 Thanks Tom and it's it's really great to be here at the NDF. I've always kind of followed it from a periphery but I'm actually attended a conference but I feel like there's been a lot of material that really relates to my work as an artist and so yeah it's Tom said I'm doing a PhD in Fine Arts at Messie University College of Creative Arts and although the booklet says that I'm here with the Altera Digital Arts Network which I am a member of and it's fantastic I'm officially here as a Messie University student. So I'm a qualified artist I have a Bachelor of Fine Arts with honours and have been making art that relates to the internet and internet culture and new technologies for about the last 10 years and so I'll just quickly run through a few previous projects that have kind of led to this so hopefully it kind of puts it in perspective of where I'm coming from so this is one of the first projects I did in my graduate year of studying which was a series of drawings of pencil on paper that kind of was seeking to represent some stories that I'd encountered online back in 2005 that kind of occupied this this territory of being believable not believable this kind of you know truth or fiction and and I thought it's kind of quite interesting that there were all sorts of urban myths and legends coming onto the internet presented as fact and in a largely kind of unmediated environment of course now we've got things like Wikipedia that are a bit more well-pair reviewed and reputable but at the time you know there was a quite a strong anti-internet resource message coming from lecturers and at the University I was studying it because there was a sense of distrust of what was online there so I've got things up here like these drawings by a Japanese guy well the crystals by a Japanese guy who would stick these words on bottles of water and claim that they changed the chemical makeup of the water depending on whether it was a positive method or a negative message the human still down here the Mars rover and this is a time machine that was available for sale on trade me and then I moved that that project kind of set off a few copyright questions for me that I kind of didn't really manage to answer as a student and it led me into this series which was in response to the fleet of icebergs that had drifted up from Antarctica to the coast of the South Island and I was really interested in this but due to financial concerns couldn't travel down to see them at the time even though Shrek got to visit them and so I set about to search images of the ice beams online from media resources and then tried to recreate those in my flat with household objects in a sheet and then took photos of those and digitally read them and then printed those and then my drawings from those and I kind of thought that's got to be enough kind of derivative process to avoid copyright infringement right so so I made this and I thought it went pretty well but yeah this is now in the Wellington City Council collection which is quite cool and then it kind of turned into getting involved in the political debate about copyright and I was one of two people who founded the Creative Freedom Foundation to represent New Zealand artists in the copyright debate here there was a particular law section 92 ways you want to remember that yeah this thing so yeah we did that and and then I got into making 3d printing and using Creative Commons and kind of starting to give my work back to the internet community and start to release and let go of it so yeah I spoke a bit about this on Monday there'll be some video of that online so I won't talk too much made a proposal for a colony on Mars Pioneer City Pioneer-City.com that's still where you can check it out and yes some more kind of 3d printing projects and yeah through the CFS stuff people often assume that I was a lawyer which is quite interesting I kind of certainly read a lot of law and sounded maybe like a new what I was talking about and and people still asked me for copyright advice but I've kind of got to say I got nine iron problems but I would agree anyone you know passed but those of you who are familiar with JZ's black album but I did end up studying some copyright law through Harvard University which is the Facebook coast of mine that's got the most likes when I said that I got into it. So that was completely online free but really amazing content through edX which is a massive open online course and that I studied when I was at home maternity leave with a two-month-old which is slightly ridiculous but really really great content and they're actually offering this course again next year they're taking applications right now so if you're interested in copyright and reading and engaging with a community online it's really well structured you can have weekly tutorial video meetings with your tutorial group so I found that really quite useful in terms of understanding things a bit more and then this is a kind of another part of my life which is you know crazy trying to try to be a serious artist with that kind of thing going on. So this is part of this project this PhD which I started in June-July middle of this year so I'm quite early on but it started with this rather kind of comprehensive project to restore a mural that's connected to the Southern Cross Cable and so I'm just going to talk about how it kind of came about because it's quite a crazy story. So early last year I was invited by Letting Space who are a Wellington based public art commissioning group, independent group who are really interested in projects that are socially engaged and engaging communities and kind of operating outside of institutional kind of traditional models and we'd actually done the Piney City project to get that put on a real estate showroom for this property on Mars in downtown Wellington and an empty retail store earlier and they asked me to put a proposal forward for a project with JWT, John W. Thompson who are an international advertising firm with an office in downtown Auckland. So JWT had approached Letting Space and said we've got this glass cabinet that's you know one wall of our boardroom. It looks through to the offices we're interested in having some interesting art in there and we'll give you some money to commission three projects and so Letting Space went yep sounds interesting and we're interested in engaging with the kind of business community and you know corporate environments but it has to have some kind of public aspect to it and so invited me and I thought it's really interesting it's quite a challenge of how to make it an artwork that's kind of as corporate and you know consumer culture as it gets but then trying to engage the local community and yeah the public in some regard and I had heard about the Southern Cross cable during research for earlier projects and had wanted to make a project around it and this was an opportunity to do something in Auckland which is where the cable lands and so I kind of proposed something something along those lines and so the Southern Cross cable network is New Zealand's primary internet connection with the rest of the world it carries roughly 98% of our international internet traffic it goes out at Takapuna Beach physically under the sand it's about this thick lies along the seabed all the way up to Hawaii over to the states where it loops around comes back through Hawaii, Fiji, Sydney and then into New Zealand on the other side at Murawai Beach so submarine cables aren't anything particularly new some people you know think that satellite communications quite big but you know light is the fastest thing that we know and so it's definitely the most efficient way of communicating that we've got so far so there are many many submarine fiber networks around the world but New Zealand has this one network so you can kind of see it in the blue in this diagram here which is from SubmarineCableMap.com which is a frequently updated map of I guess publicly known submarine cables there is a grey line connecting to New Zealand and that's a proposed cable that's the Hawaii cable which hasn't actually been laid or yet finalised and then there's a secondary grey cable from Murawai to Sydney which is the Tasman Global Connect which I think may be laid next year and we have the Tasman 2 cable which is primarily to telephone so internet sub the Southern Cross Cable is it basically so so I kind of carried on researching and I came across this article quite quickly where the WikiLeaks published a document of 300 sites the US would be quite worried about if they were damaged because it might affect their you know operations and the sites that were listed under New Zealand there were sites for New Zealand and the two landing sites of the Southern Cross Cable that was it that was like there's New Zealand there Southern Cross Cable that's that's all we really care about so at this point I kind of started to get a little bit paranoid and they've been these kind of waves of paranoia surveillance through this project but you know and Kiwi star I thought well you know let's just let's just kind of get on with it and it's all public information anyway and so and so then I started to try and find out where you know the geographical locations of the landing site for Takapuna because I decided to focus on that that beach in particular for JWT and leading space and I found the landing station so the cable lands at Takapuna Beach and it comes in land kind of under the pavement rows basically and then comes up and is you know dispersed within these landing stations so I did a good little bit of citizen surveillance and found this image so the the complex is there's the yellow building and then the building next door and then there's kind of the third building above those and there's a big fence around those and that's that and so went to JWT and said I want to do a project something to do with the Southern Cross Cable and they said cool that sounds interesting but tell us more so I went on a site visit up to Auckland in August last year and early morning flight had this amazing view over Rangitoto and Takapuna like the Hurricane Gulf where the cable actually is under the water there somewhere on the right here is a map from Lin's which is I think yeah open access public data of the Hurricane Gulf cable protection area which is actually a legally protected site where boaties can't anchor or fish so it's kind of an unofficial marine environment but yeah I don't know that it exactly operates like that but they kind of started bringing up these interesting narratives of maritime culture and you know the internet and internet and nets and piracy and you know fishing there's all these kind of interesting connections with maritime language and digital it's interesting so there's something forming there and then we visited Takapuna Beach there's a sign on the beach there warning people of the cable that's it there kind of quite nice you know she visited the beach early this year and there's a family sitting kind of right underneath the post making sandcastles and I thought you know it's such a great kind of kiwi moment of kids digging up potentially our primary communication source I mean New Zealand so and then we went inland to see the the landing station so yeah so this is it high security what's really what really struck me about this is that there's no signage at all like it's completely devoid of signage almost to the point of you know being conspicuous because that so yeah I found that quite interesting and just kind of took a few photos from the outside and was worried about a security guard coming up but that didn't happen and yeah that was kind of took photos and and got away and we're back to Wellington and JWT wanted kind of three more proposals of what the project might be for the Cabinet and so I came up with three ideas the first was to do a sort of reading room collating all of this research information I've been finding about the cable where people could come and you know like spend time in the cabinet kind of under surveillance of the office staff but then you know having access to this potentially quite yeah controversial information and the second proposal was to to get a couple of snapper fish as office pets and you know potentially name one John Key and one Kim.com but you know it was very early stage proposal and have that in this kind of you know fish tank glass cabinet thing which you know probably wouldn't have worked with the budget but and the third one was to do some kind of office game with the staff where I would install a fishing dragnet and then send images on a kind of weekly basis that would kind of slowly piece to get the lucky jigsaw puzzle to form this image and you know perhaps the office staff could take turns at choosing what coordinates they wanted for that week and there'll be this kind of exchange and this unveiling project that would you know change over time and hopefully be interesting for the people who work there every day and so JBLT were kind of interested in that in that kind of project but wanted to know more about what the image might be and so yes I went away I was like oh you know all sorts of things and then this image came through from Nicole Starazowski who's an academic at New York University in the kind of media communication area and has been researching the spatial politics of cable landing sites internationally and we'd been in conversation about these things and he actually happened to email me asking if I had a photo of the mural on the inside of the Takapuna cable station which was the first I'd heard of it and I went oh my goodness that could be my image and so I emailed Southern Cross Cables to see if I could go and just access the station and then they put me on to Telecom now Spark who said oh yes not in the Southern Cross Cable Station in the compact building and yeah Mike McGraw the cable manager came back saying there's no longer a mural at the cable station many years ago there was a ceramic mural which was on the entrance wall which is on the same site this mural started to deteriorate and fall apart so it was removed and so you know I asked him if he had any documentation and he said you know not sure there's not many people around that would know about this or have photos so I went to archives in Wellington and searched the mural and found this this wee image which was about that big on a kind of a four of the mural in 1975 installed in the cable station and I was struck by the colours by the fact that it was an image of Maui fishing up the North Island which I thought was incredibly kind of relevant in terms of what I'm trying to do and JWT we talked about this this this story of Maui fishing up the North Island as being a potential cultural connection for the image so it was kind of like a jackpot moment so that's the back of the record I found this newspaper article as well archives which had a really interesting quote from the artist a move in Taylor who was a Wellington based artist very amazing talented man who did a lot of illustrations for the school journals and was he was kind of part of this modernist movement in New Zealand trying to develop a national language kind of beyond our colonial heritage and the visual arts and it was very interested in Maori culture and illustrating that and engaging with that as a Pakeha artist and so so he said here when asked if he had any special reason for selecting this particular myth for the cable Mr Taylor explained that the myth of fishing up a piece of land was a poetical Polynesian way of describing the discovery of a new island there was an analogy he thought between the fishing up of New Zealand by Maui and its modern counterpart with a new cable again draws New Zealand out of the Pacific and into the telephone systems of the world so I kind of had this really kind of grand feeling to it and and you know the similar kind of emotions I was having reactions to the Southern Cross cable and so got a back in touch with telecom saying that it found an image of the mural and asking where these tiles might be and he went and had a look in the compact station which is now disused and found them in boxes so then I went on a site visit went inside the station this time this is the the plaque on the entrance showing John Keith Holyoke opening the compact station in 1962 so the compact cable there was the Commonwealth Pacific cable it was a telephone cable that linked Commonwealth countries kind of in the aftermath of World War two so it linked Australia New Zealand Fiji I think as they stopped over in Hawaii they went Canada Scotland and so kind of kind of this like five-eyes network which is interesting in other way that's the wall that the mural was on the boxes so in various states of repair there was this weird black cement that yeah we think might have been roofing cement something was very needed but a cleaning up and another really interesting thing that the landing station staff told me was that people used to be able to just walk into this foyer off the street and it was when it opened in 1962 it was run by the New Zealand post office which was a government department and there was a visitor's book that people could sign as they came in and so they showed me this it's still in the in the station and office and an adjacent building and so yeah so it's going on for a while the entries kind of trail off around 1990 so really selective history of cables so in 1876 New Zealand's first major international submarine telecommunications cable system opened laid between Sydney and Cable Bay and Nelson so this was quite a defining moment because before then you know they've been quite a delay in our communication with the rest of the world this is an image from from Digital New Zealand oh really five minutes okay this is an asset that I've made on Digital New Zealand anyway of people dragging things on beaches compact opened in 1962 in 1982 the ends can cable was laid as a replacement so then compact wasn't used the Labour government got into office in 1984 and split the New Zealand post office into three state-owned assets creating telecom who took over management of the cable station and then in 1990 telecom was privatised and sold off and so at that point the cable station and the mural had kind of done this full 360 from being a public resource into being completely private and then there were future cables and then the Southern Cross cable came along in 1999 and it follows the exact same infrastructure route as compact and it's actually in the building right next door and so then we had to do this into an art project and telecom really great and they let us bring the tiles down to Wellington we had some conservation advice on how to best restore them and then staged a number of working bees to actually clean up the tile and this is Sarah Taylor even Taylor's granddaughter in the manager of his estate they've been really supportive of this project been amazing and then even Taylor's daughter-in-law there so we did these working bees it's my dad and my brother kind of friends and family Kerry and Lee was there you know it's just it was really great kind of lots of record-keeping this is the kind of one example of the state we had to clean them up and then taking individual photos in the photography department at Massey have been also very helpful and then assembling two copies kind of a quarter-size copies of the mural one on a dragnet in my studio so I could track how it was going and another at the JWT offices I would post them tiles on a kind of weekly basis so they could assemble their own so the dragnet yeah it's kind of responding in a subtle way to the Edward Snowden debate was going on at the same time we talked about dragnet surveillance and I think again tapping into that that narrative that kind of maritime narrative and you know of course this went on as well Southern Cross Cable this year and you know just want to know that I was using the postal system as a point of kind of testing out other communication techniques so that's JWT and then we also released all the images online under a Creative Commons attribution license so they're up for download on my website right now and we did four releases kind of monthly releases so the image kind of look like this sometimes and then that's the final image with 16 missing tiles that were just simply not there so there's the installation at JWT quite an interesting image of the back installed and they're really quite thrilled with it and so we're at now which maybe you guys can help some of the tiles are chipped and need repair so I'm needing to find hold find a conservator who can help clean those up and there are 16 missing tiles I need to find a ceramicist who has the skills to make replacements there's this painting in the Te Papa collection the lovely Megan Tamati Konawa's showing us in this image which is also a need of a bit of restoration which they've said they will do if there's an exhibition so if anyone's interested in talking about an exhibition with these various works come and talk to me and I'm working with Spark and a few others to find a permanent installation site for the full mural on an ongoing basis and really interested in talking to someone from Takapuna Library which sits on the strand right atop where the cable comes in and beyond that I'll be working and moving into doing a separate project for the mural I end as part of my PhD so if anyone's got any kind of interesting research tips around that part of the country please talk to me I'd really like to find a natifato a connection who can perhaps you know his knowledge in this kind of particular area of internet culture and issues to help talk about some of the land-based connections I'm going to go to the National Arcos in Canberra they've got a huge collection and then funding stuff and maybe scuba diving so that's me thank you yeah I'll just say as well that I'm I have with me here today a DVD of footage of the landing the cable landing on Takapuna Beach in 1999 that the Southern Cross cable people sent me so I might see about playing some of that in the break but it's probably not time here now yeah she'll be here obviously afternoon tea is about so maybe if we just move to our message yeah thanks for coming thank you