Concrete Playground

art Olafur Eliasson

Thursday, 10th December - Sunday, 11th April
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

In a world where the new is often demanded but rarely considered or discussed for any length of time, the Berlin-based Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson is a memorable exception. A self-defined 'phenomenon-producer', Eliasson creates work from nature's supermarket: light, moss, water, ice and steam. He has summoned a geyser in...

art free Lynette Wallworth

Thursday, 7th January - Sunday, 24th January
@ CarriageWorks

Humans and their desire to experience images of dazzling immediacy and sensory adventure were given a wonderful (but soon to be forgotten) gift in 1962: the ‘Sensorama’. A pre-digital and therefore mechanical device, the ‘Sensorama’ was designed by Mr. Morton Heilig, who celebrated his prototype as the ‘cinema of the...

performing The Manganiyar Seduction

Monday, 11th January - 10AM
@ Seymour Centre

Can I ask you to do something? As you read this sentence would you mind imagining the sound of 43 third generation Rajasthani musicians singing and playing the following instruments: the dholak (a double-headed hand-drum), the kartal (a wooden block and copper plate instrument literally meaning ‘rhythm of the hand’),...

art Stories of Love & Hate – Revisited

Saturday, 12th December - 6PM
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

A wise man once said that ‘patriotism ruins history’. While this wisdom could be applied to a soup of mistakes, misfortunes and violent actions, it seems particularly relevant to the Cronulla riots of December 2005, in which a mostly Anglo-Celtic crowd took to the beach in order to “reclaim it...

art film free music Shoot The Player: Sydney + Music on Film

Saturday, 23rd January - 11AM
@ CarriageWorks

Since the grey wolf (the first known domesticated dog) was tamed and taken inside around 7000 BC, our pets require regular walks outside not only for their pleasure but for their intelligence - the variety of smells, the negotiation of territory and the possibility of an unpredictable context is necessary...

film The Edge of the Possible – Film Screening

Tuesday, 8th December - 5PM
@ Customs House Library, Barnet Long Room

I wonder how many family albums contain at least one photograph of the SydneyOpera House in the background? A nice shot of the kids in front of thearchitectural attraction. Yet while this landmark’s existence has becomesomewhat familiar – recognized as one of the iconic buildings of the 20thcentury – it...

art Art of Utamaro Symposium

Saturday, 13th February - 9AM
@ Art Gallery of New South Wales Domain Theatre (Lower Level 3)

Confucius thought that everything had it but not everyone could see it; for Kant it was located in our faculty of judgment; for Monet it was to be found in nature; Keats thought it was truth; and plastic surgeons earn money from it. What else could it be but that...

free music performing play Festival First Night

Saturday, 9th January - 2PM
@ Sydney City Streets and Parks

If you're like me and make it a bit of a project to complain about a city dominated by cars, or how there should be an energetic density to any metropolitan machine, you might agree that Festival First Night is a step in the right direction. For the...

art music 13 Most Beautiful Songs for Andy Warhol's Screen Tests

Sunday, 28th February - 8PM
@ Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House

Andy Warhol is one of those paradoxical figures. While providing a wealth of worthwhile material to consider he simultaneously fertilized followers to produce an array of boring and derivative art. In this way Warhol is both a king and a curse for art history. And yet there is something appropriate...

film free Strange Land – Starella and The Priest (The Video Preview)

Tuesday, 15th December - 7PM
@ Serial Space

We only need to look at where horror films usually take place in orderto realise that the environment is always a contributing factor to thesuspense. It is the deserted and vacant location where our psychologicalimpulse to think the worst is heightened and exercised. And so in this waycould we not...

music play REDRATNYE

Thursday, 31st December - 7PM
@ The Red Rattler

Plans plans plans! Why does the mad rush for planning New Years Eve always seem to outweigh the night itself? A night that's usually a cocktail of anticipation, nostalgia, reflection and magnificent desolation. In the rush to make it a special night and radiant restart to the Gregorian calendar we...

music Charlie Parr

Friday, 8th January - 8PM
@ The Basement

Last year Vodafone enlisted the help of Charlie Parr - the self-depreciative country and blues musician from Minnesota - for their Australian and New Zealand phone promotions. Nothing like an ad to propel your music into the national psyche. Yet while Vodafone advertising has had an expected change of heart...

art Edge of Elsewhere

Saturday, 16th January - Sunday, 7th March
@ Campbelltown Arts Centre

This is really very exciting. It isn't often that a platform for collaborative thinking and making is given enough time to find its roots and address something specific. Too often 'collaboration' is ceremoniously trumpeted around as though it deserves praise as a word regardless of the activity it is meant...

art film Cremaster Cycle

Friday, 15th January - Friday, 5th February
@ Chauvel Cinema

If you were to collect all the symbolism, totemistic allegory and florid metaphor fashioned throughout the history of art into something tangible, and, say with careful precision you placed it on a scale next to Mathew Barney's five-part feature length drama the Cremaster Cycle, it would be a difficult task to...

film music Psycho 50th Anniversary

Tuesday, 5th January - 8PM
@ Sydney Opera House

Bernard Herrmann agreed to compose music for Alfred Hitchcock's films on the condition that he would be given total control over of his arrangements. A meticulous and progressive composer, Mr. Herrmann felt that any interference with his own vision would result in taxidermy music: it would look alive but actually...

film Seen & Heard

Thursday, 14th January - Sunday, 17th January
@ Red Rattler

An observant and sometimes handsome Englishman named G.K Chesterton once wrote that "Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions". What he might have meant is that popularity or acceptance does not necessarily determine something to be true or accurate; in fact the opposite is often the...

free music Toumani Diabat

Sunday, 17th January - 8PM
@ State Theatre

When Toumani Diabaté was five years old he picked up the Kora (a 21 string hybrid between a harp and a lute) and taught himself to play. His father Sidiki Diabaté was a renowned Kora musician in Mali, and Toumani found that he could educate himself simply by listening.A child...

think 5th Pacific Thought Symposium

Sunday, 10th January - 3PM
@ Seymour Centre

Underlying all symposiums is a question: how do we know what we know? What seems like a straightforward question is in fact difficult to answer. How does knowledge accumulate? How is it shared? Why is it useful? Certainly we know its fundamental to how we perceive current situations and positions,...

free travel music performing The NOW Now

Friday, 22nd January - Sunday, 24th January
@ Wentworth Falls School of Arts

From the stings of damaged guitars to the fingers of laptop-musicians comes The NOW now: a festival offering experimental, impulsive and improvised music to ears that desire sounds and behaviors not usually found in the glistening world of popular music.I must be clear however that such a sentiment should...

art free Philippine Abstraction

Sunday, 10th January - Sunday, 7th February
@ Slot

If you thought Abstract Art was a movement relegated to the history books and the minds of hairless historians at the end of the 1950s you would be right, and wrong. Thankfully history is not a stop and start game; the emergence of one thing does not force the cessation...

art music An Afternoon of Difficult Music

Sunday, 17th January - 1PM
@ Red Rattler

Music, according to recent studies conducted by David Teie, a cellist from the National Symphony Orchestra, and Charles Snowdon, a professor of psychology from the University of Wisconsin, is species-specific. While such a theory seems a little self-evident and obvious, its ramifications become audible when we consider our taste in music...

art think DRAUGHT

Saturday, 30th January - Saturday, 20th February
@ Tin Sheds Gallery

Let’s be honest. The predicaments and problems artists have to face compared to other professions are less important and largely uninteresting for the majority of people. And yet, if we were to remain with honesty for a moment, don’t artists also seem to be very capable of voicing their problems...

art performing play think Open Fields

Wednesday, 28th April - Friday, 30th April
@ Serial Space

In order to feel incredibly grateful to our early ancestors you only need to think about their persistent curiosity and hazardous experimentation with food. How many lives, throughout the history of the human family, must have been lost to determine which mushrooms are poisonous and which varieties are safe? Imagine...

art free think Gilbert & George

Sunday, 14th February - Monday, 15th February
@ College of Fine Arts

Since the 1970s Gilbert & George have been historicized and celebrated for their unique conservatism of sensible suits and haircuts, narcissistic propaganda and exhibitionist libido. Combining English sobriety, an admiration for Margaret Thatcher and the intimacy of their own relationship, they championed what has now become easy to swallow but...

art free The Tao of Now

Friday, 22nd January - Sunday, 1st August
@ The White Rabbit

Kerr and Judith Neilson of The White Rabbit Gallery describe their extensive and dramatic collection of contemporary Chinese art as a ‘personal anthology’. Indeed The Tao of Now, an exhibition that contains the work of over 40 artists, is a little like going to an apartment where the art has...

art free performing DORKBOT-SYD: 110001000100101001

Thursday, 11th February - Saturday, 13th February
@ Serial Space

This techno-call to arms comes from self-professed dorks “doing strange things with electricity”. There's something appealing about Dorkbot's epigram, especially when we consider the predictable behaviour electricity is made to perform: it is generated at power stations, sent through the grid, directed into our homes, and used without much thought...

art think Joseph Kosuth Lecture

Tuesday, 9th February - 6PM
@ AGNSW

For Joseph Kosuth, poster boy for 1960s Conceptualism, art is effectively L.I.N.G.U.I.S.T.I.C. Or in his own words: "Fundamental to this idea of the arts is the understanding of the linguistic nature of all art propositions". What are the consequences of this and what did it mean for art history?...

film Rear View Mirror: Cinema's History of the 20th Century

Friday, 19th March - Saturday, 10th July
@ Domain Theatre, Art Gallery of New South Wales

The amazing spell of cinema is such that we are still fascinated by the same stories, albeit sometimes with different actors and set within a slightly different context. Although we all more or less know the ending to most blockbuster films (‘good’ will almost always triumph over ‘evil’, etc), our...

art film free Sylvie Blocher: What is Missing?

Wednesday, 17th February - Monday, 26th April
@ Museum of Contemporary Art

You’re likely to have heard of 'Pavlov’s dog', but did you know famed physiologist Ivan Pavlov actually had four dogs — Druzhok, Sultan, Zhuchko, and Tsygan? It was with Druzhok (‘Little Friend’) that he made his breakthrough. Deficiently put, Pavlov discovered that Druzhok’s behavior could be determined by coupling feeding...

art film free Fiona Tan: Coming Home

Friday, 19th March - Saturday, 12th June
@ Sherman Contemporary Art Foundation

If we believe the American travel writer Paul Theroux, "travel is glamorous only in retrospect". It is on reflection that we beautify and sculpt our previous experiences, assembling the pieces into stories that can be passed on to other ears with, well, a kind of retrospective glamour. Fiona Tan, an...

art free Robert Kinmont, Kenzee Patterson, Charlie Sofo and Ronnie Van Hout

Wednesday, 7th April - Saturday, 17th April
@ Darren Knight Gallery

There is not enough time to look at everything, so we have to choose. This choice can arrive arbitrarily (a magazine in a waiting room for example) or it can be orchestrated with agency, effort and that wonderfully hominid ability to ‘make time’ for something. So the question that concerns...

film music Planets: A Journey in HD

Friday, 8th July - 8PM - Monday, 11th July - 7PM
@ Concert Hall, Sydney Opera House

Written between 1914 and 1916 under the sway of a revival in astrology, Gustav Holst's [i]The Planets[/i] channels a mood for each planet in the Solar System.

art free Flow

Wednesday, 29th June - Wednesday, 27th July
@ The East Village Hotel

Flow situates two award winning photographers together, exhibiting vibrant, colourful and honest photographs of a life lived by the sea.

art music The Great Music Debate: That Experimental Music is Boring

Friday, 8th July - 6PM
@ Serial Space

The fly in the soup has finally been noticed, the question uttered: is experimental music as boring as bat shit?

music Art vs Science

Friday, 8th July - 7PM
@ Enmore Theatre

Science: noun. The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Art: noun. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.If the definitions don't seem to help all that much you might find solace in the synthy-crunchy-insistent-electro-pop of this Sydney three-piece. Recently ascending to platinum heights on the back of their self-titled debut EP, their second album [i]The Experiment[/i] has also garnered wide appreciation and made ears happy both here and abroad. The first tour since their return from the US, Art vs Science will take to the stage at the Enmore, supported by the big-beats and high-flying vocals of Strange Talk. It's enough to make Galileo and Picasso friends.

think Peter Singer: Ethical Issues in an Online World

Thursday, 14th July - 7PM
@ Studio Theatre, Sydney Opera House

Renowned philosopher Peter Singer questions how we are to think about information, access, censorship, sexuality and community in an online world.

performing Stainless Steel Rat

Thursday, 30th June - Sunday, 17th July
@ Seymour Centre

Stainless Steel Rat delves into the world of the largest information dump in history - Wikileaks - and the life of one of the most controversial contemporary figures.

music Art vs Science

Saturday, 9th July - 9PM
@ The Tivoli

Science: noun. The intellectual and practical activity encompassing the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment. Art: noun. The expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.If the definitions don't seem to help all that much you might find solace in the synthy-crunchy-insistent-electro-pop of this Sydney three-piece. Recently ascending to platinum heights on the back of their self-titled debut EP, their second album The Experiment has also garnered wide appreciation and made ears happy both here and abroad. The first tour since their return from the US, Art vs Science will take to the stage at the Tivoli, supported by the big-beats and high-flying vocals of Strange Talk. It's enough to make Galileo and Picasso friends.

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