Behind the scenes we’ve been working away at a tasty little Street Dreams logo. Something that’s not too heavy, not too light.
So, I’m proud to introduce you to Ankle’s Street Dreams 2010 official logo!
Street Dreams Festival 2010 Logo
What do you think?
Si.
We’ve been playing around with the idea of having a lead character for the Street Dreams festival, and once again master Ankle has come through with the goods.
Its my pleasure to introduce to you, the messy, the crude, Mr.Sloppy!
Mr.Sloppy!
So after the nervous and seemingly endless wait from 5.45pm to 6pm for the start of Brain Jam with a room full of no-one, we actually had a pretty impressive turnout.
25 artists and writers turned up and filled the room as we gingerly announced our initial thoughts for the festival.
We went around the table and got artists suggestions and got some really interesting ideas from it. Some of our ill formed preconceptions were blown to smithereens and other ideas really loved by everyone.
It was a pretty inspiring session, getting together so many big names in the one room.
So, lets just say that we’re all pretty fucking excited about pulling this thing together now.
Here’s a list of the ideas the came out of it for the proposed program of events:
* Urban art walking tour
* Street art projections and film night
* Street art / Graffiti Workshop for all ages
* Panel debate on Urban art
* Mural painting (the best of the best of Adelaide artists)
* Exhibition (of hand made and customised street dumpster models)
* T-shirt party (everyone wears white t-shirts and gets them painted up)
Next on the agenda is working up a logo and character for the festival.
Si.
A couple we’re thinking about so far are:
Any other suggestions / thoughts?
Si.
You are officially invited to attend Brain Jam, a gathering of street & graffiti artists to discuss things you’d like to see at the Street Dreams Adelaide Urban Art Festival 2010:
Props to Ankle for the amazing job with the jar-o-brain-jam. It looks awesome.
We’ll be unveiling a whole bunch of ideas we have for the festival, plus asking for your ideas too, so we hope you can make it.
If you can’t, or prefer to just email us, hit us up at our fancy new email address: info (at) streetdreams.com.au
Si.
Well, aside from having the song sweet dreams stuck in my head for the past month, the name appears to have stuck, so Street Dreams is who we are.
Our email correspondence is getting a bit messy though, things getting lost, half responses, hijackings, drive-bys… so today I’ve got all nerdy techy smarts and signed up a Google Group account. Its pretty neat, because you only have to email one address and it pings out to everyone in the group, plus you can upload versions of pages and have everyone work on them. Yeeeeaahhhh.. nerdy cool.
Anyway, all this nerdy-ness has resulted in our first public group meeting we like to call Brain Jam. Its like an art jam, but with your brain. Its a cured jam made from brains. Its us running around naked shouting the sky is falling. AND, its getting lots of local street art & graffiti heads together in the one room to ask what they’d like to see in the festival.
To get artists excited, you generally need more than words. So we’ve chained Ankle up to his kitchen sink and got him to make up a batch of real life Brain Jam to put in jars and send out as invites.
Hopefully in the next few days I’ll be able to show his handy work.
Si.
After a couple of weeks of throwing around ideas for names, we decided to thrash it out over a jug of beer at the Exeter.
The list of names we came up with included: fresh walls and big balls, two cans, buff marks, drip, paint&paste, urban repo, buff street, ministry of urban beautification, bombfest & street dreams.
Two jugs later, things were getting messy and we’d rapidly regressed to names like: viking pastry, sticky mess, fresh air smells funny & fuck street. It was clear that things weren’t moving in entirely the right direction, so we called it a night.
The next day while we all struggled at work and uni, the only name we could all agree on was Street Dreams.
So, from this day forth (well until tomorrow at least) the official name of the festival for 2010 is:
Street Dreams
Adelaide Urban Art Festival
Hope it doesn’t suck.
Si.
The last month and a bit has been pretty exciting. Matt and I have been emailing all the artists we know to see who wants to be involved and everyone seems genuinely excited about it.
This isn’t helping my nerves much, but Matt is staying disturbingly confident through it all, and between him and the cold pints of pale I’m slowly coming round to the idea that the festival will indeed work.
Each week we have a little drink at the famous Exeter board room (aka beer garden) to bitch and moan about the amount of buffing the council has been doing, and scheme cunning plans to put up new work in buff-proof places.
Tonight was a special meeting, because two new faces came along and with them brought an awesome new energy and dynamic.
The two people I’m talking about are Ankle & Tim Grisbrook. Ankle is an old friend who started a little illustration / paste-up group at the pub with me called ex-a-sketch. He’s an inspiring young lad and since those days has gone onto putting up loads of cool shit on the streets.
Tim Grisbrook is an Industrial Design student, who’s helped make lots of awesome stuff out of scraps of wood and cardboard.
So now the two of us has become four, and with it I think a much more diverse festival.
We’ve started thinking about new names for the festival too. Although we’re really appreciative of the support that Chris & Yasemin have given us in putting things together, we’re ready for a new start.
Si.
The waiting game is a funny thing. After the mania of balancing spreadsheets, costing artist fees, rent, paint & insurance fees, things have been really really quiet.
The JB Seed people seemed genuinely happy with our application getting us onto the shortlist… but since then it’s been eerily quiet, and I’ve been getting a little fidgety.
So today I sent them a little email just asking when we’d be likely to hear back, and their response was quite awesome!
“We’ve decided to grant you money for ST5K. Congratulations! We really like the project and can’t wait to see how it turns out!!”
What does this mean? Well it means that instead of running the entire festival on $300 as we did last year, we’ll have a couple of thousand dollars to put towards advertising, inviting some awesome artists to get involved, paying for council permits to paint murals and cover a huge amount of paint!
Its pretty exciting, but a little daunting too.
THANK YOU JB SEED!
I think we might need some extra help to pull this thing off.
Anyone interested?
Si.
After sending in our JB Seed grant application pretty much on the deadline, its been barely two weeks… and then this morning we got this email back:
“Congratulations!
You are on The JB Seed Art For The Public shortlist.
In order to decide who will be successful in this years round of funding we would like to consider your application further.
Please consider the following list of questions and formulate your responses – these responses are to be received by us (via email) on or before 5pm on Monday the 29th June 2009.”
Awesome!
We don’t completely suck.
Fingers crossed…
Simon.
