adamgifford

Matisse: The line that pulses with life

2012-01-21T23:31:00.003+13:00

Published NZ Herald Jan 21, 2012

Strip away the colours, saturated and pulsing, look past the flat plane of the pictorial surface, and you come back to the line, a single line that pulses and sings, turning everything into rhythm and light.

There have been many shows highlighting aspects of Henri Matisse, but Drawing Life at Queensland's Gallery of Modern Art is the first to focus just on works on paper - drawings, prints and stencils.

The idea came from the painter's grandson Claude Duthuit after the Brisbane gallery organised a major show of Matisse paintings in 1995. Duthuit died last May, but was instrumental in getting many of the loans for the show.

Since the 17th century, French law has required that not only a copy of every book published be put in the national library, but a copy of every print edition as well. That means the Bibliotheque Nationale has more than 14 million items, including significant collections of the major French artists.

Add to that holdings from other French galleries and collections, North American and Australian galleries, and the Hermitage in St Petersburg to which his last model and companion, Lydia Delectorskaya, donated works, and you have a comprehensive overview of this aspect of his work.

In an era when making art can be reduced to writing up the specifications for a giant plastic bunny, putting on a show of over 300 drawings could be seen as radical.

Matisse drew with whatever was in his hand - pencil, charcoal, steel etching needle, lithograph crayon, brush dipped in India ink or the scissors used for the late stencils.

It's a show that rewards close study. While there are a few paintings to give a touch of colour to rooms and put particular drawing sequences in context, most of the show is small black-and-white works.

It starts with drawings, laboriously rendered charcoals in the classical style, describing the form and volume of the models.

What stands out is their ordinariness. There is no obvious sign of the genius that would come thousands of drawings later.

Hints of it, though, can be seen in the more experimental "autoportrait" from 1900, where a single line charged with character shows the artist standing with a sketch pad, perhaps looking in a mirror.

By this time Matisse was in his early 30s but still feeling his way.

After quitting a nascent law career, he studied in the studio of Gustave Moreau, who urged his students to not just copy the old masters in the museums, but to draw in the streets.

As Matisse said later: "We were trying to draw the silhouettes of passersby, to discipline our line. We were forcing ourselves to discover quickly what was characteristic in a gesture, in an attitude. Didn't Delacroix say: 'One should be able to draw a man falling from the sixth floor'?"

It was a time of discovery. Exposure to works by van Gogh, Gauguin and Cezanne came not through visiting museums, but by being introduced to the dealers and collectors who held their work.

Processing the innovations of those artists, the Impressionists, Japanese prints and the landscape around him, Matisse came up with the expressively brushed and colour-driven paintings that were dubbed Fauvism - after fauves, wild beasts - when they were first shown in 1905.

Fauvism is generally considered the first Modernist movement, but it was a movement without a manifesto, and Matisse was not an artist who needed a movement to thrive.

Drawing Life includes early Fauvist watercolours done around the bustling fishing town of Collioure in southeast France. It was here that Matisse abandoned the neo-Impressionist technique of divisionism, which tried to capture the effects of light by laying down close-knit dots of pure colour. Instead he divided his compositions into coloured planes.

For the nude, a constant element in his work, "I go into the woods in the mountains with my wife at six o'clock in the mornings and she poses for me undisturbed".

Around this period, Matisse produced three woodblocks after seeing Daniel de Monfried's collection of Gauguin paintings, sculptures and prints. The results are bold and expressive, but Matisse did not persist with the technique because he found it painstakingly slow.

What did appeal was various etching techniques, where he could draw straight on to a plate at speed, capturing a face or figure in a few lines.

Later on he would take up linocutting, which he saw not as a cheap substitute for a woodblock but a method with its own expressive characteristics, as the engraver changes the pressure on the gouge.

Matisse made significant contributions to the evolution of the artist's book, and Drawing Life includes many examples, including a lithograph edition of Baudelaire's Fleurs du Mal, of which only five copies were printed because of a problem with the plates.

Odalisques and arabesques, figures in interiors and figures in nature, Matisse would produce dozens of variations as he drilled into his arms and shoulders the rhythms that would come through in the paintings. Spontaneity takes practice.

Sometimes he would take a break from a painting to dash off a drawing, a quick release of tension. Other times drawing would be all-encompassing as he worked his way through series, often treating them as a game with variations. Lydia Deletorskaya describes how Matisse would go into a trance while producing a drawing.

After rooms full of black lines, Drawing Life builds to a big finish.

First there is a room devoted to the Chapel of the Rosary at Vence, done between 1946 and 1951 at the behest of one of his former nurses, Monique Bourgeois, who became a Dominican nun.

As the culmination of his life's work, the secular Matisse considered it an art piece for which he designed everything, from the shape of the building to the stained-glass windows to the priests' vestments.

While this was going on, he was also producing paper cutouts and drawing with thick brushes dipped in Indian ink. These drawn interiors, still lives and portraits seem to generate light.

Visitors to the initial show at the reopened Auckland City Art Gallery would be familiar with the Jazz stencil series from the Robertson Promised Gift. The set in Brisbane is displayed as a block of colour and shape.

Discovering a new technique late in life and turning it into an aesthetic gave Matisse a new burst of creative energy, despite his fading physical powers, and allowed him to create even larger works. What started as a patch to cover a stain on the wallpaper in his Paris apartment became the two Oceania panels, drawing on memories of his 1930 trip to Tahiti. It's a spectacular end to the show.

Curators Celine Chica-Castex from the Bibliotheque Nationale de France and Emilie Ovaere-Corthay say it was a special show to put together.

"Drawing was the most important medium he used all his life. It underlies all his other work. In the paintings we chose for the exhibition, he drew also," Ovaere-Corthay says.

"The drawings and prints bring us to the intimacy of the artist," says Chica-Castex. "We had the impression when we were doing this exhibition to be like members of the family, and also to be with him."

Exhibition
What: Matisse: Drawing Life
Where and when: Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, Brisbane, to March 4

Where Art Belongs

2011-11-07T11:15:00.000+13:00

Art needs words. Catalogue essays, reviews, books, artist talks, words to explain and expose and extend the object or concept. One of the more influential writers on contemporary art made a brief return visit to Auckland last month to read from her latest collection of essays, Where Art Belongs.

So how did Chris Kraus become someone the art world reads? Kraus was born in New York but grew up in New Zealand. She started working in journalism at Wellington's Evening Post and the Sunday Star aged 17 in the mid-70s before heading back to her birthplace to become an artist and film-maker.

"It was tough. I was very much coming back as a New Zealander and, most importantly, I hadn't gone to school with these people in New York, because where you have gone to college becomes a very important part of the social milieu that you move into in your adult life. But it was New York, it was the late 70s and early 80s and it was still possible to use the city as your MFA [Master of Fine Arts] programme and make your way by meeting other artists. I sought out all the people who were my idols from a distance in New Zealand.

"There was a kind of fandom you had in a small isolated country where culture becomes such a lifeline to the outside world, so it was thrilling to go to New York and actually go to talks, go to performances and meet these people who had been so legendary.

"Then you discover these legendary performers sometimes have only 20 people in the room."

For a while, she became an assistant to artist Louise Bourgeois, who died last year at 98. "She was amazing. She was formidable. I met Louise Bourgeois about the time she was turning 65, when most people are starting to pack it in, but she saw herself as just starting.

"She wasn't that well known and she was strategising about how she was going to become well known and did it brilliantly. Being photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe in the penis coat, this old woman with this latex sexual organ garment, she really played every card right and it was so amazing to witness that, the early stages of her career.

"It didn't make sense to me until years later what she was doing."

Where Art Belongs was published by Semiotext(e), an imprint best known as the first American publisher of French thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and Felix Guattari, which Kraus has been part of since 1990. She believes a sense of being outsiders gives Semiotext(e) its edge.

"None of us is completely American so that makes us better able to function within American culture because we have some distance from it," Kraus says.

Semiotext(e) was started by Sylvere Lotringer in 1974 shortly after he moved from France to teach at Columbia University in New York. Initially a conventional academic journal about semiotics, the study of signs, it was changed by Lotringer's exposure to New York's downtown clubs and art scene.

"He organised a conference at Columbia inviting luminaries from both worlds. Foucault was there, Guattari was there, Kate Millet was there, John Cage was there, people from the art world and the activist world in the United States meeting with the luminaries of French theory and it was a real food fight.

"People talked about it for years after and the Schizo Culture issue came out of the energy of that event, where artists of the lower Manhattan scene of that time were put alongside critical texts by Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari, that was a radical thing."

Semiotext(e) eventually switched from being a magazine to publishing then-unknown writers such as Baudrillard. A biographer of Deleuze and Guattari describes Lotringer as the "ferryman", bringing French theory to an American readership. "At the time, none of their people were being published by university presses. These little black books would fit into the pocket of a black leather jacket and everybody read them.

"I joined Semotext(e) in 1990 and I was living with Sylvere and I was appalled they had not published any women, though the books were so hot and so cool. Sylvere didn't want to publish any woman theorists because he thought [of] the French women, they're so psychoanalytic. So I said, 'how about you publish American women writers?' I was working at the St Marks Poetry Project so I knew a lot of writers.

"We did them with colour covers and called them Native Agents and that kind of ran its course. By the end of the 90s, I was publishing other people, a different generation of female first-person anti-memoir writing. And then Hedi [El Kholti] joined us and kind of opened up a further channel, Hedi being gay and Moroccan, and he brought in a whole other way of republishing some classic gay texts."

Semotexte(e)'s latest series is Interventions, which gave it a surprise best seller. The Coming Insurrection by the Invisible Committee was written by a French collective who ended up being labelled the Tarnac Nine after they were arrested on terrorism charges for cutting the power on a commuter rail line.

"We published it in a way looking out the side of our eyes thinking it's such anarchist kitsch, but it was a huge hit and we realised later it really did fall right in a certain moment.

"Glen Beck denounced it three times on Fox News. He called it the most evil book in America and he kept saying, 'you owe it to yourself to read this book.' Every time that happened, it would go to No 1 on non-fiction Amazon. People who bought this book also bought Sarah Palin and Glen Beck. So it was a hit of the religious right."

Kraus' first foray into creative writing, 1997's I Love Dick, also caused a scandal. "I didn't expect that. I misjudged how conservative the art world really is. It's a chronicle of my experience in real life having an infatuation with a critical theorist, Dick H, and writing him love letters, which Sylvere, my husband at the time, collaborated with. We kind of did a Madame Bovary and fell in love with him together in a way and then it just went further and further and further to the point where I moved out of the apartment and moved to the country alone and started writing to Dick and there were some real life encounters with Dick and, eventually, by the end of the book the Dear Dick fades away completely and I'm just writing.

"It turns out to be an adventure in writing and realising that you need an addressee, so after I Love Dick came out I became a kind of motivational speaker for young women and for people wanting to write because it just kind of clicked."

Kraus came to art writing with a clean slate, having never studied art history nor any of the other conventional entry points. "After I published my first book, I happened to be teaching at an art school in California which had a very hot MFA programme, so people assumed I knew something about art and I would be invited to write about art and talk about art and do these studio visits with MFA students. I didn't really know the language so the best way I knew to lead off on was a more journalistic vein, just sort of talk about what I saw in the work, talk about the experience of viewing the work, and to talk about maybe the story outside the work, that always interested me.

"I started to enter the art world more as an anthropologist than a complete 100 per cent participant."

Kraus reconnected with New Zealand when she returned in the early 1990s to make a film funded by Creative New Zealand, Gravity and Grace, and she has maintained those links with art circles here.

* Elam Art School is showing Gravity and Grace at 6pm on Monday at the Design Theatrette in the School of Architecture, 22 Symonds St.

Published NZ Herald November 5, 2011

Exhibition seen in a foreign light

2011-09-25T20:17:00.002+13:00

Frank Hofmann stares out of the frame, literally, larking it up with his mate Eric Lee Johnson, cigarette smouldering on his lip, whisky glass clutched in his hand.

It's 1952, just over a dozen years since the photographer fled Prague ahead of the Nazi invasion. He'd settled in New Zealand, married, found work as a commercial photographer, and set about creating a culture around him of pictures and music and books and architecture.

There's another photo, taken in Albert Park in 1969 by Geoff Studd, of one of the concerts organised to defy a ban on music in parks. Among the young crowd stands a tall, thin older man cradling a camera as if it were an extension of his hand.

It's Hofmann, involved yet detached, looking for that combination of figures and light and movement that would make an image.

The photographs taken by Hofmann over the years, from the early pictures back in Prague to the commercial portraits, the interior and exterior shots of buildings by his friends in the Group Architects, and his modernist art photographs, show peerless technique and an aesthetic sensibility that did not emerge from his adopted country.

"Czechoslovakia had a major innovative avant-garde. He was informed by that. That is the milieu he comes from," says Leonard Bell, who curated the exhibition at the Gus Fisher Gallery as part of his ongoing exploration of expatriate, refugee and travelling artists.

During the 1940s Hofmann worked in Clinton Firth's commercial photography studio at 110 Queen St, which is where some of the earlier portraits in the show are from.

"Firth had an eye for the American, or more particularly Hollywood, style of the 1930s and 40s. Many of those photographers were refugees from central Europe who brought expressionist, or noir style lighting," Bell says.

That means architect Vernon Brown gets shot like Clark Gable, and conductor Juan Matteucci's profession is indicated by the shadow of a music stand on the wall behind.

A portrait of his wife, the writer Helen Shaw (or Hella Hofmann to her friends), is meticulously composed, the figure standing backlit alongside the wall, the plume of smoke rising from her cigarette testament to the time taken setting up the shot, the side of her face reflected in the glass.

From the late 1940s Hofmann worked for Christopher Bede Studios, a national chain that did advertising work as well as wedding and family portraits.

When that folded in 1975 he formed Bede Associates with Karl Jobsis and continued doing family portraits to pay the rent.

Hofmann's architectural photographs would have been the way most people saw the buildings being created by friends like Brown and Ivan Juriss, and his knowledge of European New Objectivity informing the way he emphasised the modernity of the spaces.

This show is the first time the portraits and architectural photography has been gathered together and identified as Hofmann's.

In 1989 Peter Ireland curated an exhibition of his art photographs for the National Art Gallery in Wellington, some of which are reprised at the Gus Fisher.

"He kept his art photography or personal photography deliberately and self-consciously separate from his commercial photography," Bell says. A quote on the wall cues into Hofmann's thinking on the matter: "It isn't true the camera doesn't lie. It can turn everyday objects into completely abstract patterns."

Bell says: "He wrote a lot about photography both for photographers and also for people who wanted to start taking photos.

"He was involved with camera clubs, which contrasts with the art photographers who emerged in the 1970s who were pretty patronising and snooty about camera clubs. He wasn't. He was an enthusiast and advocate for photography. He gave radio talks."

Bell became aware of the photographs held by Hofmann's sons Stephen and Michael after he was asked to contribute a chapter to a book about artists in New Zealand from German-speaking countries. "They were sitting in Stephen's basement, waiting to be looked at."

Bell has written extensively about cross-cultural interactions in art history, starting with Maori and Pacific contacts.

"This was part of that, the movement from one place and culture to another was integral to it so I became intrigued and researched travelling, emigre and then refugee artists, writers and photographers."

Family connections with people who came to New Zealand as refugees triggered academic research.

"I found that for a relatively small country with a relatively small number of refugees let in, there were a significant number of very good artists, photographers, writers, musicians, people involved in the arts in one way or another. You had central European intellectuals of multi-lingual, high sophistication living out their lives in Mt Albert."

Many of those people turn up in Hofmann's portraits, such as pianist Lili Kraus (a resident in the 1940s after her release from a Japanese internment camp), Ernst Specht and Greta Ostova.

His own involvement in music went further, playing in the Auckland String Players and helping found the Auckland Symphonia. Bell suggests that Hofmann's photographs fit the modernist tenet "All art aspires to the condition of music".

Hofmann's work can be found in music programmes and record sleeves for the Kiwi label, the Yearbook of the Arts, Landfall, and the short-lived Here and Now.

The exhibition can be seen as here and not here - an artist who contributed to this culture by bringing to it a light and shade from elsewhere.

What: From Prague to Auckland: The Photographs of Frank Hofmann (1916-89)

Where and when: Gus Fisher Gallery, 74 Shortland St, to October 29

If I'm Remembering Anything: John Mulgan and Stanley Palmer

2011-07-16T09:18:00.003+12:00

It’s a story that got Stanley Palmer interested in John Mulgan.
His 90-year-old informant reckoned he met a man in a pub just after World War II who’d been a sergeant in the New Zealand Division.
He was in Maadi camp near Cairo one evening when a lieutenant colonel in the British Army came up and talked to him.
That was unusual in itself.
The officer introduced himself as John Mulgan, said he had a child in New Zealand he had never seen, and that he was transferring to the New Zealand Army the next day.
They made arrangements to meet again, and the next afternoon the sergeant went over to Mulgan’s hotel, only to find the place swarming with military police who told him to clear off.
“This old communist guy reckons they did Mulgan in. But I can’t see the purpose of it, except it’s almost as if the New Zealand government was against him coming back,” says Palmer.
“The other thing that could have happened is that MI6 wanted to kill someone who was staying in that hotel and killed the wrong person.
“There was no way it was suicide. He was in bad physical shape but you would be after the war.”
Suicide was indeed the verdict of the second or two inquiries, although some doubt that.
“I was really interested but I’m not interested any longer because I think he bloody died, didn’t he, and what a waste,” Palmer says.
As the old man Crawley says in Man Alone when Johnson confesses to killing a man and fleeing over the Kaimanawa Ranges, “That’s a bloody interesting story.”
The death of Mulgan and what he might have become are two of the great mysteries of New Zealand literature.
His reputation is based on Man Alone, a novel about an Englishman who comes to New Zealand after serving in World War I, and Report on Experience, a long essay drawing on Mulgan’s war service, especially his work among Greek partisans.
They’re both significant works in the attempt to define a New Zealand identity.
Report has recently been republished with the addition of anti-British material left out of earlier editions.
“I started reading Report, and then one sentence grabbed me,” Palmer says.
It was where the expatriate Mulgan, thinking back to the New Zealand of his youth, says: “If I am remembering anything, it is not only of people that I care for and remember and hope some day to see again, but also of places and a particular memory of scent and light and sound that is the tide coming in at early morning at Manganese Point, or the surf at evening by Whatipu, or a bush river in flood somewhere north of Karamea.”
Palmer went back to those places and sketched in the form and mass and rhythm of the landscape.
Back in his Mt Eden studio he turned his hatched lines into long paintings, pulling his memory of light and space onto the canvas.
“I’m knocked out by his style. It’s so simple,” Palmer says.
“Listen to this from Man Alone: ‘The tide was coming over the mud-reaches pushing a line of foam with it and the mud-holes cracking open as it came. The air was soft wand warm with a scent of pine and fern and warm mangrove mud. Only the moths and mosquitoes drawn to the lamp were a nuisance.’
“I’m sure he’s talking about the pub at Parua Bay on the Whangarei Heads.
“Mulgan was interested in places that weren’t the normal romantic places. Why Whatipu in the evening? Why north of Karamea? There’s a bit in Man Alone where this fellow Crawley talks of looking for gold on the West Coast: ‘It rains down there and the sandflies. You’d go a long way before you’d find a dirtier looking bit of country than up the back of Karamea.’”
At 75 Palmer has outlasted his critics, outlasted fashion, and created his own ways of describing the New Zealand landscape, and his own techniques, especially in his printmaking.
He has used literature before, including a series of West Coast paintings that started from a quote from Bill Pearson’s Coal Flat: ‘Past dark trees, first the cemetery, then the town.’
He couldn’t find quotes as apt for the rest of the series, so made the rest up, earning what for him sums up his critics.
“The review said ‘the quotes were amazing, pity about the artworks.’”
Palmer says as the youngest child of a World War I soldier, he can understand the world described by Mulgan.
“All my brothers and sisters lived exactly the same. I even went to work on a farm when I was 18, like Man Alone, so I know about all these things and I can identify with them.”
They say the past is a different country, but Palmer doesn’t want his work to be nostalgic. “Melancholic perhaps.”

WHAT AND WHO: If I’m Remembering Anything – Remembering John Mulgan 1911-1945 by Stanley Palmer
WHERE AND WHEN: Melanie Roger Gallery, Jervois Rd, until July 30.

Cable plans set up lazy monopoly to fail

2011-04-29T17:44:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald April 27, 2011

Steven Joyce prides himself on being a pragmatic guy. That's what he told this year's Telcon conference, anyway - that's he's surrounded by people who like talking but he'd like to be remembered as a guy who does stuff.
That must be why he's giving Telecom and Vodafone $285 million to build a rural broadband network that relies on technology nearing its use-by date, which won't deliver the promised speeds.
If nothing else, it gives his boss John Key the chance to jump in an airforce helicopter for an election photo-op at some remote location.
The RBI contract gives two of the most profitable companies in the country a huge competitive edge on their rivals, which the market recognised by boosting Telecom's shares 5 per cent - although investors would probably be better off buying Vodafone shares.
Couple that with the regulatory holiday associated with the ultra-fast broadband initiative and you have a recipe for a lazy monopoly that fails to deliver.
As Labour's Claire Curran has pointed out, it's even more alarming that one of Joyce's main advisers on this, Ministry of Economic Development official Bruce Parkes, has just been fingered by the High Court for his lead role in designing the anti-competitive regime Telecom used to charge for access to its data network between 2001 and 2004.
It's the Silvio Berlusconi approach to regulation - rewriting the statues so what was criminal no longer is.
The low turn-out at Telcon was an indication of how this Government has stifled innovation and investment in the sector.
When I last weighed in on this, Vodafone claimed I'd made "misleading statements" - open access was at the heart of the bid and its 3G HSPA (high-speed packet access) solution was the global standard being deployed in the majority of developed countries.
I stand by what I said. Any 3G networks being rolled out today would be at the tail end of old projects, as the technology is supersede by the 4G LTE (long-term evolution) kit proposed by other bidders.
LTE networks will be built this year in Australia, the United States, Germany, China, India and so on.
LTE is a data network. 3G is a mobile phone network with a data service added on top.
Ordinary users struggle with the fact that existing mobile networks weren't designed to cope with the volume of data that smartphones are generating, and data-pricing plans also don't reflect evolving needs.
Claims that the RBI is open access have failed to convince the industry, both for technical and competition reasons.
With its massive taxpayer subsidy, Vodafone will have an overwhelming first-mover advantage and the number of potential customers isn't big enough to justify competitors adding their equipment to the Vodafone towers, let alone into Telecom's fibre cabinets.
The risk is that this anti-competitive subsidy, combined with the regulatory holiday Joyce is giving companies that participate in the ultra-fast broadband scheme, will give New Zealand an internet that's not what it wants or needs.
As IDC analyst Rosalie Nelson told Telcon, mobility, social networking and Generation Y-style communications are driving technology adoption among consumers, rather than the vision of fat pipes delivering data-rich applications such as video on demand.
Nelson asked whether open-access fibre would encourage new service providers - or lead to rapid contraction and consolidation.
She warned that if the Government marginalises competing infrastructure and creates a government-controlled monopoly, that monopoly is likely to become lazy and leave few incentives for private operators to invest.
There is also wallet share: If people opt to spend on their mobile pad, phone or other device rather than on a fibre connection, it will make a big difference to the economics of the ultra-fast broadband roll-out.
Given that the Government isn't investing enough in its broadband projects to buy the required outcomes, it needs to keep private-sector investment flowing, and not just the sort that aims to capture subsidies.
JADE GOES MOBILE
One company that does see opportunity in the mobility explosion is Christchurch software-maker Jade.
It has just released Joob Mobile, a platform that developers can use to connect any business system to mobile-device users.
Managing director Craig Richardson says that by 2014 more people will be accessing the internet from mobile devices than desktop computers.
The problem is that many large enterprises and software developers fail to deliver the mobile experience that customers expect.
On the other side, the sort of small teams that develop mobile phone and tablet applications can't be expected to understand all the intricacies of interfacing with a large enterprise system.
The Joob Mobile cloud service aims to bridge that and give developers on both sides the tools to do the job. It's the kind of pure technology play that Jade has succeeded with in the past.
The fact that it has come together from conception to beta in six months - despite two earthquakes - should give Joyce and his advisers pause for thought as they ponderously build us a new internet.

Bulls and a piano lead the way to Venice

2011-04-24T11:48:00.002+12:00

NZ Herald, April 23, 2011

The morning started with a call from Creative New Zealand to say Michael Parekowhai had notified them of the interview. Expecting a postponement, I was surprised to hear instead a request that I be gentle on the sculptor - odd, given his working uniform of blue overalls and heavy boots.

I took it as a sign of the extreme sensitivity in the arts funding body to everything around its participation in the Venice Biennale, the Olympics of contemporary art; ie, the only such event where art is used for nationalistic competition.

It still hasn't got over the furore over Et al/Merilyn Tweedie's installation Fundamental Practice in the 2005 biennale, clearly blaming the media for the negative response, rather than considering that maybe the New Zealand public just didn't buy into the Elam lecturer's visually unattractive reworking of post-Beuys German feminist art.

In selecting Parekowhai, CNZ clearly wanted a spectacle, and Parekowhai is keen to deliver one. He's filling the Palazzo Loredan dell' Ambasciatore on the Grand Canal with a Steinway grand piano carved with Maori patterns, two blackened bronze pianos with bulls on top, the life-size sculpture of his brother as a security guard, and some bronze pot plants.

The works are on their way to Venice - the bronze pieces by ship and the Steinway packed up waiting to be air freighted, so the interview happens in their absence, which seemed to suit their conceptual nature.

When I arrived at the studio in Henderson's industrial edge at the appointed time, the place was empty.

When Parekowhai eventually arrived, he apologised for having to pick up guests from the airport and would I mind if they sat in? (Was I supposed to feel intimidated by having the interview chaperoned by Jim and Mary Barr, Wellington-based art bloggers, occasional curators and long time champions of Parekowhai's work?)

"Sure," I said, amused rather than intimidated.

I report my conversation with piano restorer David Jenkin, that the piano in the Auckland Art Gallery, The Story of a New Zealand River from 2001, did not work well as a musical instrument.

"That one was never meant to be played," says Parekowhai. "The piano series I am working on is a bit like the George Lucas Star Wars movies. I started with that one which actually [follows] the one I've just done, so only in years to come will the story make any real sense.

"The one at the Auckland Art Gallery has lilies and some roses flicked on it, and ideally they were supposed to surround the floor as if the concert [pianist] or diva has just left the stage. The Maori ornately carved piano is meant to be played continuously.

"The one after is called the Horn of Africa which is basically a seal which balances a piano on its nose. [That 2006 work is now in the collection of the Queensland Art Gallery.]

"So when you see those three together at one point, it will be one that has been played continuously, one where you have just missed the performance, and the next one where it ascends to a new space so it just hovers in space and balances at the end of the seal's nose. It's only after the fat boy sings that it will all make perfect sense, or a sense."

The idea for He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: Story of a New Zealand River, which has been given the working title "the Maori piano", came when Parekowhai was asked to submit a proposal for New Zealand's first venture to Venice in 1999. He'd just completed the Ten Guitars project of custom-made guitars.

"When I was thinking about what Maori and Italians have in common, for me it was quite simple; opera, and then comes music and other bits and pieces. I always thought it would be a good way to build a stage or a platform for other things to happen around the art and through the art rather than for it to be about the art.

"An object works on the eye and in space but when the piano is played, all of a sudden there are other ways of engaging with the art. It's like closing your eyes and listening to the music. What's nice about that for me is the focus no longer becomes about the object or even myself but you get carried away by something else and for me that's always been a strong driver in the Venice proposal.

"I had proposed, given that 1999 was our first time in Venice, that we possibly might have someone like Dame Kiri to sing next to the piano, because 10 years before that she was singing at Prince Charles and Di's wedding [actually in 1981] and I thought she was wearing a fantastic dress and a beautiful hat and kind of being the Maori princess she was even in the old days but with a voice that had real resonance for the wider community.

"When she sings in the park thousands turn up who may not know anything about opera or supposed high culture but they all go to the park and have a picnic and listen to the opera and I love it that art doesn't just have to be for aficionados, and neither does opera. So the strategy was if you got someone like her to sing, it would be a party everyone would want to go to.

"The next time they went to Venice [in 2001] I was rung up and they said, 'would I put a proposal in?' and I said, 'I'll just do the same thing as I would last time.'

"Mike Stevenson went that year, fantastic, so no complaints about who goes and does that, for me it's more about the process. The next time they rang me Et Al and I shared an office, and they rang her five minutes before me because I answered the phone and handed it over.

"I said don't ask me again until you ask only me because I don't want to get into a competition with my colleagues and friends, and the nice thing was at the beginning of last year [CNZ Venice Commissioner] Jenny Harper asked me to do the Venice project so I couldn't say no.

"I kind of did know it would have to happen at some point, they'd have to ask me one day."

Parekowhai says when looking for exhibition space in Venice, he was struck by the fact the palazzo had a garden - unusual for that space-limited city.

"I remember coming back to New Zealand and telling Jim it's got this little garden but it's not little, it's 23 by 32 metres.

"So the great thing is, as you stood in the garden and looked through the promenade into the canal you have this interesting sight line where you are kind of standing above the water but it's like your feet are in the water as well and it reminded me of home in Huia, standing in the lounge with this green and the tidal sea in the background.

"I made a bronze piano that sits outside in the garden and on top of that stands a Spanish fighting bull so as you sit on the bronze piano stool, you are looking into the eyes of this Spanish bull. [The work is called Chapman's Homer - referring to a poem by John Keats about Cortez first seeing the Pacific from "a peak in Darien".]

"If you enter from the inside space, you walk into this quite dark room, gloomy, and it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust to the light, but I'm hoping you will hear the music before you see the object. That's where the carved piano will be doing its thing.

"If you enter from the Grand Canal, you will see a black bronze security guard there. [The piece is called Kapa Haka.]

"He's a reminder of something back here and he stands there and oversees anyone who enters the space. He's kind of based on my brother. I remember going to a Burger King out west one night when I was working late and I saw him in the light drizzle at 3am and he had his arms folded and was standing there and I said, 'Jeez, that's an artwork.' I did like the idea security is more about presence rather than actually doing anything.

"As you walk in that door, it's like a little foyer which fills with water when the canal rises. And the cool thing about that is there is another bronze piano [studio technician] Ian and I and the boys have constructed and on top of that is a bull that sort of lies. [The work A Peak in Darien.]

"It is quite a big form and I wanted it to look quite landscapy so you walk around it and suddenly it reveals what it is and it too haunches over and looks at the prospective player or the audience.

"What I like about the work is it is not activated until you have an audience or you have a performer. The performer could be as simple as someone who sits in the chair."

Says Jim Barr: "I think there are going to be many, many photos of people sitting in those chairs."

"I hope so," Parekowhai responds. "I like how the work reminds me of a sense of art history or even just history. It is quite interesting for me that we should choose bronze as a material to take to Venice, it seems quite odd. All the way from New Zealand.

"I like the way it is very weighty, very heavy, and as a material it is very loaded and what I'm trying to do is by giving it a patina and forming it in a way so the materiality of it becomes irrelevant and it just becomes a bull and a piano."

Parekowhai clams up when asked how much the project is costing. "I have yet to pay all the bills."

CNZ's budget for the exercise is $650,000, although not all that is going to the artist nor even represents the costs of the work being sent.

Says Mary Barr: "Michael has put in far, far more than anyone else."

It's an investment, then. Given the New Zealand market is too small to fund the pieces of the scale Parekowhai wants to create, he needs to establish himself as a significant international contemporary artist. If it comes off, it's a symbiotic relationship - Creative New Zealand gets a spectacle, and the artist gets a new market.

* Five pianists have been selected to staff the Parekowhai exhibition, performing a mix of New Zealand, jazz and classical music on the carved Steinway. They are Rose Campbell, Dan Hayles, Catherine McKay, Ariana Odermatt and Flavio Villani. Three Italian speakers from New Zealand have also been engaged to explain details of the exhibition to visitors.

A grand restoration

The piano going to Venice was part of New Zealand's cultural history even before Michael Parekowhai took to it with chisels. Restorer David Jenkin says the Steinway concert grand was first sold in London in 1926 and shipped to New Zealand half a century ago.

Inside the body was pencilled a dedication: "Dear friends, may this beautiful instrument bring you happiness and inspiration. All my love, Lili Kraus, London, Christmas 1959."

Kraus was a Hungarian-born pianist who wound up in New Zealand in 1945 after three years in a Japanese prison camp in Indonesia. She toured the country extensively before moving to England in 1948, and her concerts would have been the first time many New Zealanders heard live performances of Beethoven, Mozart and other greats of the classical canon.

"Michael has this thing about pianos, as a statement of high Western art," Jenkin says. "This piano was probably selected by Lili from Steinway in London for broadcasting or one of the town halls. When I first came across it, it belonged to a jazz pianist in Whangarei.

"Then Michael turned up with it [in 2002] and said, 'Can you do anything?' I said if you're serious, it will need some serious work and he said, 'I am serious."'

There is a tradition of art case pianos, where material is added to the outside then carved. "But they are mostly ugly," says Jenkin. "Michael's aesthetic is around the shape of the piano."

That meant the carving needed to be in the existing rim, but when it came back to Jenkin's Glenfield workshop in 2006, about a third of the mass was gone, which need to be returned for strength and to restore tone.

"We got oak and mahogany, put it through the thicknesser, and laminated it in alternate 2mm horizontal bands around the inside of the piano. It was a nightmare of a job, but we understood why he had to do it that way."

The cast iron frame was trimmed 10mm all round to fit in the new frame on a redesigned mounting system, and a new soundboard installed.

Because it is pierced by carvings, the lid does not reflect sound in the way of normal grands, creating a more diffuse effect.

"I have to say I think it's a thing of spectacular beauty. I love it, and I love that it's a Steinway concert grand and I love that it kind of looks tribal," Jenkin says.

He won't reveal how much his part of the job cost, but "it's the most extensive and expensive piano restoration ever done in New Zealand".

Venice Biennale

What: On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, by Michael Parekowhai

Where and when: Palazzo Loredan dell' Ambasciatore, Grand Canal, Venice, June 4-November 27

Decade shows Moore's Law in action

2011-04-24T11:44:00.002+12:00

NZ Herald April 20

Ten years is a long time in technology, so the blowing out of candles on the birthday cake by New Zealand IT firms Oxygen and SnapperNet is worthy of note.

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted the number of transistors on an integrated circuit would double every 18 months.

Moore now says that dictum has about served its usefulness as the size of atoms becomes the fundamental barrier to the industry's growth, but the exponential nature of Moore's Law means the basic building blocks of computer hardware have increased their capacity a hundredfold over the decade.

On the software side, the improvement has been even more dramatic.

According to a report on funding for IT research and development by Barack Obama's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology, progress in numerical algorithms far outstrips advances through silicon.

It cites research by German optimisation expert Professor Martin Grotschel, showing a benchmark production-planning model would have taken 82 years to solve in 1988, using the computers and the linear programming algorithms of the day.

Fifteen years later - in 2003 - this same model could be solved in one minute, an improvement by a factor of about 43 million.

Grotschel estimated a factor of about 1000 was because of increased processor speed and a factor of 43,000 was because of improvements in algorithms.

The two 10-year-olds are on both sides of that equation.

SnapperNet distributes a wide range of hardware for data networking, such as switches, routers and internet gateways.

Managing director Richard Paul said when it started much of its business was supplying network interface cards to the thriving local personal-computer assembling industry - remember that?

"The first Ethernet switch we sold was 8-port 10mbps and cost $2500. You can buy one now for $25, and we're selling 10GB switches for $2500," Paul says.

Moore's Law in action.

SnapperNet's customers are now the re-sellers and large services firms such as Axon, Datacom and Gen-i have become the main interface to the technology market for many medium-sized and large New Zealand companies.

Over at Oxygen, it's the algorithms that underlie the extraordinary growth of its business, which is installing and maintaining systems from German company SAP, the world's largest business software company.

Oxygen grew out of a decision 14 years ago by forest products conglomerate Carter Holt Harvey to run its business on SAP.

For a company that size, the normal process is to engage a large global consulting firm.

The consultants analyse the business processes, change the software to match the business or the business to match the software, and leave - taking with them much of the company's cash, valuable business knowledge and some of its IT-savvy staff who have found the excitement of large IT projects appeals more than going back to business as usual.

Then-chief executive Chris Liddell decided instead to use internal resources, with the aim that at the end of the process Carter Holt would not only have a team that understood its business but it would also have a valuable IT business that could be sold.

That duly happened and, for the past five years, Oxygen has been owned by Australian IT group UXC, which also owns Microsoft specialist Eclipse and Red Rock which services all the flavours of Oracle.

Liddell, of course, moved on to Microsoft and General Motors, but the person he brought in to run the fledgling company, former Jade chief executive and Harvard alumni Mike Smith, is still in the job.

"It actually feels like it's been three distinct jobs," says Smith.

"First there was growth under the Liddell model, then the 18-month process of selling the company - longlisting, shortlisting, doing due diligence, communications with staff and so on - and then under UXC it has been a different regime."

Over the decade, Oxygen has maintained SAP for a solid list of blue-chip customers on both sides of the Tasman, including Air New Zealand, Fonterra, KiwiRail, TVNZ, Zespri, Blue Scope Steel, Bridgestone, Linfox, Oxfam and Rio Tinto.

The exponential rate of technology improvement means many of the capabilities which only the largest organisations could afford, such as business intelligence, are now available to a much wider range of firms.

"For the large end of town, there has been an incredible amount of R&D within SAP to simplify the product set and make it much more user friendly," Smith says.

"In the mid-market, SAP has taken a leap forward. It had no story for the mid-market six or seven years ago. It does now with A1 and B1."

A1 (or SAP All in One) is the main SAP engine wrapped into a templated form so it can be dropped quickly into smaller firms. B1 (or Business One) is a separate suite of business software for small and medium-sized firms.

Oxygen resells A1 and B1 in Australia, as well as the Business Objects business intelligence software, but in New Zealand it tends to implement the systems that SAP sells directly.

It now has 180 permanent staff and 40 contractors.

Stay one step ahead of cyber criminals

2011-04-24T11:43:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald April 6

Listen to Tom Clare speak and you would be extremely concerned about where you go on the internet.
You'll not just consider updating your antivirus software, you might start asking questions about what your internet service provider is doing to protect you.
Clare is the principal author of the Blue Coat 2011 web security report.
Blue Coat sells a secure proxy gateway that sits between customers and the internet, rating 3 billion web requests a week from its 72 million users. In combination with the antivirus information it pulls in from partners such as Trend Micro, that sort of reach gives it a handle on the changing face of cyber-crime.
"The top categories for delivering malware used to be the traditional red light areas - hacking, gambling, personal lust," Clare says. But during the past year cyber criminals have moved their activities to known sites with good reputations.
Dynamic web links are used to load attack elements from a number of sites, rather than lurking on one dodgy server in downtown Taipei.
The criminals hack insecure sites or acquire access credentials, thus getting around reputation filters, the so-called white and black lists and commonly blocked web categories.
Death, drama and disaster are powerful lures to get people to jump on to the internet, and any news story can be used by criminals to create hooks to web links that lead to threats.
Social networking is creating new opportunities, through Facebook links or tiny URLs from Twitter. Simple keyword ratings prove ineffective against such attacks and defences need to understand wider patterns - why is this page from Boston going to Kiev to load an invisible element?
Last year opened with Operation Aurora, a sophisticated attack over the holiday period when IT shops were thinly staffed, which used flaws in Internet Explorer and Adobe's PDF technology to target more than 30 technology, finance and defence firms.
The attack seemed to be aimed at getting source code from companies such as Google and Adobe.
Once the IE vulnerability was exposed, cyber criminals were quick to launch "me too" attacks, by which time companies with updated antivirus software could expect to be protected. Clare said Aurora led to the creation of advanced PDF tools and active script analysers. "Eventually all attacks reach out to a remote host for more content or to deliver information. These dynamic links and requests are the key to effective web-defence filtering," he says.
Malvertising, or delivering malicious software through fake ads, takes patience. Clare said in one case a relatively new ad domain had existed for about six months, delivering cheap ads to web pages and passing any checks for malware.
One day in November some of the ads sent to selected targets were malicious javascript, sending the browser to an attack site. The domain then shut down.
Another attack which hit many Italian websites used Twitter search results to create domain names for each day of malware delivery.
A major Google study found fake antivirus software accounts for 15 per cent of malware found on the internet and half of the malware delivered through ads.
Users are told their system is infected so they click on the link to accept, install and pay for fake software. Scareware merges into ransomware, where payment is demanded for a tool to clean up the infected computer. Better to stick with antivirus software from major brands.
Then there's the fake update, which often links to searches for adult material but is now increasingly tied to social networking.
A cyber criminal breaks into a social networking account and sends a short message and link to all the user's friends asking, "Is this a picture of you?" Instead of leading to a picture, the dynamic link asks the users to make a software update before the picture or video can be viewed.
The 2010 Soccer World Cup created many opportunities for cyber criminals, especially for phishing attacks which outnumber malware attacks two to one. Fans looking to watch matches online would be directed to pages which would collect private information and payment credentials. Expect more of the same for this year's Rugby World Cup.
Some crime is moving to malware, which puts keyloggers on to the computer to collect logins and passwords.
Lazier criminals can buy fully developed phishing kits. They may be surprised the kits have a backdoor, so its creator can steal their catch.

Endace: Being first and going fast

2011-04-24T11:41:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald March 16

Every second millions of electrons stream across glass or wire networks, pulsing on-off, building into patterns that turn into numbers and words and pictures and whatever the human imagination comes up with.
Many firms are looking for ways to trap that packet information to look for other patterns, good, bad, even dangerous.
New Zealand firm Endace has got further than most, growing from its origins in Waikato University labs 15 years ago into a global company supplying network monitoring technology to some of the world's largest telecommunications and financial services companies and government organisations.
Growth is accelerating and the company is looking to hire more talent for its Hamilton and Auckland research and development labs and for its global sales team so it can stay ahead of the pack.
It has got a $6.7 million infusion of Government cash over the next 36 months though the "funding winners" strategy that replaced the universal research and development tax credit.
"We're looking for the next generation of developers to take us to the next level," says chief executive Mike Riley, an Englishman who followed his New Zealand-born wife back here after a career with high-tech firms in the UK and Boston.
When Riley joined Endace four-and-a-half years ago it had fewer than 50 staff and revenue was in the low millions. Last year it sold $31 million in technology. Current headcount is about 150 and, if the right people can be found, could be 200 by the end of the year.
Endace's accelerated growth has involved a move up the value chain.
Instead of selling a US$7000 ($9400) card that plugs into a server - a geek to geek sale - the firm is now more likely to sell a $40,000 appliance that sits on the network and comes loaded with all the software and analysis tools needed to give "the power to see all."
"We guarantee we can monitor and record every incident on a network. The only way to do that is deliver the complete solution," Riley says.
Incidents like Wikileaks and the subsequent attacks on networks by the Anonymous collective has made organisations more aware of the need for good packet security. Endace allows businesses to track and visually identify security breaches and stop them happening at a network level in real time, rather than by a post-hack examination of logs.
It is looking to fill a range of positions, including another 20 in R&D. It set up an Auckland office in anticipation of the expansion, with the Auckland and Hamilton teams linked through high definition video conferencing.
"We're looking for the best of the best, both recent graduates and people with experience in this field."
While the company has many international staff, Riley is keen to hire New Zealanders.
As the solution grows into a fabric that sits across networks, there are more software layers to build, each requiring specialist expertise. Selling complete solutions means selling to CIOs and higher, and having sales and implementation teams who understand large and complex networks.
"We need not just more people but more skill sets," Riley says. "We are bolstering quality assurance and customer support, because we don't just test components but complete systems."
These are systems that can't go down.
"We have customers who tell us five nines (99.999 per cent availability) isn't good enough. So they don't buy one, they buy two just in case."
Endace finds it is competing with the traditional network management vendors such as Cisco, IBM, HP and so on, as well as network security vendors like McAfee, Symantec, Juniper and Cisco again,
"Rather than have different vendors supplying part of the solution, why not see everything on the network all the time. We are a consolidation play," Riley says.
In common with many New Zealand tech companies, Endace doesn't play the patent game, relying on levels of encryption tricks to keep its secret sauce safe from prying eyes as well as making sure it stays a head of the technology curve. "Be first and go fast," Riley says.
Endace is listed on London's AIM market, with about 7 per cent of the company held by large institution shareholders in the United States and UK and 20 per cent by founders and staff.
It has an employee share scheme, adopting the norms of the technology companies with whom it is competing for talent. "I'm a huge believer in stock options. We are a global company that happens to be in New Zealand."
Riley says the big selling point for getting "the best of the best" is the technology. "It's hard to find places where you are working on as cool a technology as Endace."

Put your firm's best online face forward

2011-04-24T11:37:00.002+12:00

NZ Herald March 16

Websites have become the most-seen faces of many businesses, but are New Zealand organisations putting their best face forward?
Not according to a new study of some of the most used sites.
Intergen web strategist Giles Brown based his study on similar work by EpiServer, a Swedish firm which makes tools for web content management (WCM), online social communities and e-commerce.
"We were curious about the level of engagement in the New Zealand market, and EpiServer's template is an attempt to measure and quantify that engagement," Brown says.
He rated the performance of New Zealand's most popular websites as average, with limited scope for user contribution and interaction.
"Engagement is one aspect of what makes a good site. A lot of that is around the tools people have to share and distribute content," he says.
Many entertainment, automotive, news and media sites are performing well but Brown says a lot of government sites, as well as sectors such as food and beverage, still haven't got past the model of passive "shop window" sites.
Intergen used Experian Hitwise to identify the top five sites in 10 industry sectors. It looked at whether they had online communities and whether the company participated in those communities, the sites' readability and multimedia content, whether sites could be personalised, whether there was "sticky" content that would keep visitors on the site, whether blogging or social media was part of the strategy and how easy it was to find contact details on the site.
It found 73 per cent of the 50 organisations feature a community on their website but they were created through Facebook and Twitter rather than being a built-in forum or chat room.
About 83 per cent of websites with online communities initiated conversation with visitors by uploading new content regularly, but many online forums and chat rooms had no specific "company" member, making it difficult to tell whether they were not engaging with members.
The report says if organisations don't invest effort into participating in online exchanges, they run the risk of their customers answering their questions for them.
"A community needs support and attention - too many community initiatives feel empty and unattended.
"A lot of people open the fire hose without thinking how they will manage that channel. The 'launch and leave' mentality is still there."
Brown recommends setting up an editorial team which has responsibility for refreshing content and driving engagement.
Customers need to be given reasons to use the site, and fostering conversations between employees and users will help with brand awareness and loyalty. Firms also need to keep an eye on how their online community can lead to more sales.
Intergen found all 50 sites had some rich multimedia content, including videos, animations, audio and interactive content.
While it found 81 per cent of sites easy to read, the balance were cluttered with too much dense text. It says online viewers are looking for concise messages that are easy to digest, so snappy copy is the aim, with video or pictures used to explain long or confusing concepts.
But don't go overboard - too many multimedia elements turn people off.
While Web 2.0 is said to be about interaction, the next wave is likely to be about greater personalisation, so visitors are identified and presented with new content which matches their stated interests or browsing history.
About 86 per cent of the sites had started the process by giving visitors the opportunity to sign up, and some shopping and classified sites such as Trade Me contain a range of personalised features.
Sticky content refers to distractions that draw people into using a website, such as news feeds or updates on company information.
Brown recommends talking to users and analysing website metrics to find out what works, and dropping or reshaping pages that don't work.
Having the right content-management system is important, so refreshing content isn't a major task.
About half the sites used blogs, with the majority updated on a regular basis. Blogs have their own culture - they need to be informal and personal and it doesn't pay to use them as a blatant sales tool.
Intergen says many organisations are investing a lot of time in nurturing communities on social networks, but then neglect to advertise these to visitors on the site. Of the 61 per cent of surveyed websites which had a Facebook presence, 40 per cent failed to mention it on their home page.
It's in the design area that most New Zealand sites fall over.
Brown says many sites present an inconsistent brand image through their design or copy.
Many are simply tired, poorly executed, inconsistent or text heavy.

US giant shows the Lovey with buy out

2011-04-24T11:35:00.001+12:00

NZ Herald March 9

People often don't realise that very large software companies are not that quick at developing things.

The sale of EMS-Cortex to United States software giant Citrix shows Mark Loveys has become one of New Zealand's most successful serial IT entrepreneurs.

Of course there's more to it than the softly spoken chief executive. There's the management and governance team that has grown around him, and the developers who have cracked problems some of the world's largest software firms still struggle with.

Those 20 developers will stay with the product, forming the core of a new Citrix New Zealand research and development centre.

Loveys and the parent company Enprise will move on. Or rather foster parent. The EMS assets came to Enprise five years ago, as part of a $2 million funding package from TMT Ventures and the Government's New Zealand Venture Investment Fund.

EMS had started out promisingly enough, making a tool to add new users and applications to computer networks. Its foundation customer was the dot.com era e-solutions joint venture between Telecom, Microsoft and EDS, but the company's attempt to expand overseas almost killed it.

"It was a business before its time. The cloud-computing model was in its infancy, and by the time the company came to us there was just the development team left," Loveys says.

The team was left servicing existing customers while Enprise got on with its main business, selling exo-net accounting software to mid-sized Kiwi customers as a complete ERP (enterprise resource planning) system.

A short history lesson.

Back in the 1980s, when Loveys wasn't writing songs for his band Satellite Spies he wrote business software under the name Orbit Computers. One of his customers, PC Direct, was so impressed it bought Orbit and took Loveys on as information systems manager.

When PC Direct was sold to Gateway, the accounting software found new life as exo-net - which after a complicated saga involving greed and hubris and companies like IT Capital and Solution Six, ended up in the hands of MYOB.

As well as selling exo-net on steroids, Enprise also had a brief spell selling SAP's Business One package to small and medium businesses who wanted a foreign brand on their accounting software.

That brought him into the orbit of one of the world's largest business software companies - and its worldwide reseller network.

Spotting that many customers bought exo-net because of Enprise's job-costing module, Loveys wrote a similar module for SAP.

After a couple of years Enprise judged New Zealand didn't need four Business One resellers and sold its agency to Eagle Technology, keeping the software-development business.

The job-costing module isn't a big-ticket item - just under $1000 a seat - but lots of firms use Business One.

Loveys and his team used their venture funding to build the relationships the business needed to grow, spending a lot on airfares.

He was elected to the SAP Business One customer advisory council, which he now chairs.

As more implementations of both Business One and Enprise systems became hosted rather than installed on customer premises, the EMS-Cortex product came into its own.

Citrix came into the picture when Loveys was working on a proposal by Canadian telco Telus proposal to expand its hosted services business.

"Citrix wanted to analyse what we added to the mix with our control panel, so they took it into their labs in Florida and their engineers got all over the product and really liked it."

The price is confidential, but an industry analyst who has tracked Enprise reckons $18 million.

And lessons for other Kiwi firms?

Listen to the customer. "With Orbit, I used to customise by doing the job on the customer's site. ... It helps me relate to how much upset you can give a customer if you get it wrong. So get it right first time."

The name of a product is important. "For a long time we called Cortex a provisioning product, which is the correct term, but as soon as we started calling it a 'cloud-control panel', it gelled with the surge of investment going into cloud computing."

Kiwi companies should stop trying to do everything. "We can play well in niches. People often don't realise that very large software companies are not that quick at developing things."

Surround yourself with good people. "EMS-Cortex has a lot of talented people who made this happen. My job as CEO is to talk about it and represent the company, but I could not do that without passionate and hard-working people."

Know when to sell.

Ant Howard, the chair of Enprise's board and head of technology investment and advisory firm Howard and Company, says New Zealand capital only goes so far. "Cloud technology is taking off, but we don't have the distributions channels in place for New Zealand-built software nor the capital to create them.

"The lifecycle for New Zealand technology is to create market credibility, then find a home for it."

Disaster-proofing pays off for firms

2011-04-24T11:33:00.001+12:00

NZ Herald March 2

In a building in the Christchurch suburb of Middleton, staff from six of the city's firms are trying to keep their businesses going.
Out at the airport, space is being transformed into another shared office, with desks, chairs, computers, printers, faxes and other equipment trucked down from the North Island over the weekend.
This is Plan-b in operation, a firm whose business is keeping others in business when disaster strikes.
"We had to get our Middleton building signed off as safe but, by Thursday evening, we had customers in there," says managing director Ian Forrester.
Plan-b inspected the airport space when it was looking for Christchurch premises a year ago, so it made the necessary phone calls when it became clear its 70 existing seats would not be enough.
Kordia is putting in Wi-max to cope with likely data loads and Forrester says the firm should have more than 250 seats available in the city by the end of the week.
"We can see demand for about 700 seats just from our existing customers, so we are looking at other options, such as running multiple shifts if that is suitable."
Plan-b is also looking at setting up childcare, in case the city's schools remain closed for a long time.
If firms need to relocate staff out of the city, Plan-b has facilities in Auckland, Hamilton and Wellington. Its services also include offsite and online data back-up, so firms can keep going even if their buildings are off-limits or absolutely trashed.
Forrester says that while the September earthquake didn't bring in many more customers, there was a big jump in existing customers testing their business continuity plans - something that is helping the transition this time go more smoothly.
That means not just how to get servers back up but who takes charge in a crisis, who makes decisions about moving, who talks to customers or the media.
"It all needs to be rehearsed. It's not just backing up data. You've got to practise these things or when it happens people don't know, they run round like headless chooks."
He says last week's quake is clearly more devastating than September's.
"It will have a longer-term impact, so where previously people were with us for one or two weeks, now it could take a year or longer to rebuild."
He says the phones have been ringing off the hook since last Tuesday from firms around the country suddenly wanting a back-up plan.
"New Zealand has had a big wake-up call about business continuity. We still have businesses here who say their plan is to get a fireproof safe and keep the back-up tapes there. That's not going to work.
"Working from home doesn't work. Schools are closed, homes are damaged, phone circuits are overloaded. internet connections go down.
"In a crisis, people need to be together, make decisions together. Small businesses can work from someone's home but, for larger organisations, it doesn't work."
Another firm whose service is helping Christchurch firms recover is Datalock, which offers online back-ups.
Andrew Schick says its Christchurch customer base increased by a third since September, and many will now be thanking their foresight.
"If they can find any computer that works and an internet connection, they can get their data," Schick says.
Datalock is flat out setting up new virtual private servers so firms can move their vital applications and data online.
Many firms are looking for short-term back-up solutions, while they wait for tape back-up services to resume, and the civil defence staff and volunteers flooding into the city also need an efficient way to back up their hard drives.
Schick says many of the city's schools are Datalock customers, and roll back-ups, in many cases done hourly, helped rescuers account for whoever was in buildings.
"Our databases were the first port of call. If the data back-up is only done on-site, or it's only done at the end of the day, you can't do that. That's where continuous data protection is valuable."
He says many firms are now tracking down back-up tapes and trying to reconstitute their business.
Cloud economics means virtual back-ups are no longer just for large firms.
Schick says Datalock is talking with resellers about creating a service that will allow individuals to back up their data for $5 a month, with a donation going to the Red Cross for earthquake relief.
"The aim is to raise $1 million in three months. If we get 50,000 people using it, we can do that."
NZICT and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise are collecting equipment for Christchurch firms, especially laptops, and Wellington firm Catalyst IT has created a website, to co-ordinate support for IT businesses in the city.

Hot shots offer right skills at right time

2011-04-24T11:12:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald February 23

The challenge for IT professionals wanting to maintain their market value often comes down to picking the right technologies and the right projects.
Recruitment firm Randstad has been looking at the hot skills and top growth sectors in the New Zealand technology market this year.
Unsurprisingly, SAP remains top of the totem pole.
Paul Robinson, Randstad's New Zealand manager, says the German business software giant's success here means the demand for staff skilled in SAP enterprise resource planning software will continue to be strong, both from end users and consulting firms.
"Typically when a client decides to do an installation, they will engage a systems integrator to do that. As they go live, they hire people to do the application support," Robinson says.
"The trend in the past few years is a lot of the technical development work is done offshore, so we see more the demand here for functional consultants, the business analyst types."
He says as demand for SAP skills is strong across the Asia-Pacific region, salaries are correspondingly high.
There is also a lot of activity round business intelligence and data warehousing, with increasing demand for high-end professionals with expertise in products such as Cognos, Teradata or and Hyperion.
In application development, employers are looking for experienced developers in languages such as .NET and Java-related platforms, as well as people with expertise in systems integration and messaging technologies.
He says much of this work will be done on a contract basis or through third-party vendors rather than internal teams, and given the shortage of skilled applicants for these roles, rates and salaries are expected to increase for more senior candidates.
"There is still a lot of pent-up demand from the slowdown during the global financial crisis."
The fourth area that will drive the year is data-centre design and management, and the maturing of what is called cloud computing.
"We are seeing big growth in chatter from corporates round cloud," says Richard Talbot, Randstad's solutions director. "There are large investments being made in data centres, with web-oriented technologies in extraordinary demand."
There is also demand for storage experts and people who understand the virtualisation technology used to run multiple servers on shared hardware.
Sovereignty concerns about where data is held means organisations may need "nearshore" data-centre capacity, rather than offshoring all their information to Singapore or the Arizona desert.
"Infrastructure is a real growth area. As people invest, the demand comes for more people in that space."
Australia's $40 billion investment in its Next Generation Network is also creating strong demand in the region.
Robinson says organisations are reluctant to increase salaries for permanent staff but pressure will show up in the contracting market.
"What we see now and expect will increase is more jobs with fewer ideal candidates, so as that work moves to [being done on] contract, it will put pressure on rates.
"We won't see a huge shift in the daily rate initially but it will be an ongoing challenge for clients and prospective contractors," he says.
Robert Walters is also seeing a return of confidence, with pressure on salaries and contract rates set to rise.
In its latest global salary report released last week, the recruiting firm said it saw an increase in permanent recruitment of IT staff in the second half of last year as firms rebuilt teams they slashed during the downturn.
It also saw some larger organisations creating new teams as they looked to grow their businesses again.
Rather than paying higher basic salaries, firms offered bonus incentives and improved packages overall.
Hiring levels were highest in the insurance and financial sectors, which were the first to be hit in the downturn and the first to recover.
But confidence means projects, and projects are more likely to mean contractors.
Robert Walters says shortages are emerging of candidates with niche skill sets such as digital marketers, business analysts and IT professionals with cloud-computing experience.
Business intelligence and social-networking experience will also be in demand.

Where danger always lurks

2011-04-04T09:43:00.002+12:00

Publishd NZ Herald April 2, 2011

What is sometimes labelled southern gothic is a persistent mystery - why is it so many Christchurch artists and musicians mine feelings of darkness and disquiet?

The earthquakes which turned much of the city's gothic revival architecture into heaps of dust and rubble show the artists may have been tapping into some deeper premonitions of stress below.

Their landscape turned upside down as the faults hidden beneath the moraine ripped and tore, and in the battle between the swamp and the Anglicans, the swamp proved stronger.

At Ivan Anthony Gallery are two artists from over the hill in Lyttelton whose work fits in the gothic vault.

Bill Hammond's response to the September earthquake was to start work on a large canvas. Wishboneash: Urns and Burners was finished (or work ended) on February 22, the day of the second quake.

It was rescued from the damaged studio.

The view is from a cave, propped up in the centre by a Doric column, looking out at a harbour and low hills.

Bird figures, in red or yellow shifts, stand or levitate, holding smoking burners. More smoke comes from a volcano across the harbour or depicted in large funerary urns. A grey pallor hangs over the picture.

It's an extraordinary distillation or processing of experience. Over the past 20 or so years Hammond has re-imagined the New Zealand landscape, moving beyond McCahon's unpeopled hills to fill it with bird archetypes, a mythology from here we did not know existed until it sprang into being from his subconscious.

His Arcadia is untameable, a place where danger always lurks.

That willingness by southern artists to trust the tenets of surrealism and surrender themselves to the activity of art making, rather than trying to think everything through beforehand, gives their work its dark power.

Hammond is also showing smaller paintings on paper, birds and urns. Some are merely decorative, some step over into mystery.

Jason Greig makes monoprints, rolling, smearing or painting ink on to formica or hard plastic, then rolling off a single impression.

Trained as a printmaker, he says he hated doing monoprints while at Ilam art school, but discovered the technique again while showing it to students a decade later.

"They're all one-offs, so you don't have to print editions, and you can use the same block over and over for different images. You get the idea down and then go on to a new one," he says.

It's also a much cheaper way of working for an artist who has been at various times "down to the bones of my arse" and unable to afford zinc plates. "You can be painterly, and as the years went on I found I could make them as tight or loose as I wanted, even make them look like an engraving."

Greig bristles a bit at the southern gothic label. "I'm a printmaker. I was brought up on medieval images, that's the tradition. Durer, The Temptation of St Anthony by Martin Schongauer, Goya, when you see his work you've got this whole social commentary."

Then he concedes he wonders why he is drawn to darkness.

"Perhaps repressed guilt and bullshit and hypocrisy. I'm as uncomfortable with the label as the works make people uncomfortable."

It's hard for him to deny a gothic label when his last show in Dunedin was a suite of works based on Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

"I made it a personal story so I plugged myself into the characters. I was sitting drawing myself screaming with a mirror on my shoulder and another on the table, so I was getting cramps and needed to draw fast.

"I found I clicked on to overdrive and was doing an hour's worth of sketching in five minutes, the drawings coming very swift and pared down but holding all the information I needed to flesh out the monoprints."

The series came out of his recovery from alcoholism, something he said took him "two weeks away from dying" and took away his ability to draw before he checked into a three-month residential rehabilitation programme.

"I cleaned up my act and now I'm doing what I love doing," he says.

Phantogram draws inspiration from a Vampirella comic Greig found in a Sumner junk shop one wet Sunday.

Some of the images stick closely to the Frank Frazetta/Jose Gonzalez model, others go somewhere else.

"I make images I want to see. It makes me happy when I pull off some of these prints. I'm glad I'm here. I want to see things creeping out."

There are boats on storm-tossed seas, bridges over dark gorges and a lone figure stranded on an asteroid, which bubbled out of his subconscious after the February quake.

Greig says the quake shook his house around like a rubber band, causing its two chimneys to implode, coating everything in the house with brick dust, but surprisingly leaving the pictures just swaying on the wall.

"When they come it's like a pneumatic drill. One aftershock - it must have been right underneath - it felt as if someone had picked up the house and slammed it down."

Fortunately the 115-year old cottage survived, and Greig was back working within days. "The porch is a bit munted though."

During the clean-up he found an obituary for Hurricane Higgins, the George Best of snooker, so turned out a couple of small prints of the star as Franciscan monk and in skeletal form.

"I take love, life and death and squish it through a press. Half the time you are working on something and the ink takes over and takes you on a wee drive of its own."

Exhibition

What: Phantogram by Jason Greig and Wishboneash: Urns & Burners by Bill Hammond

Where and when: Ivan Anthony Gallery, cnr East St-Karangahape Rd, to April 23

Stepping into the luxurious lion's cage

2011-03-23T00:28:00.001+13:00

When the queen goes a-visiting, the pervasive smell is the smell of fresh paint. There is that "dress to impress" odour about the third Singapore Biennale.
Apart from the effort needed to turn the old Kallang airport into an exhibition space, the event showed other strains.
There was the strain of putting 63 artists from 30 countries into four venues, and of negotiating a place for an official display of international art in a country whose own artists are often seen as challenging the authoritarian regime.
Artists can fight government, even if it means many Singaporean artists now live and show their more controversial works abroad.
State-funded curators must try to tiptoe around it, and the biennale has three - Australians Trevor Smith and Russell Storer and Australian-resident Singaporean Mathew Ngui - who held the title of artistic director.
For those looking for a crash course in Southeast Asian contemporary art, the parallel show Negotiating Home, History and Nation at the Singapore Art Museum covers some of the highlights of the past 20 years.
Here it becomes clear artists in the region don't believe in art for art's sake. "In Southeast Asia, contemporary art always has a social purpose. Artists have sided with the 'losing side', people without power," says museum director Tan Boon Hui.
That's what the biennale seems to avoid as it strives to become part of the international circuit, clutching at tropes which have been recycled through other biennales of the past couple of decades,
It's a bit like those shows the Auckland City Art Gallery used to put on in the 1980s (when it at least tried to curate current New Zealand art) which excluded art with a self-consciously regional flavour in favour of self-conscious internationalism.
Performance art remains a feature of Singaporean art, perhaps because of the state's efforts to suppress it, but the performances at the biennale did not feature Singaporean artists.
Negotiating Home is packed with performance artefacts, such as a photograph of a Lee Wen show in London where he was splashed with yellow paint as a commentary on the way everyone there assumed he was from mainland China, rather than Singapore with its 700-year history of Chinese settlement.
The museum also holds the video of the event and the yellow painting produced by the performance, which is part of Lee Wen's long-running Yellow Man series.
Upstairs is one of Suzann Victor's early light pieces, rows of lights arranged in a triangle, the bulbs in constant motion touching small mirrors set in smashed windscreen glass on the floor, as she responded to the ban on performance art by making kinetic performance works that did not require a body.
Another of Victor's pieces, a row of red chandeliers permanently installed over a walkway in the huge Museum of Singapore, uses magnetic pulses to create a series of lively dances through the day, contrasting with the one-note tones of many of the biennale entries in the galleries below.
The biennale theme (or "banal-ay" as the woman from the Singapore Ministry of Information called it during the opening speeches) was Open House, referring to the Singaporean custom of opening their homes to others during festive occasions.
Ngui says it also refers to "an open house to the contemporary artist's process", the word process having replaced the dreaded "practice".
Walking in the main lobby of the Kallang terminal, which since the airport's closure in the 1950s has been used by the People's Association as offices and a place to build parade floats, it looked like a house terminally unfinished.
Most of the striking deco features of the 1937 building uncovered by
project architect Marcos Corrales were covered up by German artist Michael Beutler, whose "process" was to make long cylinders from plastic-wrapped wire mesh and lean them against the walls.
It's as if every action of an artist produces something of note, but at what point in a site-specific work should a curator step in and say "this fails" and scrap it?
Around the terminal building as punctuation are several pieces by Turner Prize winner Martin Creed, one of the least interesting of the YBA crew, looking like worn out party pieces - his row of metronomes, a jaundiced yellow neon tube spelling out "DON'T WORRY".
Upstairs another Briton, Mike Nelson, fills a room with scarred plinths built from the walls he destroyed for an installation in London's Hayward Gallery.
Critiques of the "white cube" are stale - Billy Apple was doing it better 30 years ago - and irrelevant in a region still struggling with the notion of finding places to show art at all.
The east wing was stronger. Rafael Lozano-Hemmer turns viewers' shadows into radio frequencies, drawing in splashes of sound as people walk through the space. You have to freeze to catch the latest death toll from Japan.
It gives way to Sheela Gowda's tangle of black rope holding up chromed car bumpers.
It's the smell that tips you off it's human hair, a reference to a south Indian practice of braiding locks around bumpers for luck.
At the end of the row, young Singaporean artist Michael Lee has created cardboard models of bizarre buildings tracking the career of a fictitious architect who supposedly brushed up against the greats of 20th century architecture.
In a city which seems like a giant architectural laboratory, it made a lot of sense.
Upstairs though was a stinker - the sole New Zealand contributor, Dane Mitchell, did one of his spooky pieces, enlisting the help of a medium to map the psychic traces of those who had passed through the room, with a pathway created by an oddly-shaped rail.
Mitchell, who was also in Auckland's Mystic Truths show, delivers the kind of emperor's clothes that curators use to assert their superiority over the rest of us.
The next room says much about the biennale phenomenon. Young Singaporean artist Genevieve Chua has a show at an Arab St photo gallery based on the pontianak, an Asian mythological creature with no western equivalent which is created when a woman dies giving birth.
Chua's interpretation, in blurred black and white photographs and spidery photograms, has a poetic power.
At Kallang, she projects a short video of vegetation down a long alley, so it appears to be swaying in 3D. By going bigger, the work becomes slight and one-dimensional.
Out the back, Michael Elmgreen and Inga Dragset did one of their funny, ironic biennale spectaculars, a large German-style barn filled with mounds of hay bales on which four male models in lederhosen sprawl.
Various trophies, tools and drinking steins hang from the wall, and there's a white stuffed goat with a white-painted car tyre nearby - a Jasper Johns reference as fodder for critical analysis.
The other big biennale piece looked like it had evaded critical analysis. Japanese artist Tatsu Nishi is Berlin-based, like so many of the "international-arti".
His party trick is to go to cities and build a room around a prominent public sculpture, so viewers can get up close and personal with something they may take for granted looking from below.
He did it in Christchurch in 2008 with a statue of Captain Cook, and this time he was allowed to take on the Merlion, the giant concrete sculpture of the Singapore national symbol which stands by the harbour.
Around the head of the lion he constructed a luxury hotel room to be occupied each night by one member of the public, while during the day small groups are ushered through.
So, let me get this straight. Singapore, with its history of wartime occupation, allows a Japanese artist to build a cage around its national lion in the guise of renting it out for luxury accommodation.
It's certainly thought provoking.
Singapore Biennale
What: Open House Singapore Biennale 2011
Where and when: Various sites in Singapore, to May 15
* Adam Gifford travelled to Singapore as a guest of the Singapore Art Museum and Singapore Biennale.

Miners' Requiem by John Madden

2011-02-17T21:20:00.001+13:00

Published NZ Herald February 12

Two weeks before the explosion at Pike River Mine, John Madden completed a painting of a mine rescue team, the "proto" men, waiting to go in. The son and grandson of West Coast coalminers, Madden has often painted mine themes, alongside his raw-boned investigations of the New Zealand landscape.

"When I first showed that proto painting, my speech was, 'Don't forget it can happen again,"' he says.

Growing up in Greymouth, Madden thought he was heading for a life in the mines, and he has worked underground. Mine miscellanea is scattered through his studio in bush above Karekare - his father's pick and banjo shovel, a helmet, old family photographs of uncles at Denniston and Burnett's Face, torn out newspaper articles and photographs, a proto breathing mask.

Outside, the jim crow he used to bend the rails for Barry Brickell's Driving Creek railway hangs off the side of a steel coal skip.

"Feel the thickness of that steel," he says. "When the Strongman Mine blew [in 1967], the steel wagons were shredded in the explosion. Rails were bent. Those explosions travel at twice the speed of sound through those tunnels, and they went around twice - through the workings and back out again."

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That's why he was mystified by the attempt to keep alive the hope of a "rescue" at Pike River. "Every mining son knew at that first bang they were dead, and why they carried on for days I don't know."

Madden had considered applying for a job as a roof bolter at Pike River - the six-figure salary would buy a lot of paint - but was warned off by a cousin still in the industry.

In response to the disaster, he painted a cross made up of the number 29 repeated. "I was driving along and it came to me. I couldn't wait to get home, sit there with a bottle of wine, and then it's done. Then you're disappointed because [the act of painting] is over, and you want it to go on."

What kept Madden away from the mines was an early exposure to art. He remembers Toss Woollaston coming to the door to sell the family Rawleigh's health products. "I saw his eyes and never forgot them, they just looked right through you."

But it was potter Yvonne Rust who first spotted his potential when as a third former he came into the art room at Greymouth High School.

"I was a loner. Rather than playing rugby on the weekend I preferred being in the bush with my dogs. She took me under her wing and next thing I was down at the old brewery where Barry Brickell in his little shorts was building a coal-fired kiln.

"My parents thought she was a witch. Sure, we did have sake after work and homemade bread and cheeses I'd never had before. Yvonne used to say, 'you're not a potter, you're an artist'."

Madden no longer works with clay - it was hard to sustain the collective effort required to keep a wood-fired kiln going for a week, and the bricks now lie scatted behind the studio - but the scattered pots display the same elemental forces he tried to capture in his paintings.

The work is clearly in the Bernard Leach-Shoji Hamada vein that influenced that pioneering generation of New Zealand studio potters, although Madden ruefully notes he seems to be missed out of the histories and major collections.

"People didn't get my pots. You had to approach them, they didn't seduce you. That's where it failed in New Zealand, because people want to be seduced ... the 'wow' factor."

When Madden left the West Coast he headed to Nelson and the home of Toss and Edith Woollaston. "What I learned from Toss was how to live as a painter. I arrived on their front lawn in my Volkswagen just as the petrol coughed out. I knocked on the door and said, 'Yvonne Rust sent me'."

By the end of the evening he'd been asked to stay on as a sort of unpaid "batman", making the coffee, keeping the fire stoked up, and driving the painter round.

"He fancied me as well. I was a beautiful young man, and he was writing [the autobiography] Sage Tea at the time.

"I stayed a year, and then I wanted to find a place for my pottery and painting, and found it in Whangamoa."

He was there for 20 years in an old house on a rough block that had been the site of a failed ohu commune, living off the land, digging clay and providing a haven for other artists.

Twenty years ago he came to Karekare to build a house for friends, met the mother of his children and stayed. He rejects comparison of his landscapes to Woollaston. Madden owes less debt to Cubism and hammers the underlying landscape harder.

As the cicadas sing their summer symphony, he talks about the mystery of painting.

"By the time I come to do the next painting it's like I have no idea and it feels like I have never painted before and I leave that naivete in myself. I don't write things down, I don't note colours, I just go by instinct.

"There's this interview with Colin McCahon where the interviewer says, 'I suppose you're just painting, painting, painting?' and there's this drawn out silence before he says, 'There's more looking, looking, looking in painting, the painting is very brief, it passes very quickly.' I had to learn that one too.

"I watched Woollaston do this massive Wellington landscape. He was just sitting there, and he picked up this tiny little brush, put a little bit of white on it, walked over to this massive wild work, makes a mark, and says, 'We're finished for today. We'll go for a drive up Mapua now.'

"I was awestruck, and I thought, now I get a little bit more. I spend up lot of time just sitting up in the studio ... thinking about where to go next."

Exhibition

What: Miners' Requiem by John Madden; 20pc of sales will go to the Pike River Fund

Where and when: Orexart, Upper Khartoum Place, to February 26
By Adam Gifford | Email Adam

Rural broadband scheme destructive

2011-02-16T12:06:00.000+13:00

John Key says he wants to "streamline and improve" bureaucracy.

Bill English says the country can't afford waffly policy.

Great. They can do away with the Ministry of Economic Development. That should save billions and get rid of policy that is not only waffly but downright destructive.

The decision to start commercial negotiations with Telecom and Vodafone about handing over $285 million to improve rural broadband services is a case in point.

Either the ministry supplied bad advice to Communications and Information Technology Minister Steven Joyce, or it is shielding a decision he made for his own political or philosophical reasons.

Because be in no doubt, this is a bad decision that will not only saddle rural areas with sub-standard service, it will entrench existing monopolies and blight international standing as a place to invest or do business.

The group which may have the biggest stake in improved rural broadband, Federated Farmers, isn't happy.

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It's trying to get Joyce along to a "solutions summit" with the successful and unsuccessful bidders, industry experts and other stakeholders, to thrash out the issues under Chatham House rules.

The most positive thing the Feds drew from the announcement was the promise to retender if the contracts can't be finalised by the end of March.

The successful plan will extend Telecom's fibre network to 719 rural schools and to 154 new cellphone towers that Vodafone will build.

Apart from the schools, the other 250,000 potential customers will have to connect through either ADSL on Telecom's copper network, or through wireless connections.

Joyce is promising at least 5 megabits per second to 86 per cent of rural homes and businesses.

Federated Farmers wants at least double that speed, for around $60 a month retail.

In reality the proposed solution may deliver 1 mbps.

Joyce says the joint Vodafone/Telecom proposal is based on proven, existing technology, giving the government confidence it will work.

He says it will ensure serious competition in the last mile, giving many customers a choice of fixed wireless, ADSL2+ or mobile broadband, and was the only one that increases mobile coverage.

Joyce said it with a straight face, although he does have a tendency to smirk when he's putting across something particularly outrageous. But he didn't make his fortune in radio by relying on outdated technology.

The unsuccessful bids, from the OpenGate consortium with Kordia, Woosh and FX Networks and from the Maori-backed Torotoro Waea group, were based on deploying 4th generation technology called TD-LTE.

Joyce says it's risky, while giving his preferred partners five years to roll out more of the old 3G kit that has so far failed to do the job.

A generational step in technology is exponential rather than incremental. LTE stands for long term evolution - this stuff has been a decade in development, so the bugs have been worked out of it.

TD, or time division, is a variant on LTE developed by China Mobile that runs on cheaper spectrum bands.

LTE has much faster speeds than the solution Joyce wants to lumber farmers with - easily 50 to 100 times faster - and it has a larger coverage area, with a single cell tower covering up to 100km. It can also support more users in an area.

One of the reasons it took so long to develop was future proofing. Networks were designed so it can be easily upgraded in future.

The equipment is cheaper, it works better, and it uses less power.

OpenGate would have its network complete in two years, not five, delivering more than Federated Farmers was asking for at the price it was seeking.

So why give a mountain of cash to two transnational companies with a record of failure in rural New Zealand?

Telecom has been subsidised for years through the Kiwishare to supply rural service, and has done the least it could get away with to keep the 111 service going.

Vodafone hasn't invested any fresh capital in New Zealand since it bought Bellsouth's network, merely reinvesting some profits and taking advantage of poor regulation to lock in customers.

The big loser in this, apart from rural New Zealanders, is 2Degrees.

Its investors have sunk close to half a billion dollars creating a mobile network, despite an extraordinary unwillingness on the part of the politicians to address barriers to competition that would be considered illegal in other countries.

Now Joyce is offering a dollar for dollar subsidy - to the multinationals using anticompetitive tactics to lock it out.

Call in the World Trade Organisation.

Demands in city pipeline

2011-02-16T12:05:00.000+13:00

Published NZ Herald February 16

With the super city a reality, there is a hunger for some big projects to turn Auckland from a disconnected series of villages into a properly functioning metropolis.

"City shaping is primarily transport. Other infrastructure tends to follow," says Stephen Selwood, chief executive of the New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development.

Big projects include: completion of the western ring route, including the Waterview tunnel, over the next five years; completing the inner city rail route, the final piece of the commuter rail in the city; and the Auckland-Manukau Eastern Transport Initiative (AMETI) to improve connections between Auckland's south eastern suburbs and Manukau.

If that's done by 2025, a new harbour bridge needs to be built.

Mr Selwood believes getting consent will likely be a bigger challenge than engineering and construction.

"If you add up all those projects and consider conventional funding, existing taxes, road user charges and so on, there is a $5 billion funding gap over 20 years," he says.

"The only way to bridge that is user pays on the roading networks. Though councils and government can borrow, there are limits."

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The projects will call for professionals, including engineers, construction workers, lawyers and bankers.

There will be operations and maintenance staff to manage the new infrastructure.

"The industry has no reservations about its ability to meet that need and it has a track record of expertise and capacity," Mr Selwood says.

"Five years ago there were questions about how it would cope with the increase in workload with current projects, but it has not been an issue. Things were tight at times, but it managed.

"Any cost increases have been the result in the change of scope of projects, rather than the inputs."

The strong caveat, says Mr Selwood, is that there needs to be certainty of timing, phasing and funding for the industry to be confidence enough to invest in the people and training required to get up to speed.

"It's not fair on people if a workforce has to be laid off because there are gaps in the pipeline. We can't afford that socially or economically."

"These are big projects on a global scale, so there is global interest. Chinese, French and other European firms are among those looking, but their interest will be conditional on there being that certainty.

"We have a tendency in New Zealand to find reasons why not. We say we don't have the money, we don't have the resources. If you say that, that's what you get."

He's worried the new council may come up with a motherhood and apple pie spatial plan, rather than trying to tackle real questions about what needs to be done and how it will be funded.

At Auckland University's Centre for Infrastructure Research, director Dr Jim Bentley is looking for ways to improve how infrastructure is built and managed.

As a former chief executive of Metrowater, Dr Bentley has personal experience of running an Auckland infrastructure service provider.

"I perceived it was difficult to find the right knowledge and skills to make good infrastructure decisions across their range and across their lifecycle," he says.

The challenge is often measuring value for money - reducing wastewater overflow onto beaches is good, but how much is it worth to society? How good does a solution need to be? Fixing 90 per cent of a problem may be enough, or all a city can afford.

"Answering those sorts of questions needs more than an engineering, construction or planning approach. It needs all of those things together," Dr Bentley says.

The centre also pulls in expertise in economics and management.

Dr Bentley says critical infrastructure decisions are often made by mid-level managers rather than at the boardroom or senior management-level.

Giving those managers value-for-money tests and tools can have a big impact on the public purse.

In Auckland, the fact there are now single organisations with regional responsibility for water and transport should allow for more integrated planning and development.

Dr Bentley says the centre wants to establish executive education teaching broader decision-making for managers.

"I think there is a gap there rather than with engineering skills.

"We have competent engineering schools, but the gap is turning those engineers into good infrastructure decision-makers."
By Adam Gifford | Email Adam

Mobile browsers give power to the people

2011-02-16T12:03:00.000+13:00

Published NZ Herald February 9

At Xero's partner conference in Taupo at the weekend, the online accounting software provider demonstrated taking pictures of invoices or receipts with a mobile phone camera and sending them to their Xero account.

This will be the year business embraces smartphones, and that means some hard choices for software developers.

Do they create versions of their applications to be downloaded on to the iPhone, the Android, the Windows phone or whatever, or do they make sure their web applications work on phone browsers?

Xero's Rod Drury is firmly in the latter camp, but he's willing to create a native phone application when there is no other choice.

"We see mobile as an extension of our core platform. It may seem attractive to go in and develop pure mobile applications, but it's hard to think of ones which will be an enduring business.

"We have built our (Xero web) application in HTML5, but you can't access some features in the hardware like the camera," Drury says.

"It's a nice compromise. We maintain our investment in the core platform, but we can deploy specific features as applications and get access to the native phone hardware."

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Xero used an open source mobile development framework called PhoneGap to compile the camera application, which created a positive buzz in Taupo.

"Instead of expense claims meaning a three or four hour catch-up on the last day of the month, people will be able to take a picture of the receipt as they leave the cafe or get out of the taxi in Sydney and send it off to where their accountant can pick it up."

Drury says Xero has largely completed the task of building its accounting engine for the web, and is now looking at more rich features.

"The big direction is mobility so we are asking what are the mobile scenarios our customers will use."

Apart from expense claims, Drury says there is business potential in the fact most phones know where they are.

"We are keen to build a location layer over everything we do. We have enabled geocoding for our contacts.

"That means you can get maps. It also leads to being able to report which regions revenue is coming from."

He says developers need to take advantage of the investment made by companies like Google, rather than try to compete or replicate cloud-based services.

For example, Google Places is overtaking Yellow Pages as a source of business listings.

Matthew Miller from Havelock North-based web development firm Mogul has also been weighing the pros and cons of mobile web apps versus native mobile apps.

He says a native mobile app is best suited for gaming and when the app needs to access hardware features of the device, such as the camera, accelerometer, GPS, or FM radio.

Native mobile apps need to be programmed for each mobile operating system, putting developers on the path of constant maintenance and upgrading as the systems develop.

Because the user downloads the app from the operating system manufacturer's marketplace, the developer must jump through whatever hoops the manufacturer puts up.

In contrast, while a web app working through the phone's browser may not be as well integrated with the device's hardware because it's not written specifically for that device, it's cheaper to develop and maintain ... write once, run anywhere.

It's also easier to program, because universal programming languages like HTML, CSS, and Javascript are used, and increasingly some of the phone or pad-specific features such as geolocation and swipe functionality are built into the languages.

"Native phone app development is inherently riskier than web apps," Miller says.

"Some people call mobile app development a crap shoot, because for the few apps that take off, there are thousands of apps out there that get used once and never again."

He says demand is growing from clients to incorporate mobile devices into their digital strategy, but the big drivers in smartphone uptake are social media such as Twitter and Facebook, and content consumption such as news or celebrity gossip feeds, rather than specific business apps.

"The mobile browsers are a lot more powerful than people give them credit for, so the important thing for developers is to make sites look good on mobile," Miller says.

Mogul has produced a website for the

Data dolled up and delivered to the eye

2011-02-16T11:59:00.000+13:00

Published NZ Herald February 2

Eight lanes running straight across the Hobson Bay lagoon; Auckland city ahead under a glowering grey sky.
That picture on the front page of the Herald in 2004 spelled the end of the Eastern motorway. It sunk John Banks' first mayoralty and won Richard Simpson and his Action Hobson colleague, Christine Caughey, a term on the Auckland City Council.
"Christine said we needed a picture so people could see what was proposed and engage with it," says Simpson.
As co-founder of one of the first computer graphics companies, Cadabra, Simpson was a dab hand at delivering data to the eye.
Cadabra's innovations included modelling the shade cast by office towers around Auckland and creating visual representations of the effects of the various planning codes governing the central city.
His spell in local government has given him an even greater appetite for using graphics to inform planning decisions.
He's now doing business development for NextSpace,, a company formed out of a partnership between Right Hemisphere and the Ministry of Economic Development to find more applications for Right Hemisphere's world-leading 3D visualisation technology.
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Right Hemisphere's focus is on industries such as aerospace, to which it provides the software now used by companies such as Boeing to render and manage their designs.
"We want to be a catalyst for the expansion of the computer graphics industry here in New Zealand. This could be the next Fonterra," he says.
One of its major projects is the Visual City, creating the next generation of digital tools that cities can use to do their spatial planning. "If we can get this right, there are 1000 cities bigger than Auckland it can be taken into, as well as any number of smaller ones. It's a billion-dollar opportunity for New Zealand Inc."
It's an opportunity our cousins across the Tasman seem receptive to, with a major investment in Virtual Australia. That's part of the wider Digital Earth project that Simpson is also involved in, as the chairman of the International Society for Digital Earth's working committee on the digital city.
NextSpace is working with water authorities in Melbourne and Sydney on projects to upgrade water and sewerage systems. The NextSpace tools allow them to incorporate and correlate any number of rich data sets.
On top of basic topographical maps, LiDAR or airborne laser scans allow them to add in the built environment, with hyperspectral imaging adding further layers of textures.
That means planners can not only get an idea of what sort of ground cover exists but even the types of trees and the likely root patterns which might affect their networks.
"Sydney spends $600 million a year on tree-related problems," Simpson says. "With the greening of cities, a lot of trees were planted along sewer lines and they are getting big now.
"Planning is not a 2D problem, it's a 3D problem." Broadband will add more opportunities for real-time data collection which can be fed into such models.
The new low-pressure sewer networks that South East Water is building in Melbourne will use information collected at street and house level to determine the best times to pump waste out of smaller holding tanks to lower the use of energy.
"With Auckland, there are opportunities to create models in 3D, so people can see what the city might look like in 20 or 30 years. It also allows for the creation of consultation tools so homeowners can see how a development is relevant to them."
One such project Simpson is promoting through visualisation is a bridge over the Auckland Harbour, to mark the Anzac Centenary in 2015.
In some ways, it's a metaphor for what he's trying to do. The current tunnel project is about trying to hide as much of the infrastructure underground as possible - at great expense in construction and maintenance costs - while it doesn't do everything a harbour crossing needs to do.
Simpson says the Visual City model of bringing together a wide range of data and working with it in a more understandable way will improve not only the design process but the consultation required to get public acceptance.
He's concerned the structure developed for the Auckland Super City could encourage the sort of disconnected mentality that precipitated the push for a super city in the first place.
The greater use of geospatial data could be what's needed to break the document-centric approach that locks council thinking into narrow silos, Simpson says.
"The Auckland council, because of its size, should support innovation and local business because part of its mandate is economic growth.
"I'd like to see a [council-controlled organisation] for the Visual City, so it's not just seen as an information technology thing ... this will be the new digital infrastructure."

Working class man

2010-12-13T12:52:00.000+13:00

A Sam Harrison woodcut is a bravura performance - big, ambitious, the lines carved into rough plyboard building up a well-rendered form. His technical skill can make one stand back and ask "where's the art?" until you realise his is an art that comes first from the hands and the heart rather than the head.

At the Jensen Gallery is a selection of woodcuts and sculptures, a small sampling of the Christchurch 24-year-old's protean activity. So why the body as a subject?

"I've always been fascinated with watching people, observing them. I like the idea of it being something that's timeless, anyone can relate to the human figure," Harrison says.

While other artists talk of their "practice", Harrison talks about work. Doing a bachelor of art and design at Canterbury Institute of Technology was a way to keep working in the gap from school to what comes after.

"I just work, that's all you can do. It's nice dealing with people and having people round. I've got a lot of friends who don't do much, they're just there [in the studio] with their clothes off and I'm trying to make work off them," he says, laughing.

He's also hungry to learn from the work of other artists.

"I probably spend half my time getting books out of the library and looking at them, and people keep putting things in my face all the time. Since the fifth form, I've not really given myself anything else in life to do. I'm a bit dyslexic and struggled through everything else. I think I was just lazy, because now when I am interested I can do it fine."

Harrison finds out how to do things by giving them a go, or having friends show him. He's recently learned the traditional method of casting plaster for sculpture, having developed his own techniques using roofing silicon and concrete.

"It opened up new stuff I can do, so my brain is ticking again. The woodcuts look more anal than they are. They look very laborious and painful but I just do big graphite drawings and then, when the model is not there, I carve through the thing. Usually I have four or five things on the go at once, so when I get bored I jump on to something else."

A larger than life sculpture and a long woodcut of a reclining figure are both of the same model. "That's Vincent. I got him to lie down and he fell asleep. I think he likes sleeping."

The print has similarities to Durer's portrait of the dead Christ. Harrison says he didn't look at the Durer while he was doing it, "but it was in my head".

Harrison draws inspiration in his printmaking from the German Expressionists, and in sculpture form Italian Marino Marini, even if they don't come out that way.

"I struggle with the idea of the way I work most of the time. It irritates me. I do a tiny print and I just make it, and then I get to a big one and that changes the process."

He says much of what he does in the studio is about fighting control. "The first work [in a new direction] I am always really excited about, and then I somehow manage to control it, suck the life out of it, and then do another first work, so that process of letting go and tightening and letting go, I find it is opening up."

Harrison takes on religious subjects, such as the large crucifixion woodcut which is part of the James Wallace Collection in the Pah Homestead.

"My dad is the pastor of a small church, Judah, which he started in the 60s, and he's awesome. It's just 50 or so people, just simple. I think that's where the relevance is for me."

Meanwhile, he's looking forward to getting back to the studio for some concentrated drawing.

"All my friends from art school always talk about proposals. I've never written a proposal in my life. I don't even know what they're talking about. I say, 'Why don't you just do some work?' They don't understand the idea of work."

What: Sculpture, Paper by Sam Harrison

Where and when: Jensen Gallery, 11 McColl St, Newmarket, to December 18

Published November 27

Refusing to do the frangipani thing

2010-12-13T12:51:00.001+13:00

Residencies are a good way for artists to take stock of where they are in their career, tackle major projects, or just get down to the business of making art with fewer day-to-day distractions.

They are also an affirmation that the life the artist has chosen has been recognised as valuable by others.

Andy Leleisi'uao has strung together three residencies over the past year or so - at Beachcomber Contemporary Art in Rarotonga, as Taipei Village artist in residence in Taiwan, and over the winter the McCahon residency in Titirangi.

He says they allowed him to pursue a line of exploration, or rather explore the potential of a linear type of composition. Limiting his palette to black on white with touches of red, he divided each canvas by horizontal lines, like the pages of a school exercise book, and painted small figures and scenes along each line.

The figures seem to be engaged in work or play or ritual or conflict. The newspaper-strip format suggests storytelling and narrative, or even a multi-perspective view of village life.

En masse the paintings can be seen as an even field, broken up by the red highlights, like zooming out of Google Earth.

The work on show at Whitespace reads as one large work although it is in fact 12 individual paintings which can be hung separately or combined in a range of formats.

When the Taiwan works were shown in July at COCA, the Christchurch Centre of Contemporary Art, as Wandering through Pandemonium Quiet, they were hung in a line down the spine of the gallery. "This is the final part of the line work. I don't think I'll do any more. You sort of know when to stop," he says.

Leleisi'uao says he has worked with the idea of multiple interchangeable panels since painting a mural for the Mangere Community Arts Centre, which was rejected.

"They hated the idea. They hated the concept. They hated the images. They hated the artist," he says. "They ended up having a ballot about it, and some of the comments that came out: 'Go back to working in the factories,' or 'You're not a real artist.' Well, f*** you ... They don't get it out this way [in Mangere]."

Leleisi'uao sees his place as in the wider art world, not in some corner labelled Polynesia, even if much of his subject matter in the past has been about fa'a Samoa, social problems like suicide, the greed and corruption of churches and politicians, and the conflicts between immigrants and the New Zealand-born.

For him, art is not some feel-good manifestation of culture, but the creation of culture stroke by stroke.

He remembers going through school during the period when educationists incorporated Fatu Feu'u's frangipani patterns into the curriculum as a way to engage Pasifika students.

It was part of a trend by the Education Ministry to over-prescribe art education, which led to identikit portfolios of work rolling out of the school system.

"I refused to do the frangipani thing because it was too easy, just coloured patterns. I was more interested in what painters like Clairmont and Fomison were doing. Those kids who did were getting 80s and 90s, working to a system. But they had no interest in it, there was no soul in their work, and if they got into art school, they didn't last a year," he says.

He still sees a very short career span for young Polynesian artists, who show briefly before fleeing to the safety of a regular job. "I'd rather have the freedom to do my work. I have not had a proper job for years. That allows me to do what I do."

The main room at Whitespace is taken up by drawing produced by New South Wales-based expatriate Locust Jones during a residency in Seoul, South Korea. Like Leleisi'uao, there's a cartoony, calligraphic feel to his lines, and a sense that information is piled up on the viewer.

And while it was Leleisi'uao who had the McCahon Residency, it's Jones who is exhibiting the text-based works. Jones, who crossed the Tasman in 1990 when he couldn't get into art school in his native Christchurch, says his response to the media-soaked environment he was in was to pull images and texts out of television and newspaper photos and headlines.

"I was making my own poetry from the headlines. By the end of the residency, I was just making text. I preferred writing them to drawing."

Jones has always worked on paper, and being in Korea allowed him to learn more about the Korean hanji papermaking tradition. "These are made of mulberry bark, so it's the same material as tapa," he says.

He got local conservators to splice together some of the large sheets so he could have a continuous roll to work on, generating the large drawing which fills the gallery's long wall.

Korean colleagues also taught him traditional ways to dilute the inks, giving him a greater tonal range.

He works with bamboo sticks rather than brushes, filling in the outlines with eyedroppers or syringes of ink. In some works he uses sticks of graphite to scribble freely.

Recycling media images can be a way of the artist withdrawing from the work, a charge Jones accepts. "If I was to put myself in there, the personal, it would be a mess," he says. But with 16 million people living in a small space in Korea, there is a constant noise that made its way into the work.

In the Whitespace window, for those walking round Ponsonby at night, there is a video installation by Janet Lilo from 6pm to midnight of a group of dancers who perform at nights by closed storefronts and shop windows in Sapporo, Japan.

Who: Andy Leleisi'uao, Locust Jones and Janet Lilo

Where and when: Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, Ponsonby, to November 27

Published November 13

Messing about with everyday things

2010-12-13T12:45:00.000+13:00

Now that no less an art world figure as a former director of the Tate Modern has told us young men who don't clean their rooms are the pinnacle of New Zealand contemporary art, the latest show at Artspace is timely.

Koki Tanaka has made an art form out of making a mess. He's been funded by the Asia New Zealand Foundation to come here from his base in Los Angeles and reprise a performance/installation he did in Yokohama.

Tanaka takes stuff that's lying around, finds ways to trash or scatter it in a random way, and has a video of himself doing it. Which actually helps to make it make some sense. It explains how all that stuff got on the floor, and why it's damn well going to stay that way for another month.

Over in the corner is another video, a sort of greatest hits package of Tanaka performances: stuffing a large tarpaulin into a small car, jumping on a pile of cardboard cartons, squirting tomato sauces on the ground in a circle.

What supposedly ties Tanaka's work with the others in the show is that they offer "perspectives on the intersection of human and sculptural form".

Tanaka says he wants to make viewers aware of everyday things. "You normally ignore how you sit down, so even when we sit down in a chair, you can find something strange or something new or something fresh in that.

"I try to find something different in everyday routines, so in this work I try to use every object in a different way to show its possibilities."

The works, which turn out to be the products of three separate sequences of actions, and grouped around a pentagonal divider, which is imported from Tanaka's works about disrupting the linear curatorial flow that galleries get into.

His interest in what he calls "temporary sculpture" is a reaction to Japan's ongoing economic crisis.

"When I was at art school in Tokyo from 1996 to 2000, I felt not only the economic crisis but that I cannot make any art. There are so many artists already, so many nice works, I cannot add anything new, so I start to focus on our everyday, because we don't need to do any art any more, so just focus on the everyday to find something different," Tanaka says.

He was inspired by a student exchange trip to the Vienna Secession in 1998, where American artists Mike Kelley and Paul McCarthy collaborated on Sod and Sodie Sock Comp. O.S.O, a giant installation and performance piece around the idea of a boot camp featuring cartoon character Sad Sack.

"I saw it and felt, 'I can do anything, make anything,"' Tanaka says. "Maybe it's a huge mistake but I keep going because I can't go back to making just painting or use my cultural background, making animation or whatever. I feel guilty if I make something like that."

Layla Rudneva-Mackay's work at Artspace is a large photograph of a figure trapped face down under the mattress of a bed.

The title work is a video of Korean artist Kim Beom talking to a rock in a classroom. Beom seems to have made a career out of Joseph Beuys' How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. Maybe Anne Tolley could learn something.

Another Beuys work was a cycle of drawings he claimed was an extension, requested by the author, of James Joyce's Ulysses.

Walters Prize judge Vicente Todoli said Dan Arps' work was "a development of a concept first created by James Joyce in Ulysses, which is the epiphany of everyday life ..."

In the side room at Artspace, Arps has modified an insulated container.

A conversation with Dan Arps. "I've got a little cave going on."

Are you going to make it more cave like or will it be a room like that? "You know I'm kind of just making this up as I go along. Yep."

So you've got the space and ...? "I was kind of interested in the idea you have like, something that is one thing on one side and something quite different on the other side. So it's a facade and kind of illusionistic, kind of riffing on the way theme parks operate with almost full-scale representation of things, and everything is like a facade."

Have you spent much time in theme parks? "I've never been to a theme park. This is my way of going to a theme park. It's kind of the Against Nature way of working. I just make it for myself. There's probably going to be a few other things going on.

"The idea was that I have a mock Tudor face on the other side. I really like mock Tudor because it's like really hard modernism, like brutalism or something, and then it has this obviously thin facade layered over the top and what that does is connect it to a history so it's like a facade of being connected to a history."

So how will this relate to your Walters Prize entry?

"I kind of think of my work as being a separate thing from myself. The work comes from this other world so we say this thing comes from the same universe as the things in the Walters.

"The aesthetic will be similar. There's a kind of similar dirtiness, there's a similar approach to materials."

Or non approach? "Non-approach."

It's a bit more composed isn't it? "I wouldn't necessarily say that. I think the Walters Prize is very, very composed. I guess this has a much more directed narrative flow than the Walters Prize, maybe that's what you are getting at."

Exhibition:

What: The Rock That Was Taught It Was a Bird, by Dan Arps, Kim Beom, Layla Rudneva-Mackay & Koki Tanaka

Where and when: Artspace, Karangahape Rd, to November 20

Published October 23

Private agendas invade public space

2010-12-13T10:23:00.001+13:00

NZ Herald December 8

As you pen that memo or email or confidential report, just ask yourself: What if this turned up on Wikileaks?

That's the position thousands of United States diplomats, lowly embassy officials and State Department staffers, not to mention the CIA agents secreted amongst them, must now be asking as the internet-based media organisation sets about publishing 251,287 leaked US embassy cables dating from 1966 to the end of February.

It's going to take some time. A week in and only about 1000 are up so far: like old magazines in waiting rooms, many will include stories that have lost their currency.

They may be useful for historians wanting to get a head start on their projects, without having to wait for such documents to find their way into the archives and then be declassified.

Others may cast light on current conflicts and embarrass some actors.

One aspiring German politician has already had to quit after admitting he was the party up-and-comer who went to the American embassy to deliver a detailed briefing on what was happening in coalition negotiations.

Wikileaks says the trove "will give people around the world an unprecedented insight into US government foreign activities".

Spying on allies and the United Nations, turning a blind eye to corruption and human rights abuses in "client" states, lobbying for US corporations and well-connected individuals - it's not that we don't know that's what they are up to.

The hysterical reaction by the US political and media establishment to Wikileaks is revealing and has wider implications.

A staffer for Joe Lieberman, who chairs the Senate's homeland security committee, asked Amazon why it was hosting the material, and the firm cut off the feed immediately.

Wikileaks tweeted: "If Amazon are so uncomfortable with the First Amendment, they should get out of the business of selling books."

Buying hosting from Amazon may have been part of a deliberate strategy to test the resolve, or the rhetoric, of such organisations.

Students have been warned they may blight their prospects of a career in government if they links to Wikileak documents, even though study of such raw material might be good training for anyone with such aspirations.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has leak problems of his own, with prosecution files on the alleged rape cases against him in Sweden being released to the media.

Calls to, in some cases quite literally, "kill the messenger" have meant the substance of the leaks disappears.

The "Collateral Murder" footage of an American helicopter shooting up civilians and reporters on a Baghdad street belied the relentless Hollywood war porn and the language of "surgical strikes" and "surges".

The field reports from Iraq show American fingerprints all over the descent into a bloody ethnic civil war in 2004 and 2005, as tactics used in El Salvador were transferred over.

One of the great historians of our times, Chalmers Johnson, who died last month, said in Blowback that Americans are surprised when people attack them because they don't know what is being done in their name.

Wikileaks trades in raw documents, not editorial opinion. The internet allows a review process - if decisions were made on the basis of this raw material, were they the right decisions?

The Wikileaks saga has implications for anyone who wants to use the internet as a medium to publish, do business or conduct political debates.

That space for debate is now not a public forum but one owned by private companies, who may have their own agendas.

Internet service providers should be switches, not censors. But politicians see them as the throat to choke when they can't throttle critics.

The negotiations in Auckland this week for the Trans-Pacific Agreement on trade has also rung alarm bells on internet management.

The US has joined in the talks and New Zealand officials fear they are trying to import into the document some of the conditions on intellectual property and internet usage which have been kept out of ACTA, the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement negotiated in Wellington this year.

According to a paper leaked via US consumer advocacy group Public Citizen, the New Zealand negotiators warned of "a tendency towards overprotection of IP in all our societies, particularly in the areas of copyright and patents".

They say intellectual property rights that are too strong detract from innovation rather than promote it.

Rights holders, such as the big music companies, are seeking more intrusive international rules on copyright. Treaties such as the World Intellectual Property Organisation Copyright Treaty provide stricter digital enforcement measures that are based on traditional concepts of copyright protection.

These treaties "have limited ability to recognise the reality of emerging new business models and new ways of consuming creative works via the internet", the paper says.

Such leaks give us a useful window into how decisions are being made that affect us all. They may even be welcomed by some negotiators as a way to get open dialogue with affected groups, getting round the constraints of official diplomacy.

U2's costly tour envy of Irish Govt

2010-12-13T10:21:00.000+13:00

By the time U2 finishes its 360° world tour in Pittsburgh next July, it's expected it will have generated about $1 billion in revenue.

That makes U2 one of the only bankable businesses left in Ireland (even if it now does its banking in Holland for tax reasons), and allows it to invest in the spectacle that draws people out to the stadiums.

It was the spectacle, or rather the technology behind the spectacle, that drew me to Mt Smart last week.

Dell wanted to show me how its workstations get used to process the video which gives those back in the stands something to look at.

Going over the lip of the bowl and I'm struck by the Claw, the 50-metre high, four-legged steel rig which holds the speakers and cylindrical video screen over the circular stage.

In the twilight Jay-Z was haranguing the crowd, his sound punched out by the Clair sound system, which is billed as the largest speaker assemblage in touring history.

The tour is U2's first in a 12-year deal with the promoter Live Nation, so expect them back before 2020.

Jay-Z's hits done, a swarm of black-clad elves cover the stage quickly hustling away kit and dismantling platforms to reveal U2's waiting amps - despite the millions of dollars in digital kit hidden away underneath the stage, the core of the sound is going to be the wood and wires of The Edge's smorgasbord of classic guitars processed at the first instance through Vox amps.

The sun drops over the horizon, Bowie's Space Oddity comes over the PA, the lights come up, the band comes on, all cocky strut and big gesture, the crowd goes into its roar.

Bono immediately sets off on a tour of the ramps which are connected to the main stage by two moving bridges.

Wireless connections mean bands are no longer tethered to their amplifiers, and Bono makes the most of it to preserve the illusion of intimacy among such a big crowd.

Cameras run on rails along the edge, sucking in images to be projected high above on the LED screen.

On previous tours U2 cancelled shows because of weather damage to video screens.

The 500,000 LED pixels in the transforming screen are weather resistant, and they're made up into elongated hexagonal segments mounted in a way that allows them to spread apart with a scissor-like motion during parts of the concert.

As well as live footage from the 14 cameras, the crew back in the tower mix in footage from previous concerts, news images, colour effects, and, after the performance of One Tree Hill, a roll call of the 29 miners killed at Pike River.

The tour's architect, Mark Fisher, told CNET News that while in general the technology behind U2 360° isn't new, the way it's being used is, from the large number of computers and electric motors that control the motion of the screen and the moving lights to the computers that map the video picture on to the transforming screen.

"All of this automation and programming is possible because the computers available in 2009 (when the tour started) are more powerful and cheaper than they were when we created the Vertigo tour in 2005," Fisher said.

After the Vertigo tour U2 ended its relationship with Apple Computer, opening up opportunities for other vendors.

Dell's contribution includes off-the-shelf, rack-mounted Precision workstations that allow the crew to work with raw footage back in their hotel room, rather than be tied to the control room, as was the case with the earlier generation of custom-built systems.

While the high tech images are going off above, all around me people are using their phones to record stills or video grabs whenever Bono or The Edge or Adam Clayton or even Larry Mullen come out on to the ramps.

Such technology means the days of camera and recorder bans are well over.

Bono uses the ubiquity of cameras to provide light during the encore of Ultraviolet (Light My Way) - a step up from the cigarette lighter spectaculars of yore, but probably still making a contribution to the concert's massive carbon footprint.

In total, the tour is expected to generate as much carbon as flying a passenger plane to Mars - for which the band has bought offsets.

Open source feats to be proud of

2010-12-13T10:20:00.000+13:00

NZ Herald November 24

When Rob O'Callahan moved home to New Zealand five years ago, there was a feeling of pride in this country's small open source community at his achievements.

Like many of our top computer science students, O'Callahan had gone overseas to further his education.

Between finishing his doctorate and working in places like IBM's Watson research laboratory, he made significant contributions to the Mozilla project, which developed the Firefox browser out of the bloodied ruins of Netscape.

O'Callahan is the first winner of the University of Auckland Clinton Bedogni Prize for Open Systems, given as part of this year's New Zealand Open Source Awards.

O'Callahan got involved in open source while doing a PhD in software development research.

"I had no experience actually doing software development. I was feeling a bit of a fraud, so I got involved.

"I also believed in what Mozilla was doing, that there needed to be competition in the browser market," he said.

Mozilla grew out of the open sourcing of the Netscape code base after that company lost out to Microsoft's market power in what were known as the browser wars of the 1990s.

O'Callahan has played a major hand in developing Mozilla's Gecko layout engine.

"Most open source projects have a bug database, with lists of known bugs ... and there was a bug entry about text justification, where a Netscape developer said 'this is likely to be hard'.

"I said 'How hard can it be?' and a few months later I emerged with something that worked. It was hard, but I enjoyed doing it.

"I started taking over responsibility for bits and pieces, rewrote some nasty code and then became the authority for those areas."

He now works for Mozilla, managing the team that works on how web pages display items.

Mozilla's small Newmarket office also includes developers working on how video and audio works in the browser.

The job came soon after he moved back home.

"I was a contributor for five years and proved myself that way. It then becomes an easy decision to ring you and say 'We'll pay you to work full time on this'."

O'Callahan says it was humbling to win the Bedogni prize.

"It's sort of weird to have an award for an individual contribution to open source because it's such a community effort. I feel incredibly lucky to write software and get paid for it, and even to give it away," he said.

"Also, I think of all those people like me who spend a lot of time doing this as a hobby or on a voluntary basis.

"It means there is probably something else they are not doing. You are taking time away from family, from other people, so I also have to thank all those other people for bearing with us."

Wellington firm SilverStripe, which won the open source project category, also relies on the worldwide community formed around its content management system.

The firm developed the SilverStripe CMS to support the side of the business it gets its revenue from, which is developing websites.

It has since been downloaded more than 300,000 times.

Chief executive Brian Calhoun says it uses the BSD licence, which allows people to modify it for commercial use.

"We open ourselves up to the world, say 'Use it any way you want, you don't have to tell us, you don't have to pay us,' and that has an interesting effect.

"People have responded with feedback, with patches, with feature requests and new development, with showcase sites they have given back to the community," Calhoun said.

"Over time we are getting more developers who aren't SilverStripe employees contributing to the core product."

He estimates about 12 per cent of his firm's time is spent on open source work, such as adding new features or testing patches developed by the community.

Calhoun says open source is a pure meritocracy, which can lead to payment and careers.

"If you are a motivated developer and play with (SilverStripe), you get involved, you talk to our developers on email groups, if you make good suggestions, your ideas will get into the product."

He says winning the prize was humbling, especially since SilverStripe was up against statistical language R (whose instigator, Ross Ihaka from Auckland University, won the Catalyst Lifetime Achievement Award).

"It's testament to the strength of our community, the pride of our community," he said.

The People's Choice award went to Amie McCarron for the websites she built for Alcoholics Anonymous.

McCarron has built her Bluebubble Design business around the Joomla open source content management system to build and maintain her sites.

"Most of my clients are artists and non-profits, so cost is an issue. Using open source means I only need to charge for my time," McCarron said.

Risk in turning back regulatory clock

2010-12-13T10:19:00.000+13:00

NZ Herald November 10

Bill English's response to New Zealand's third placing in the World Bank's survey of the best countries to do business in was instructive.

While attributing the result in part to the quality of our regulatory frameworks, the finance minister suggested improvement could come from cutting red tape - ie, less regulation.

Regulatory reform is, of course, the portfolio of Rodney Hide, who has yet to meet a regulation he likes. Steven Joyce intends to go one step further, changing the Telecommunications Act to remove partners to his Ultra-Fast Broadband Initiative from Commerce Commission scrutiny for the first 10 years.

These guys are hard wired against regulation, which is why we still have an unhealthy dependence on a hard-wired copper network.

The previous National-led government's failure to regulate meant the owners of Telecom were able to extract monopoly rents from existing infrastructure, while moving aggressively to stomp on challengers.

This approach actually made it vulnerable to technological shifts, as it sacrificed future growth in the pursuit of sweating the last drop out of existing assets. It also allowed Vodafone, taking advantage of Telecom's wrong choice of technology, to dominate the mobile phone market.

The result of this cosy duopoly has been high prices for both fixed and mobile services, and a lower level of broadband speeds and use than could be expected from New Zealand's history of early adoption.

Asked by internet New Zealand to analyse the proposal, lawyer Michael Wrigley concluded that Joyce's proposals would breach New Zealand's international legal obligations under the General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) and be out of line with Apec's best practice guidelines, which both call for an independent regulator for all telecommunications services.

Joyce said his officials rejected the Wigley opinion, and that local fibre companies would in fact be regulated by way of contract, with Crown Fibre Holdings setting pricing through a competitive tender process.

Internet NZ chief executive Vikram Kumar agreed that there would be regulation, with the argument being which arm of government would do it: Crown Fibre Holdings or the Commerce Commission.

"Is it the independent arm or the investment arm? There are good public policy and legal reasons for it to be the telecommunications commissioner," Kumar says.

He says other countries have been able to attract investors without shielding them from ongoing price scrutiny, so it's strange for New Zealand to be so out of step.

Getting the price or services right is important because people need to see the value of switching.

"We really want [the Ultra-Fast Broadband Initiative] to succeed. We don't know what the Government's plan is for people to migrate from copper to fibre. It might be hidden in the procurement negotiations, but there is a big danger that in the hurry to get fibre out they will turn the regulatory clock backwards, and the gains of the past few years (since the passing of the Telecommunications Act 2006) will just wash away.

"The Government is creating unnecessary risk."

But there are people in Government who do get technology and want the rest of us to get it, too.

Digital New Zealand, part of the National Library, is one of a number of government and private sector groups behind the Great NZ Mix and Mash Competition, which aims to encourage the use of existing free digital content and data to tell New Zealand stories.

The contest's categories include remixing a poem from words and images, a poster design for the great Kiwi summer holiday and an open category.

Andy Neale from Digital NZ says the remix idea is in the spirit of the creative commons, where previous material could be used legitimately to create something new.

"The mash-up side is to encourage the development of new software applications that use public data, so that encourages Government to release data in ways people can reuse," Neale says.

He says the Obama Administration's data.gov initiative is creating interest worldwide in the sorts of data that governments collect and how it can be made accessible.

"The thinking goes it is not enough to release data; you have to encourage the use of it," says Neale, whose group was a finalist in this year's New Zealand Open Source Awards.

He says new devices such as tablets and smartphones are creating demand for applications which pull together data from multiple sources.

Entries close on November 30.

One of the judges, Nat Torkington, says the work done by the Digital Ninjas group over the past year has encouraged central and local government agencies to think about how they release their data.

Contestants can look at catalogue sites such as data.govt.nz for material to mash up.

Website usability team keeps you in mind

2010-12-13T10:17:00.000+13:00

A bad website can generate frustration or anger. It creates a prejudice against the organisation whose brand it carries.

A bad application will die in the marketplace. A bad chair can cripple you. A badly designed car can kill you.

Usability, that combination of design and build that determines whether an appliance, software application or website becomes part of our lives, has often been a neglected part of New Zealand design.

Optimum Usability makes a business out of improving the experience of users.

It's growing fast as New Zealand organisations wise up to the limitations of the No8 wire mentality - the Taranaki gate may be okay for a little-used paddock but it's not what you need outside the milking shed.

Chief executive Trent Mankelow says the field has only taken off in New Zealand in the past decade, and he estimates there are only about 50 or 60 usability experts here.

"We were the first decent-sized usability consultancy when we started in 2003. In Australia, Telstra established a usability team in 1991, so we were far behind," he says.

He believes that as people start looking seriously at usability, things such as websites have improved.

"The quality of web design has improved because of the success of simple sites like Google."

About 70 per cent of his company's work is structuring websites or designing internet applications. It also designs retail stores, interfaces for automatic teller machines, information kiosks, iPhones, in-car navigation systems and even paper forms.

"We're starting to do more of that ... You need to understand the context in which something is used, and try to make sure it's intuitive."

He says the trend to multi-channel and cross-channel service, whereby organisations interact with customers in person and over the phone, email, websites and texting, creates challenges to ensure people get a consistent experience.

"For a long time we were mainly doing user work, but we are moving more to design where we can give more value to customers."

The shift to people accessing the internet on mobile devices and smartphones means website and application designers have to think about usability for a range of platforms. User expectations play a big part. Increasingly, if people see an information screen in a public place they will approach it as if it were a touchscreen - and get a trifle annoyed if they find it needs a keyboard and mouse to access.

In business applications, older users may still look for keyboard shortcuts while younger ones reach for the mouse.

"We will find that more people expect to be able to do swiping and pinching type of gestures.

"Devices are also becoming context aware. They are packed with sensors to measure motion or pressure or location. There's a Nokia phone out which, if you're on a call, will reject another incoming call if you turn it upside down.

"The essence of usability is asking, 'Who are the users, what are their goals, and what is the context of use?' When you find a system that is unusable, the designer has probably not understood the answers to those questions.

"They might understand all the information that needs to be on an immigration form, but they might forget the context - that this might need to be filled in in a dimly lit airline cabin."

Optimum Usability has been thinking a lot about travelling in its work for Air New Zealand. As well as looking at check-in facilities, it also helped design the Skycouch, which allows economy-class passengers to lie flat during flights.

It also worked on Snapper, the electronic ticket system used in Wellington. "We helped them figure out how to improve the on-bus experience. There used to be this annoying message when you tagged on, reminding you to tag off when you left the bus."

The next person on the bus could not swipe their card until the message cleared, causing interruptions to passenger flow. "We ended up replacing the message with a beep when the signal had cleared, and people loved Snapper for it."

The company is also turning its attention to service design, trying to understand why customer service in New Zealand is so bad.

Many of the company's staff are recruited from Europe and the United States. "We find it hard to find qualified New Zealanders. Usability consultants have a range of qualifications - we have cartographers, graphic designers, sociologists, psychologists.

"We're looking for experience and a sense of curiosity and empathy, and the ability to question how people use things and to find how to make them work better."

Open source awards source of pride

2010-12-13T10:16:00.000+13:00

NZ Herald October 27

It's time for the annual New Zealand Open Source Awards, and the 31 finalists show an extraordinary range of innovation and collaboration.

Among the three nominations for best open source project are: SilverStripe, a New Zealand-made content management system that has been downloaded more than 325,000 times globally in less than four years; Kete, a digital library project, and R, a programming language and software environment that has become the lingua franca for statistical computing and graphics.

Ross Ihaka from the University of Auckland started developing R 20 years ago, but it took off about a decade ago as the internet picked up speed. He said the university wanted to commercialise it.

"We got as far as buying a book on business and we could have gone that way and there would have been half a dozen people in Auckland using the software. Now there are thousands," Ihaka says.

He says open sourcing it means some of the best brains on the planet help to maintain and develop it. "These guys are at a level where money is not a motivation."

R was developed when statisticians had far less computing power to work with, and Ihaka is now working on tools to handle the data rates of today and tomorrow.

"We are now getting exabytes of information. Numbers flow in like a river. You have to reduce it down to something you can handle with a computer."

Nominations in the open source use in business category include Ponoko, which describes itself as the hub of a global personal manufacturing eco-system that brings together creators, digital fabricators, materials suppliers and buyers.

Co-founder David Ten Have says apart from using open source software to build its applications, Ponoko uses the same principles to change the design business.

"We use creative commons licences so we encourage designers to use open source to get their names out there. Obscurity is a greater risk than foregoing licensing revenue."

He says it's expensive and difficult for new designers to get licences or patents, and there is next to no certainty they would be respected.

"For things like medical products or drugs they are totally appropriate, but not for young designers."

Ponoko makes money through manufacturing and materials. Designed as an international company, it has production nodes in Wellington, Oakland, Milan, Berlin and London making things such as electronics, jewelry, and even models for architects.

Ten Have says there are now about 30,000 users. "We are starting to see users getting high five-figure and six-figure revenue," he says.

With Ponoko, people can start businesses carrying only a few weeks of inventory and can get access to expensive equipment like laser cutters.

Another firm bringing open source to business is Adaxa, which has pulled together a complete suite of applications including enterprise resource planning, customer relations, document management, web-content management, business intelligence and telephony.

Founder Peter Milsom was working as a consultant, advising blue chip companies on systems and implementation, when he came across an open source accounting package called Compiere. "I went up to Boston in 2003 and did the training, and we became partners," he says.

Milson said he was struggling to find solutions that left enough room for new initiatives, once clients had finished paying for licences and installation.

"As the web started to emerge as a business environment, you also had disjunctive licensing schemes where you were paying per processor, so when you wanted to head out to the web it was hard to formulate an economic answer."

He says the Adaxa Suite aims to meet about 90 per cent of the common needs of 90 per cent of businesses. The other 10 per cent is where the company pays for its lunch, by providing professional services such as installing software and training users. Also, any extensions made to users' products get put back into the original project, so the suite grows in power and scope.

Development was done initially under Milsom's McBoss label, but he swapped it for part of Australian firm Adaxa to get the business going further, faster.

Resolve Digital, which has offices in Christchurch and San Francisco, is nominated for the contribution it is making to Refinery, a content-management system for developers who use Ruby on Rails to build their web applications.

Developer Philip Arndt says Resolve developed Refinery because it couldn't find a suitable CMS for the websites and applications it was building for clients, and open sourced it in May last year.

"Since then, about 60 or 70 programmers have contributed to the code, so it's a win win for us and our clients," says Arndt.

He says Refinery is user-focused: "Our clients can do quite sophisticated stuff to maintain their own websites without having to come back to us."

The winners will be announced on November 9. Vote on the People's Choice category at www.nzosa.org.nz/

Beat the Hackers

2010-12-13T10:14:00.001+13:00

Published NZ Herald October 20

You've been hacked. What do you do? Who do you call?

It's good to know before time, because you can waste a lot of time, and do a lot of damage to your systems and your organisation if you don't, according to Paul Craig, the lead forensic incident responder at Security-Assessment.com.

There are people out there who will hack into your system with criminal intent.

There are people who do it for fun, or so they can skite about it on sites like zone-h.com - which will point other people to your servers, your databases and your credit card numbers if you don't move fast to secure them.

Craig says most hacking now starts with web applications, because the firewalls that aim to stem other types of network intrusion are now almost ubiquitous.

Once a server has been hacked, people need to work out what the hacker has done in the system, whether they have taken anything or made queries on the database, whether they have left any back doors so they can come in later.

Craig says a common response to being hacked is the worst one.

"People say, 'We've reformatted the servers, reinstalled from back-ups, the crisis was averted.'

"What they've actually done is destroyed forensic evidence, and they have no way to find out what the hacker has done."

He says in one New Zealand government agency where Security-Assessment.com was called in, the security manager was unaware the website had been defaced.

The content manager was, but just restored from back-ups whenever it happened.

Craig says once he ran all the available data through his tools and in effect recreated what had happened by automatically sifting through gigabytes of logs to find out what, when and who, he discovered eight separate hackers had exploited a vulnerability in the DotNetNuke web content management system.

Hacker five had listed his exploit on zone-h.com, where hacking government sites earns extra points, and hackers six, seven and eight followed the link in.

He recommends organisations sort out their business processes and technical response before they get hacked.

If they identify a preferred forensic supplier, one with the trained staff, the equipment and the processes to do the job right, they can have emergency response numbers, pre-signed non-disclosure agreements and to-do lists in place if the worst happens.

Digital evidence degrades over time, so it's important to move fast.

Craig says if a server is hacked, leave it on and connected to the internet. That means the forensic examiner can look at logs and routing tables and get an accurate picture.

Action may need to be taken so the machine does not restart. That means disabling any automated shut-downs or patch routines.

If the incident responder can't get there for a few days, get a new one - and rip the power cord out of the wall.

"Don't do a shut down. When Windows shuts down, it clears a lot of volatile information," Craig says.

It's good if organisations know what their incident responder needs and have it ready. They will be paying big money for forensics, maybe $2000-plus a day, so why waste it by having the person wandering the building chasing up network topography maps and server logs.

Craig says he is still waiting for the job that leads to a successful prosecution.

If the hack came from New Zealand or Australia, that would be relatively simple, but most hacks come from places where local law enforcement doesn't seem inclined to chase down the culprits - such as when he identified a United States-based hacker who was even using his smartphone to grab credit card numbers.

And if the hacker comes from China, there may be a prosecution - but the sentence is to be drafted in to the army's cyberwar division.

Ultra fast lessons from Singapore

2010-10-18T10:57:00.002+13:00

From NZ Herald October 6, 2010

Ultrafast broadband is almost upon us. Or so we're told. Almost two years ago a change of government meant the Labour socialists' plan to stimulate the market to give us broadband was shelved.

Instead, the fiscally rigorous right would spend more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Oh yes, which would be matched by selected private sector partners. Typical New Zealand Alice Through the Looking Glass politics.

If that piece of political and economic theory has you scratching your head, it flummoxed the industry.

The only thing it could count on was no substantial decisions from a new government for at least 18 months, so any spending was risky. There was a subsidy, but there was no way to construct a business case without seeing what the strings were.

Things finally started to move last month, with the Minister for Communications and Information Technology, Steven Joyce, announcing negotiations on binding agreements would start with three regional fibre providers.

They are NorthPower in Whangarei, Alpine Energy in Timaru, and the Central North Island Fibre Consortium covering Tauranga, Hamilton, Cambridge, Te Awamutu, Tokoroa, New Plymouth, Hawera and Whanganui. Note they are all lines companies, not telecommunications companies. Which would indicate Vector is a shoe-in for Auckland, justifying its saturation TV advertising campaign. But you can't count Telecom out yet. Subsidy or not, it has fibre, copper and customers it wants to keep.

With the promise of a fibre in the air, it was timely of Huawei to hold a conference on ultra-fast broadband in Auckland. The Chinese state-owned telecommunications equipment firm, which is providing the gear for 2degrees, wants to sell to whoever is building the infrastructure.

Despite the short notice, Huawei pulled together impressive speakers, including two people involved in rolling out Singapore's Next Generation National Broadband Network. Khoong Hock Yun is assistant chief executive for the infrastructure and services development group of Singapore's Infocomm Development Agency.

That's a statutory board under the Ministry of Information, Communication and the Arts responsible for acting as the Government's chief information officer, setting the nation's information technology strategy, encouraging use of technology in innovative ways. It's the regulator, promoter and developer.

Eighty per cent of Singaporean homes use broadband, with the target 90 per cent by 2015, when the next generation network is completed.

The aim is for what the Singaporeans call an "infocomm-savvy", globally competitive workforce and industry.

The next generation includes both fibre optic and wireless networks, with an open access model allowing multiple wholesale and retail providers to emerge.

The immediate aim is for download speeds of up to 100 Mbps and uplink 50 Mbps, with the expectation the system can eventually handle 1 Gbps downlinks.

A Singapore internet Exchange was opened in June. Above the passive infrastructure layer, OpenNet, are active infrastructure companies selling wholesale bandwidth services.

The first of these is Nucleus Connect, which is a separate subsidiary of internet service provider StarHub.

Its chief executive, David Storrie, told the conference the aim is to have a fibre network accessible to 95 per cent of households and businesses by June 2012. By the end of this year it expects to have 60 per cent coverage. Its pricing plans start at 25 Mbps, but Storrie says it makes as much sense commercially to start at 50 Mbps.

Singaporeans are talking about more video, including for things like online video-conferencing, remote health services, greater uptake of cloud computing and software as a service, new ways to teach and learn, interactive TV with new advertising models, the usual Jetsons scenarios.

Incentives have been built into Nucleus Connect's contract with the Government to encourage it to push higher capacity downstream, so retailers are offering the full 100 Mbps, rather than breaking it down into slower speeds for customers. If such innovation does come out of Singapore, New Zealand users may take a while to catch up.

Crown Fibre Holdings is talking about 30 Mbps downlinks for entry level consumers and 100 Mbps for small to medium business, but the minimum commitment rate is only 2.5 Mbps. It wants to have something in place for priority users - education and healthcare providers, government and business - by 2015.

Given the Singaporean example, there could be a case this country needs to take a more New Zealand Inc approach. Singapore is spending not just on infrastructure but on providing customers, promoting broadband use.

It is also using its power as a customer. In New Zealand, governments seem unwilling or unable to aggregate government demand, which could be the first step in creating an network that makes economic sense.

Tech sector tipped to top dairy, despite dip

2010-10-18T10:55:00.001+13:00

From NZ Herald, September 15

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare passed the $500 million. Photo / Supplied
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare passed the $500 million. Photo / Supplied

A 15 per cent drop in Fisher & Paykel Appliances' revenue pushed the total export revenues for New Zealand's top 100 technology companies below the $5 billion mark for the past year.

But Technology Investment Network founder Greg Shanahan says the sector still has the potential to surpass dairy as the country's number one foreign exchange earner.

The sixth annual TIN100 report shows Fisher & Paykel Appliances remains our only billion-dollar company, despite its $208 million revenue haircut.

Computer services company Datacom enjoyed 10 per cent growth, maintaining its number two spot on the table at close to $700 million, and Fisher & Paykel Healthcare passed the $500 million mark to stay third.

Then comes a cluster of companies hovering at $200 million, including NDA Group, Tait Electronics and Temperzone.

In total the TIN100 companies had revenues of $6.7 billion, exports of $4.9 billion and employed 24,000 staff.

The next 100 tech-based companies had total revenues of $507 million and employed about 2900 staff.

Shanahan says the entry point for the TIN100 is now $12 million, up from $7.5 million last year. Building a world leading technology, becoming a market leader and taking it global is a long term process more suited to builders than speculators, he says.

That means most of the most successful New Zealand technology firms are private companies or ones that behave that way, who can take a long term view and reinvest profits.

On average TIN100 companies spend 6 per cent of revenue on research and development. The research and development (R&D) spend for companies in the next 100 is $1 for every $5 that comes in from sales.

Companies which have achieved leadership in their markets spend on average 9 per cent of revenue on R&D, having learned their top spot protects their margins and market momentum.

Market leaders include F&P Healthcare, health software company Orion, crystal oscillator Rakon, Weta Digital, Flotech subsidiary Greenlane Biogas - which has 30 per cent of the global market for plants which turn biogas into vehicle-quality fuel - fruit sorting specialist Compac, and Douglas Pharmaceuticals, which leads with both its acne drug Oratane and its expertise in hard-to-manufacture drugs.

TIN100

New Zealand's top 100 tech firms:
* $6.7b... Total 2010 revenues
* 24,000... Employees
* $4.9b... Value of exports, down 1 per cent

TOP TEN
* Fisher & Paykel Appliances... $1.16b revenue
* Datacom (computer services)... $667m
* Fisher & Paykel Healthcare... $503m
* NDA Group (stainless steel vessels)... $200m
* Tait Electronics... $200m (est.)
* Temperzone (air conditioners)... $163m
* Gallagher Group (electric fences)... $160m (est.)
* Douglas Pharmaceuticals... $145m
* Rakon... $144m
* Moffat (baking equipment)... $140m (est.)

Shaking and moving in IT world

2010-10-18T10:54:00.000+13:00

From NZ Herald, September 15, 2010

Seismic upheavals in a technological sense are part of the DNA of Christchurch's Jade Software, and the geological shake-around is now just part of the company's rich history.

"The backup power came on and we didn't miss a beat," says Jade's chief innovation officer, John Ascroft, about the earthquake.

That's important for many of the New Zealanders paid through Jade's payroll system, or whose business applications run on its data centres in Christchurch and Auckland.

Jade started almost 30 years ago when programmers Gil Simpson and Peter Hoskins wrote a language called LINC to simplify development of programs for a Burroughs mainframe computer.

It was so good Burroughs (now Unisys) started selling it to other customers, and the developers set up a development centre in Christchurch.

Fast forward to 1996, and Simpson recognised mainframe computers were on their way out. He developed Jade as a software development and deployment platform which would, he said, allow mainframe computing on the PC.

Simpson is gone as a director, but the company continues to innovate.

It has had big successes, but it almost went broke a few years ago and its history contains a wealth of lessons good and bad for other technology companies to learn from.

I sat down recently with Ascroft and managing director Craig Richardson, who joined the company less than a year ago, to find out what the future holds.

While Jade comes up with great technology, it's hard to sell pure technology out of New Zealand.

Over the years Jade has tried several ways to do it, usually involving developing an application to solve a particular customer's problem then trying to make a product out of it.

That carries the risk of having to devote more and more resources into understanding the needs of a particular industry or sector without having big enough customers willing to pay for the development.

That can be managed by spinning off separate applications companies, or entering partnerships, but it all takes effort.

Richardson says when he came into the business there were at least 12 verticals demanding resources. "The intent is to narrow that down."

There are three core strands.

The payroll business is strong on both sides of the Tasman. It's a steady earner without being showy.

Three years ago Jade bought a Wellington company, Methodware, which had a product for managing governance risk and compliance which had 2000 customers in North America and Europe. Jade has been rebuilding Methodware in .NET, adding features and building up services around it.

The third strand is the core Jade software, the object-oriented database and associated tools that give developers a different way of solving complex business problems than can be done on relational databases such as Oracle or SQL Server.

Richardson says he has tried to work out where Jade works best, or can find a natural fit.

He has come up with logistics, investigations and intelligence, financial services and a new generation development tool, JOOB, for the Microsoft .NET environment.

Jade's logistics packages manage marine terminals and rail systems.

It's now deploying software into ports in Iraq and Italy, and a package it developed to keep freight deliveries around Britain from clashing with passenger services is now being rolled out through Europe because of Deutsche Bahn AG's acquisition of English Welsh & Scottish Railway.

A case management tool called Investigator, built for the Australian federal police, is now used by police, customs, government agencies and companies in almost 30 countries. Last month it won Technology New Zealand funding so it could be developed further.

"The other part of the business is in high volume, low latency enterprise businesses that are under pain where we think we can a solve problems."

That's where JOOB comes in.

Ascroft says JOOB is out now in beta, and should be released towards the end of the year.

He says financial services and telecommunications companies are seen as logical fits for JOOB, with large databases and complex problems that need rapid solutions.

It means Jade can be selling its technology on an as-required basis.

He says JOOB sparked a lot of interest from developers when it was demonstrated at last week's Microsoft Tech Ed conference in Auckland.

Ascroft says JOOB should allow Jade to attack the global product space, offering a high-value tool set that can be useful to millions of Microsoft developers.

Tech companies ticking along nicely

2010-10-18T10:53:00.000+13:00

From NZ Herald September 22. 2010

Fisher & Paykel Appliances is New Zealand's number one technology company, with revenue of $1.16 billion. Photo / Richard Robinson
Fisher & Paykel Appliances is New Zealand's number one technology company, with revenue of $1.16 billion. Photo / Richard Robinson

If you can, be number one somewhere.

That's a bit of advice gleaned from this year's Technology Investment Network guide to New Zealand's top 100 technology companies.

The TIN100 report is becoming an annual highlight, as compiler Greg Shanahan drills down into what makes our tech companies tick, and asks how they can tick better.

This year he's expanded the list, so companies which fall below the threshold for inclusion (which this year is $12 million in revenue) go into the TIN100+ list.

Shanahan says it surprises some people New Zealand even has 100 technology companies, but he's digging out more each year, as he pushes the vision that brains rather than butter and dried milk are our future.

Total revenue for the TIN100 in 2010 was $6.7 billion, of which exports accounted for $4.9 billion.

Shanahan's former employer Fisher & Paykel Appliances ($1.16b) and F&P Healthcare ($503m) held the first and third spots, with IT services firm Datacom second with $667m.

Many of the larger companies are manufacturers rather than software or service providers, and the volatility of the New Zealand dollar has posed challenges.

A decade ago, with the dollar hovering around US40 cents, companies like the F&Ps and Navman were able to pick up traction with well-priced technology earning generous margins.

Those margins have shrunk. Exporters can only do so much to hedge their currency risk, and from there it's about cost control and looking for higher value.

That's where being number one helps. Being first to market, or clear best in market, means you can make rather than take the price.

Without the sort of marketing budgets many better-funded competitors have access to, that's likely to mean winning at the research and development stage.

Fisher & Paykel Healthcare is number one in the global market for respiratory humidification devices.

Success wasn't overnight. It was in the late 1960s that the company picked up work done by the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research on ways to warm and humidify the air used in hospital ventilators.

The business took off in the early 1990s, and the company has extended the technology into solutions for obstructive sleep apnea, which now make up half its sales.

F&P Healthcare's success has encouraged other firms in the sector, with nine in the TIN100 and 13 in the second 100 providing healthcare software or devices, making it more than a $1 billion sector.

On the software side, Orion Health has become the country's largest software vendor by becoming a global leader in clinical workflow software and online patient records.

Douglas Pharmaceuticals' earnings come largely from manufacturing generic drugs, but it has also built expertise in hard to manufacture drugs, including Oratane, which is now the market leader in Europe for acne treatment.

Another drug manufacturer, AFT Pharmaceuticals, enjoyed 20 per cent growth last year from its Maxigesic paracetamol and ibuprofen combo.

New Zealand's long involvement in marine navigation can be seen in today's companies, with Rakon the global leader in frequency control devices for GPS, with over 50 per cent market share.

The currency arbitrage that helped secure the opportunity to create three Lord of the Rings movies is gone, but the innovation generated along the way means Wellywood still beats Hollywood on some fronts.

This year the TIN100 separated Weta Digital from the rest of the companies associated with Sir Peter Jackson, with an estimated $100 million in revenue.

The key to becoming and staying number one is research and development. TIN100 companies invested about $360 million in R&D last year, or an average 5 per cent of revenue.

On the web: www.tinetwork.co.nz

Gen Y lead call centre changes

2010-10-18T10:52:00.000+13:00

From NZ Herald September 29, 2010
The ideal call centre worker is a Generation Y woman who can handle the phone, emails and up to 10 web chats at the same time.

"Those Gen Y skills in social media are proving assets in the workplace," says Dr Catriona Wallace from research firm Callcentres.net, who was in Auckland last week to deliver her annual benchmarking report on the New Zealand contact centre industry to a conference.

Call centres have become a ubiquitous part of modern life and commerce, accounting for more than 80 per cent of the contacts which organisations who have or use them will have with customers.

It's probably going to be the entry-level job for many young people, although only about one in five is likely to go on to another role in the same organisation.

Wallace says that's because it is a high-stress job with high staff turnover - 28 per cent here last year, 40 per cent across the Tasman - and few firms have processes to identify people who might have other talents and move them to other roles when they inevitably get jaded with dealing with 75 calls a day.

"A lot of companies can't hang on to staff."

Wallace picked call centres as the thesis for her doctorate in sociology 15 years ago because she was looking for a place to study organisational behaviour in a high-technology environment.

Call centres fitted the bill, with workers spending more than 80 per cent of their day using technology.

There are just less than 30,000 call centre seats in New Zealand, with a workforce of between 40,000 and 50,000. The average base salary for a full-time agent is $40,685, 4 per cent up on last year. Supervisors average $55,838, a 2 per cent increase, and managers $88,879, up 7 per cent.

Wallace says call centres are increasingly becoming multi-channel contact centres, using voice, email, social media and SMS messaging.

Some 48 per cent of call centres have fully or partly implemented multi-channel integration and another 31 per cent intend to do so over the next two years.

"That is transforming the job agents do. Employers will select more tech-savvy Gen Y staff and it will become a more interesting job."

Smart organisations are also looking at ways they can use social media to create online communities around their products or brands.

Wallace looks at performance measures such as the rate calls are abandoned (on average 5 per cent), the rate problems are resolved on the first call (77 per cent), the average speed of answer (21sec) and the average handling time (nearly 5min).

The average cost per inbound call last year was $8.08.

Wallace says organisations have seen call centres as part of their operational costs, which meant constant pressure for cost savings.

But one in five customer interactions last year included an opportunity to generate revenue and this is likely to increase.

Technology is driving the evolution of call centres and Wallace says New Zealand tends to be ahead of Australia in this respect.

More than half of contact centres have implemented knowledge or content-management systems and 31 per cent have e-learning in place.

A quarter can handle SMS messages. Only 7 per cent can currently do web chat or monitor social media but 12 per cent intend to invest in web chat over the next year.

About 14 per cent have put in speech-recognition tools and 2 per cent have ventured in to the world of biometric identity recognition and speech analytics.

Wallace says such cognitive load analytics can improve the way a centre works, such as by monitoring the tone of voice and word choice of the customer and automatically bringing in a supervisor on to the call if things get sticky.

Where New Zealand is behind Australia is in the percentage of call centre staff who work remotely - 20 compared with 12 per cent - but the potential is there to catch up once broadband is rolled out more widely.

The issue of offshoring is one which hangs over the industry but Wallace isn't concerned about the prospects of jobs going to India or the Philippines.

"There's a service shift," she says.

High-value work will probably stay local.

Voice inquiries are going to the Philippines and the technical/back office calls are going to India - with customer satisfaction surveys confirming that is the best place for them.

Alex Monteith knows the best kind of speed camera

2010-09-30T12:34:00.001+13:00

Alex Monteith likes her art loud. Loud enough to give viewers a sense of what it's like to be on a motorcycle swapping lanes through Auckland rush hour traffic, or surfing a break off Taranaki, or thundering over alpine terrain in an Iroquois helicopter.

"For me the most significant moment in the art is to do with accessing what is happening in those high-speed cultures and having a conversation, so if it's speed culture I am looking at, some element of speed needs to be carried through in the artwork," says Monteith.

Passing Manoeuvre with Two Motorcycles and 584 Vehicles for Two-Channel Video is Monteith's Walters Prize entry at the Auckland Art Gallery, and in conception and execution it stands in contrast to the un-composition of Daniel Arps' bricolage, Saskia Leek's artful paint-by-numbers and Fiona Connor's critique of gallery space.

For her survey show in New Plymouth, she has filled the Govett-Brewster Gallery with works, including Composition with RNZAF 3 Squadron Exercise Blackbird for three-channel video installation, filmed the day before the Walters Prize exhibition opened.

She describes her methods as "post-studio", involving performance, video, experimental film, photography, and just being.

"One of the tenets of post-object art is that somehow it does relate to the everyday," Monteith says. "I am thinking about what the role of art is in these spaces with what is happening out there in the culture and I've gone beyond wanting to have conversations about what is going on in the gallery because I'm impacted by those broader subjects in a much more intense way ... I want the viewer to have access to some of those ideas."

By culture she means the cultures of the groups she chooses to work with - surfers, motorcyclists, the military, protesters, often adrenaline junkies and always passionate about what they are doing.

Monteith goes in not necessarily knowing the outcome. She looks for actions which define the culture, or show how people engage in quite dangerous physical ways with larger environments.

"I would love to bring some of those activities closer to the gallery so viewers could experience them first hand, but it would mean sacrificing some of the unique experiences in the geography, so I try to find potent ways to document the practices of people who work in those spaces.

"With the Iroquois, I worked with Oliver Bint from 3 Squadron who was really open to exploring the possibilities we could come up with from Exercise Blackbird."

The Air Force uses the exercise at Dip Flat at the southern end of the Nelson Lakes to train its pilots for alpine rescues and help them build up flying time in those conditions.

She says filming at high altitude in drizzle, snow and below-zero temperatures was some of the hardest work she has done. "A lot of what we did was working out how to create powerful documentation of what they do in that environment," she says.

She won't say whether she was on one of the two motorcycles speeding through lines of crawling traffic from Greville Rd to the city offramp for the Walters Prize exhibition - road rules may have been broken, but it's understandable to a motorcyclist.

"You're half the size, there's a different striation in that use of urban space, and with motorbikers there's often something quite playful, but it does have that added dimension of risk, which is why it is quite interesting as a social practice."

Early in the decade Monteith returned to her birthplace in Northern Ireland and made an experimental documentary about the Troubles, called Chapter and Verse, which screened at film festivals in 2005.

In between interviewing the likes of Ian Paisley, she donned a wetsuit and took to the surf. "The project was stressful and I needed that emotional space," she says. "Ireland has really good surf, but it's very cold. You have to be committed to get out there through the winter."

Her commitment made her the Irish women's surf champion and eighth in the European rankings.

Going back and exploring the country she lived in until she was 10 gave her a way to explore this country.

"When I came back after ... working through documentary issues and issues of site and place, I started to look much more at the New Zealand context because I felt I hadn't really connected with an audience or community here.

"I started to look a lot more closely at New Zealand's political and cultural history and be much more interested in the representation issues affecting it and what potential art had in those spaces."

That led her to protest, from which emerged two of the works in the Govett-Brewster. The first from 2008 is 1020 meters in 26 minutes Waitangi Day Auckland Harbour Bridge Protest, documenting vehicles crossing the bridge at walking pace to protest Transit New Zealand's refusal to fly the Tino Rangatiratanga flag.

"My onboard cameras had just arrived, and I was participating in the protest, so I trialled them. That turned into an artwork."

The cameras and the flags were out again the next year for a performance, Parihaka to Cape Egmont Rd to Parihaka with two Tino Rangatiratanga Flags and two Land Rovers.

On that same trip Monteith did the Red Sessions performance, where surfers arriving at Taranaki surf breaks were asked to wear a red rash vest while in the water, with the results filmed for a multi-channel video panoramic installation.

"What unites political protest and the works that engage with territory and also the high speed ones is the passion involved in people's engagement with the physical environment or with these territories," she says.

"They are really involved with the geography and with their particular experience of these places, whether it is day after day practising on the racetrack or constantly surfing the same breaks just to get better and understand [how] the water moves."

She says one of her last conversations with her host at Parihaka, Te Miringa Hohaia, who died last month, was about his expectation that anyone who had a platform for a wider audience through surfing should use it to remind people of their responsibilities towards coastal ecology.

"What surfers notice is how fragile and how rare it is that certain combinations of geography and weather come together to produce the wave and it's unnerving when human activities start to interfere with those forms," she says.

Exhibition
What: Alex Monteith: Accelerated Geographies
Where and when: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, opens today, to December 5

Alan Miller: New Zealand Photographs

2010-09-30T12:32:00.001+13:00

I'll probably have a couple of days at Rotorua again soon. I got a lovely image there last year, a great image," says Auckland photographer Alan Miller, almost in passing.

Miller wrests his photos hard won out of the landscape, and Rotorua and Auckland's west coast beaches are places he has returned to a lot over years of training the eye, doing a lot of looking, seeing and waiting, rather than snapping off shots.

Miller went to Elam art school in 1977 after travelling overseas, but elected to stay on the fringes upon graduation, making a living elsewhere and having occasional shows.

"The gallery thing to me is closer to fashion, it's ideas driven, there's turnover happening. If people sell well they can get away with a couple of shows, but then they have to change. I take photos for myself."

Now he has self-published New Zealand Photographs, making some of those images more widely available.

"I just thought I'd bite the bullet and put this stuff together. I also thought I would like to join people who have done stuff, so you become part of what has been done here before you kark it," Miller says. "This book really came out of a show I had at the Sargeant Art Gallery in Whanganui in 2003.

I printed up a lot for that, about 40 images, but there is also some more recent stuff.

"A book is a kind of permanent exhibition. That's why you have to be reasonably happy with it, because you can't get rid of it."

The book includes a conversation between Miller and Kriselle Baker and a dense, poetic essay on photography by Martin Edmond, which seems to be more about raising questions than answers.

Talking about some of his Elam contemporaries who became professional artists, Miller comments on their ability to talk about art.

"I'm simple beside all those guys," he says in his slow drawl, but it's deceptive - he didn't get his degree in art history without putting in the work. "Photographers don't usually say a lot. That's why we take images. The ones who do talk said about a paragraph. [Josef] Koudelka won't say anything because he says, 'I might change my mind tomorrow'."

The Czech photographer is a major source of inspiration. "I like the way his photographs are taken. His landscapes have an interesting sense of survival. It's desperate stuff."

Miller describes himself as old fashioned "in the sense that I stay with the frame", rather than editing images in the darkroom or on a computer screen.

The work is composed in the camera, usually his well-worn Leica with a fixed lens, and shot on Kodak Tri-X black and white film.

He doesn't shoot a lot of film. "I think my photographs are more about a long look rather than being dramatic, the idea of absorbing. I'm thinking now about images I shot last year in Europe. I develop the film and then think about which ones might make it. I might make a little print and then have a look.

"Koudelka would print so many to postcard size and put them in his pocket, so when he'd go walkabout he would occasionally take them out to see which ones would hang about."

The ones that made the cut for the book include landscapes rich in texture; Mt Ngauruhoe with a tree silhouetted in the foreground, rain in sunlight bouncing off the roof of a shack at Paradise near Mt Aspiring, the heads of two women at the Ngaruawahia Regatta in 1988, their dark wavy tresses cascading down below taniko bands, wind-shaped trees standing over landscape, a white horse against a grey sky at Helensville, tyre tracks on Muriwai Beach, wind on waves and waves of sand and a fantail flying over sunlit sea.

The closest he comes to street photography is a woman pulling down a pine tree bough for sheep to graze on, the view that struck him when he opened the curtains at a motel in Omapere one morning in 1986.

"When I was living in Sydney in the early 1980s, I did a lot of street stuff. I probably got two or three images from that time and I took a lot of film, more than I do now, and I did a lot of walking.

"It's tough, dragging something from the street. I thought, 'What am I doing this for' and I came back and started getting in the landscape here and continued. That's 20-odd years ago and I feel better for it," Miller says. "I think what I am trying to do is take the eye further. I think the amount of emotion you get from an image, that's still probably the art."

New Zealand Photographs by Alan Miller (Anglesea House $70)

Poster boy for art road trips

2010-06-22T11:09:00.001+12:00

John Lyall reaches out with his left hand to shake, a light clasp. A series of strokes four years ago means some of the big installations he used to do are no longer as feasible to achieve, but for an artist whose work has always been concerned with process and ideas, there's still a lot of art he can make.

Lyall has had 37 shows since the strokes. He still does performances, including one in the window of a Queen St bookstore eight days after getting out of rehab, even before he could walk again.

"Obviously I'm not as fast as I used to be. That is a two-edged sword. It means sometimes I can't do what I would like to do, but sometimes it means I have to think about the stuff I do rather more.

"So it isn't always worse. It isn't always better, but it isn't always worse. There's this enforced restraint, and also the work becomes tinged with not quite sadness, but ..." Lyall trails off, looking at the works on the wall.

His new show is a performance, a process, a way to recapitulate a life in art, and a road trip.

It records Lyall and partner Claudia Bell's tour of the South and Stewart Islands last December, making stops at specific sites where Lyall would be videoed tacking up a poster, noting the date and place with his new left-handed writing, then walking away.

Some of the places were familiar from the pair's 1995 book on local claims to fame, Putting Our Town on the Map. Others were new tothem.

The one-off posters were recovered for the show, sometimes battered and stained by wind and rain. A unique larger version of each PDF file, printed on good-quality watercolour paper, is what is offered for sale.

The images are collaged from work Lyall has done around the world, manipulated in Photoshop and Illustrator.

"I was collapsing the world into the South Island and then collapsing the South Island into the Jane Sanders Gallery," Lyall says.

A photo of a moa in a bakery in Korea was taken to Moa Flat in Otago for installation. Beach litter from Busan; an equation drawn in mussel shell pearls on a bed in a Korean love hotel; a mathematical equation walked into the snow at Sarajevo; Lyall in the Queen St window - all these fragments turn up in announcements of apocryphal shows.

A Southland beach became briefly festooned with a scan of a Meccano motorcycle in honour of Burt Munro.

In Cass, Lyall was videoed putting a poster on the railway station featured in the Rita Angus painting. His installation also includes a Des Helmore painting of Cass which does not include the shed. It adds more layers of reference to the palimpsest of New Zealand art.

Lyall says the road trip continues the ethic that he has pursued since his early art-making with Sydney School of Architecture colleagues in a collective calling itself the Bhutanese School of Environmental Sculpture.

"In all my work I tend to take nothing but photographs, leave nothing but footprints," he says, paraphrasing a line from the historic Chief Seattle letter which has been adopted as a green creed.

The prosaic act of tacking a piece of paper to a shed wall can become an elegant rhetorical question through process, intent, image and text.

The coarseness generated by the poster production process was deliberate. "I don't want them to be beautiful because that would upstage the project, because the image would become too important," Lyall says.

"Art's ugly. Art's ephemeral. It always has been, or it has since Marcel Duchamp. Work like this is imbued with the realities of process art ... these works become your way into that process, but have their own artefactual nature, which is as residue."

Lyall says the mainland is a great canvas for a conceptual artist.

"These places in the South Island, which, particularly for North Islanders who don't go to the South Island, they are mythical, they are more spoken about than visited, places like Jackson's Bay, Doubtful Sound, Stewart Island. The point is I went there - this is a road trip."

EXHIBITION

What: Poster Boy by John Lyall.
Where and when: Jane Sanders Art Agent, cnr Shortland-Queen Sts (open Wed-Sat), to July 10

Up to speed and on the move

2010-06-22T11:06:00.001+12:00

With the iPad still a month away from New Zealand release, it may be a time to consider where some of this technology is taking us.

Fortunately, Morgan Stanley managing director Mary Meeker has been doing some of the thinking for us and made a presentation on internet trends at the CM digital marketing summit in New York, which has sparked considerable interest.

The immediate message was that early-stage growth of the mobile internet was unprecedented. It's ramping up faster than desktop internet did, with Apple leading the charge with its iPhone and iTouch devices.

Meeker, who was one of the early Wall Street analysts to cover companies such as Apple, Microsoft, Nescape, eBay and Google, believed smartphone sales would outstrip PC shipments within two years.

Within a year, more smartphones will be sold in North America than feature phones, as the industry calls non-smartphones.

The mobile internet also involves iPads and Kindles, tablets, car electronics, home entertainment, gamers and wireless home appliances.

Every device is looking for a connection, and increasingly it's able to find one.
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Meeker says this year the number of 3G users passed 20 per cent, which meant technologies such as WCDMA, LTE and WiMax are now considered mainstream. The number of mobile-application users and mobile-browser users both doubled over the past year, with searching the most common activity on mobile browsers, followed closely by social networking and checking the news.

Some 20 per cent of users have looked up sports or movie information on their phones, and only slightly fewer have done banking on their smartphone.

On average, iPhone owners have downloaded 47 of the 200,000 applications available.

Phones with the Android operating system now have on average 22 downloaded apps, and in the few weeks they have had them iPad users have installed a dozen of the 3000 applications available.

Shipments of Android units are growing fast, with Google reporting that 100,000 such units were activated or shipped each day in May.

It took Apple 28 days to sell one million iPads, compared with the 74 days it took to sell that many iPhones and the 180 days it took netbooks to crack seven figures.

The change can be seen in the change in Apple's revenue sources over the past three years.

This time in 2007, the company was getting 47 per cent of revenue from traditional Mac sales, 29 per cent from iPods and 11 per cent from the iTunes music store.

Now the Mac accounts for just 28 per cent of the dollars flowing into Steve Jobs' pockets, the iPod 14 per cent, and the iPhone is now the biggest earner at 40 per cent, or US$5.4 billion in the first quarter of this year - equal to the total revenue for a quarter back in 2007.

Its operating margin now sits at 30 per cent, compared with 19 per cent, a sign it is getting a premium for innovation.

That premium is driving not only the incumbents - such as Apple, Google and Amazon - to innovate furiously, but there is also innovation coming from new attackers such as Facebook, Skype, Twitter and Zynga, the company behind Texas Hold'em Poker and Mafia Wars.

Meeker believes one result could be that online advertising may finally be entering the long-predicted golden age. The internet accounts for 28 per cent of time used consuming media, compared with 31 per cent for television, but only 13 per cent of total advertising budget is spent online.

Meeker says that represents a US$50 billion ($72 billion) global opportunity.

She says Japan is pointing the way, with mobile advertising revenue growing 11-fold in the past six years.

Social networking now outstrips email use, with more than 200 billion global minutes a month spent on social networking sites compared with 100 billion reading or writing emails.

Meeker predicts people will expect, and get, real-time connectivity any time in the palm of their hands.

Wi-Fi will be nearly ubiquitous in many developed markets, with new pricing models encouraging take-up.

We still prefer to view internet pages on desktop machines or tablets, but user expectations are changing.

Wireless consumers expect super-fast boot time, fast access to information and day-long plus battery life.

Peter McCaulay from research firm IDC New Zealand says this country has all the building blocks in place for similar growth in mobile internet, including the backhaul capacity needed to underpin wireless.

What may be needed, though, is more competition from new entrants to break the telecommunications companies out of the old-style ways of thinking that has so blighted the mobile phone and ISP markets.

"Everyone is prepared to pay to be connected, but the concept of payment based on volume of data is nonsense," McCaulay says.

The key is that connectivity will become ubiquitous, so the only thing that matters is the size of the screen.

Kiwi marketers call blind shots

2010-06-22T11:04:00.000+12:00

An army of lone New Zealanders roam the world, going door to door selling Kiwi technology, mainly to Australians and Americans.

That's the picture that emerges from a new study of how New Zealand technology companies do sales and marketing.

Owen Scott from Christchurch-based tech marketing consultancy Concentrate, which did the Market Measures study with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, says it's a clumsy and expensive way to do the job.

He says the more successful companies are those that try to "move the herd" by researching target markets, building brand awareness and demand generation, and working with resellers and other partners in their target market.

Some 144 companies were surveyed, including exporters of electronics, software, telecommunications and associated services.

Despite the recession, the firms were performing well. Turnover growth at 39 per cent was down on the 58 per cent recorded a year earlier, but it was still positive. Software and service companies were relatively unaffected, but electronics companies averaged an 82 per cent drop in turnover growth.

But alarm bells rang because while New Zealand companies typically position their technology as superior in quality to the competition, they only get market or below-market prices.

"Clearly something is just not right," Scott says. The typical approach is to load a salesperson up with collateral and send them to the other side of the world to sell direct to customers.

This door-to-door approach results in a high cost of sales, which stays relatively constant despite growth and depends very much on the quality of the sales people. Growth is restricted by the size of the sales team, and it's hard to achieve any scale.

Scott says the more successful companies are those that invest heavily in advertising, promotion and social media so prospects become aware of the product before a salesperson arrives.

"If there are 500 companies in the market, you can only visit 20, but with a more strategic approach you can move the target market en masse through the sales cycle."

He cites Christchurch firm SLI Systems, which makes tools for searching and navigating websites, online stores and search engines.

"It has a whole programme of blogs, newsletters, e-books and other media, which is touching people all over the US regardless of where they are in the sales cycle," Scott says.

He says Kiwi tech companies continue to have an "aggressive but misdirected" approach to marketing.

They spend 40 per cent of their turnover in sales and marketing, with a lot of that going into attending trade shows, websites and developing collateral like brochures. They see less transaction-oriented activities such as sponsorship, social media and advertising as less effective.

"High-growth companies tended to be those who were using social media and advertising ... many companies were not measuring brand awareness." When asked to rank their sales and marketing activity, companies believed they were good at developing value propositions, gaining leads and closing sales.

They knew they stank at researching and understanding markets, analysing competitors and promotional activity.

More than two thirds of companies have a marketing staff of one or none. It looks like luck and a sunny disposition is the strategy.

The survey threw up regional variations. Auckland is the home to entrepreneurs selling business to business products typically priced between $1000 and $100,000, with an average lead time of four months.

Wellington, which is home to software-as-a-service firms such as Xero, has more firms selling to consumers and government, with many companies selling products in the $1000 to $10,000 range.

The big deals are down in Christchurch, with typical sales in the $10,000 to $100,000 range and the average lead time out to eight months. Christchurch is the only centre that reported $1 million-plus deals.

Scott says that given the official focus on fostering innovation, New Zealand firms don't have a great record of finding people to sell their inventions to at a profit.

"That New Zealand hasn't yet built a lot of large-scale technology-based businesses, with a few outstanding exceptions, is evidence of this commercial weakness," Scott says.

Concentrate and PricewaterhouseCoopers are running seminars on the survey results' implications for technology companies. Seminars are in Wellington on June 22, Christchurch no June 23 and Auckland on July 5.

www.concentrate.co.nz

Broadband panic sets in

2010-06-22T11:03:00.000+12:00

There are signs of panic in the broadband arena.

It's now more than halfway through the term of this Government and the model brought in by Communications Minister Steven Joyce to roll out fibre to businesses, schools, hospitals and 75 per cent of New Zealanders over the next 10 years still hasn't delivered.

These things take time, especially when so much money is involved - not only the $1.5 billion the Government says it will pony up, but the matching investment from the private sector.

That's why it's important to get things right, especially since one of the reasons for the current lack of suitable broadband is regulatory failure, which has made investing in the New Zealand telecommunications sector so fraught.

Crown Fibre Holdings now has $400 million in the kitty to start signing contracts with private sector companies.

That should allow the new network to start rolling out on schedule, says Minister Joyce.

CFH intends to pick its preferred partners next month, and there is a lot of jostling for all that cash.

Power lines companies, especially Auckland's Vector, have been positioning themselves as the ideal network builders - power lines, fibre optic lines, what's the difference?

Canadian company Axia Net Media, whose presence in the race had many observers perplexed, has this month revealed itself as the front for Vodafone's bid for direct involvement.

And now Telecom New Zealand is offering to twist itself into whatever shape is necessary for its Chorus network division to grab a chunk of the cash.

This week's announcement that it was making a "thorough assessment of structural separation" was accompanied by speculation the real game was a sale back to the Government - 20 years and $20 billion in extracted dividends after privatisation. So long suckers, thanks for the cash.

There are people in the industry who think New Zealand has been waiting long enough for broadband, it won't hurt to wait a bit longer and make sure all the elements are understood and accounted for - or regulated for.

But the Key Government promised ultra-fast broadband, so it will want something to show in time for the next election.

That means its Crown investment company picking winners and losers, rather than letting the market do its work. Oh well, who ever expected ideological consistency from politicians?

Last week, internet New Zealand convened a summit under Chatham House rules under which industry and officials discussed some of the issues, particularly whether the layering rules made sense.

Should the regional fibre companies be restricted to providing layer one or dark fibre, as under current rules, or should they also be allowed to sell lit fibre two retailers, known as layer two services?

The lines companies want to diversify into a business where they can get higher margins than their current regulated space, Telecom wants part of whatever it is that will eventually replace its copper network, and Vodafone also wants a chunk of what is the major threat to its business.

Don't forget that Vodafone bought Ihug's internet business, and its massively profitable New Zealand operation gives it a huge war chest for subscriber acquisition.

Also understand that fibre everywhere will lead to an explosion in wifi, and smartphones will increasingly move off the mobile phone networks and onto the internet.

The other major player is Sky Television. Ultrafast broadband will replace the set-top box, but the pay TV model will remain. Network providers may struggle to earn back their investment, but content providers will rake it in.

The dominant position Sky has built up here (in large part because of poor regulation) means Rupert Murdoch will probably be the largest user and the largest earner from New Zealand's ultrafast broadband.

That makes the Government's decision to scrap the digital broadcasting review started by Labour look shortsighted.

Content is what will eventually sell fibre into every home and business.

So far there has been little appetite even where it is available, whether because of price, lack of compelling applications or just disinterest.

So will the Government buy back Telecom? I'm picking no.

It doesn't need to, because Telecom, with its existing capacity, probably needs to be part of the ultra-fast broadband network as much as Crown Fibre Holdings needs Chorus' existing network and army of trucks and technicians. Both sides will compromise.

It will also send a terrible political signal for the next wave of privatisations Joyce, John Key and Bill English have planned. Or a great one for investors.

Meanwhile, we're still waiting for that fibre to come snaking up the front path.

Green computing adds up

2010-06-22T11:00:00.001+12:00

On current trends, in just over 10 years from now the amount of power spent running and connecting to the world's communications networks will equal the total 2010 global energy supply.

That's if current technology is used.

Fortunately, as Rod Tucker, emeritus professor of engineering at Melbourne University, pointed out in a seminar on green computing in Auckland earlier this month, it can be largely offset by steady improvements in the power consumption of computers, servers, routers and all the other bits of silicon and metal that move bits around.

Replacing equipment when the depreciation schedule demands it, rather than sweating extra months or years out of that server or PC, is better for the planet.

Green computing isn't high on the priority list for most New Zealand firms surveyed by technology research firm IDC, but saving cost is - and that could make them look green sooner rather than later.

Vernon Turner, IDC's Boston-based senior vice-president for research on sustainability, says the information and communications technology sector can play a significant role in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

He says that will mean talking to policymakers - but since many governments around the world seem to be avoiding leadership on the issue, industry may have to step up.

Challenges to green IT include the fact business and operational requirements will take priority over environmental concerns, and it can be hard to find benchmarking data to show any progress - just look at the resistance to accepting data that shows that climate change even exists.

There is not enough renewable energy currently available to drive all of the initiatives people may want to do, and there aren't that many people around who can give good advice on what to do.

Turner says it's rare for organisations to have dedicated staff responsible for sustainability, but it is possible to argue such staff could pay for themselves in future savings.

There is a tendency in New Zealand to feel our total carbon production is too low to mean savings will make any significant difference to climate change, but Turner says there's no room for smugness, especially if our trading partners start demanding action.

New Zealand's record on carbon emissions doesn't look so flash either. While it only amounts to 9 tonnes per person, when you compound annual growth between 1990, the benchmark for the Kyoto Accord, and 2006, the last year with figures useful for comparison, the growth rate stood at 72 per cent.

That probably reflects population growth through migration and the dairy boom.

In contrast, Australia's compound growth rate was 51 per cent - its reliance on coal-fired power stations meant twice the volume of carbon was produced per person.

The United States also produces about 17 tonnes of carbon per person, but its compound growth rate was a mere 17 per cent.

The current IT infrastructure contains a massive carbon footprint, but shifting to something greener can't be done overnight.

It will require energy-efficient devices with lower power consumption and high performance, as well as energy-efficient networks.

Turner says waste management, recycling and re-manufacturing of infrastructure need to be measurable and accountable - it's not good enough just to ship scrap off to China or India.

IT can contribute to savings through smarter energy generation and distribution, smarter buildings and reduction in transportation.

Smart grids and smart meters can lower power use and allow the orderly integration of renewable sources such as wind and solar power into the grid.

Energy management systems, smarter building design and more teleworking can reduce the drain of our workplaces on the environment.

IT can also cut energy use in industry through things such as intelligent motor controllers and automation of industrial processes.

Turner says it's not pie-in-the-sky stuff. There are technologies with the potential to reduce emissions in energy, transport, buildings and industry that are mature enough now that given reasonable investment, they could be implemented in three years.

Broadband is especially important, as it has the potential to decentralise business and make physical daily travel much less necessary.

Turner says further investment in telecommunications and network services will enhance New Zealand's ability to improve to move up the sustainability index.

He estimated New Zealand could save more than 10 million tonnes of carbon by 2020 through IT, including 24 per cent from power savings, 22 per cent from smarter buildings, 10 per cent from industry and 44 per cent in the transport sector.

Turner says an area in which IT will make a big impact is the shift to cloud computing and the efficiencies that can be driven through virtualisation and consolidation.

Every watt saved in the data centre means four less watts that need to be generated at the power station, because of reductions in cooling, lighting, networks and other infrastucture.

Every server removed from the data centre through virtualisation saves 10 tonnes of carbon emissions through its lifecycle.

Data has an energy cost. It may be far more energy efficient to send data by airmail than over the internet, but the difference between flying someone from Australia to New Zealand for a business meeting has 200 times the greenhouse impact as conducting the meeting by videoconference.
www.greentouch.org

The end of the enlightenment

2010-06-22T10:53:00.001+12:00

Louise Bourgeois died this week at the age of 98. If you want to see why the work produced by this tiny Frenchwoman living in New York became increasingly relevant as the century rolled over, you can go to Sydney, where her psychosexually charged sculptures and gouaches steam away in the 17th Biennale.

Or go to the Jensen Gallery in Newmarket, where one small etching shows the emotional power she could pack into a line.

Don't go to the Auckland City Art Gallery, though - it's off somewhere in a hot-air balloon.

The congruence of the Sydney Biennale and the Auckland Triennial, as will happen every six years, raises questions about why institutions do such shows and whether Auckland needs one, or needs one in the current format.

Chris Saines, director of the Auckland Art Gallery, says the triennial was started 12 years ago because the gallery thought it needed to put a recurrent show of international and New Zealand contemporary art in its calendar.

It has had a different curator each time, alternating between staff and outsiders. This time it's the gallery's contemporary curator, Natasha Conland, who ostensibly has put together a show exploring "the ongoing possibilities for adventure and risk in art".

Saines believes it is the best triennial yet. He says visitor numbers are up, and their comments are very positive. "This is a triennial in which a curatorial premise which is metaphorical and poetic is translated into a meaningful collection of work."

I'm wondering if he's describing a different show from the one which leaves everyone I talk to distinctly underwhelmed. Not that many people know it's on. Apart from an extremely ugly poster pasted around the city, Auckland seems to be putting no effort into telling people it's on. There's no buzz, no snap.

In the line-up of people you have never heard of and will never hear of again, there are no Maori or Pacific artists (apart from an opening-night performance by the ever-risky Shigeyuki Kihara), so the evolution of those unique streams in New Zealand contemporary art will go officially unremarked for six years.

The budget is a fraction of what Sydney has to spend - Saines believes the bill for the 4th Triennial will come in at about $700,000.

But Conland's contrived rubric can't hide the fact that there's no spectacle, nothing much to look at, no "wow" factor.

In Sydney, Cai Guo-Qiang suspends nine cars from the ceiling in what looks like the animated sequence of an explosion.

In Auckland, Robert Hood lays all the shredded components of a Toyota in a neat array, art too lazy to get off the floor.

There are reasons for bringing in outside curators for such contemporary shows - contacts, vision, mana.

Sydney hired David Elliott, who had a two-decade career as director of the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford, England, before setting off on an international career which has included heading the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Tokyo's Mori Art Museum and Istanbul Modern.

His curated exhibitions have included big themes like the relationship of art with totalitarian regimes, and art and culture in post-communist Europe.

Before the Sydney Biennale opened, I had the opportunity to ask Elliott how a biennale is different from any other big exhibition of contemporary art.

"Biennales take place every two years so they really have to be current, they need to look at what's happening now," he says. "Now, because I happen to think, and I'm not alone in this, that we are going through a period, a very long period, of being at the end of the European Enlightenment and facing a very different kind of world in which power and knowledge are dispersed in different ways, so the theme of the biennale is about that and also about how it is now.

"These are not amazingly new things but they are becoming increasingly critical as the previous political and geopolitical structures break down."

The twin threats of nuclear Armageddon and climate change cast a shadow over the times.

Works like the 360-degree video panorama The Feast of Trimalchio by Russian collective AES+F, or Isaac Julien's nine-screen film Ten Thousand Waves, tackle such global issues, or issues of globalisation, in a spectacular way.

Elliott says there should be an element of spectacle in a biennale, as well as smaller moments, like the three beautiful paintings by Iranian Shirazeh Houshiary in an alcove at the MCA.

"No doubt a lot of people will go past those quite quickly. They're abstract. That's okay. They might go back and have another look. Other people will get it. You've got to balance these things in a big show like this to make Towards the end of the Enlightenment

WORTH IT: David Elliott says the expense of the Sydney Biennale is part of being a world-class city.PICTURE / WILKsome sense. Sydney is a big brash city and it really needs something to slap it across the face so it will take some notice." That's the logic for putting the huge welded stainless steel Neuron by American Roxy Paine out front of the MCA where it can be seen from ferries coming into Circular Quay.

"If you want the big audience, the big audience actually has to know it is going on. Because they are not going to read what you write or what I write," Elliott says. "What they will do is look at the telly and maybe prick up and say, 'What's that?'

The biennale is free, including the ferry to Cockatoo Island - set aside a day just for that alone. Auckland charges $7 - and you should be out of there in time to beat the parking warden.

In illustrating his theme, The Beauty of Distance: Songs of survival in a precarious age, Elliott felt compelled to include work by Australian Aboriginal and other indigenous artists.

"All that work is there on grounds of quality. It's not the same quality but it's good art. It's complex, it's sophisticated, it's well done, it's total."

Being so close, biennale curators will grab New Zealand artists. Elliott was familiar with Colin McCahon's work (and includes a stunning painting in his side-exhibition drawn from the works in the MCA collection), but took a couple of weeks across the Tasman to scout out the territory.

He seems pleased with the piece Brett Graham made for the show, a Russian scout car covered in whakairo in the way Maori used to carve the stocks of their muskets.

"It's that ambivalence about his work and this sort of reflection on minorities and terrorism, the way these people are looked at from outside and the particular history that Maori have against the British that I find very interesting," Elliott says.

He was also looking forward to meeting photographer Yvonne Todd.

"She's very good. This kind of New Zealand gothic fascinates me. It's the most gothic place I've ever been, really Twin Peaks, the whole country. They all look normal, but what they are doing behind locked doors, God."

Elliott steered clear of the history lessons which have become part of other contemporary art shows, apart from including the late American maverick Harry Smith.

"He's a kind of patron saint or regimental goat. He's there for metaphorical reasons," Elliott says. "People ask, 'When did contemporary art become a level playing field?' He's one of the people who were thinking about, writing about, making work about the idea of a modern vernacular, of being within modernity but also aware of the vernacular from the 1940s, so that is really why - someone who could make avant garde movies, be aware of eastern religion, of shamanism, drugs everything, and folk music, he was one of the people who changed the culture."

Elliott talks of turning ideas on their head, of the end of colonial distance through mass travel and communications. "We're all a long way from somewhere or close to somewhere.

"The other thing is looking at the Enlightenment. There's the light side of the Enlightenment but there's the dark side of the Enlightenment and for every encyclopaedia you have a prison or a panopticon, both based on the ridiculous premise that one culture, one person, can know, see, possess everything, control everything.

"The other thing is the museum, the encyclopaedia, and looking back to the cabinet of curiosities, which I'm not seriously suggesting as a model, but things which come in for delight and wonder and interest and horror, just to have a more open view. You can't know everything but just enjoy it on its own terms and what you don't like, don't bother with.

"There's no shortage of good stuff. That's not an issue. This is a kind of story or series of stories put together in different places and the work is both reacting to the actual site it is in and the theme of the exhibition and first and foremost it is itself, and all these different elements come together."

Elliott concedes the biennale costs a lot to stage, but it's part of the cost of being a world-class city.

He says Australia "needs to get the message that Sydney is its biennale". Perhaps New Zealand, less flying time away than Adelaide or Perth, should start thinking the same way.

The Sydney Biennale continues until August 1; the Auckland Triennial ends on June 20.

The Challenge of the Flesh

2010-06-22T10:50:00.001+12:00

Among the representations of nakedness in Andrew Jensen's Newmarket galley is a large, smooth panel painted in tempera to a fleshy alabaster sheen. The work by American minimalist Winston Roeth is more the sort of severe abstraction that Jensen's gallery is associated with than the bodies adorning the other walls. "I'm a sensualist," says Jensen, explaining his liking of Roeth and some of his reasons for curating an international show on such an unfashionable theme.

In an essay on Philip Pearlstein's nudes, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted there was "something of minimalism's dedication to just plain facts in Pearlstein's approach, a commitment to an underlying abstract geometry that gave a contemporary edge to the work."

Jensen hasn't got Pearlstein, but he has got another heavyweight, American figurative painter and sculptor Eric Fischl. He says seeing Fischl's Tumbling Woman at last year's Basel art fair in Miami galvanised his thoughts about doing a show of nudes.

The work was Fischl's monument for the victims of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It was first shown at the Rockefeller Centre on the first anniversary of 9/11, but was removed after a week because of the strong reactions it engendered.

New exhibition shows art doesn't have to be modern to be radical
Loss: American artist Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman is a monument for the victims of 9/11 in New York. Photo / Michael Benedikt
Loss: American artist Eric Fischl's Tumbling Woman is a monument for the victims of 9/11 in New York. Photo / Michael Benedikt

Among the representations of nakedness in Andrew Jensen's Newmarket galley is a large, smooth panel painted in tempera to a fleshy alabaster sheen. The work by American minimalist Winston Roeth is more the sort of severe abstraction that Jensen's gallery is associated with than the bodies adorning the other walls. "I'm a sensualist," says Jensen, explaining his liking of Roeth and some of his reasons for curating an international show on such an unfashionable theme.

In an essay on Philip Pearlstein's nudes, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman noted there was "something of minimalism's dedication to just plain facts in Pearlstein's approach, a commitment to an underlying abstract geometry that gave a contemporary edge to the work."

Jensen hasn't got Pearlstein, but he has got another heavyweight, American figurative painter and sculptor Eric Fischl. He says seeing Fischl's Tumbling Woman at last year's Basel art fair in Miami galvanised his thoughts about doing a show of nudes.

The work was Fischl's monument for the victims of the destruction of the World Trade Centre. It was first shown at the Rockefeller Centre on the first anniversary of 9/11, but was removed after a week because of the strong reactions it engendered.

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"Because so many bodies were unaccounted for, for many people 9/11 has been about the loss of the building, not the people. Fischl felt there was undue attention to what the building represented," Jensen says.

Fischl was intrigued enough by Jensen's idea for a show that he allowed him to pick three works, including a maquette for Tumbling Woman, a woman squatting with Rodinesque power and a standing figure harking back to Degas.

Leaving aside the emotional heat of 9/11, nudity remains one of the few areas where art still has the power to shock.

Naked includes Those Who Suffer Love, a 20-minute stop-gap animation by British artist Tracy Emin featuring the splayed legs of a woman. "That's pretty overwhelming at full roar," says Jensen.

In contrast, a video of Marina Abramovic overwhelms with its reserve and erotic beauty. For just over 12 minutes the Serbian performance artist lies spooned underneath a skeleton, her breathing gently raising and lowering the bones, until it ends in tears.

The third film work came from a chance wander into a side room at the Whitney Museum in New York, where Carolee Schneemann's 1968 work Body Collage was screening. It's identifiably a product of 1960s feminism meeting Fluxus performance art, with a dig at the macho rites of action painting. Schneemann immerses herself in a bath of glue, and then rolls round her studio floor, her body picking up bits of paper tissue in a Fellini-esque frenzy.

The nude is not passive. Lack of clothes isn't what makes someone vulnerable. Nakedness can be a challenge. In evidence: two backsides.

In one, contemporary German photographer Thomas Ruff reworks a fetish image, the woman bent over, looking back at the viewer so the vulnerability of the pose is outweighed by the contempt. "The most obscene image is the least sexy," says Jensen.

The other backside is from 1930, Man Ray capturing the roundness of Lee Miller's perfect derriere. Again, is it invitation or exclusion? That is the image Jensen has chosen for his poster.

The Surrealist lineage continues with a rare photograph by German Hans Bellmer, who created life-size female dolls in the mid-1930s in protest of the Nazi Fascists' aim to create perfect Aryan physiques, and Louise Bourgeois' small etching of a headless woman on a meathook, the body pendulous like the Venus of Willendorf from 30,000 years ago.

Not so old, only 4000 years or so, is a small Cycladic terracotta woman from Syria. Then there's a Greek vase and an Indian Tantric miniature.

"The idea is the naked figure is a perpetual thing the culture keeps going back to," says Jensen. "The inclusion of the Syrian and Greek items is about crossing time lines. I'm sick of the idea of contemporary, radical, now. Man Ray is more radical than any of the contemporary pieces."

EXHIBITION

What: Naked
Where and when: Jensen Gallery, cnr McColl-Roxborough Sts, Newmarket, May 4 until early July

Jewelry as performance art

2009-10-30T21:05:00.002+13:00

NZ Herald October 24

I'm killing off Cook & Co," says jeweller Octavia Cook. That's not definite, hence the title of the show. Cook added the "& Co" tag at her first show at Anna Miles in 2005, part of the process of staking out territory in the world of art.

"It was born of a need to make more than just jewellery. It brings my family into it. It started off as my version of Tiffany & Co, a humble, no-frills version, but it has grown and expanded with every show," she says.

Two photographs made to accompany specific works show Cook picking up on the performance aspect of wearing an eye-catching piece of jewellery and turning it into performance art.

In one, she is seated in a chair in the corner of her parents' Pakuranga living room, which has been augmented by items like royal portraits added to things Cook grew up with.

A photo within the photo shows the interior of a maharajah's palace with an octagonal table with a mirror top, the model for the table Cook's pieces are displayed on.

"Mine is more a customised barbecue table," she says, picking up the theme of the shady cousin with aspirations to grandeur.

Read more...

John Walsh at John Leech

2009-10-30T21:02:00.001+13:00

NZ Herald September 19

The figure lounges on a couch, arms thrown back, chest thrust out, feet entwined in front of its crotch.

It's not overtly threatening, but it's not to be trusted either.

The painting is loosely based on a pare, a door lintel, an idea artist John Walsh been playing with for several years.

"Every time I take it on it seems to be looking less and less like a formal pare and taking on other forms."

Pare to My Place was done while Walsh was in Xiamen, China earlier this year as part of a sister city exchange with Wellington.

"We had to produce some work over there and we didn't have a lot of time. I knew the format of these pare, so I flew into that, and the idea was of having to go through this pare and this guy, who is not quite menacing, but he certainly gets your attention, to get to the landscape and the little house on the hill.

"I didn't want to spook (the viewer) but I wanted them to feel you had to puzzle your way through this guy to get beyond him."

Walsh operates in a territory which combines a painterly take on New Zealand light and landscape with Maori signifiers.

It's territory which has to be navigated with care. Slapping a tiki on the canvas won't save a bad painting, and loaded ideas can go off in unexpected and unwelcome ways, or fail to fire completely.

Read more...

The power of observation

2009-10-30T20:56:00.001+13:00

NZ Herald: Saturday Oct 10, 2009

Marti Friedlander calls the new book by art historian Leonard Bell on her life's work a love story.

"Leonard Bell decided he wanted to write about my photography and I feel it's a gift to me to have someone write about my work with such understanding. In a way it's a kind of love story. One feels very touched by that. It's beautifully written."

There's another love story, too, the one that got a free-spirited Londoner to New Zealand half a century ago.

Gerrard Friedlander is sitting at a nearby table in the Parnell cafe where I meet the photographer, perhaps in case she wants to abort the interview - he leaves only after she's gone. She quizzed me about why I want to write about her, and then agreed to answer questions.

"Why does one need to expose oneself?" asks the woman whose images strip away psychological layers from her subjects.

I suggest that she's an interesting photographer because of the way she has put herself in all sorts of extraordinary situations.

Read more...

Test tubes boiling over in mobile experiment

2009-08-12T12:32:00.001+12:00

New Zealand is an ideal laboratory for social and economic experiments – a small, well-educated population, reasonable standard of living.
Unfortunately our politicians are poor students and their advisers not much better, failing to notice when the test tubes boil over or the promised elixir fails to materialise.
The launch of mobile phone company 2degrees is a great chance to observe economic phenomena and test some of hypotheses about competition and the state of the economy.
Telecommunications is an example of where the central planners and politicians and regulators have got things so wrong, bizarre behaviours have spring up.
People don’t talk on their phones, they write with them. They go to the hassle of getting another landline connection when they move, instead of switching to cellphone. They tell their mobile phone provider whom they are going to call most often, and then call no one else. They won’t call or text subscribers to another mobile network, even though the arithmetic of networks is 1+1=1.
If the country stuffs up the introduction of a third mobile phone company, forget any meaningful foreign investment – the only money coming in will be to pick up any remaining New Zealand-owned businesses with assets still to strip, or state monopolies the Key-English government flogs off in its second term.
Australian telecommunications analyst Paul Budde has already sounded a warning that because the Commerce Commission has still not made the changes which make competition possible, “there is very little opportunity for 2degrees to become a successful competitor in the New Zealand mobile market”.
“What nonsense,” you say. “There has been competition between Vodafone and Telecom, and 2degrees makes one more.”
What we’ve had until now is two huge trains steaming down separate tracks, hot cinders flying, swathed in steam so passengers can’t see where they’re going or how their pockets are being picked.
Vodafone is a mobile phone company which bought the network built by BellSouth and has since brilliantly worked the referee to maximise its return with minimal extra investment.
I don’t know where the millions Vodafone claims to be spending on network upgrades is going – my calls still drop out at the same spots on the ride between the airport and the city.
Telecom’s business model since the departure of its cash-guzzling initial shareholders has been to squeeze every last dollar from its copper landline network. Its management has extracted huge salaries while driving down shareholder value through this lack of vision.
Its mobile phones are there to prop up the landline business. They didn’t work anywhere else, so no global roaming.
High fixed to mobile rates suppressed traffic and provide a subsidy for mobile operators. Extrapolating from Commerce Commission estimates that fixed to mobile traffic rose from 900 million minutes in 2004 to a billion minutes last year, landline customers have handed more than $2.4 billion dollars to mobile operators over the past decade.
Factor that into Don Brash’s productivity review.
Telecom only built a proper mobile network when 2degrees emerged as a real prospect, because a new entrant can win market share either by winning another mobile network’s customers, or by encouraging customers to ditch their landline.
It’s all about the bundles. Get substandard broadband, mobile and landline services in one convenient package and you’re less likely to shop around for a better service in any individual area.
Throw in “free” SMS text and the customer is locked in. Since SMS and any cheap call offers take advantage of on-network pricing – made possible by poorly conceived regulation and high termination rates – shifting provider means cutting yourself off from friends and family.
The Commerce Commission says in 2008 on-net traffic accounted for more than 80 percent of all mobile to mobile voice traffic and a higher proportion of SMS traffic.
Young people in Auckland may pick up a 2degrees SIM card, but it remains to be seen how long they keep using them when their friends on Vodafone stop texting them (because it costs them money to do so).
The same applies in Dunedin, where the network of choice for scarfies and high schoolers is Telecom.
If New Zealand had an indigenous mobile phone manufacturing industry, it would be producing phones which took two SIMs. As it is, kids will just have to keep carrying one in each pocket.
There’s no sound economic reason for this, apart from anti-competitive behaviour by the incumbents. The arguments about the cost of an SMS message is what fraction of a cent it is – nothing like the 9.5 cents Vodafone and Telecom have been charging each other.
It’s a bit like the Auckland Harbour Bridge (one of whose supports was last week plastered with a huge 2degrees logo for the launch). By the time tolls were scrapped in 1984, they were costing more to collect than they were contributing to bridge repayments.
Most of the cost of SMS is in wrapping a billing system around it.
The Commerce Commission wants to regulate because it says current rates for provision mobile termination access services are well above cost and a barrier to efficient market entry and expansion.
That mean at least another two or three years of policymaking, politics and litigation, plus the ongoing bureaucratic effort of arguing with large multinationals about their real costs.
Better to do what they did on the Auckland harbour bridge – take away the toll booths, and let the companies compete on signal quality and innovative services.

Julian Dashper: A few words on a mate

2009-08-09T12:32:00.003+12:00

NZ Herald Saturday Aug 08, 2009

Julian Dashper had a work called Curriculum Vitae. His biography and list of exhibitions would be pinned to a gallery wall, taking more space each time.

That vitae part ended on July 30, but the curriculum bit will continue being added to, as people assess the achievement of one of New Zealand's most consistent and challenging artists.

Entering Elam art school in 1978, Dashper cut a large figure with his khaki shirt, umber corduroy trousers and shaggy mop of golden hair.

He came with a dog, a van, every Bob Dylan record and a back story that was obviously improvising with the truth, but so amusing it did not need questioning. The joker's mask protected him from the pressures of the institution and allowed him to get on with his serious purpose of becoming an artist.

In finding a voice Dashper was not shy about working through the slim canon of New Zealand modernism, painting landscapes that referenced giants like Colin McCahon and Toss Woollaston as he assimilated their influence and moved on.

Through the 1980s, in tandem with John Reynolds, he made an art of markings, painterly effects and colour, often squeezing pigment straight from the tube.

Underneath the abstraction was an exploration of the city he traversed as a taxi driver. His father Dick, a former Ministry of Works architect, and mother Madeline, a potter, had developed his appreciation of architectural form and he knew every public artwork or sculptural relief in Auckland. The Tip Top factory, the Sheraton Hotel and other landmarks made their way into his paintings.

Dashper's abandoning of a painterly vocabulary in the early 1990s caught many by surprise, but the clues were there early. His first show while still at Elam, at Frank Stark's 100m2 Gallery, was Motorway Schools, two pairs of Polaroid photographs of Westlake Boys and Westlake Girls high schools, with a tape loop of motorway sounds running in the background.

Reassessing the hot abstract work in light of the cool conceptualism, it's clear the same concerns continued. This was an art about art, aware of its history, modes of production and distribution.

The readymade drum kit emblazoned with a name from the previous generation was an assertion by Dashper that those New Zealand artists were part of the wider stream of modernism, even if for New Zealand modernism was "a car we only get to drive secondhand".

Dashper set out to change that turning himself into an international artist based in New Zealand. That meant travel and residencies building up relationships with artists, galleries and collectors. He also took on limited teaching work, treating students as future colleagues and opening them up to the power of ideas. It meant ideas that could travel and not burn up the budget in freight costs.

Rather than wait for Artforum to notice him, Dashper mocked up a cover featuring himself and inserted it in the magazine as a paid advertisement, after negotiation.

His growing international recognition culminated in a retrospective which toured three state galleries in the American Midwest. There has been no similar attempt by any public gallery here to survey his achievement.

Julian Dashper is survived by his life partner and fellow artist Marie Shannon and their son Leo.

Music industry sounds like a broken record

2009-08-09T12:30:00.001+12:00

NZ Herald Wednesday Aug 05, 2009

There's only a couple of days left to make submissions on proposed legislation governing how copyright affects your internet use.

It follows last year's debacle, in which former culture and heritage minister Judith Tizard and departmental officials used a supplementary order paper to jam a new section into the Copyright Act stuffed with provisions a select committee had already rejected. According to technology law specialist Rick Shera, the regime would have been even worse than that in the United States, where record industry enforcers are winning millions of dollars in damages against hapless downloaders.

Shera says the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act requires actual knowledge of infringement rather than the "reason to believe" in the New Zealand Act, and penalties for people making false or misleading takedown notices.

That's important, because as Judge David Harvey pointed out in a submission to the Telecommunications Carriers Forum, 30 per cent of New Zealand copyright litigation fails because of a failure to prove ownership of copyright, or due to the copyright in question not being governed by New Zealand law.

The new section 92A was not implemented because of public uproar, and officials were instructed to try again. At issue was wording which would have required internet service providers to cut off the accounts of customers suspected of downloading copyrighted material.

On one side are the rights holders, the music and film industries. On the other the ISPs. The two sides have been unable to come up with a voluntary code of practice on how section 92A would operate.

There are also other parties whose interests aren't being properly considered by the proposals - artists, who want to reach an audience and get fair recompense for their efforts, and the audience, which wants a constant diet of new sensation at a reasonable price in a convenient format.

The Ministry of Economic Development says its aim is "to provide a fair and efficient process for rights-holders to deal with repeat copyright infringement in the digital environment". Its current proposal is for an escalating process.

When a rights holder considers its copyright has been breached, it would send an infringement notice to the ISP to be forwarded to the subscriber. If the infringement continues, they will be sent a cease and desist notice, again via their ISP.

If they still won't stop, the rights holder can go to the Copyright Tribunal to demand their identity, and then force them into mediation.

The problem with all this is there is a huge amount of effort going in to fix a broken business model.

The recording and film industries are structured around distribution of physical items - getting bits of shellac or vinyl or plastic into shops, celluloid into cinemas.

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Unravelling bureaucracy's tangled web

2009-08-09T12:23:00.001+12:00

From NZ Herald Wednesday Jul 29, 2009

Ever wondered what happens to all that information the Government collects? Think you can make better use of it than the bureaucrats? Need some facts to give your mash-up some muscle?

A new initiative by a group of digital activists aims to identify sources of public information, classify who "owns" it, what licence it is distributed under and if it is free or not. Open government ninja Glen Barnes says the Open Data Catalogue is from open.org.nz's practical manifesto.

"We have paid for that information, and I believe we have a right to it," says Barnes, whose day job involves turning property information into useful applications.

Some information must be kept behind departmental walls to protect individuals' privacy but there is a lot more which can quite safely be let loose.

To make it easier for local bodies and central agencies to let their data out, Barnes is working on an API (application programming interface) for data which is not available in easily digestible formats like Excel or CSV (comma separated values), such as information from websites written in HTML.

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He'll take it along for discussion next month at the first open government data bar camp, a user-generated conference to be held at the National Library in Wellington on the weekend of August 29.

"I'm also taking down some work I'm doing on real-time transport information - some of the councils are interested in the concept of how things can happen from that.

"Local bodies often do not have the resources to build websites, but they might make data available for private enterprise to do it."

A typical example is mashing up Google Maps and crime statistics, giving people a visual impression of risk in their town.

Open data scares some agencies and politicians, as evidenced by Education Minister Anne Tolley's contortions when questioned about the league tables her national testing programme will inevitably generate.

It also raises questions about the way government agencies have treated data in the past.

Think of the Companies Office site, which is an excellent and free source of information, but was first designed with the aim of charging fees to offset its development and running costs. It's burdened with some clunky APIs - so for example it's not possible to search which files have been recently updated.

Laurence Millar spent the past five years as government chief information officer trying to streamline the Government's information systems and get better outcomes from its $1.9 billion IT spend.

In his last blog posting as a public servant, Millar wrote of a need to recognise the network effects of opening up government data in a form that means others can access it.

North of the equator

2009-06-26T21:49:00.005+12:00

Published NZ Herald May 30

What happens when an anthropologist and an artist go in search of a long-dead carver? Some of the results can be seen at Two Rooms in Mark Adams' large-format photos of the work of Ngati Tarawhai carver Tene Waitere (1854-1931).

There is also the accompanying book, published by the University of Otago Press, which is credited not only to Adams and Cambridge University fellow Nicholas Thomas but to Waitere's great-great-grandson James Schuster and carver Lyonel Grant.

The first Waitere work Thomas saw was the Ta Moko panel in the post-Te Maori show, Taonga Maori, which travelled to Australia in 1989. It features three heads, two male with eyes open and one female with eyes closed, rendered in a realistic fashion from a single slab of wood.

It was not in Te Maori - its early 20th century creation, the fact it was not made for a house or traditional use, and even the fact Waitere incised his name on the back made it marginal to the canon of great works that show was arguing for - "but when I saw it I thought it was impressive and interesting", says Thomas.

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Making a case for book-keeping

2009-06-25T12:03:00.002+12:00

Published NZ Herald June 20
In the 18th century a book cost as much as a shirt. Most people only had a couple of shirts - they were an expensive hand-made item. The invention of the papermaking machine at the end of that century and other advances in mechanical binding brought down the price of books, so they are still about the price of the shirt.

But there are a few souls out there keeping older methods of production alive, printing lead type on handmade papers and sewing them up into books. "Marshall McLuhan said when technology becomes obsolete for industry it becomes available for art," says Peter Simpson, publisher of the Holloway Press, which is celebrating its 15th anniversary with a burst of activity.

Fine press printing has been an important undercurrent in New Zealand cultural history, as pioneering printers like Bob Lowry, Pat Dobbie, Robin Lush and Ron Holloway in Auckland, and Dennis Glover and Leo Bensemann in Christchurch, ran off small editions of poetry, prose, criticism and typographical fantasies that recorded and fuelled the literary underground.

The coming together at Auckland University 15 years ago of Simpson, a specialist in New Zealand art and literary history, with poet and printer Alan Loney, led to the creation of the Holloway Press, named after Holloway, who donated some of his equipment and archives.

Loney moved to Melbourne in 1998, but after a short hiatus Simpson carried on as publisher, and his retirement from teaching at the university's English department at the end of last year has given him more time to devote to the press.

Two books have come out over the past month: Fishwork, a collaboration between Loney and New York-based expatriate artist Max Gimblett; and The Fruits Of, a retelling by writer Murray Edmond and photographer Joanna Forsberg of Apuleius' Eros and Psyche story from the 2nd century AD.

"I invited Alan to contribute because he had never done a book for the press of his own writing, and it made sense he print it," Simpson says.

The collaboration with Gimblett was established early on when the press published his illustrations to Robert Creely's 1995 poem Mad Dogs of Auckland. In 2006 it published Searchings, a selection by Loney from the artist's private journals and sketchbooks.

"For Fishwork, Max had done a series of figurative paintings, which is unusual for him. Alan saw them in his studio and was so struck by them he wrote poems about each of the nine paintings. Then Max responded to the poems by doing drawings for books."

The deluxe edition of 30, which includes an original artwork by Gimblett, has a gold cover and comes in a slipcase, and costs $2000 compared with $700 for the standard edition of 50 copies.

That price reflects the high production costs of the materials and the effort to co-ordinate the project across three countries, as well as the unusual layout - because Gimblett wanted his drawings to run across two pages with the text placed over or around them, each page is treated as a single signature and sewed in separately to the spine.

"This book was signed up a year ago, and the change in the economy means it's a nerve-racking situation producing luxury books but the libraries are still buying," Simpson says.

"If you think of the books in relation to the art economy, they are not all that expensive. I'm also giving work to a lot of people - the typesetters, platemakers, binders, the printer."

The Fruits Of was printed by the press' usual printer, Tara McLeod, as boxed unbound leaves in an edition of 35, selling for $650.

Simpson says the press has come to reflect his interest in the crossover between art and literature, as well as flying the flag for colleagues like Edmond and others associated with the university.

"It is a university press and I see it partly as a vehicle for university artists and writers. If you look at who we have published, it's pretty much the A list - Colin McCahon, Alan Curnow, Kendrick Smithyman.

"A lot of hand press books are beautiful to look at but boring to read. I won't print anything where the material is not worthy of publication in its own right," Simpson says.

"I believe our New Zealand traditions are richer and more interesting than we are given credit for. There are certain narratives that have taken over New Zealand art history and literature history. I am interested in going behind those master narratives and renovating them. I'm interested in someone like Leo Bensemann, because he has been dropped out of the narrative.

"When you put him in, it becomes so much more interesting - here was someone not doing realistic landscapes of Canterbury but weird drawings based on the Brothers Grimm and Dr Faustus.

"That is part of the role of the Holloway Press, bringing stuff out of the archive that complicates the texture of the history. It's a small and new enough culture, we don't need to make it smaller and more linear than it actually is." Alan Loney says his own printing history was influenced by the example of Keith Maslin at the Bibliography Room of the University of Otago and the late Don McLeod at Victoria University's Wai-te-ata Press.

"They published books of contemporary poetry, they hand set the type, hand fed the printer and folded the covers.

"I modelled my work on theirs and found them of continuing interest and value. When I started I was publishing poetry, which I also happened to print, so I eventually became a printer."

He was driven to self-publishing by the typographical demands of his own poems, which use a lot of internal spacing.

"I think the basis of typographical accuracy to poems as they were written is difficult for some poets in New Zealand," Loney says, citing Smithyman's occasional practice of not putting a space between a full stop and the first word of the next sentence.

"If I am printing a text I presume the poet is taking care of what they are doing, and my job is to be accurate to that, not to play the editor."

Loney says starting the Holloway Press "is one of the best things I have done in my printing life.

"It enabled me to make books I couldn't possibly have made on my own and I think a university press like Holloway Press permits the continued production of books that are special, that are different, that the commercial world does not tend to pick up on so it creates extra opportunities for writers which simply do not exist in the commercial realm."

On Simpson's list of books to do is a second book drawn from material in the Len Lye archives by Roger Horrocks, an unpublished James K. Baxter poem and a celebration of the work of Bob Lowry.

The umbrella of the press could also be used to hold events such as symposia.

There is online production - Simpson has put up an annotated archive of the complete poems of Kendrick Smithyman on his Mudflat Webworks site.

"It's just too big to be published as a book in this country," he says.

There is also an anniversary sale now on, with steep discounts on the back list.

Roger Ballen photographs as metaphors

2009-05-13T10:29:00.005+12:00

Published NZ Herald May 9, 2009

Roger Ballen's photographs journey from the disturbing documentary images of his early series in rural South Africa to the disturbed interiors of his recent compositions, taken around Johannesburg.

It started with a journey, with the young American hitting the hippie highway in 1973 and travelling overland from Cairo to Cape Town.

"I stayed awhile, then went on another journey from Istanbul to New Guinea before going back to America in 1977," says Ballen.

His first book, Boyhood, was drawn from pictures taken during those travels, but his name was made by the work he did after returning to his wife's country of South Africa in the early 1980s, which is included in the retrospective at AUT University's St Paul St Gallery.

Ballen has been seeing the world through a lens since he was a small boy. "My mother started one of the first photography galleries in New York in the 1960s, and I got seriously interested. I knew the leading photographers of the time."

That interest gave him a comprehensive understanding of the craft, but it didn't extend to wanting to become a commercial photographer or a photojournalist - the options for a photographer in the era before photography was considered a proper art.

Instead he secured a PhD in geology and mineral exploration, and continued to take pictures as a hobby. Prospecting in the back blocks of South Africa, Ballen would shelter from the heat of the day by knocking on people's doors.

From those encounters came the images in his first important collection, Dorps, Small Towns of South Africa. The following book, Platteland, extended the ideas and created sufficient impact for Ballen to seek interest outside the country.

"My early pictures were more documentary in terms of the questions I was asking, and the images were more about the culture I was in. For the Dorps project the question was, 'What is the unique aesthetic sensibility of these small towns?'.

"In Platteland, the pictures of poor white South Africans on the margins were a metaphor for emotional states."

By the mid-90s, when he settled in Johannesburg and pursued photography fulltime, the work was becoming increasingly complex and metaphorical. The next collection, Outland, took a more theatrical approach, with its subjects performing in mysterious tableaux.

"They would add something, I would add something. I was asking questions like how would people deal with their ultimate fear, how would they deal with shadows."

That exploration of metaphor continued in later collections like Fact of Fiction, Shadow Chamber, and the most recent, Boarding House, in which fragmentary human or animal subjects compete with drawn and stained walls, worn out furniture, grime and mysterious sculptures.

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Art in comics in art

2009-04-23T07:28:00.002+12:00

Published NZ Herald April 19, 2009.

Pic Kenny Rodger: Barry Linton (front) with Kelly (left) and Darren Sheehan and Dylan Horrocks.

IN 1961 Roy Lichenstein painted Look Mickey in response to a dare from one of his sons to match the quality of a Disney comic. The challenge turned him from a lately arrived Abstract Expressionist to a pioneer of Pop, but half a century later the relationship between comics and art is still fertile ground for debate.

Lichenstein himself had largely moved on from sourcing images from popular comics by 1965 - looking at his paintings in the flesh you realise the popular image is a misinterpretation, and his concerns were surface and space and colour and how the eye responds. Comics gave him something to paint, but the painting was the bit that interested him.

The debate continues at Bath St, with some of our more maverick comic artists and some artists who use comics for image-making.

Dylan Horrocks, who is represented by panels from his great Hicksville series, two pages from the 2000 story called Western Wind and some colour originals from the Milo's Week comic strip drawn for the NZ Listener in the mid-1990s, gets prickly about the difference between comics and "gallery art".

"Ultimately I guess I'm just not that interested in the distinction. I sometimes get a lot out of looking at paintings as 'comics' - Art Spiegelman once said Picasso is a great cartoonist - but I also have spent much of the last several years exploring the pictures in comics as individual drawings, rather than merely storytelling tools," says Horrocks, adding that the differences "are probably about milieu and markets and subcultures, rather than the work itself".

Rob McLeod, who is showing his 2007 painting Bridesmaid, is unwilling to give up any ground, despite his plunder of cartoon forms.

"I am very protective of painting's territory. I want to establish boundaries by pushing at them, not breaking down barriers. It's important that my work is always recognised as painting," says McLeod.

Denys Watkins is more conciliatory, saying the "art crowd" doesn't get the crossover with comics. As well as Lichenstein, he points to Philip Guston's reversion from pure abstraction to imagery, guided in his exploration of the human condition by George Herriman's Krazy Kat and Robert Crumb.

"For me, Hogarth was the first in this genre. The Rake's Progress was a big influence in subject and drawing."

It was also a work interpreted by David Hockney as a student at the Royal College in London a few years ahead of Watkins. "Being a line and tone man, my early influences were Ginger Meggs and Dagwood in the newspapers. I then expanded to Beano and Disney, graduated to Crumb in the 60s, and have a great respect for the influence of Mad and the iconic skills of Marvel and Eagle."

Many of the American artists he likes, such as Peter Saul, John Wesley, Jim Nutt, and Sue Williams, display some of the drawing skills associated with cartooning.

"Back home, I have to say that only Dick Frizzell, Tom Kreisler and myself had a take on this from my generation, and this came from a love of drawing and the emotive information you can get from such simple apparatus," Watkins says.

McLeod dates his use of comics to 1973, soon after he arrived in New Zealand from Glasgow. "It wasn't so much comics as the newspaper strips, The Wizard of Id in particular and the characters' noses to be specific."

Much of the work from that period was never shown, and McLeod then went "on the road to abstraction". The cartoons returned in the 1990s, even though the paintings looked abstract.

"I finally acknowledged the figurative element in Meet Mutant Mickey, an important work from 2000. Full-blown figuration took over. I started looking at comics again and referring to certain characters: Mickey, Goofy, Daffy Duck, Tweety Bird. But not post-modernly appropriating them. They get twisted to my ends."

Horrocks says comics ignore borders. "Comics tend to be equally engaged with art and literature, and are really both." He says comic artists in the show are some way outside the mainstream, have zero interest in superheroes, and are producing distinctly "local" work.

"Barry Linton and Tim Bollinger, especially, have a very deeply Pacific feel. One of Tim's stories in this show is about the so-called 'terror raids' against Tuhoe and his other story transplants Noah and the flood to contemporary Wellington. Tim's work often has a very strong sense of place to it, especially his Wellington stories.

"Barry's been off on his own unique path for years, creating work that's unlike anything else. He's totally his own man - and he's had very little to do with wider comics cultures, especially the commercial industry, which he probably views with contempt."

Linton sees himself as carrying on an ancient tradition of blending words and pictures for instant and direct communication, saying, "It's as complex as stage or screen art. Its potential is depraved by commerce, but it thrives in secret globally."

Exhibition

What: The Comics Show: Comic book pages by Tim Bollinger, Dylan Horrocks, Barry Linton, Darren and Kelly Sheehan; paintings by Mark Braunias, Dick Frizzell, Rob McLeod and Denys Watkins
Where and when: Bath St Gallery, 43 Bath St, Parnell, to April 25

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Earth, heat and fire are putty in his hands

2009-03-24T19:00:00.002+13:00

From NZ herald March 21, 2009.

Pic: Kenny Rodger

When Len Castle was 10 a cousin took him to Wiri Mountain in Manukau when it was still largely intact. "I was taken down and into - it was a tight squeeze - a lava tube, a wonderful experience that stayed with me and I think it may have triggered off my interest in volcanic phenomena," says the 84-year-old potter.

The extreme combinations of heat and earth are in evidence at Lopdell House, where the travelling show Mountain to the Sea brings together stone and earthenware works from the 1980s to 2008 along with Castle's photos of geothermal activity and poems commissioned for the show by curator Tanya Wilkinson of the Hawkes Bay Museum and Art Gallery.

Castle discovered clay growing up at Westmere. He remembers sitting on the sand under the pohutukawa trees "modelling things with my hands while looking out at the black reef."

That memory came back when the late James Mack invited him to be among the select group of craftspeople showing work at the New Zealand Pavilion at the Seville Expo in 1991.

"He gave each of us a motivational statement. Mine was, 'The magma cools on its way to the ocean,"' Castle says.

What's striking about many of the works in the Titirangi gallery is their sculptural nature. Many New Zealand potters have made the transition from pottery to sculpture, but for Castle it just meant getting better.

"Back in the 1960s when I started potting professionally, I needed to make tablewares and I quite enjoyed that, but if I was making 12 casseroles, they would all be different. I was more interested in getting variations of form.

"As soon as I made my quota I started modelling objects that hinted at the organic world, and I found a few people interested whenever I had an opening of the kiln, and it built up from there."

Even before then, Castle had been working out not just how to make pots but how to be a potter. He remembers seeing his first Shoji Hamada pot in the early 1950s in the Upper Hutt home of fellow schoolteacher Ray Chapman-Taylor, who had sought out the master ceramicist while stationed with J Force in Japan after World War II.

"When I first saw my Hamada piece I kind of shuddered but I was drawn to it. I thought about it that night. What was it that has drawn me to this rugose [wrinkled] piece? It took me a while to sort it out. Here is a man who had probably thought about things carefully, but then he had acted, and that intuition played an important role in what he was doing.

"At that stage I didn't know very much about materials but I could sense he obviously understood his materials, and he allowed the kiln to have its say, and so on. This struck me as something valid, and so a truth to material approach became a key thing in my work.

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Reflections on Giovanni Intra

2009-03-10T10:33:00.004+13:00

Pic Jennifer French
Published NZ Herald Saturday Feb 14, 2009

A young man goes to art school. He has energy, charm, an exotic name and an appetite for art theory. He proves adept at turning out ideas for theory-drenched conceptual pieces, which appeal to a certain faction of the New Zealand art world of the early 1990s.

He's even better at organising, networking, writing about the work of other artists, writing thank you notes, and all those other important things required to build an art career.

After art school he and some of his peers start an art gallery where other young artists can show their reifications of theory. (If you need to look that word up, you haven't read enough theory.)

He has a fascination for surrealist photography, particularly that of Jacques-Andre Boiffard, whose day job was medical photography. He explores medical themes in his work, always a giveaway sign of an unhealthy interest in recreational chemistry.

He gets a scholarship and enrols for postgraduate study at a good California art school, which leads to the creation of a similar artist-run space in Los Angeles' Chinatown. He becomes a prominent writer and art critic for word soup journals such as Art and Text, Semiotexte, Artforum and Flash Art. Then he dies at the age of 34, overdosing during a visit to New York in 2002, where street drugs are stronger. That's the same age as Phil Clairmont was when he died almost two decades before, but the volume of Giovanni Intra's art output was a mere fraction of the painter's - a few pieces in private and public collections. His sketchbooks, correspondence and collections of exhibition invites, posters, pamphlets and tracts are donated to various archives, including a boxload dropped off at Artspace.

The box sits under a desk until curatorial intern Kate Brettkelly-Chalmers decides it might illuminate part of the country's recent art history.

"He was a fascinating and interesting person, not only for his art practice, which was really significant at the time, but for his other modes as writer, curator and for Teststrip, which was a significant artist-run space," says Brettkelly-Chalmers. "He was a nexus of activity and discussion and in a way came to sum up a shift in contemporary New Zealand art.

"What people have said to me was when [Intra] was at Elam, there was this idea that theory sat external to the work. Intra and his contemporaries spent a long time looking for contemporary art theory that they fed back into their practice."

That's the perspective of the curator, who is trying to unpack this box of tatty fragments as cultural history. I try to unpack it as memory. I never met Intra, and never found the doorway in K Rd leading to Teststrip. When I first heard of him I thought the name was a construct, like the names his colleague Merilyn Tweedie uses to project her theory-laden contrivances.

By the time Intra got to Elam, the debate between regionalism and internationalism was well worn here. Intra chose, or was drawn to, the school of thought that art should be part of an international dialogue, so the same scattering of objects on a gallery floor could have been produced in Auckland or Amsterdam. His take on surrealism owes nothing to the curious southern Gothic strain which has infused the regional art DNA.

His story is like that of many young people who make their way to art schools, rather than study law or accounting. They learn some foundations, either practical or theoretical, shape some sense of identity, try making art for a while, then go off and do something else with their lives.

They provide an informed audience for the arts and, if they shift into more lucrative careers, support those who persevered by buying their work.

Intra stopped making art and became a critic and gallerist. Whether he would have returned to contribute to the arts in New Zealand will forever remain an unanswered question.

It's a bit like trying to do a show on Hamish Keith with a cutoff point at age 34. But as Keith's recent memoir shows, that's when he was probably just getting into his stride as a shaper of and contributor to the country's cultural life. As it was, Tweedie as Et Al got to represent this country at the Venice Biennale three years after Intra's death, marking the high point for that particular strain of strained conceptualism.

And up the road, Objectspace's annual Best in Show, which draws on the end-of-year shows at the country's craft and design schools, indicates the prominence of critical theory in the way the arts are now taught.

Exhibition

What: Beginning in the Archive: Giovanni Intra 1989-1996.
Where and when: Artspace, 300 Karangahape Rd, to Feb 28.

Short courses boost degrees and polish CVs

2009-03-10T10:30:00.001+13:00

NZ herald Wednesday Feb 11, 2009

Students looking to recession-proof their degrees are increasingly looking at taking on short courses which don't add any credits but do make them more employable.

At Auckland University's business school, that includes Microsoft and Cisco certification, and for the first time last year, certification in SAP, one of the major enterprise management software systems. Tutor David Sundaram says the school will try and run it again this year.

Don Sheridan, the head of the information systems and operations management department, says: "There has been significant interest from students in taking the related commercial courses we offer to enhance their CV."

The 12-day course, Integrated Business Processes in SAP ERP based on SAP best practices (BPERP), costs $2000.

SAP and other commercial programmes are also used in the school's enterprise systems courses, giving students hands-on experience of the technology they will encounter in the workplace. Sheridan says it is increasingly focusing on industry solutions, setting up a centre for supply chain management to make students aware of the practical aspects of what they are learning.

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Albert Wendt, painter of words

2009-02-10T14:12:00.001+13:00

Published NZ Herald November 29, 2008

On the front of Albert Wendt's Ponsonby house is a plaque saying it was once the home of Michael Joseph Savage, before he became the first Labour Prime Minister. In years to come there may be another plaque identifying it as a home for the premier Samoan novelist of his generation.

It probably wouldn't add the term "painter", but that is how Wendt is increasingly choosing to occupy his time.

"I used to do lot of art as a boy in Samoa, but I was from a poor family so it was just pencil drawings and copying the comics," he says.

Boarding at New Plymouth Boys High School in the 1950s, he was streamed away from the art option, but picked it up at Ardmore Teachers College in 1958. "I was in the same class as Selwyn Muru and Sandy Adsett. I did art for a few years, taught it, but when I went to university I concentrated on writing."

In 2000, the urge came upon him to return to the visual arts. "I went up to the French Art Workshop [on Ponsonby Rd] and bought $300 worth of pencils and crayons and paper," he says. Since then he has been learning to paint with acrylics, something that was barely around in the 1960s. "In many ways I am younger than most of the younger generation of Pacific artists."

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Telco revival needed to boost the economy

2009-02-10T14:09:00.001+13:00

Published NZ Herald, February 4, 2009

Forget tax cuts. Fixing telecommunications infrastructure would put money in people's pockets and generate long-lasting economic stimulus, without knocking a gaping hole in the Government's books.

Real high-speed internet at realistic prices and mobile phone regimes that allow New Zealanders to make calls without a meter ticking in their head are the sort of boosts individuals and businesses will notice.

Two decades of folly and "market" solutions which are anything but have crushed innovation and left New Zealanders with high phone bills and mediocre service. Fed up with the antics of the telephone companies, internet New Zealand has urged the Government to instead work with electricity lines companies to realise its promise of an accelerated roll-out of fibre.

That would fit in with the principles of National's broadband policy articulated by John Key: no undue advantage to existing providers, open-access architecture, avoidance of duplication, accessible to all, and a future focus on public private partnerships.

More ...

New player tries NZ market

2008-12-11T12:04:00.001+13:00

Prepared for New Zealand Herald November 26, 2008

The day Australian listed software company Comops opened a New Zealand office, the country officially went into a recession.
It’s not an auspicious start, but there is always room even in the toughest times for a vendor to identify where its solution to standard business problems will be a better fit for the customer’s circumstances.
Comops has been here before, selling software through IBM in the 1990s, and has a number of existing customers for a range of products.
Its roots go back to a 1972 computer bureau, whose owners soon realised it needed to be offering its own applications. Being engineers, they named their product BMS, or Business Management System.
Despite any apparent marketing zing, they developed a loyal customer base ranging from small to large organisations.
In the past couple of years Comops has developed an appetite for expansion, fleshing out its product range with the acquisition of a workforce management and rostering solution, an occupational safety and health tool and a performance management solution.
It’s finally found exporting, something Australian companies are often slower about than New Zealanders, who don’t have the luxury of a 20-million person domestic market.
“We feel New Zealand is a good market for our types of products so we’re reinvesting,” says executive director Cameron Brown.
For the jump across the ditch it hired Mark Heard, who fronted Ariba’s expansion into New Zealand and more recently held down enterprise sales roles at Jade and Telstra New Zealand.
Its rostering solution, which allows fine tuning of skills and shifts, has already been picked up by Sky City and several district health boards.
That should mean nursing staff with appropriate experience get assigned to the operating theatres where they will be most useful – or dealers to the tables they know how to play.
Analyst Ullrich Loeffler from International Data Corporation says putting in a local team is smart thinking, given there are cultural and resourcing issues to contend with.
“Some Australian companies see New Zealand as another state rather than an individual market, and they don’t put in the required resources,” Loeffler says.
“They are similar but not identical markets, so some localisation is require.
He says while the top of the enterprise application market has consolidated around SAP and Oracle, with Lawson picking up some of what’s left, further down it’s a fragmented picture, with a lot of niche operators and local developers jostling for share.
“There’s anything from 60 to 80 vendors we try and keep track of,” Loeffler says.
Doing well in recent times has been SAP’s Business One package, which is sold through systems integrators.
Microsoft has its own network of resellers for its Microsoft Dynamics range, which pulls together a bewildering range of products and packages and throws it out to the market.
Software as a service is also starting to gain traction, with companies going online to assess applications from the likes of Salesforce.com.
Loeffler is also detecting more demand for MYOB, which has beefed up its offerings beyond the home and micro business level with the acquisition of products like the New Zealand-developed Exonet package.
“Lots of the technology investment here is seen as cost cutting designed to optimise processes,” he says.
“Back end applications like ERP can reduce operational costs, so we see a lot of interest coming.
“Companies will put more focus on return on invest.
“For smaller companies, the automation of back processes is of less importance. They are more likely just to have a bookkeeper coming in once a week.”
Mark Loveys, the chief executive of Auckland software development and integration company Enprise, has experience in both Exonet, which he was an original shareholder in, and as an SAP Business One reseller.
“There is a shift to software that can help businesses reduce costs,” Loveys says.
“Things are much more competitive in the New Zealand market. We really have to work hard for sales. A lot of businesses are putting purchases off until the next calendar year.”
Enprise is the largest Exonet vendor with more than 300 sites.
“MYOB has positioned Exonet, renamed MYOB Exo Business, as the natural upgrade for the MYOB community as their businesses grow, so there is a huge amount of business coming from that,” he says.
Because the products were evolving on similar lines, Enprise recently sold its New Zealand Business One operation to Eagle Technology to avoid conflicts of interest.
It retains an international involvement in Business One, selling a job costing module which at US$995 a seat is providing a welcome boost to the Enprise accounts as the kiwi dollar weakens.
Sales have doubled this year on last, and it is now it at about 200 sites worldwide, with sales being driven by SAP’s Business One network rather than requiring effort from Enprise.
Another product line, the EMS Cortex provision software for application hosting companies, is also generating strong international sales.
“Most of our revenues now come from offshore,” Loveys says.

Technology Investment Network 100

2008-11-25T23:28:00.000+13:00

New Zealand technology firms could be well placed to weather tough economic times, as a more favourable exchange rate boosts earnings.

The latest Technology Investment Network analysis estimates the total revenue of the top 100 tech companies at $6.4 billion.

"Some 75 per cent of that is from exports, it's not internally generated revenue," says Greg Shanahan, the network's managing director.

Most of the companies are in the business of making products rather than software, so a big question for the future is where will manufacturing be done, as firms try to control costs and risk.

Fisher and Paykel Appliances, the largest firm on the list with revenue of $1.4 billion, moved the majority of its manufacturing offshore during the year, and its spin-off Fisher and Paykel Healthcare is considering a Mexican plant.

F&P Appliances' revenue dropped 1 per cent during the year, while F&P Healthcare could only manage 3 per cent growth in New Zealand dollar terms, as exchange rate fluctuation knocked back the effect of its 18 per cent boost in US dollar sales.

More in NZ Herald October 22...

Robinson consumed by glass

2008-11-25T23:05:00.001+13:00

A critical part of the glass caster's art is "annealing", slowly bringing down the temperature of the kiln so the glass cools from liquid at a steady and even rate without cracking.

Talking to glassmaker Ann Robinson in her Glendene studio in an industrial area on the banks of the Whau River, the opposite process seems to be going on - a slow warming up as she tries to talk about anything but her work.

"I find it really difficult being interviewed because I haven't got a hell of a lot to say," she says, after articulating clearly the thinking that drives her to make increasingly larger and more challenging objects.

"It's the exploration of a material, where it is at and it probably comes from my heart at some point but it's not hugely rationalised.

"It's more that you think about it as you are doing it and wonder what you are up to and what it means and why you might have chosen that.

"It's sort of an internal dialogue that's going on, but I don't think for a second that anyone else would be interested in that dialogue, can't imagine it, so I am just being true to my own sense of how I think this material could be expressed and the sorts of things I want to do with it."

More at NZ Herald November 15

Rotuma to Grey Lynn in magpie eye

2008-11-25T23:02:00.001+13:00

Somewhere around Grey Lynn Park there is a magpie nest with a mother of pearl disc which was supposed to be part of a Sofia Tekela-Smith jewellery piece.

"When I've finished sanding them, I leave them to dry on the deck. There were eight, and then there were seven, and there was a magpie on the fence looking very pleased with itself," says Tekela-Smith, chronicling some of the challenges of preparing her new show, Grace.

The biggest challenge was working around daughter Helava, who has just turned 1. "I couldn't cut stone or shell while I was pregnant, because it's all toxic stuff."

A show in an art gallery setting forces Tekela-Smith to think about more than the immediate object. "Jewellery is small. You can't do big works, and for it to have a presence outside the body in an arena like a gallery, you need to present it in a way that it doesn't get lost."

Her first John Leech show included big breastplates, the second large photographs of women wearing her jewellery.

With Grace, the photographs are of herself, posed as Botticelli's Birth of Venus and Raphael's Madonna and Child.

"It's a labour of love, this show. I have put myself up on the canvas naked. People have said incredible things about the photographs such as, `Why do that when you are not in your best shape?' - real personal criticisms.

"The photographs are not intended to be a fashion photograph but everyone is looking at it from a very superficial level. I have to be strong and not listen to what other people say. I know why I am doing stuff."

Grace was sparked by finding a photograph of her mother in a nun's habit on a website about Rotuma, a Polynesian island administered by Fiji.

"I knew she had been a nun but had never seen a photo. I wanted to do stuff around that. What was it like for her family when she left [the convent], what was it like for her?"

But in the way that so much renaissance art is unknowable to most modern viewers, because they are not familiar with the keys to the symbols, so Tekela-Smith's photographs are open to misinterpretation.

She seems surprised that they are being read as ironic commentaries on the "dusky maiden" stereotype.

"It's all going back to my mother. I look at it and think, 'There is a woman who has run away from the church'. One day she pledged herself to God and church, and took on vows of poverty, chastity - then one day she wakes up and that's not her any more. She is not going to be chaste any more. She starts exploring that whole sexuality she has. That is how I am looking at the photograph," Tekela-Smith says.

The first stop for the former Sister Francis of Assisi was Fiji.

NZ Herald November 8 more...

Walters Prize judgment on aesthetics

2008-11-25T23:00:00.002+13:00

Pity poor Catherine David. She is shortly to leave her Paris home and fly to Auckland to pick a winner from four artists whose installations have been determined by a group of curators as the best that New Zealand art can offer.

Yes, it's time again for the Walters Prize, that biennial attempt by Auckland Art Gallery to prove it is still engaged with the country's contemporary artists.

Chris Saines, the director of the gallery for the past 12 years, says in the catalogue foreword that it sets out to review the work that "arguably made the strongest or even potentially the most lasting impact on current New Zealand practice".

In case we might think that implies some judgment, Saines reassures us the intention is "always to start a conversation about contemporary art, not to establish a canon".

The prize exists because of the generosity of patrons Erika and Robin Congreve, and Jenny Gibbs. The gallery even stands back from the selection. That is left to a panel of jurors.

MZ Herald October 25

Shades of McCahon in Brown

2008-11-25T22:59:00.002+13:00

Nigel Brown remembers going to see a Sidney Nolan survey sometime in the mid-1970s, and chancing upon his former art school teacher, Colin McCahon.

"We ended up looking at it together," he says. "I can't remember much of the conversation, but he realised it was in a different direction to his own work, which at that time was moving into more abstract forms.

"I was attracted to [Nolan], but Colin was not interested in his obvious storytelling," says Brown, whose Lamp series - opening on Tuesday at the Warwick Henderson Gallery - includes the unashamed influence of McCahon, as well as borrowing the Ned Kelly mask so memorably used by the Australian painter.

The starting point for the series is an early McCahon of a kerosene lamp. The now anachronistic lighting device serves as a metaphor for casting light on people's lives. "I try to deal with archetypal symbols which will last the distance," Brown says.

The largest painting in the series, Hide and Seek, is a triptych grouping three of the characters Brown often uses: the poet James K. Baxter, a burly male in the Ned Kelly mask and Captain James Cook, in this case accompanied by his wife.

NZ Herald October 11

Scaling her own mountains

2008-11-25T22:57:00.000+13:00

Sarah Hillary remembers family holidays near Wanaka, climbing the relatively benign Mt Maude.

"I seem to remember it had a wonderful cave near the top, which we used to love going into as children. It was very exciting," she says.

The Mt Maude in Hillary's new show at Anna Miles Gallery is a copy of part of Rita Angus' Mt Maud, done on an ancient pipi shell collected from a beach at Whangarei Heads. What is different from many of the other mountains featured in the show, all sourced from paintings by 20th-century New Zealand artists, is that it has the "right" name.

The mountain in Mt Cook, which draws on a familiar Rita Angus painting of a bare tree at Lake Wanaka, is probably Treble Cone. The Cook is a reference to Angus' married name. Angus is also the source of Mt Rita, which samples her painting of the railway station at Cass.

Hillary thus joins a line of homage - which includes Julian Dashper, Peter Peryer and Dane Mitchell - to a work voted New Zealand's greatest painting in a 2006 poll conducted by television arts programme Frontseat.

NZ Herald August 16

Artspace turns 21

2008-11-25T22:55:00.000+13:00

Twenty one years ago, Auckland was in a ferment, with many industrial buildings in the central city waiting for demolition, the sharemarket crashing and the property market about to follow. The art market - such as it was - was slowing and artists, especially those doing more edgy work, weren't feeling much love from Auckland Art Gallery.

There was a mood afoot for an artist-run space where new ideas of sculpture and performance could be tried out, bold experiments conducted, young artists exposed before they were picked up by dealer galleries.

There had been a similar attempt at an artists' room earlier in the decade, Frank Stark's 100 Metres Squared gallery, and a city council-administered work scheme, Artworks, had allowed younger artists to think about different ways of producing and presenting work.

"When we started there were few opportunities for emerging artists, curators and writers," says Mary Louise Browne, a sculptor and performance artist and Artspace's first director. "We developed lots of space," she says, crediting people like Sandy Morrison and then-mayor Cath Tizard for support in finding venues.

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The first space was the George Fraser Gallery in Albert Park.

"The very first show we did was Di Ffrench and Fiona Pardington, about the body. Di, who also did performance art, had these big colour cibachromes and dye works. Fiona had pictures of Neil and Joe [her brother and partner] in masks.

"We had Janet Frame upstairs as the artist in residence. She came down every day to check it out. She responded really well to it," Browne says.

A month later, Artspace opened a second gallery in a large white-painted brick building in Federal St which was awaiting the bulldozers for what eventually became the Sky City Casino. "We could do things there without pressure. It was very industrial, and there were a lot of performances and films made there after hours."

Browne says Artspace was definitely a reaction to the direction Auckland Art Gallery was taking, with an emphasis on quality high-end imported historical shows of artists like Claude Monet. When 101 Federal St was finally demolished, a lot of art went with it. For the last show, artists were invited to do works directly on the walls.

That was also a feature of the next venue at Quay St, where a Julian Dashper piece, which consisted of the word DRIVE painted from floor to ceiling on the wall, led to challenges from visitors that the space was being wasted.

"We tended to have an opening every two weeks alternating between the George Fraser and the other venue, so things kept moving. A lot needed to be looked at and we needed to be light on our feet because the space could be taken away at any time," Browne says.

More art...

Internet NZ annual meeting

2008-11-25T22:53:00.000+13:00

From NZ Herald Wednesday Aug 13, 2008

Internet New Zealand held its annual meeting recently. You probably didn't hear about it. Just a bunch of people from across the political spectrum sitting in a room talking about stuff most of us now take for granted.

You might have heard about the Netsafe conference in Queenstown in the days leading up to it. That was a forum to discuss what could be done to stop the extraordinary openness of the internet being used against the young and the vulnerable.

Netsafe is backed and partially funded by internet NZ, as are a number of other initiatives aimed at improving how New Zealanders experience the internet in all its many guises.

Internet NZ exists as an independent, membership-based organisation because of a desire by the creators of the internet that it not be run by governments, corporations or other vested interests. Its key goal is a free and uncapturable internet. Its primary job is running .nz, the top-level domain assigned to New Zealand.

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Cutting Vodafone down to size

2008-07-25T09:37:00.001+12:00

Published NZ Herald July 23, 2008

Got your new iPhone yet? Want one of those slim and shiny rectangles?

You can't have missed out on the marketing, and the marketing within the marketing.

What other cellphone has been launched with such hoopla? When did Nokia or Sony-Ericsson or Samsung or Motorola have people camping out on the winter streets - even if they were put up to it by people marketing other products or services?

It's not hurting the Apple brand and it's not hurting Vodafone New Zealand which has an exclusive on the 3G iPhone here and should win a sizeable chunk of Telecom customers, going on overseas precedents.

As the only GSM network here, Vodafone has a monopoly it can exploit to the full with such a shiny new toy.

Its monopolist behaviour was on full display with its plans.

The top end drew instant negative reaction, as people worked out the $250 a month for 1GB of data and 600 minutes of talk would turn a $199 investment in a subsidised handset into a $6000 drain on the budget over two years.

Existing Vodafone One Account customers who buy a full-price iPhone can get 1GB of data a month for $49.95. Compare that with the United States, where AT&T is charging US$30 ($39) a month for unlimited data or $45 on its business plans.

The argument being made by Vodafone reps at last week's launch was the rates could represent a 20 or 30 per cent saving for some existing power users.

But it's hardly disruptive pricing to go with disruptive technology.

More...

Unimarket networks buying effort

2008-07-04T00:19:00.002+12:00

Published in New Zealand Herald, July 2, 2008

Spend management is one of those shiny ideas for which organisations are willing to spend more to spend less.
Electronic procurement systems can avoid unnecessary multiple purchases. Better prices can be negotiated from suppliers. Fraud and waste can be detected more quickly.
It’s not easy though. Procurement systems have to be integrated to back end financial and asset control systems. Cultural change may be needed so staff go along with the programme. Systems need to be simple to use, so staff don’t have to wade through multiple screens to buy another packet of pens, or wait for days to get a purchase order approved.
It’s an area a lot of software vendors have tried to capture. ERP systems modules, online portals and marketplaces, buying clubs, anything to save a dollar off a ream of paper.
The big name in the space is Ariba, which is used by 18 of the top 20 Fortune 500 companies.
But Ariba has always been a high priced option for the New Zealand market, where it is mainly installed at the local branches of multinationals.
“Ariba is the top of the market, but there is 80 percent of the market they can never get to,” says Scott Blackwood, who has built a syndicated network system which aims to capture a big chunk of that 80 percent.
The idea for Unimarket came to Blackwood during the eight years he worked as a consultant in the United States, helping large companies optimise their supply chains
Every project started with setting up a master register of customers and suppliers, and work out how to integrate as many as possible with whatever system was being implemented.
ERP or enterprise resource planning systems are great to run large organisations, but they often don’t communicate well with the outside world. Expensive gateways and data exchangers are needed to make sure messages don’t get scrambled.
Add to that the complexity of large organisations – the division of a large pharmaceutical company Blackwood spent time in had 30,000 customers and more than 2 million SKUs.
“It was impossible to keep customer systems up to date through EDI (electronic data interchange),” Blackwood says.
He came home in 2003 to make a better system.
His first recruit was a former classmate from Auckland University’s computer science department, Damien Hollis, who has also just returned home after developing the back end systems that power the lastminute.com travel site.
After a few years of working in the garage, the pair moved into the Icehouse incubator and started winning customers in tertiary education, local government and the corporate sector, as well as high powered support from the New Zealand IT community. Former gen-i chief executive Garth Biggs chairs the company.
Unimarket works on a software as a service model. That means it’s an Internet application living on Unimarket’s servers, rather than being installed at each customer site.
For buyers, costs are reduced by consolidating suppliers in one place, creating a uniform buying process, and ensuring any requisitions are made and recorded in the buyer’s own systems.
Because of the way Unimarket manages both buyer and supplier information, supplier information is always up to date, so people aren’t buying off out of date catalogues or price lists.
For suppliers like Office Express and House of Travel which have made their own investments into e-commerce, Unimarket presents a window into those systems.
Other suppliers can upload catalogues through a simple interface.
There is no duplication of information in different systems, and invoices always match purchase orders, cutting out the huge number of manual checks and corrections which impose hidden costs on procure to pay systems.
Buyers can team up internally or externally to get volume discounts, and supplier costs are reduced through scale and better business processes.
Blackwood says Unimarket is aimed at organisations that spend over $10 million across 50 or more suppliers, and at companies looking to sell into that market.
It’s also for companies which are trying to move their business more towards e-commerce, networking and collaboration.
Unimarket collects a monthly fee from customers who buy through its electronic procurement and invoicing modules, and if takes a small clip of the ticker from sellers.
He says Unimarket isn’t asking people to throw out their existing investments. They can use the whole system, or just the parts of it which complement what they have.
“If they use ERP solutions, we integrate. If they use spreadsheets and email, we can accommodate,” Blackwood says.
Because it doesn’t demand suppliers use EDI, it can carry a long tail, from the high volume vendors of office supplies to specialist outlets that may occasionally sell a few items to a university laboratory.
And because Unimarket is a syndicated network of suppliers, new customers can take advantage of integration which has already been done.
That means when Victoria University went live, it was able to immediately connect with all the existing suppliers it shared with Waikato University, which was already connected.
Unimarket is now out on the incubator, and has raised extra capital from investors to set up offices in Australia and the United States.
Blackwood says there’s no time to lose, as other firms try to solve the electronic procurement problems of the millions of firms around the world who don’t have the resources to implement Ariba-size solutions.
“There’s a land grab going on,” he says.

©Adam Gifford 2008

OOXML vote doesn't end standards row

2008-04-17T12:42:00.000+12:00

Published New Zealand Herald, April 16. 2008.

The email from the wine merchant came through late in the evening, including an attachment with a list of the specials in a 24-hour sale.
The document was generated with a new version of Word in Office 2007, which my machine wouldn’t open.
I left it to the morning to hunt around the Internet for a utility to crack the file. I achieved that about the same time a revised list in the old format arrived with an apology – but too late to pick up any of cost price sauvignon blanc I had my eye on.
That’s why there are standards – so developers of software have the specifications to make their products interoperable with others. That’s the theory anyway.
Over the past year a major battle has waged over file formats, the bit of XML code which says how a document produced with one application can be read by another application or on another computing platform.
It’s important not just for documents exchanged today but to ensure documents created in the past can be read decades hence, even if the programs which created them are no longer used.
Two years ago the International Standards Organisation adopted Open Document Format or as the standard for Office documents.
ODF was started at Sun and taken over by a consortium, the Organisation for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), so it represents an open source approach to the problem.
Governments, which are major buyers of information technology, started adopting ODF as the default format for office documents, and many urged Microsoft to bring its future versions into line.
Instead Redmond set out to torpedo ODF, and this month succeeded in a way which critics say severely damages the credibility of the International Standards Organisation.
It gave information on how all the many past versions of formats like Word, Excel and Powerpoint behave to Ecma International, (originally the European Computer Equipment Manufacturers Association) to package up as a proposed standard called Office Open XML file formats.
Ecma, which has liaison status with the ISO and therefore the right to demand a fast track process, delivered up a 6000-page document, which swelled by half again once the comments came in.
OOXML was knocked back last September, but won enough votes last month to become a standard - ISO/IEC DIS 29500.
The voting process drew allegations of committee stuffing and political interference, with many countries with little previous involvement in setting standards turning up with Microsoft staffers or partners in their delegations.
Even before the vote, the European Union, which has fined Microsoft heavily in recent years for anti-competitive behaviour, was investigating how some of its member countries came to their positions.
Despite the use of the word open, OOXML is not open source. Microsoft has waived patent claims for some but not all parts of the specification.
In a detailed analysis, Matthew Cruickshank (Holloway.co.nz), who was on the committee developing this country’s response, argues it is is impossible for vendors other than Microsoft to fully implement the standard, because it is packed with mistakes, undisclosed behaviours and application specific instructions. For example, an command like “autoSpaceLikeWord95” is of little use without the Word 95 source code, which is still a Microsoft secret.
Standards New Zealand says it is not a standard at all. After a rigorous process of consultation, which included input from Microsoft, it concluded there were sufficient stakeholder concerns about technical omissions, errors, inconsistencies in the draft standard, interoperability, and intellectual property to vote against it.
It did want the document published as a Technical Report, which would make the information on Microsoft’s historic file formats available to software developers.
Chief executive Debbie Chin says adoption of the standard is likely to lead to increased costs government agencies, because they may need to provide output documents which can be read in two incompatible formats.
It’s the sort of thing that could come up for agencies with international obligations for customers being able to share documents.
Organisations covered by the Public Records Act also have an interest in ensuring records are preserved in a readable electronic form, and National Archives was represented on the stakeholders committee.
She says New Zealand is keen to be involved in the ongoing process to improve OOXML and harmonise it with ODF.
It may be too late for that. The standards committee responsible for maintaining DIS 29500 has invited Ecma, that is Microsoft and its OOXML development partners, to “attend and fully participate” in its work.
Brett Roberts, Microsoft New Zealand’s national technical officer, says it was a great example of the international standards process at work.
“Standards New Zealand are allowed their viewpoint and opinion, but it’s obvious from the voting results worldwide that they are in a minority. New Zealand was in with Cuba and Venezuela and Iran and Ecuador.”
And Canada. The Standards Council of Canada’s final position statement says “the general quality of the standard was not yet what was expected of an ISO/IEC Standard, and that there were still too many unknowns.”
It also claimed the “inappropriate use of the fast track process … rendered it impossible to ascertain whether in fact 29500 meets the standard of quality and correctness required in an International Standard.”
Roberts says the impact of the new standard on commercial, non public sector organisations will be minimal.
“They always have to make technology choices based on fitness for purpose.
“For software developers, it opens up new opportunities, especially those who sell technology into the public sector, because it is the public sector that tends to look at ISO standardisation, and the fact OOXML is an ISO standard means public sector organisations have an additional option when it comes to file formats,” Roberts says.
Which is what the fuss is about, selling Microsoft to governments.
Lobbying at the ISO session which awarded the standard, former Ecma president Jan van den Beld warned that governments which mandated just one electronic document standard such as ODF may run foul of World Trade Organisation policies that standards are not used as a barrier to trade.

EDS offers Maori scholarship

2008-02-20T10:14:00.000+13:00

Technology StoryRSSFacebook
Making the most of young Maori minds
Page 1 of 2View as a single page5:00AM Tuesday February 12, 2008
By Adam Gifford
When Steve Murray moved from heading Tainui Group Holdings to running New Zealand's largest IT company, EDS, he looked around and didn't see many Maori in his new workplace.

So he's done something about it, setting up a scholarship programme within the company. The plan was for one post-graduate and four undergraduate scholarships but, on launch day, Maori Affairs Minister Parekura Horomia gave matching funding, doubling the places on offer.

The programme is administered through the Maori Education Trust, which has been using bits of private and public funding to put Maori through secondary and tertiary schooling since 1961.

"We take a holistic view of scholarships, so it's not just financial but mentoring and paid holiday work, so that at the end we get well-rounded, talented individuals," Murray says.

Ideally, the scholarship recipients will end up in EDS's large graduate programme.

Murray says they'll be looking for a mix of students doing computer science and technical subjects, business, finance and management.

More...

Entrepreneurship is knowing when to sell

2008-02-20T10:11:00.001+13:00

Published Sunday Herald January 13, 2008

Know yourself. That's about the most fundamental piece of advice serial entrepreneur Tom McKaskill can give people who want to follow in his footsteps.

"Being willing to admit what you don't know and ask for help is really important," says McKaskill, who is now, after building and selling four businesses, the professor of entrepreneurship at Swinburne University in Melbourne.

"You need to understand what your strengths and weaknesses are and understand you cannot build a business without other people. You have to learn to work with other people and in a sense empower other people. You've still got the vision, you've still got the passion, you've still got the energy, but you will not do it by yourself."

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Richard Stratton Teapots

2007-12-03T22:38:00.000+13:00

News Zealand Herald November 29.

WHAT AND WHO: Nurturing Dialectics – A Legation of Teapots by Richard Stratton
WHEN AND WHERE: Anna Miles Gallery, until December 22.

Richard assures me all his teapots can hold tea. “But if you’ve paid $1800 for one, why would you?” he asks.
That makes it clear at the outset his aim is high art, not high tea.
And what teapots they are. Bizarrely shaped, brightly glazed, decorated with drawings and slogans and treated photos, they each promise hours of conversation or reflection.
“It started out as a homage to the humble New Zealand teapot, but that’s long since forgotten,” Stratton says.
“I got a grant from Creative New Zealand to do the research, and the show grew from that.”
The research started in second hand where Stratton bought teapots to pull apart.
That gave him a sense of some of the finer points of spouts and handles, and provided a spring board for his imagination.
As someone who trained in ceramics at the Dunedin Polytechnic art school, and has worked for a spell as a production potter, Stratton has a lot of respect for the challenge of getting teapots to work.
“Even at art school I had a drive to learn technique. I wanted to feel that if all else failed I could get a job making a product if the art didn’t sell,” he says.
So these aren’t those potters’ follies which will never see a leaf, nor the $2 shop atrocities which follow the form but fail the function.
According to the time chart which accompanies the show, Stratton produced his first teapot (“green, thrown and altered, woodfired”) in 1993, his last year at Otago.
The time chart also tracks some of the concerns that go into the work: the history of pottery; the evolution of the teapot; war and peace; obesity, anorexia and famine.
So a pot like Fad or Fact Teapot will include a skinny supermodel next to a starved Biafran (the Nigerian civil war ended in 1970, the year of Stratton’s birth – the next entry on the timeline is the birth of Kate Moss in 1974).
The idea of evolution is a natural for ceramics. Charles Darwin, born 1808, was a grandson of Josiah Wedgwood.
Nurturing Dialectics falls into distinct groups. Some relate to family history and relationships, others offer commentary on different ideals of beauty. There are Feast teapots and Famine teapots.
Historic elements inform the pots. The Feast pots are based on early English designs, incorporating the scroll handles of Wedgwood creamware, or the reeded double intertwined handles and fluted spout of Leeds pottery.
Other pots use the handle and spout developed in 1960 for the Tower Brite anodised teapot, the sort of pot the Stratton family would have used growing up in Dunedin when they might had broken up a shopping trip in town by nipping in to Woolworths to “have a pot of tea”.
Stratton says for the Feast set he also tried to go back to the colour range of the early ceramics.
“I wanted this specific yellow, so I found I had to change the clay body. When I did the oxide tests of the underglaze, I found I had to go back to older china paints as well.”
There are weeks of modelling, decorating and multiple glazing in each pot.
Some of the designs are worked up on computer and then transferred using a modified photocopying technique – “poor man’s litho,” Stratton calls it.
In others he has used gone for the a sgraffito technique of German expressionist woodcuts or Edward Gorey fables, as revived by some of the RAW artists who pushed the limits of comic art during the 1980s.
“What I put on them is just images. It’s up to individuals to work it out,” Stratton says.
While he doesn’t expect to make such a lot of teapots again, “they’re not out of my system yet.
“I enjoy making them, but do people still use them? Maybe I should be making soy latte cups.”
But it’s not about craft or function. Ceramics has transcended such humble origins, as Turner Prize winner Grayson Perry showed.
Tea and the teapot has become such a rich brew in the English language, describing social niceties and plain hospitality. “I didn’t even get offered a cup of tea,” is one of the worst things one can say of a host.
Stratton’s timeline misses one of the most important dates in the history of tea – 1865, the first publication of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which featured a tea part where his pots would have been right at home.

Zealous embroiderer draws the art into craft

2007-11-29T08:08:00.000+13:00

Published NZ Herald November 01, 2007 

Sandra Bushby opens a box of embroidery. There is her mother's work, tightly stitched, immaculately finished front and back; pieces by her grandmother, looser, freer, on ageing linen; and the scarf her grandfather stitched in Cairo in 1916, bright threads on black silk drawing out words, flags and an animated lion.

Bushby's own embroidery is on the walls at the Anna Miles Gallery - an ancient craft technique pressed into the service of art.
She started as a painter, after training at Canterbury University's Ilam Art School, then taught secondary school for 12 years. She abandoned that to make art full time, or as full time as the mother of a young child can manage.

"I was wanting to make art and looking for fresh ways, mediums, materials," she says.

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A little miracle

2007-11-25T15:44:00.001+13:00

NZ Herald, Thursday November 22, 2007

What: Small Wonders
Where and when: Objectspace, 8 Ponsonby Rd, to Dec 22

Shows don't just happen. There have to be people willing and able to come up with ideas and bring them to fruition on the gallery walls or floor.

To increase the pool of people who could curate shows around the areas of applied art and design, Objectspace this year pulled together a group interested in handmade pieces.

Fortnightly sessions were held to talk about and look at the process of making exhibitions. The immediate outcome is Small Wonders, at the Ponsonby Rd gallery, on the theme of the miniature. That brief was interpreted in diverse ways by the participants, making for an intriguing show. Some asked makers to create new objects around a theme. Others plundered existing collections for works that illustrate the largeness of thinking small.

More...

Technology Innovation Network 100 Exporters

2007-11-19T12:56:00.000+13:00

Zero to 100 in 20 years and the future is yours
Wednesday November 14, 2007

Ignore the biotech hype. Say no to nano. Look for a career with companies that manufacture smart stuff intelligently and sell it overseas.

That seems to be a conclusion to be drawn from the Technology Investment Network's third annual survey of the 100 top technology exporters.

High-tech manufacturing accounts for half the list and 72 per cent of the $5.8 billion in revenues the TIN 100 generated last year.

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Collaboration online tools developing

2007-09-27T12:01:00.000+12:00

Published NZ Herald September 19

The promise of online collaboration on the internet should help teams or groups of people work faster, more efficiently and more creatively without having to be in the same place.

The reality is that a lot of the tools and processes supposed to achieve that haven't really worked.

So what has worked?

"Email has won. You have to use email," says Dan Randow of Christchurch company OnlineGroups.net.

However, email isn't so good for many-to-many communication.

Randow believes what's needed is email list servers with really good web interfaces.

Google Groups and Yahoo! Groups offer list servers but they brand them and set the rules, and use the interface to deliver content for their real customers - the advertisers.

The software is free but users can't build their own branded site with it.

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Field series

2007-09-27T11:58:00.000+12:00

Published NZ Herald September 6
What: Field Series: New Works, by Mike Petre
Where and when: McPherson Gallery, 14 Vulcan Lane, to September 15

Alot of farming is about looking. Standing by the fence looking at the paddock, checking there is nothing out of the ordinary, getting a sense of the health and heft of the beasts.

Mike Petre brings that observational experience to his painting, now on show in the heart of downtown Auckland.

Raised on a farm west of Piopio in the King Country, Petre has been around animals all his life. "Working them, farming them, butchering them. I carried on from there."

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After Action for Another Library

2007-09-27T11:55:00.000+12:00

Published NZ Herald September 27

Indonesian troops in East Timor set fire to all books including private collections as they left in 1999. Photo / Reuters
When the Indonesian Army left East Timor after its people voted for independence, it burned every book it could find. Not just the books in public and university libraries but the bookshelves of private individuals were dragged on to the street and burned.

As an activist who had joined an East Timor solidarity group while studying at the Drawing College of Arts in Melbourne, Tom Nicholson was asked by friends in Dili for books in English to replace those lost.

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Maori Trustee to get independence

2007-08-24T23:25:00.000+12:00

The Government wants to turn the Maori Trust Office into a stand alone organisation, separate from Te Puni Kokiri.

It's seeking feedback on the plans, which will require new funding arrangements between the Maori Trustee and the Crown.

In his latest 2006 report, Maori trustee John Paki said he was acting as trustee or agent for 186,000 owners of more than 2000 properties, covering 100,000 hectares.

While the post is statutorily independent, the post has always been filled by someone from the Maori affairs department, and the office is staffed through Te Puni Kokiri.

There will be no changes to the trustee’s duties, but in future he will directly employ staff and the office will no longer be part of the public service.

The trustee will also start paying interest on his Common Fund, with is money held on behalf of owners.

In the year ending March 2006 there was $38 million in the Common Fund and $60 million in the General Fund, which represents a century of retained earnings and investments.

WHANGANUI POROPORAKI FOR CHAS POYNTER

Whanganui Maori this afternoon had their own send-off to former mayor Chas Poynter.

The iwi was invited by the family to the funeral home to poroporoaki the man who headed the council during the long-running Moutoa Gardens occupation.

Mr Poynter's funeral is tomorrow.

Putiki Marae chairperson Hone Tamehana says their feelings for the former mayor have nothing to do with their objections to a proposal by current mayor Michael Laws to rename a road after Mr Poynter.

“We do have a lot of fond memories with Chas, and more importantly, we’ve had special events on the mare here at Putiki. Chas has always been invited and he’s always attended. The unfortunate thing with this current mayor, we’ve always extended the hand of manaakitanga to him. He hasn’t replied in a way that he would actually be forthcoming to actually participate,” Mr Tamehana says.

The road at Putiki that Mr Laws wants to change was named after Wikitoria, the daughter of premier 19th century Whanganui chief Te Rangihiwinui Keepa.

NEW WARRIORS SIGNING HAS BIG FUTURE

The new coach of the New Zealand Rugby League team predicts an exciting future for young Maori prop Sam Rapira.

The Waikato-raised Warrior has signed a deal with the club that will keep in Auckland until 2012.

Gary Kemble says Rapira, a former junior Kiwi captain, is benefiting from playing alongside experienced internationals Steve Price and Reuben Wiki.
The 20 year old will be in the thick of the action, when the Warriors take on the high flying Manly Sea Eagles at Mt Smart on Sunday.

“He's learning a lot off Price and Reuben, and that’s great. For a young man he’s doing great stuff and he’s going to be round a long long time and I think he’s going to be one of the best we’ve seen once he matures and gets right into it and takes responsibility,” Mr Kemble says.

A win will guarantee the Warriors a spot in the top eight for the playoffs.

KAUPAPA DRIVEN SEX EDUCATION A SUCCESS

The Education Review Office wants to see a greater Maori dimension in sex education.

A new study of 100 schools found the majority are not meeting the needs of Maori students.

The subject was made compulsory for year seven to 10 pupils in 2001 because of concerns over New Zealand's high teen pregnancy rate and rates of sexually transmitted infections.

Chief review officer Graham Stoop says too many schools took a one size fits all approach to the issue.

He says the most successful programmes for Maori students were where Maori kaupapa-driven organisations were brought in to help.

“When that has happened, Maori students have been far more engaged than when it didn’t, so that’s one really practical good example that we give in our report. Another one we give is where Maori are brought in for hui and meetings and conferences so that their perspectives can be brought to bear on this,” Mr Stoop says.

Only 17 of the 100 schools had good monitoring of pupils' progress.

HAPU DETERMINED TO STICK OUT WINDFARM FIGHT

Ngati Kahungunu isn't letting up on its resistance to a Hawkes Bay windfarm despite its foe just getting a lot bigger.

Genesis Energy has joined Unison & Roaring 40s’ in a venture to build a 34-turbine windfarm on the Te Waka Range beside the Napier Taupo Road.

The Environment Court has already knocked back a 37-turbine farm for the site, because of its impact on the environment ... and on Maori spiritual values.

Bevan Taylor from the Mangahaururu Tangitu Society says the involvement of the State Owned Enterprise will make the fight tougher.

“You've got two powerful groups forming together an alliance and it just makes it, if we’re looking at resources, tough for our hapu eh,” he says.

Mr Taylor says the hapu will repeat its objections to the resource consent hearing next month.

TA MOKO AWARENESS RISING

One of the country's foremost ta moko artists is noticing major changes in people's acceptance of tattoos.

Gordon Toi's designs adorn the skin of many Maori, as well as hundreds of Dutch people, where he works for a couple of months each year.

He says in both Aotearoa and Amsterdam his clients have become more aware of the significance of ta moko and what the designs mean.

“I can still remember a time where people would want it but were afraid to even almost talk about it but now days people are quite confident about what they want and why they want it and where they want it,” Mr Toi says.

He will talk about ta moko at the Auckland Central Library on Monday, as part of the programme around the library's three-month Hokianga exhibition.

Vanishing into the landscape

2007-08-24T11:20:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald August 23

Polixeni Papapetrou and Valerie Sparks at Roger Williams Contemporary, 61 Randolph St, Newton, to Sep 13

Photography has given artists powerful technology to explore their ideas.

The challenge is to measure the result of its success in conveying the ideas, rather than being an artefact of the production process.

Two Melbourne artists who go beyond the technology are sharing space at Roger Williams Contemporary Gallery off Upper Queen St.

Polixeni Papapetrou shows several works from her Haunted Country series, which use stories of lost children to explore the relationship Australians have with their landscape.

Maorigami at Whitespace

2007-07-22T18:44:00.000+12:00

Published NZ Herald July 19

Maorigami by James Ormsby
Whitespace, 12 Crummer Rd, until July 28
By Adam Gifford
Under the veranda of the house at the Navy marae in Devonport the kowhaiwhai conform to the traditional rafter patterns published by Augustus Hamilton in 1901.
Inside the whare it’s another story. The Douglas pine boards display a wealth of invention, with spirals giving way to geometric shapes, star clusters, and figurative embellishments giving clues to the tribal areas they represent.
They were painted several years ago by James Ormsby, who was then part of the team from Te Wananga o Aotearoa which built the house.
Ormsby has continued his explorations of the form, with the latest instalment on display at Whitespace.
Of Maniapoto, Waikato, Ngati Pikiao and Scottish descent, Ormsby wasn’t raised around traditional Maori culture.
Born in Hamilton in 1957, he lit out for Melbourne when he was 19, studying and teaching there as well as working as an industrial illustrator, drawing sketches of machines for instruction manuals.
He returned in the mid ‘90s to help Buck Nin set up the wananga’s art course “when it was still a tin shed on a car park at Te Awamutu”.
Ormsby wears with pride a description artist Selwyn Muru gave to him and other artists who trained outside the traditional system - Ngati Whiriki.
“It means those who come from outside, the freaks from outside. I liked that idea.
“You have your carvers and weavers, and then you have those who come in from outside and add another colour. It may be the wrong colour, but it kicks up the dust.”
Which brings us back to kowhaiwai and its relationship to origami.
“Maori art is a more than the spiral,” says Ormsby.
He tried to open up his students by taking them to the Alexander Turnbull Library and showing them unpublished sketchbooks of designs collected from around the country, so they could see how it was more than the limited range collected by Hamilton.
“Kowhaiwhai is more than sign and symbol, more than geometric analysis, slip rotation, symmetry and the rest. There was probably some ethno-mathematics going on as well,” Ormsby says.
“I read that NASA was trying to figure out how astronauts could navigate in space if their electronics broke, and they were thinking about three dimensional star maps using folding maps.
“I then thought about Maorigami, putting kowhaiwhi into three or four dimensions.
“It’s a theory. The more I do it, the more I think I’m completely wrong, but you have to have a go.”
The Maorigami works are small works on paper, depicting quirky folded paper structures covered in kowhaiwhai patterns.
In many, the fine brushworks is contrasted with expressionist calligraphic swipes with a larger brush.
Ormsby has piles of failed attempts littering the studio.
“I spent a day or two outlining, thinking exactly where to put the marks and get the structure right, and then I got out the pot of paint and the floppy brush and thought, ‘I can stuff this up in two seconds.’
“I found myself under that pressure, so from some innate sense I started to clap and walk around, thinking ‘there’s some Max Gimblett going on here”, and then went back and slapped it on.
“Then looking later at Shinto religion, they do a lot of clapping and ceremonial chanting with the Zen paper as well, and I love those strange coincidences of knowing things before you know them.”
He was also attracted to the Shinto respect for paper, including the notion that paper has a wairua or spirit of its own.
“I realised the ‘gami’ in origami is pronounced the same a kami, which refers to a god. I love that conscious/subconscious thing.”
“I like the idea of pushing new materials and negative space in front of Maori, who are prone to over-accessorise.”
He cites the carving Uenuku held at the Te Awamutu Museum, one of the standout pieces in the Te Maori exhibition.
“The old stick is so minimal, it’s pure form, not embellished in any way. I love that style.”
I mention a canoe sternpost in the Waikato Museum, a minimal board with a few flecks dug in to it.
“I’ve drawn that taurapa again and again,” Ormsby says.
Drawing is an essential part of Ormsby’s practice. He even had a life drawing session because coming up to Auckland to do the cleaning and restoration work on the navy marae.
“It puts you in the ‘no bullshit zone,’” he says.
The Whitespace exhibition also includes some larger works on paper which are homages to the korowai or cloak drawings of the late John Bevan Ford.
“I’m not trying to mimic the master,” says Ormsby, who rates Ford as a friend and mentor.
Indeed, the works include elements of quirky humour and startling juxtapositions.
“I like the idea of working on a large scale on paper, the idea of big yet fragile.”
Ormsby quit teaching last year to work full time as an artist.
“I’m 50 now. I’ve mucked around long enough, so I’m finally doing it, and I’m just loving it,” he says.

Not the New Zealand Pavillion at Venice

2007-07-04T22:55:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald, July 4

On the eve of the opening of their collaborative multi-media sculptural installation, Brett Graham and Rachael Rakena went shopping in the Venice fish market. Their raw fish and other kaimoana, washed down with a sponsor's wine, provided a taste of home for the few New Zealanders who made it to the contribution from this country to the world's largest and most important art event, the Venice Biennale.

Note "contribution from". Officially there is no New Zealand contribution. Perhaps burned by the negative reaction back home to et al/Merilyn Tweedie's piece in the last biennale, Creative New Zealand opted to sit this one out. Read more...

Mobile pricing fixed by ministerial fiat

2007-07-03T12:16:00.000+12:00

NZ Herald, Wednesday June 27, 2007

It may be time to fix your mobile phone costs for the next five years.

"Ridiculous," you say.

"No one would offer a deal like that, and I'd be a mug to take it."

Moore's Law, which says the capacity of silicon chips doubles every 18 months and the price halves, and Metcalfe's law, which gives a handy reckoning of the value of networks, would seem to indicate committing yourself to a technology spend five years out is folly.

But in the looking glass world of New Zealand telecommunications, the Five Year Plan has made a dramatic resurgence.