Art & About - Sydney's annual outdoor art festival

Sydney's annual mutli-site public art festival Art & About has returned to Sydney again for 2013 with a range of public installations, exhibitions and performances in open spaces. The festival runs from 20 September to 20 October 2013 and has a number of public installations stretching from Circular Quay in the North of the City to Surry Hills in the South - notable this year are the giant brightly coloured snails located in various points in the city. Towering three to three metres high and four and half metres in length ('Smailovation' by title), these noticeable visitors can be found in Hyde Park, Customs House Forecourt, Queens Square and so on.  As with previous festivals, banners with a particular image and message form part of the festival and this year the theme is 'walking men' as part of the international art project, walking-men.com. Banners hanging from street light poles have figures printed in human scale demonstrating how different countries choose to represent the 'common man' in a pictogram.

Another highlight of Art & About is the photography exhibition 'Sydney Life' located in Hyde Park North which captures people and moments of Life around Sydney.Public art festivals such as Art and About are as much about accessibility as civic ambiance and add much to the concrete and glass urban landscape.

Film Review - The Best Offer - Geoffrey Rush

Geoffrey Rush in The Best Offer

The Best Offer was written and directed by Italian film director, Giuseppe Tornatore, better known for his acclaimed award-winning film Cinema Paradiso. The film follows combined themes of love and deceit, is set in Europe (and filmed in various locations Trieste, Bolzano, Fidenza, Rome, Milan, Merano, Vienna, Prague) and centred on the world of high-end art auctions and antiques. The central character is Virgil Oldman (Geoffrey Rush), an elderly, esteemed, but somewhat eccentric principal of an auction house bearing his name. Oldman operates as both valuer and auctioneer for his clients but his poise, prestige and undoubted expertise is counterpointed by an ongoing bidding scam whereby his friend Billy Whistler (Donald Sutherland) operates as an undisclosed related bidder  in auctions to enable Oldman to acquire a secret private collection of master paintings - for a fraction of their actual value.

 

Virgil is contacted and then hired by a reclusive young heiress, Claire Ibbetson (Sylvia Hoeks), to value and auction off the large collection of art and antiques left to her by her deceased parents. Claire consistently refuses to be seen in person but communicates only by phone and often fails to appear even when agreed with the auctioneer. Oldman also has another associate being a young artificer and 'fixer', Robert (Jim Sturgess), who aids him by restoring objects and devices he acquires by whatever means. A particular project involves reassembling a robotic device Virgil carefully acquires piece-by-piece from Claire's property. Virgil also seeks Robert's advice on how to befriend her, and how to deal with his evolving feelings towards her.

 

The film has a number of cliches but the storyline does provide the ultimate twist when the scam or 'sting' is revealed. A few clues are given so the audience is able to deduce that all is not as it seems.  It is the performance of Geoffrey Rush however which forms the foundation and strength of the plot line and ultimately the entire film.



Climate Change Insight: How the Earth's tilt is affected

As most high school students would know (and the rest of us remember), the Earth spins, or more accurately, it wobbles on an axis which in turn causes the magnetic poles to shift slowly. The Earth's rotational axis and its rate of spin are influenced by the fact that the planet is not a perfect sphere but rather has a changing surface caused by plate tectonics, movement of mass such as oceans due to the weather and erosion of solid structures. The drift has generally been around 6 centimetres a year with the poles moving in a constant direction however in 2005 this suddenly both changed and accelerated. The drift switch was a surprise and researchers at the University of Texas using the GRACE satellites (or Gravity Recovery And Climate Experiment) have found the answer. 

Warming temperatures have led to an extraordinary loss of mass in glaciers in Greenland, Antarctica and large mountain ranges in the order of 600 gigatonnes a year. The redistribution of water from ice surfaces to the oceans accounts for almost the entire change in the Earth's polar tilt since 2005 and its acceleration.