Night At The Museum

Griffith Pioneer Park Museum's first night time event in living memory was an explosion of colour

Projection artists worked alongside a cohort of local students to develop the Night At The Museum event with Riverina-based arts organisation Red Earth Ecology and visitors the Bioluminescence Project. 

The Museum's historic and replica buildings were bathed in large-scale animations with a variety of styles and materials. 

Locals Andrew Keith and Bernard Gray were joined by regional artists Jason Richardson and Greg Pritchard. 

Scott Baker returned to Griffith to run workshops in video projection-mapping and digital file manipulation. 

The group of eight also learned skills in design and event management for the public outcome on Saturday night. 

An audience of over 160 people from all ages attended and were able to appreciate the diversity of projection art techniques. 

Mr Gray was demonstrating live-coding, while Dr Pritchard showed material from his project recording the Murrumbidgee River. 

"It was beautiful to see Greg brought the River to the old Baptist Church building," said Jason Richardson, event coordinator and Museum Curator. 

"Scott and I were also happy to be joined by Andrew Keith, who attended the first projection-mapping workshop that we ran in Griffith back in 2016." 

The opportunities for night time events at the Museum offers a range of possibilities at a venue traditionally used during the day. 

"The buildings provide a wonderful environment and we'd love to see Griffith continue to host showcases for projection art in the region," said Mr Richardson.

Night At The Museum was supported by Griffith Pioneer Park Museum, Red Earth Ecology, Western Riverina Arts and Create NSW through funding from the NSW Government.

Towering over the gods

Flipping through books about Art Deco at the library last week and I saw this design on the Rockefeller Centre in New York.

I like the way it's viewed while craning your neck to look up, which is where you'd expect to find an old god among the clouds. Yet this one is crowded by the building, which seems to be the point.

It's as though it's meant to give the impression that new gods have replaced the old.

This photo by "me9aman" via Google image search.

Radio daze

Art Deco money clip

Gorgeous Art Deco money clip that I found tucked away at work today.

Modern designs inspire

I like this Dethridge-inspired water feature in Leeton's Chelmsford Place almost as much as I like the Walter Burley Griffin-inspired water tower behind it.

John Stewart Dethridge designed the water wheel to measure the flow to irrigated farms. The design was widely used around the world as a result of his refusal to patent the invention. These days a civil servant might not get the choice but I think it's inspiring that he wanted it to be used, rather than attempt to make money. This is an attitude I take toward my creative endeavours in sound recording, with my work made available under a Creative Commons licence.

Walter Burley Griffin is famous for winning the competition to design Canberra. Less known is that he left before Canberra was completed and only saw a memorial built to his designs in the Australian national capital.

During his time here Griffin undertook other work, including the designs for Leeton and Griffith in the Murrumbidgee Irrigation Area. The water tower shown at the top of this post was built in the 1970s but retains the design Griffin developed for the two towers that lie behind it. He thought they would form a gateway to the town, like a walled medieval village.

Griffin also added features to Leeton including a bandstand, which I like to think shows the value he placed on cultural activities like live music, as well as park that is like the water towers in being kinda small for contemporary times. I remixed it as part of my project for the centenary of Leeton, see below.

Leeton Art Deco Festival 2013

Nice to see the 2013 Leeton Art Deco Festival using my design for their colouring-in competition, along with a couple of other ideas. One of the highlights in 2011 was seeing the Roxy's windows full of entries, especially the messier ones that hide the speed at which I put the design together.

Magnifique!

See more beaut colour photographs of Paris from early last century.

Rediscovering the theremin

Years ago I bought a theremin because it seemed like a good idea.

When it arrived I was disappointed to discover it's almost as difficult to play as a violin. I experimented with gating it and triggering it with drums and then it got packed away.



Then the other day I was writing a list of ideas for the 2013 Leeton Art Deco Festival and I'd included the theremin, as it was invented in the 1920s.

Since I've been experimenting with putting different signals through different guitar pedals, I plugged in the theremin and found some pleasing sounds. Have a listen :)

March into the archives : Betty Boop

A number of Betty Boop cartoons are in the public domain and this is one I screened as part of the 2011 Leeton Art Deco Festival.

My contribution to the above production is the mastering, which involved increasing the perceived volume of the soundtrack.

March into the archives : Duke Ellington

The following summary of Duke Ellington's career was published in BMA Magazine on 17 February 2000, ahead of Wynton Marsalis leading the Lincoln Centre Jazz Orchestra in a performance of Ellington's songs.

In 1917 when 'Duke' Ellington was eighteen, he'd wanted to become a painter. In the decades that followed, Ellington remained a painter although it was in the guise of a jazz composer.

In conducting his orchestra Ellington arranged music as though it were colour on a canvas, with deft movements of his hand (the piano his brush) he would sketch sonic landscapes and illustrate a path for the other musicians.

Yet Ellington should not be viewed as a maestro in the mold of European composers like Mozart; the Duke's talent was to recognise and arrange melodies that were created through the improvisation of his band. Most Ellington pieces were collective arrangements and as much the music of each individual member but Duke headed the collective.

It was through a dynamic willpower that Ellington stamped his ideas onto his musicians and, while he developed their talents, this leadership is his claim to authorship.

Duke Ellington has earned his stature in the history of jazz for many reasons and it has been claimed that he founded a number of innovations. These included the tune 'Caravan' written by his Puerto Rican-born trombonist Juan Tizol in 1937, which paved the sub-genre of latin jazz; and, perhaps more importantly, the history of jazz bass stretches through Ellington's work form the first recording with an amplified bass, 'Hot and bothered' in 1928, through to the influential playing of Jimmy Blanton in the 1940s, who helped make the instrument what it is today.

Above all, Ellington's career had longevity. From his start with a five-piece combo, who (according to popular myth) were so poor they had to split a hotdog between them to keep from starving, the Duke headed the most significant big band in an era when big bands were like pop groups are today.

His final landmark was the '70th birthday concert' which was chosen in 1969 as 'Jazz record of the year' all over the world. On 25 May 1974 Ellington died of pneumonia in a New York hospital, only a few weeks after musicians including Leonard Bernstein and Miles Davis had paid homage to him on his 75th birthday.

The importance of his music cannot be overstated.

Still an amazing speech

Many remember Charlie Chaplin for his silent movies but there's a speech of his that is foremost in my mind. It's from The Great Dictator, the Hitler pistake comedy made around the start of World War II to encourage the US to join the fight against fascism -- muchlike Casablanca did in 1942.

I was thinking about this speech earlier in the year when I was working on the soundtrack mixed for Metropolis. These two films seem like bookends with Nazi Germany in the middle.

Both films say that compassion is needed to stop people becoming like machines. It seems to pre-empt the 'Nuremberg defence' and remains a powerful plea for humanity.

Casablanca is propaganda

Should Casablanca be considered one of the greatest propaganda films as much as one as of the greatest romances?

This is the question that will be offered, along with award-winning Lillypilly Wines and canapés, to those attending a screening of the film as part of the Leeton Art Deco Festival on Friday 1 April from 7pm at The Roxy Theatre.

A critical success on its release, Casablanca continues to entertain audiences and appear in lists devoted to the greatest films and deservedly so. The Warner Brothers Studio talent of the day includes Humphrey Bogart in his first romantic lead and five-time Academy Award winner Michael Curtiz directing a film that captures the hallmarks of Hollywood studio film-making.

Casablanca is known to film buffs for its midget actors in the airport set and Bogart's improvised lines, including the oft-misquoted "Play it!" The film should also be known as propaganda and it has been argued that it played a role in US President Roosevelt's decision to end America's relationship with the Vichy government of Nazi-occupied France in 1943.

The original script had been written as a play by Murray Burnett in 1938 after he saw Nazis discriminating against a black piano player in Vienna. Warner Brothers producer Hal Wallis had been convinced to pay a record $20,000 in January 1942 for the unproduced play titled Everybody Comes to Rick's and the film had been rushed into production after Allied forces (but not yet the US) had occupied North Africa in November 1942.

Scriptwriter Howard Koch identified Casablanca as part of a trend of films with social themes in his memoir:

"Since Warners was leading this trend, it was natural that many of its writers were politically conscious. To one degree or another they were involved in the struggle against fascism, in whatever form it appeared, and in working for a more democratic society, economically and racially. Today the label applied to us would be left-wing, but all labels are suspect; the word we used at the time to define our political activities and organisations was progressive, regardless of differing party affiliations or lack of them."

The progressive politics of scriptwriter Koch would see him 'blacklisted' as a result of criticism by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951. His role in the development of Casablanca saw the setting shifted from Lisbon.

If you ignore the romantic developments, Casablanca's plot sees Rick, whose “American” cafe is effectively an embassy for those fleeing occupation, become politicised against the Nazis. Near the beginning of the film Rick ignores the arrest of those actively resisting the Nazis in his bar, yet by the end he actively assists a Resistance leader modeled on Charles de Gaulle to reach the United States.

Academic Richard Klein has written that US President Roosevelt screened the recently released Casablanca for guests on the eve of 1943. Ten days later he became the first US President to travel by air while in office when he flew to Casablanca for a historic meeting with Winston Churchill. In August of 1943, the US shifted support from the Vichy-led government of Nazi-occupied France to the French National Committee of Liberation chaired by Charles de Gaulle.

Whether Casablanca influenced Roosevelt in his negotiations is an unresolved question but this can be seen as a key theme in the politics of the film. With the perspective offered to contemporary viewers by subsequent decades, it's interesting to see the US joining the fight against Nazism in 1943 as the start of a campaign that continues to this day as the US media continues to produce propaganda focusing on bringing freedom to oppressed people throughout the world.

Leeton Art Deco

Here are some pics from a photoshoot tonight for the Leeton Art Deco Festival.

Metropolis

A free screening of the film Metropolis will be held in Chelmsford Place on Saturday 2 April as part of the Leeton Art Deco Festival. "If you haven't seen this classic, then this is a great opportunity to see a film that is the 1920s equivalent of Avatar," said organiser Jason Richardson.

Released in 1927, Metropolis has had an influence on science fiction films like Star Wars and Bladerunner. In 2001 the film was included in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register and in 2010 Empire Magazine ranked it at number 12 in a list of The 100 Best Films of World Cinema.

The film bankrupted the UFA studio with a budget of over five million Reichsmark, estimated to be worth over $200,000,000 today. "Metropolis was possibly the first cult film," explains Mr Richardson, "as it had an underwhelming response at the box office on its release and took many years to find an audience but is now screened widely

"Metropolis and Avatar share in common is their criticism of contemporary politics. Where Avatar can be viewed as a comment on the US-led invasion of Iraq, Metropolis can be seen as criticising on the rise of the Nazi party in Weimar Germany, as well as promoting unionism and the achievements in establishing modern working conditions.

"It's a Romeo and Juliet-type story that's complicated when the Juliet-character, a community leader, is replaced with a robot manipulated by the Romeo-character's capitalist father," said Mr Richardson.

The silent movies were never silent, cinemas of the 1920s and '30s would have an organist or maybe even a full orchestra to accompany screenings. For the Leeton Art Deco Festival screening, Metropolis will feature a soundtrack drawing on the work of Duke Ellington.

Duke Ellington is one of the foremost figures in American jazz music, with a career that began in 1923 and ended with his death in 1974. "He is arguably the greatest composer of the twentieth century and the Art Deco period was known for big bands, like the orchestra Ellington led," said Mr Richardson.

It's sure to be a great night. "Bring chairs or a blanket to sit on, pack a meal or fill your Thermos and see a film that continues to resonate with audiences nearly 75 years after its release."

Metropolis is rated PG and will start around 7.30pm on Saturday 2 April, projected onto the main water tower in Chelmsford Place as part of the Leeton Art Deco Festival.

March of the blogs: Leeton Art Deco

This month I'm going to promote three posts from each of my other blogs. Here's a collection of Leeton Art Deco.