform. Mine certainly wasn’t. And even today I think that accepting one’s queer identity can take a lot longer than your experience at school.
What is great about this film, especially for queer youth, is that ultimately Mik isn’t doomed by some poor choices, nor consumed by his perception of guilt over his brother’s death. He proves to be resilient to the brutality he suffers, retains his tender loving nature, doesn’t burn all his bridges before him and then gets on with his life. Hopefully he hooks up again with Sam, but maybe that is just me dreaming.
A memorable and enjoyable queer film about choices, love and hope.
My Bruce McAvaney Specialness Rating*: 4/5 (Most people would think this to be special.)
The Endless River – review #sydfilmfest
The Endless River begins by rolling screen credits in almost sepia tones and a typeface that are both reminiscent of most of those old Westerns from Hollywood. I wasn’t sure why. Perhaps because that is where the director, Oliver Hermanus, thinks that South Africa is up to with respect to racial integration and the development of a moral code beyond an “eye for an eye”? It certainly made me think. (Possible spoilers ahead.)
We are soon introduced to the two lead characters: Tiny (Crystal-Donna Roberts) whose husband Percy (Clayton Evertson) has just been released from a four-year prison stint for gang activity; and the Frenchman Gilles (Nicolas Duvauchelle) who suffers the loss of his entire family in a brutal home invasion, rape and series of murders at their farm. Many seem keen to think that Percy was involved in these murders and a local policeman gives Gilles far too much of a tip about the possibility of his involvement, and Percy too is killed on his way to rob the farm that has been isolated as a crime scene.
Things are moving along very quickly in these two opening chapters and just when we are wondering whether naughty Gilles was involved in Percy’s murder as an act of revenge, he and Tiny become involved. I thought it was quite engrossing up to this point.
Disappointingly, it all gets a bit lost and self-indulgent in the third and final chapter, like the film has become bored with telling its own story and more fascinated by the scenery that the two lead characters escape to. This soon became boring to me. There are some short flashbacks to what look like headlights in the rain and Gilles standing over something, but to me it isn’t enough to conclude that Gilles took his revenge on Percy who, it turned out, wasn’t involved in the murder of Gilles’ family.
Then, with Gilles and Tiny still on their escape and processing their thoughts, it all concludes. Without a real ending. DIY. Again. Nooooooo! A cardinal sin in a story like this in my opinion. GIVE ME AN ENDING.
Good in part, but ultimately not at all satisfying.
My Bruce McAvaney Specialness Rating*: 3/5 (Not especially special.)
Desde allá (from afar) – review #sydfilmfest
I read another review of this film that concluded that the reality of life is too cruel for hope. Yeah, no. I didn’t like this film because there was no hope and I’m tired of seeing movies with a strong GLBTI theme that have no hope. We’re not all that grey, sad and hopeless.
At a big film festival you’re fortunate enough to witness the story telling efforts and methods of many different directors and those who are successful really stand out. This effort from Lorenzo Vigas isn’t one of them. I saw his film Desde allá after seeing the work of the amazingly talented John Michael McDonagh (War on Everyone), Ivan Sen (Goldstone), André Téchiné (Being 17) and Frederikke Aspöck (Rosita) to name just a few. These films are all entertaining and well-told stories. Lorenzo Vigas holds far too much back in Desde allá, but it is also far too depressing.
The actors can only work with what they’ve got but the well regarded Chilean star Alfredo Castro as Armando, gives us nothing. He shows hardly any emotion in the entire film and he does have a fair bit to be emotional about. He plays an older man with some issues who seeks sexual gratification by cruising for and then watching naked or near-naked youths undress in his apartment while he jerks off. His co-lead as the younger man, Luis Silva, manages to show a wider range, including some tenderness and vulnerability. He also adds some much needed colour in this largely colourless film. Maybe Castro just isn’t allowed to respond, but it would have worked better if he did, regardless of all of Armando’s unidentified issues.
The film is set in Caracas, Venezuela and I acknowledge that the film also highlights the differences between the haves and have-nots. It certainly made me feel a lot luckier with my own lot, but to some extent Rosita also dealt with a bleak economic environment and some unrequited love and still managed to leave the viewer with some hope and inspiration.
I was disappointed.
My Bruce McAvaney Specialness Rating*: 2 (Pretty ordinary really.)
Demolition – review #sydfilmfest
Mal: In Demolition, Davis (Jake Gyllenhaal) loses his wife in a car accident in the opening scene. We soon learn from several confessional letters written to the customer service department of a faulty vending machine’s company that Davis is an investment banker who works in his father-in-law’s firm somewhere in Wall Street. Not surprisingly, Davis quickly loses the plot, but through the letters he writes it seems that he may not have had a firm grip on it in the first place. He certainly looks the part, wearing fitted shirts, shaving his chest and trimming his eyebrows. He and his wife have a great house in the ‘burbs with lots of space and nice appliances, apart from a leaky fridge.
Frank (an imaginary rabbit): All is not as it seems. I liked the mattress salesman line.
Mal: Davis, however, starts to wonder whether he really loved or even knew his wife, perhaps whether she loved him and questions why they got together in the first place. He seems stuck in the weird-reactions-to-everything stage of his grieving process, starts to notice things he never had before and eventually tells a counsellor that he is numb from his head to his knees and has been so for about the last 12 years (see trailer above).
Frank: zzzzzzzzzz
Mal: Along the way he eventually hears from the vending machine customer service department he has been writing to in the form of a phone call from Karen (Naomi Watts). Davis eventually tracks Karen down and soon after meets her probably-gay son Chris (Judah Lewis) who uses the f-bomb far too much and gets suspended from school for mixing science experiments with the politics of war in Afghanistan.
Frank: He is definitely gay.
Mal: It was about this point in time that I started to think that Demolition was just a little bit Donnie Darko all grown up. Did Karen and Chris really exist or were they just imaginary friends in Davis’ mind?
Frank: No, that’s a stupid proposition, but at least I now know how I got mixed up in this. Of course Karen and Chris are real. You probably think I am imaginary!
Mal: Unfortunately, father-in-law Phil gives Davis/Grown-up-Donnie some dangerous advice that to repair something (e.g. a human heart): you need to take it all apart, strip it down and then you can put it all back together again. Davis quickly proves interested in and reasonably skilled at taking things apart. When it comes to the putting back together again, not so much.
Frank: He really sucks at the putting back together again, but at least he is proud of his work in the firm’s wash-room.
Mal: The random demolitions soon get ridiculously out of hand as Davis and Chris start dealing with their demons and learning about themselves.
Frank: Yeah and I was particularly fond of their shooting practice scene in the forest with a hand-gun and bullet proof vest. Don’t try that one at home!
Mal: Karen and Chris introduce Davis to other elements of life, including the music of Heart (Crazy on You), and his road to recovery begins.
Frank: Karen, Karen, Karen. Marcia, Marcia, Marcia.
Mal: I won’t spoil the ending, but suffice to say that we do get one. This is not common these days and I for one really appreciate not having to make up my own or phone a friend.
Frank: You tiny brain. Have you no imagination at all?
Mal: Demolition is billed as a darkly comic drama, but I don’t think it is that dark and it isn’t all funny. It is very entertaining and refreshing.
Frank: I don’t know, I found that Republican Party convention in Phil’s house a bit dark.
Mal: I liked it a lot. I’m sure it’ll be successful at the box office and Jake will probably win some kind of award for his performance. It is good to see that the US can still make films like this. Go away Frank.
My Bruce McAvaney Specialness Rating*: 4/5 (Most people would think this to be special.)
FromMelbin 