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.

We’re working on some films to show on one of the nights at the festival.

A couple we’re thinking about so far are:

Stick-em-up

Beautiful losers

Any other suggestions / thoughts?

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.