The Subjects at Adelaide Writers’ Week

if Sean, Jen, Thom & I were in a band, it’d be called “theSubjects” and this would be our (badly focused) album cover.

I’ve just uploaded a whole bunch of the photos I took during #TheSubjects, an arts/science residency by ANAT (Australian Network for Art & Technology) held at The Appleton Institute exploring the affect of sleep deprivation on creativity. I sent some of them through to ANAT be uploaded while I was ‘inside’ but they didn’t seem to make it onto the blog, sadly. I’ve been meaning to fix this since I realised they were missing after we ‘got out’ but, well, a few things have held me back.

The first was that I was a lot more affected by this experience than I expected to be and it has taken me a hell of a lot longer to recover than I anticipated. The second is that I live in a bus that hasn’t yet been modified internally and only recently got a solar rig to enable any kind of electricity at all, and all that is still taking a bit of getting used to. The third is that (apart from a little bit of downtime needed for point1) I pretty much had to get straight on with the next project on the schedule, hAbitAt (which happens this Monday in Canberra) so I’ve been a bit distracted. And the fourth is that for the most part my internet access is a shitty little 4G system – yes, basically like trying to run a geek business via mobile phone data tethering, which especially sucks (and costs) when you want to upload a bunch of photos that are around 5MB each. Sigh.

Anyway, thanks to borrowed wifi (ta Pia) and a much better head… you can now see the photos on my flickr account (I’ll publish my summary post and link to it from here too). Oh and for the record, all photos were taken in EXTREME low-light levels and have been purposefully untouched in post by me. They’re subsequently often extremely unfocused (sometimes intentionally so). The idea is that eventually we’ll make a collaborative work and an exhibition based on what we made while ‘inside’, the affect those experiences have had on us following the residency and the data the scientists gathered from all the tests & surveillance footage (and whatever we decide to do with that).

I’m flying to Adelaide in a few hours to join the band (the first time all four of us have come back together) to talk about our experience at Adelaide Festival’s Writers’ Week (in a panel wonderfully titled “THE SUBJECTS: STORYTELLING IN EXTREME ENVIRONMENTS” – I love how they shout it, seems highly appropriate). You can follow the panel event chats today from 1.15pm on twitter via #AdlWW. The session is being introduced by Vicki Sowry (Director ANAT – the troublemaker behind all this!) and chaired by Professor Drew Dawson from The Appleton Institute – who hosted the residency).

While I’m at it, I just discovered today that if you click on our names in the above event info, the lovely Laura Kroetsch (Director, Adelaide Writers’ Week) has done a video intro about each of us. I embedded these below because I think they’re really cute, so find out more about my fellow subjects via these clips then go read our blog entries to see what it did to our heads.