Ages ago, last year on November 22, I went with M to an event at the Bondi Pavillion called Interesting South. I decided to go because it was inspired by an event held in the UK that I read about on blogs and liked the sound of called Interesting 2007. The organiser of Interesting 2007, Russel Davies, said of it:

“The plan is to have all sorts of speakers speak about all sorts of stuff. Not brands, advertising, blogging and twitter but interesting, unexpected, original things. I’m hoping to find fascinating people and to just ask them to speak about something they care about. I want to replicate the experience of clicking from one really good blog to another, ranging across sciences, arts, musics, jokes and whatever.”

You can get an idea of the result here on Russel’sBlog and at the Interesting 2007 Wiki

Anyway, At the local version, Interesting South, they handed out an orange feedback form which i filled in but forgot to hand back. You can go to the official site now and watch videos of all the speakers. But I thought it might be interesting to test just how interesting it was by reading my feedback and then record any triggered memories to the echo chamber, here on this site.

So, some memories:

• Cheese tasting: Claudia of McIntosh and Bowman Cheese Mongers (I kept her card) was there offering free samples of 10 or so different cheeses. She was extremely popular as it was around dinner time and there was no other food to be had around there. Also the cheese was excellent - I can even remember likeing a goats cheddar but not what it was called.
• Nudie Juice or Smirnoff Ice: Inclusive of the ticket price, courtesy of the sponsors I guess. I liked the Nudie but couldn’t drink the vodka, blurghhh.
• Random book on arrival: Everyone was given a book from a pile under the welcome table, I’m happy with mine, A Princess of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs - written in 1912 but with a beautiful 1979 cover by Michael Whelan. I’m enjoying it but not sure I’ll read the other 10 books in the series.
• Lots of attendees seemed to know each other, I didn’t run into anyone I know (I often do at tech/UX related events. The MC Katie Chatfield introduced it as a marketing conference which surprised me, but perhaps that suggests I don’t know many marketers?
• Subliminals in Lauren Brown’s presentation, gorey art photographs.
• Dan Hill’s drawings in his slides. He said they were rough but they looks like ideal interfaces to me hand drawn floating in space where they’re needed.
• Mat Moore, possibly my favourite, a epic poem about bad love and ethnobotany? set to power point.
• Small Town Australia, photos from Martin Mischkulnig’s future book. I think he said we’re lied to about small town’s aesthetics, i’m not so sure.
• Hug Man: He’s being evicted for opening up his home, I wonder what happened. Is it OK to depend on others so completely by choice?
• Dr Adrienne Withall: Happiness: “Not depressed does not equal happy”
• Pia Von Gelder: Dorkbot. I like how Pia read out her prez, like a long essay in monotone, it worked well with the hundreds of images of dorks and their toys - I’ll have to go one day soon.
• Can’t remember what Errol Flanagan said. In some ways I wish he’d just made us all hum with our eyes closed for the whole 3 minutes rather than a few seconds - I was really starting to enjoy it. Also like his gestures, he moved around the stage a lot i think.
• Natasha Lewis was promoting her coffee and managed a to explain half of what Fair Trade is. Was it collectivisation to achieve economy of scale and guaranteed prices?
• John McWhorter described fleeing a charging moose on a dog slead - I can’t remember how he escaped
• Samantha Graham spoke about language, sexism inherent in English
• Tim Baynes talked about conservation, had nice animated sheep in his slides. He illustrated the tragedy of the commons. He had a great chart showing how energy consumption has been tightly following the rise in GDP, reconfirmed for me that it will be hard to save the world and maintain growth.
• Tiffany Kenyan: Tango is about control
• Gavin Heaton, not to my taste, the Clue Train Manifesto through the eyes of his own children, reminded me of dressing up pets in dinner suits. I thought their dolls house was impressive though.
• Tim Noonan was blind and scared us all buy walking too close to the edge of the stage. He says he can tell a lot about people by the sound of their voices, calling it vocology. My favourite thing he said was “In my minds eye your all beautiful sexy people” which struck me as an incredible concept. I cannot really grasp what my minds eye would see If i’d always been blind.
• Rachel Wotton. She said something like “imagine never being touched by another human being except to be washed”, I agree only being touched in non sexual ways would be painful if you retained sexual feeling. I admire and see the value in her work.
• Tim Longhurst spoke about his grass roots campaign to attack Coca Cola’s fake grass roots campaign. I see one of their billboards every morning at Kings Cross St and was tricked into following up the web address. Zero Coke Movement is a great slogan - I liked his point about the canned soft drink business being an environmental disaster

Those are my memories jogged by reading my feedback form. You can go watch the videos to see whether they bear any resemblance to what actually occurred.

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