It's a bit late in the day to throw to this project, but there's a fascinating story of an experiment by tenants in Melbourne to turn their backyard into a permaculture environment over here:
http://permaculturesolutions.com.au/thomasstreet/
Even the battle they've been having with their landlord is interesting, a great story.
[nb: the following is the first blog entry for the project Bilateral Petersham. For the rest, head on over to http://thesham.info]
Petersham_04_04_06
The clock ticked round to midnight and I sat in the kitchen watching it. When all the hands pointed to twelve, I took two photos. Without the flash, the clock looked yellow and blurry. Flash-frozen, on the other hand, it looked like it had been caught in the act. Embarrassed at having been sprung doing something vaguely shameful but essentially harmless.
That’s how I brought in the third of April. The beginning of “Bilateral Petersham,†aka “my Petersham project,†aka “The Petersham Lockdown.†There was no tangible difference between one moment, where I was not “on the job,†and the next, when the “project†had officially begun. No fanfare, no ribbon cutting, no glass of champagne. I went to bed and read a bit and then fell asleep.
Continue reading
Spiros, a clubbsy fellow in Melbourne, is doing a fascinating process-oriented project at the moment. Check out the blog here: http://with-out.blogspot.com
It's tricky to see exactly what is going on – many layers of activity. But Spiros is engaging particular groups, [activist groups?], and designing posters for them (but not particularly "useful" posters, I think). He's also running workshops in the gallery, collaborative reading groups where the participants wear odd head-pieces, and is struggling mightily with the forces of gravity and a large curtain. It's part of the midsumma festival, at gertrude gallery.
With all the argy bargy going on over at the situation blog, i've been thinking a bit about the issue of blog etiquette: some folks have been calling for the banning of some other folks, simply because they're long winded or dogmatic. but that doesn't seem like a good enough reason to ban someone. Spam of course would be shitty, but luckily the WordPress software seems to be resisting spam so far.
It would be interesting to see if there was a plug-in we could use for rating comment posts. That way anyone could post anything, but they would be rated by users, and then you could simply choose to filter out all comments with ratings of lower than 4 out of five, for instance. Or, if you wanted, you could choose to read em all…
Here's a fairly clear post about blog etiquette I found by googling "blog comment etiquette":
http://www.cafemama.com/etiquette.html