Sketch – Making a slow text poem, with hyper (hyphae?) text inputs

Saturday, April 30, 2011



Video-sketch: Drawing, singing, yelling, thinking a slow text poem into being with hyper text inputs and world-as-everything mania, this video illustrates a fictional process of writing the first four stanzas of a new slow text mesostic, Step by Step, after the fact. The attempt with a slow text mesostic is to create silence out of industrialisation's hammering, thus utilising John Cage's mesostics as a chance-induced trigger for slow reading.

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Doctoral mindmap (or, the unavoidable fact of nearly everything)

Friday, April 29, 2011

In preparation for my doctoral review...


Click for bigger.


The unavoidable fact of everything is a line from my friend Ian Robertson – graphic artist, John Cage enthusiast and designer of countless arts related books and publications, including my first two books, Words and Things and How to do Words with Things (with Peter O'Mara).

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What mushroom is that?

Thursday, April 28, 2011

I found this mushroom in a pine forest while taking Alison Pouliot's fungi workshop last weekend.


It was new to both of us, so Alison asked if I'd take a spore print and send her the results.

As the spores were white Alison emailed me back saying it may belong to the genus Tricholoma, though she wasn't entirely sure.

Regardless of the genus, the real excitement was that I made my first spore print (thanks Alison) demonstrating firsthand and emphatically the incredible reproductive ingenuity of fungi.

I took this peg today of a small colony of Inky Caps (Coprinus atramentarius) inhabiting ground under our young pomegranate. They are not only autonomous, auto-digesting and self-determined beings in our food garden, but edible too as long as we don't add alcohol to the meal as the combination creates allergy-like symptoms.

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Holding up the Mirror (or, the indecency/idiocy of shareholder science)

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

I photographed this ridiculous wall sculpture at the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) in Melbourne a few weeks ago. I was there for a symposium on weeds organised by the Weed Society of Victoria. Two friends of mine were giving papers on the ecological and social benefits of wild, autonomous plants, calling into question our governments' open cheque books to chemical companies who profit from a hyper-ideological ground war on weeds – which, in effect, is a war on our foraging commons.


It was an intense day with multiple views being aired and argued. It was clear change was in the air, not just because my pro-weed friends and others were invited to participate in a domain that has been a typically pro-war assault from science and government on self-organising floras, but because it is evident that this dumb-arse science isn't working. Katherine Wilson, writing in Meanjin back in 2009, holds up the mirror:
At the time I was among those campaigning against the Howard government's courting of Monsanto – a company that US courts had found guilty of negligence, trespass, nuisance and suppression of the truth, among other crimes. For its environmental damage, including poisoning of rivers, Monsanto is one of the very few companies found guilty, under Alabama law, of 'outrage' – a conduct 'so outrageous in character and extreme in degree as to go beyond all possible bounds of decency so as to be regarded as atrocious and utterly tolerable in civilized society'.
With CropLife Australia we don't just have Monsanto advocacy in place to court unconvinced politicians, but Monsanto's brown brothers and sisters too – Dow, Syngenta, Dupont, Bayer, Nufarm etc. Here's a taste of their greenwash:
CropLife Australia promotes a life-cycle, or stewardship, approach to the management of crop protection products. Lifecycle stewardship starts with research and development, and includes manufacture, transport and storage, through to use, and eventual disposal of waste, including empty product containers and the management of unused and unwanted registered products. Our stewardship programs raise awareness and enhance the capability of farm chemical distributors and users to manage any risk posed by these products to people, the environment or trade brought about by incorrect transport, storage or use. The overall aim of the stewardship approach is to maximise the benefits, and minimise any risk, from using crop protection products. CropLife, its members and its wholly-owned subsidiary, Agsafe, either collectively or individually undertake a range of activities to ensure that products are developed, sold, used and disposed of appropriately.
The use of life-cycle and stewardship are clever, if you are a moron. But many of us aren't buying the profit-focussed science and there seems to be a bit of a rethink at the moment as government expenditure is requiring contraction. At the end of the weeds symposium the convener asked the room "where do we want to be in thirty years time?" I answered that we will want to hope that CropLife Australia is bankrupt and out of the picture, to which he, a DPI bureaucrat, clammed up with discomfort and mumbled something like "well, we won't go there, will we".

Oh yes siree, many of us will:

including friends Diego Bonetto and David Holmgren.

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Greenwash #21 in Trouble - Michael Reynolds' Biotecture Future

Friday, April 1, 2011

Click for bigger, then click again for better focus.

Ecological pioneers: David Holmgren and Michael Reynolds at the Daylesford tip, 2011

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