MONA. Just to say the name is a gasp and a groan of pleasure. Mooooooonnnaaaaaaaaa. It’s hard to know what MONA is before stepping through the door. All you hear beforehand is whispered excitement from somebody who’s been, or who know somebody who’s been, and it builds a wave of curiosity that starts at the back of the brain where it nags and nibbles and pokes with insistent glee. The website and marketing material reveal little, creating mystery and intrigue and utter, unbridled frustration. It all involves a leap of faith, into the wilderness and the distinctly non-cosmopolitan southern-most state of Tasmania, where fast-paced lifestyle generally goes to have a rest.

Words fail to explain MONA. It’s a place to experience with all the senses, but struggles to be definable. You can hear it, see it, smell it (in certain places, a distinctly olfactory smell), touch it, taste it. The building itself, and the artery lines of the the personalised iPod information guides (The O), are just as much a part of the experience as the creative works. It offers total, all-encompassing sensory participation, and you almost skip from Fish in Bowl With Knife through to the heart-beat rhythms of steampunk Victorian globes leading a path across the ceiling. You’ve entered the Chocolate Factory and as you descend through Basement Levels 1, 2 and 3, you start to see potential in everything that’s ever been encountered in life.

Hobart remains a sleepy little town, but MONA brings a bright shining star to guide people to it. What groups where involved in making this happen? Why did this project fulfill so much potential where so many other projects only seem half alive? Someone was reaching for the stars and they grabbed one from the sky, with work and passion, and drive. And a decadent, unseemly, sophisticated star it was, to corrupt us into a rejection of convention like the serpent with the apple. Perhaps a bold claim for a venue which houses a room with 30 television screens, each with a Madonna fan singing The Immaculate Collection off-key. We’re a strange bunch, us humans are. Isn’t it great?

Given the pure variety and volume of interaction we experience on a daily level, the high hit-rate of miscommunication is somewhat staggering. We go through our lives never fully understanding one another. And sometimes no amount of words can come close to bridging that gap. Many misunderstandings are inconsequential. Not enough information: “Where were we meeting?” Others can span the entire length of a conversation, with each party making vasty different references the entire way through without ever fully converging into a seamless, cohesive exchange (and it can be one of the most tortuously awkward experiences).

A question raised in the recent Geek Girl Dinner meet-up: how long will existing marketing models exist within a community which has increasing control over what information it accesses and when? And how much value does demographic data have in shaping a campaign to target specific social groups, and the individual within them? We [@GGDMelb] are a generation of 20-somethings with an intricate understanding of advertising manipulation, with effective filtering tools for what we view as white noise. And despite certain things in common, we all have vastly different tastes. The question is; how does anyone communicate with us at all, unless we specifically invite them in? Suddenly opposing views are no longer relevant because they are no longer acknowledged. It becomes a dangerous situation where communities can absorb niche to such a fine degree that the greater world disappears.

So, if people can’t understand each other, how does an organisation, with potentially divergent internal views, communication effectively with its audience comprised of people with conflicting tastes, opinions and pasts? From a business environment, the ultimate goal is the same as in personal life; honesty. Communicate what you want to say, not what people want to hear. You can never make everyone happy, and by trying to anticipate what may be the ultimate winning card to success you lose your most valuable asset, and that’s your own uniqueness. Fuck the people who aren’t going to understand you, because they never will.

For the layman, Roller Derby is a sport with women on roller skates trying to a) earn points by lapping the other team while b) trying to prevent the other team from earning points. There’s more too it than that, but the strict details of fouls and such aren’t adequately explained over the distributed jumble of words from the speaker system, so really, make up your own rules from the benches. Or behind the suicide line if you don’t mind a derby girl falling on you.

Every woman who gets a glimpse of derby contemplates joining the next Fresh Meat intake, as derby is an open sport as long as you can commit the hours. Many of us, however, only get as far as hypothesising what our derby names should be. It’s almost a Rite of Passage in our modern world. We’ll look back in 15 years time as comedians make lame retro jokes and we’ll sigh with nostalgia.

It’s the VRDL Grand Final on the weekend. They’ve bumped up to a larger venue of 3000 and it looks set to sell out. For a player-run league only a few years old, that’s not bad at all.

If you see Moldy Locks, come say hi. GO TOXICS!!

For designers, this represents an astonishing opportunity for coverage and distribution of their artwork. The Adelaide Fringe Festival is the largest Fringe in the southern hemisphere, and second largest in the world after the mammoth that is Edinburgh Fringe. In 2009, the festival was able to report in excess of one million attendances across paid and free events. And almost every one of those people would have seen branding in one form or another; a program, a poster, postcards, outdoor banners, staff in t-shirts, advertising in print, coasters, stubbie holders, SOMETHING with the Fringe design. The city of Adelaide becomes one big Fringe party for the summer. To be the person to have supplied the design is like a gigantic business card hovering in the sky above the city, blocking out the sun.

And it the spirit of the Fringe, a festival defined by artists and producers making their own work and finding their own crowds, the doors are left open for someone unknown and random to bring the artwork that will be the public face of the festival.

The competition is themed each year, 2011 bringing the ‘King and Queen of the Fringe’. When the call for artwork opens, the rush towards Fringe begins to quicken. Poster call, artist registrations, forums and seminars, staff recruitment, all flow towards a quickening tempo. The poster announcement (released this year on 4 November) really kicks the game into the air, and suddenly everyone’s aware that we’re approaching Fringe time again. From a pragmatic point of view, it’s an extremely effective buzz tool, three and a half months out from the festival itself. The festival doesn’t need to be constantly in the media or across the public’s eye, but from this moment onward the new campaign can seep subtlety into the community brain, and when the program kicks off in January then the festival is already ahead in the game.

The theme of a festival is almost arbitrary, as each person brings their own perspective to the mix and no two festival experiences will match. Fringe means celebration and creation, and those hints appear across much of the artwork from the last few years. However, there are a number of issues with the theme for next year’s festival ‘King and Queen of the Fringe’.

• An ingrained bias towards traditional gender pairings, which seems utterly contradictory to the Fringe spirit. King and Queen can be interpreted in many ways (Drag King/Queen, half King/half Queen), but ultimately a conventional impression won out in the end.

• Less about expression as socialisation, which may or may not be a flaw depending on how your festival experience is defined. The media is already geared towards mandatory coupling within social groups; it would be nice for Fringe not to embrace this.

• Embedded hierarchical dynamics, reenforcing a perceived elitism within certain artistic arenas. ‘My art is better than your art’, so says our band of merry followers.

Of course, for all its flaws, the theme does embrace a theatricality of adventure, of costume and revelry, and you can close your eyes and imagine the crowds swarming with royal personages and monstrosities.

The winning design itself, by Belgium designer Kamen Gorano, shows the intwined arms of tentacle girl and muscle man, formed using mixed media and splatters of spray painted colour/darkness. It’s very bright and Fringey, and utterly predictable. It is a friendly image; fun, playful, and it does make you smile. But it doesn’t make you wonder. There’s no aspiration; no challenge. The two characters are ineffectual figureheads out to amuse themselves, as royalty is often imagined to be.

But as a branded design, it holds your attention. It makes you double-look. What are they up to, those crazy kids?

And it’s a fine looking app. No matter what anyone might say, the small screen capacity of the iPhone essentially makes it a visual, rather than written, communication tool. The Thousands app uses bright colour to break down each menu section, and the uncomplicated use of bold colour equals straight-forward usability. Simple to use even when drunk. There are a few colour coding mismatches (the What > Out section, in orange, and the When section, in yellow, both display events for the day and coming week) so an eye for consistency might be called for in the next update.

The content structure and formatting are also uncomplicated; unfortunately this works less well when it comes to functionality. It’s almost so simplistic as to be limiting. The structure is laid out as a basic content tree; you click through to city, then continually through a range of selections to narrow to pre-determined categories. The problem with this is that you’re bound by what someone else has chosen within a particular category (the categories themselves are so specific to an elite demographic as to be alienating; high on Art, Fashion and Vintage – the very idea of a Concept store makes the eyes roll). The lack of a search function is glaring.

The location features are the highlight, providing both a map function (Near Me) to pin-point establishments in the users current location, and breakdown of businesses by suburb. Be mindful though, when browsing a category no ordering system seems to exist, so if you’re looking at a highly-populated category (Melbourne for example, or the Eatdrink category in the What section), listings can exceed 100 and are provided seemingly in random (though possibly in the order they were added to the database). Alphabetical would be the obvious choice, by eh.

The Thousands app is obviously still in its early stages. Certain categories are low in content. The When section is surprisingly empty in Three Thousand given that Melbourne is an event-whore of a city, (Ed: I love you Melbourne). A category for Books & Mags lacks listings for Brunswick Bound, Polyester Books and Minotaur (though includes Comics R Us, huh?). Content is the most time consuming element of any project and updates do seem to be coming through so listings should continue to evolve.

What would have been nice in the app is an iPhone friendly version of the newsletters, with archive available.  There’s also no interactivity (Twitter dude, Twitter) which is puzzling given The Thousands audience is typically young, internet savvy, and really like to tell their friends about cool new things that no-one else knows about yet. Ultimately it’s an app which looks mighty fine but is, well, unimaginative.

Disclaimer: I work for a company that offers festival apps, so my opinion is biased and CAN’T BE TRUSTED.

A few tips for the upcoming Melbourne Fringe Festival:

1. Glance through only first time in. The design of the program aims to sell the overall experience. Does it feel right? It might not. For example, the Next Wave festival, dedicated to multi-media artwork by young Victorians under 25, was held earlier this year. The design of the program very much represented the age group of the festival focus – a bit clumsy while trying to be ambitious. The event descriptions themselves proved largely incomprehensible. The festival radiated itself as only for an audience already within the emerging art community; those who want to create but haven’t yet developed their craft. As well as their family and friends.

2. Second time around give yourself at least half an hour. You’re not reading the program cover to cover – you’re scanning each session and looking for images/keywords to grab your attention. Circle. Go through the program once then go get a snack.

3. Okay, now it’s time to get a bit serious. You have your round one of selection. You have to decide how many shows you’d like to see, what dates, and who you want to come with you. Let’s face it, there’s a bit of scheduling involved. Ask yourself some questions. Is price a defining factor? Hub events offer 2-for-1 tickets, and most shows offer a Tight Arse Tuesday price to get people in on typically quiet days. Fridays and Saturday are always the busiest days of the week so plan early. Do you want to see something close to home or work? The new Fringe iPhone app provides a break down of shows by suburb. It’s also a lovely lovely app. (Declaration of extreme bias: I do work for the company which designed the app).

4. Buying your tickets. If there’s something you REALLY want to see; book early. Dude, no joke. Online ticketing is your friend. If you’re up for a casual experience, head down to the Hub venues in North Melbourne and take a punt. You are taking a bit of a chance, but that’s part of the fun. Even if you don’t end up liking the show, just think of the conversation piece it will make.

5. Let yourself be swayed by recommendations and random suggestions. Say ‘why yes, I would like a flier for your show’. Melbourne Fringe is the opportunity to see something you’ve never seen before; attend at least one show you didn’t pick yourself.

6. Finally, go to the Festival Club. This is the beating, bloody heart of the festival. The Fringe Club is free; there’s sometimes dancing, sometimes talks, often performances, and always something to drink.

Random musing: It feels like there are fewer shows in the Fringe program this year, though this could be a result of the larger canvas of the printed version (many shows but spread out across the plain). As long as their are good shows, the sheer quantity shouldn’t be a defining factor. Yes, it’s lovely for artists, new and established, to be invested in making art and challenging audiences. Even when the quality of a show is suspect, you have to appreciate the commitment and daring involved. But a bit of consideration never goes astray and a well-crafted, thoughtful work has a longer impact then someone just having a punt. Hopefully there are artists who didn’t think the timing was right in 2010, but are laying plans for the future.

And finally, my shortlist. I haven’t gotten to scheduling yet. My friends, let me know what you’d like to see.

The Lost Story of Magdalen Asylum, 10 September – 2 October (Abbotsford)

Chose Rong Again – The Musical, 22-25 September (Fitzroy)

I Love That You Forgot, 22-26 September (Fitzroy)

DownPour, 23 September – 6 October (Prahran)

A Study in Scarlet (A Study of…), 24 September – 1 October (Fringe Hub)

The Hermitude of Angus, Ectastic, 24 September – 9 October (Fringe Hub)

Big Shoes to Fill, 24 September – 9 October (Fringe Hub)

Fin, 24 September – 9 October, $18 (Fringe Hub)

The Omega Quest, 24 September – 9 October (Fringe Hub)

Elle Danse, 25 September – 9 October (Fitzroy)

SPRUIK, Sun 26 September, FREE (Fringe Hub)

Paper Theatre, 28 September – 10 October, FREE (Nth Melbourne)

Kitty Bang, 28 September – 7 October (Melbourne)

Women of Letters, Tues 28 September, FREE (Fringe Hub)

Postcards From The Abyss, 30 September – 3 October (Fitzroy)

Fringe Fair Day, Sat 2 October, FREE (Newport)

For Whom The Bell Tolls, 2 – 9 October (Fringe Hub)

Mothlight, 2-9 October (Fringe Hub)

Andrew McClelland – Truth Be Told, 2-9 October (Fringe Hub)

Fan Tales, Sun 3 October (Fitzroy)

Arcadiance – Sun 3 October (Northcote)

Hair Removal The Musical, 5-10 October (Carlton)

Melbourne Fringe Disability Action Plan, Wed 6 October, FREE (Fringe Hub)

Good Clean Fun, 6-9 October (Fitzroy)

Porcelain Punch, 7-10 October (Fringe Hub)

Clockwork Butterfly, Sat 9 October (Thornbury)

Update: Late addition - KAPOW! 29 September – 2 October (South Melbourne)

If the Melbourne Writers Festival can dress volunteers in red berets, two years in a row thank you, then I can totally justify glow-in-the-dark lanyards.

Craft and sustainability are both buzzing. Of course sustainability is a noble aspiration, but it also smacks of marketability. For sustainability to have a long-lasting environmental impact, to create viable long-term change, it needs to happen on a mass scale. This trend of artisans using recycled, non-industrial materials, with a sustainable sticker attached, for a relatively small output feels just like those kids on the street who protest through megaphones, who you can’t understand. It makes them feel better, but doesn’t affect any tangible change. It’s a training ground for them to want change but not know how to make it happen. One day though, you hope they’ll have a bigger impact.

I’m with these science fiction writers, with the desire to be surrounded by books and windows, with a big desk in front, and, you know, maybe a dog. Writing’s a solitary task; it’s nice to have contact with life every now and then. But in reality it doesn’t turn out like that. Sure, I’m surrounded by books. Not quite as much natural sunlight as I’d like, but a little. A plain but hardy desk, including, for the very first time in my personal life, an actual filing system. No dog, and it pains me so. I have these things (or aspire to have them, floppy-eared dog of my future), but generally home is a place that I find hard to work in. Too many books proclaiming, ‘You’ve had me a year already. Come on. Read meeeee!’ Instead I go to the library with a laptop, some free wireless, and less life-shaped baggage pulling me in unwanted directions. There are books, but they’re not my books, so it’s more like a silent crowd in the other room. If they don’t bother me then we’ll get along fine.

So we get to the audience participation bit of our tour. Tell me about the spaces you work in. Study. Backyard. Library. Warehouse. What circumstances do you need and what gets in the way?

And, it’s not quite on theme, but look at Neil Gaiman’s library. My heart beats a twinkle faster every time I see it.

To say street art is a bit of a craze would be an understatement. Melbourne’s a city that breeds DIY art (and so many art festivals that you might choke one day if you don’t take time to breathe in the middle). So the idea that visual artists in this city have spilled from the inside of building to the outside doesn’t feel like much of a stretch. A blank wall is a blank wall, after all, and ones on the outside do have the undeniable feel of potential.

Anyway. I wasn’t planning a rant on street art. I’ve been planning to get a tattoo for a while. What always holds me back is the utter fastidiousness that hits me when decisions seem final. Most choices we face branch into other choices; a growing tree of potential. You take a wrong path, you can always choose another way. Tattoos feel final. Like they have to represent Always and Forever. I’ve been contrasting this with street art. Street art is the essence of impermanence. It is constantly mutable and erasable. New art takes over the canvas and suddenly there’s a whole new story mixed in with the old one. Somehow I think the two can work together. I just have to find a way.

In the meantime, I’ll wander the streets, staring at walls, and occasionally muttering to myself. I’m just contemplating the fluidity of life, okay!