Blender was one of the forty or so projects that were exhibiting at the Linux.conf.au open day, held at the University of New South Wales in a nice glass covered pavilion in a courtyard. With me was Hassan, a Blender user and BlenderNation reader who very kindly offered to help out on the day, and also fellow ex-Elephants Dream artist Lee, who made the trip up from Adelaide.

Armed with a Blender-logo-on-white cube for signage that I’d fashioned out of pasteboard that morning, we had two of our laptops out on the desk, which was quite popular, being the foremost one in the pavilion that everyone saw as they were entering. There was always a small crowd gathered around watching Elephants Dream on repeat play, which many of them had seen before or heard of, and a few gleefully trying out the upcoming Sculpt Mode, by defacing a work-in-progress head model of mine.

The day was lots of fun, and according to the official stats, over 700 people came along, with about 400 attendees from the general public (i.e. who weren’t already at the conference), ranging from little kids to grandparents. We chatted with a few interesting people throughout the day, including someone that Lee and Hassan talked with from the National Gallery of Victoria, who was interested in using Blender for their new media productions. Unfortunately I had to leave early, but Lee and Hassan stayed around until the end, running into blenderartists.org member ‘jumpy-monkey’ who also dropped by.

All in all it was a fun day, if only just to hang out with a couple of other blenderheads. Sydney’s a big city, but I’m not really aware of many Blender users that are living around here (though I suspect there are plenty more in hiding). Perhaps we’ll have to organise more events in the forms of social gatherings or a revived Australian Blender mini-conf to draw you all out of the woodwork!

The timetable looks like this:
9am: Furniture layout and check of electricity - Open Day organisers only
12pm - 2pm: setup for Open Day. If you need more than 2 hours to setup, please let me know.
3pm: Open Day starts
6pm: Food is served - one pie and drink per person (and extra for sale)
7pm: Prizes, announcements, some last talks
8pm: Open Day close

If anyone can help, that would be really great, so please get in touch with me (email: ) ASAP in order to work things out. Thanks!

Nothing like a nice, fresh, only-just-slightly-different design to usher in the new year.

As an example, a paintbrush is a tool that’s simple in construction, but can be used in a multitude of ways, to create a multitude of results. However these techniques and resultant effects are not necessarily designed from the outset. They are not necessarily results of conscious choices made during the creation of the tool, they are results of the brush’s innate being, that are intuitively discovered or learnt by the artist by experience or experimentation, not by remembering formulas or keystrokes, or reading technical references.

I’d be confident in presuming brushes weren’t originally designed with the explicit thoughts “we will give it a feature to be able to be impressed, or used with too little ink, or to be thrown or flicked, or used with the opposite end”. These are uses that come from outside the tool itself, from people using it and taking advantage of (abusing?) the form that it has.

How can this simplicity yet potential for complex creation be realised in software? Software is programmed, and often it’s a case of if one wants a certain function, that functionality is programmed directly, and access to it given through some kind of direct command, button, gesture, or action taken from a range of choices. How can we make more ‘analogue’ software tools that ‘just are’? How can we make tools that can be used in different ways by virtue of what they are, with simplicity that we can use for expression in subtle, yet complex ways? Or further still, can we do this with something unique to the digital environment, and not a remediation or simulation of existing tools?