Concrete Site Online
It’s no huge leap technologically, but I’m quite happy with my small, hand crafted site for Concrete. I’m really starting to enjoy CSS and coded this little fella myself, with the exception of the great Fancybox jQuery script for the gallery.
Take a look around and let me know if you bump into any problems. I’ve tested it on Safari and Firefox, but I haven’t tried Internet Explorer because I’m on a Mac (not to mention the risk of getting hacked).
Edit: Instead of making yet another post with ‘Concrete’ in the title, it’s probably best that I fill in some details here, like I promised to do in my last post anyway…
Concrete is a night that I had great intentions for when I was a little bit more bright eyed, but no less jaded. In December 2007, I unleashed the first one at a small bar in Surry Hills, with the wonderful performances of Sub Bass Snarl, Peter Newman, Scott Morrison, Matt Levinson and Eli (who is one of my closest friends, which means he gets billed last).
The concept was to find a middle ground between a club night and a sound/video art event. Frigid was something that I arrived at too late to really experience fully, but I was truly sad to see it go. It was the closest thing to what I had in mind for Concrete: a relaxed space where people could still chat, but witness something special for that time and place – art which is being created in front of them.
Coming from a DJ/nerd background, I’m more inclined to gravitate toward art that falls under the disgusting title of ‘new media’. So for me it makes sense to combine these worlds into an experience for everyone to be involved with as much as possible. I’m not interested in billing someone to perform the most technically amazing, but utterly alienating set of all time. If the audience cannot connect with it in some way, then I believe the experience is lost. That’s not to say I don’t want to see the audience challenged, quite the contrary. But I do want them to be able to view and understand on some level, that the artist in front of them is creating the work they are experiencing.
Unfortunately, although it seemed my public liked the idea right off the bat, the venue was simply too difficult to keep dealing with. Sydney is notorious for this, and instead of moving on, I decided to put Concrete on the shelf for a while, whilst I started a new degree at university.
That’s where it stayed for 19 months, when I came across a fantastic new bar in Erskineville, called The Hive. It’s small, the manager is friendly, they serve excellent local beers (that means boutique beers, not VB) in pints, and they’re open to local art of all forms. I jumped at the chance to put the next Concrete night on there and I’m really interested to see how it goes in that space. Check out the full details at the Concrete site.