At the conference dinner of THETA 2013, the gig that has got me to Hobart. These guys also turn up, do their thing, go away again and presumably get something out of it all. There are plenty of people watching them – even if you can’t see them in this photo.
As my mother has been known to say, I ‘do get about’. This week I have come to Hobart, Tasmania, for a conference. Tonight’s reception was held in MONA, the Museum of Old and New Art: one of the world’s largest totally privately funded museums.
This water feature was an interesting element – I don’t know if it’s ‘art’, but in a purely technical sense I have never seen anything like it before – the precision needed to create clear lettering (in Helvetica font, or something similar) from dropping curtains of water is quite impressive. The words have been picked at random from today’s headlines, apparently – but I don’t know what the Philippines have done to be worth recording in raindrops today.
I am still in Brisbane – 14 days in a row now – but have temporarily forsaken the Kookaburra Inn for this place, the Rothbury apartment hotel on Ann Street. Nice place, but I am sure those are the kind of elevator doors that blood pours through in steaming gouts. I’ve seen The Shining.
This building sits within QUT’s campus. It was the first seat of government of the state, built between 1860 and 1862 and in use as the state parliament until 1910. It is now mainly used as a cafe and a nice place to take the weight off one’s feet, sit in a shady spot and check social media (or whatever). Which is a decent way to evolve as a building I guess.
And yes, though I like this photo, I know it would have been even better if I had centered the doors at the back exactly between the pillars.
It’s not exactly home, but I’m here often enough at the moment. And I was working. Honestly. All the trappings are there – Mac, cup of tea, the essentials.
Feel like I should feature on here some of the nice people at QUT (Queensland University of Technology) who have set up this academic visit of mine and are doing their best to make me feel at home. This is Christine, speaking at today’s launch of the HERN (Higher Education Research Network), in the atrium of one of their impressive new buildings (in fact, on the floor above the Digital Barrier Reef which featured back in early February). There are actually a couple of hundred people in this room at this point, but I like the sense of emptiness in the shot.
Incidentally, I think the following universities have featured on this blog at some point, in no particular order: Manchester, QUT, Charles Sturt, Helsinki, Otago, Alabama, Leeds, Birmingham City, Bergen, Bergen University College (these are two different institutions) and the Academy of National Economy in Moscow. The nicest campus? Er…. probably Alabama.
I was working (teaching online) until nearly 10.45pm today so it was rather late once I got to the pub, and with it being St Patrick’s Day, it was like, come into the party late but sober, or just go home and ignore it all. I went in for a drink. Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea. I started talking to someone only to later have her friends basically tell me to piss off, for no reason other than they were wankers. So much for the legendary hospitality of denizens of the Emerald Isle. But Brighton beat Crystal Palace 3-0, which restored my faith in the rightness of the universe.
Why this shot? Because it’s green, because it amuses me that the cardboard leprechaun behind the customer has collapsed in a state of drunkenness, because I worked for 13 hours today (on a Sunday!) and didn’t get much chance to take much else, and because this now takes the record for the latest shot yet in any given day.
Unlike most days I didn’t take my camera with me when going out into the city tonight, for my Friday night out – so all pictures that could have been taken were taken in the Kookaburra Inn, my hostel, where I stayed all day working. I like the frosting on these open windows, and the way the light is catching them, their different colours and so on. And there’ll be plenty of chances to take photos of Brisbane at night over the next couple of weeks, I’m not going anywhere particularly.
These are the nice people at Charles Sturt University (Information and Library Science department) who have been looking after me the last few days and were nice enough to turn up today – along with a bunch of other online participants – to hear me talk about my work. I like this shot because of little details, like the disembodied legs and the distant perspective down the corridor to the right. Anyway – last day in Wagga today for now, though I may be back in May. Sydney tomorrow.
After my exertions on the Heaphy Track, spent the day chilling out and doing a bit of work at Rongo Backpackers in Karamea, another great hostel in another New Zealand town that feels like it’s halfway to the end of the world. This one was a little community operation, including a radio station broadcasting on 107.5 FM to the local area. “Want to play some of your tunes on the radio?” was asked. Sure, says I. That’s my iPod there, giving it out to the world. Well, to Karamea, anyway.
Being 42 