the value of mainstreets
As a main street Magill Road is central to local community identity, both historically and today as it changes with the times and the needs of the community. Magill Road is home to a mix of traders and artisans focusing on antiques, interiors, gifts, arts, food and beauty. Most business are distinctly individual and reflect the the unique skills, trade, craft and personality of the owners. Magill Road has a point of difference from any other location … you will not find this unique mix of shops in the big shopping centres, nor would these types of businesses generally flourish and survive in these centres.
Many businesses have longstanding relationships with their customers. Most businesses pride themselves in a high level of ‘old fashioned’ personalized customer service. Eureka Antiques has been trading on Magill Road for almost 30 years and is now restoring the furniture of whole extended families and the children of original customers. Magill Road is not about sameness … it is unique, rich in creative energy and full of character. These qualities are integrated with the wider historical and emerging character of the local community and provide enrichment to all.
Peter Young, Eureka Antiques & Gallery
City Lights and Digital Campfires
The spread of digital signage throughout urban spaces has been prolific and led almost unanimously by commercial interest; I see amazing potential for social, philosophical, art and design industries to embrace this canvas to invigorate, enliven, and change for the better the places we live in. Modern day light and lighting in the form of digital pixels has become a powerful tool for communication, as well as an aesthetic and physical meeting point for citizens, providing a place for a new form of ‘civic communication’ and exchange.
Digital light today replaces the firelight, which was the symbolic centre for family and community gatherings in ancient history. At that time it symbolised warmth, shelter, security. Today sitting around a tribal fire replaced by the LED or LCD pixel TV’s and digital screens. These screens and images have a mysterious and powerful presence, almost as if they represent echoes, traces of forgotten dreams reappearing in our modern city landscapes.
Jimmy Mcgilchrist, Media Artist, Creative Director, rezon8
Flaky?
You wouldn’t do business with artists because they are too flaky, they do what they want to do, turn up when they want to and are not interested in making money, or worse they are hostile to making money. But it is not just artists; I get to hear the same thing about scientists. That’s interesting to me because I work with both on a daily basis and the thing that makes artists and scientists similar is their open ended, creative curiosity. A science paper is just a sign post of a much more complex exploration, the paper may give great insight, but the scientist continues to explore. The same is true of the artist’s exhibition. An exhibition is not a full stop, but a consolidation of thought and experience, readying them for much deeper exploration. So you wouldn’t do business with an artist or scientist because they exhibit unbound creative curiosity and business is up against it working on innovation, or application of ideas, let along spending time and money on mere speculation. Or it could be the best thing you ever did.
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Would I travel for that?
Last week, with some guilt, I went to Borders in the CBD to by a book. Guilty for picking over the bones of a dying business, guilty as the staff talked about their unknown futures. I was after a book that had been a business best seller for the last 6 years. Unexpectedly Borders had what I wanted on their shelves. I am so used to retail stores not having something in stock that my initial bad feeling left me and I got excited by the large 40% off tickets, I found my book and looked to the back for the price, calculated the discount and then it struck me, the deep problem that retail is facing. The discount price was still five dollars more expensive than if it had been purchased from Amazon (that’s including shipping). My emotions had swung from guilt to excitement to disappointment. (more…)
Note from the Future – All industries are Creative.
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries economies around the world once again legitimately welcomed some of humanities most long-standing professions into the economy. Creative and cultural industries where embraced and labelled in a way that allowed them to be measured economically. Some of this was due to new technologies mediating creativity, making it easier for them to be commoditised and some, such as art and craft, had always been economic contributors, but through industrialisation had somehow lost their legitimacy in the economy. This loss of legitimacy was partly due to the difficulty in fitting one-off objects into the new industrial framework, and partly due to art theorists who felt that this type of creative work should not be included in the economy. The new terminology of creative/cultural industries allowed a number of disparate economic activities to be linked through the commonality of leveraging intrinsically motivated creativity for economic outcomes. (more…)
