People get a bit local here in the winter. Half the population flees the island for for somewhere (anywhere) else, the wealthy to the Northern hemisphere and anyone who can afford it to a caravan park on the coast in Queensland. There’s a noticeable drop in traffic. The rest of us, increasingly bothered by the cold short days, stay and find ways to amuse ourselves at home.
Last winter a couple of local young people took a dose of methamphetamine and went on a ‘crime spree’ in our area. This involved breaking in to sheds and fishing shacks and squirrelling around looking for money/alcohol/souvenirs. They had a great time and caused lots of minor damage until someone called the cops and they got rounded up for their own safety. Of course everyone knew who they were. It’s that kind of place. No one pressed charges. We’ve all had teenagers and what would be the point? There’s no gold in these fishing shacks. They are the embodiment of brutal simplicity.
The girl’s (it was a Bonnie and Clyde situation) father got a telling off for allowing this and it’s not likely to happen again.
Anyway, the security door on our shed was broken during the ‘event’. Lots of phone calls and “no officer we won’t press charges” later we need to fix it. The flies are getting in. The shed is really old, like a hundred years, so of course the door was custom made and we can’t buy one off the peg. To have a new one made is quite shockingly expensive so it’s off to the workshop for us.
Interior July
We collect old doors. This is genetic and so we even have doors that we have inherited from Brian (more on him later). Some of these we use for painting panels but a pair of cupboard doors rescued from a renovation are forming the base of our new security door. We try to avoid twee elements in repair and maintenance of old buildings but the quality of local hardware store replacements for anything is completely dire. We look for a balance, recycling old materials and seeking functionality and form. In this case we have rebuilt the existing doors for correct sizing and added an old screen from the tip shop for airflow during the summer. We will build the whole setup in the workshop slightly over size and then trim it down and rebate the hinges on site for an exact fit. We had to buy the brass fly screen online because no one sells it locally. There was a lot of chisel work in this job which was fun but slow going until we found a chisel set in the shed that Brian had sharpened. Lucky.
rgbdesigner Pop up Shop July
Not a lot going on with rgbDesigner this month because we’ve decided to open a souvenir shop in our shed this summer. It’s all we can talk about. Decline of local shops. (Even the pub has closed down). Low bar for community participation (anyone can make a souvenir - so much less fussy than art). A broad church (so many great things to make). Why doesn’t everyone open a pop up souvenir shop in their fishing shack? Did you even know that you can design your own plate transfers? Souvenir suggestions welcome in the comments. More to follow.
Writing July
This months entry from our developer Robert Gowty is strongly influenced by the beginning of the fishing season..
Making Maps
The digital landscape is an infinite dimension that remains largely unexplored. If AI feels like an entire world, to my mind it is but a small island. An interactive library that cuts and pastes what we already know into new combinations. It doesn’t create a new map, it just reads the old ones.
When you explore new places you often return with new things that are hard to recognise and easy to dismiss. I’m reminded of when the British first arrived in Australia, then returning home with some new and unexpected oddities, including the platypus, which at first was considered to be a hoax.
When I look at the digital landscape my goal is to create maps, ways of exploring things we might know are there, like Australia, but with which we might be unfamiliar.
Tomorrow is the opening of the fishing season and I’m sitting here waiting for my friend from Inland Fisheries for leisurely lunch. In a unusual turn of events. I’ve ordered a ginger beer and I can see the particles of ginger pulp drifting in the bottle. It’s exactly the sort of motion that I try to map onto the digital landscape.
Which brings me to my latest video for the song, The Mountainhead. Coloured particles swirl, exerting a force on each other cascading in an endless motion, mapping a world that is both real and imaginary. AI ends nothing.
There are many, many maps still left to be plotted.
Our Book of the Month is The Forest of a Thousand Eyes (2024); written by Frances Hardinge and illustrated by Emily Gravett. Kids book, we got the hardcover from the library. Never read a book by this woman that didn’t bring a tear to the eye which for unsentimental us is saying something. Highly recommend all her books. She is the nearest thing to Joan Aiken you will get in these sorry times.