Wednesday, August 1, 2007

City of Perth - Gold Sponsor of Byte Me!

I'm very happy to announce that the City of Perth have given us generous support by providing the wonderful Perth Town Hall venue for the duration of the Byte Me! Festival, and as such are our first Gold Sponsor.

If you're ever looking for a stunning, well-appointed and very centrally-located venue for your corporate function, wedding reception, exhibition, or community function please consider hiring the Perth Town Hall. There's a great virtual tour of the building and it's facilities online. Yeah, it's a plug and they gave us some sponsorship - but I really mean it. The refurbished Town Hall really is an amazing venue.


We're very grateful to the City of Perth for providing this support. Since I first started researching potential venues for the Festival, the Town Hall quickly became THE venue that I wanted to be home of Byte Me! The co-operation and depth of practical knowledge of the facilities manager there, Colleen Dixon, has made me even more convinced what a great venue it is. I am sooo happy to have it locked in (do a little dance).

Coincidentally, Jasper and I went to a City of Perth Public Forum this week, which was really interesting. I wish these public forums were better attended, it's an opportunity to get to know the Elected Members (aka Councillors) and what they're doing. There was some fascinating discussion about the big projects the City has been working on, and we got to hear their perspective on the delays with the Northbridge Link project and also their plans for the James St piazza. We were especially thrilled to hear that their plans for that site (currently an open, grassy area that replaced a run-down food hall) include a huge LED screen similar to that in Melbourne's Federation Square.

Having a large screen available for public arts projects is BIG news for those of us involved in digital arts. The Digital Fringe Festival in Melbourne is just one of the many festivals in Melbourne that utilise the Federation Square screen and once Perth has a similar screen, perhaps it will be the tipping point to get public interest in digital art to the level where we can have a multi-format community screen-based events like the fabulous Digital Fringe. Perhaps that could even be part of Byte Me! Festival in future years?

These things take time, and it's not likely to happen before 2009, but in the meantime, I'm personally enjoying the open space on the corner of Lake and James. And those big, plain walls around it... hmmmm... just perfect for some guerrilla-style projection perhaps? ;)


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