Tag: craft

  • The Spotify playlist

    This week’s Spotify playlist features, as always, audio that relates to the articles on the blog. In addition there are some extras, it being the festive season for many across the world. To listen to the playlist click on the player above or go to Spotify on the Web or in the app and search…

  • Shooting fashion in a slum

    In November this year, an NGO in India released an Instagram video of a fashion shoot with a difference. For 41% of India’s urban population “home” is a slum. (A slum is defined by the World Bank as a group of individual people who live under one roof and lack one or more of the…

  • Studio update

    The new studio is being prepared to begin opening up in mid-January. With newly-painted floors and rugs down, the space is looking bright and cheery. There is an exhibition of two garments at the moment in the window – a Japanese haori and a black boxy jacket, both of which are attracting passersby. There is…

  • What’s on Spotify this week

    This playlist features: Songlines by Nyoongi and Rüdiger Oppermann Australia meets Europe in Songlines, a piece that combines plucked strings with didgeridoo. Songlines are the walking music that Aboriginal people memorise to travel safely and to pass on ancestral routes. In a Landscape by John Cage, performed by Alexei Lubimov American composer, John Cage, is…

  • Baboon

    Baboons, those Bad Boys of the Old World, have a reputation… Wily, cunning, vicious… these are all words that are used to describe our primate cousins. Baboons are seen as pests because they plunder houses, and farms, and take food right out of tourists’ hands. They roam freely, seemingly wherever they want. After all who…

  • The Spotify playlist

    Each week a playlist of audio is created to go along with the blog. The playlist, on the Spotify platform, is made up of songs and sounds that have some relevance to the blog. For those with a paid subscription to Spotify the music will play uninterrupted, either on the player above or in the…

  • Iconic Australian design

    In the 1980s and ’90s, jumpers in Australia became startling. Beginning with Coogi, a fashion label first established in Melbourne under the name Cuggi, the bright colours and bold patterning of these sweaters took the entertainment world by storm with The Notorious B.I.G. (Biggie Smalls) name-checking them in his lyrics and sporting the look. Coogi style…

  • How Typing Affected Nietzsche’s Consciousness

    This article on the MIT Press Reader describes how it appears the act of typing affected the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche’s thinking. When Nietzsche bought a typewriter he noticed that his writing changed, as did his productivity. He was going blind and the typewriter meant that he could continue to work. But writing is a demanding…

  • Weaving and technology

    This article has been supported with research using AI and has been fact-checked and corrected by hand. To read the original AI results go to the bottom of the page where it is copied and pasted verbatim. The craft of weaving is one of the oldest in the world and has a long history of…

  • AI and image generation

    In researching this week’s blog entries Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a tool. Harnessing the power of data to create new images is powerful but it currently has limitations. The images on this page were created using AI. By typing prompts into the AI platform new images were created to illustrate the articles on the blog.…