Melbourne-based Portuguese artist and designer Marta Figueiredo experiments with materials and methods to create objects that challenge a uni­functional approach to design. “I try to make my objects bring openness and include everyone,” she says. “To challenge thinking that an object is going to be used in a certain way and is for a certain person.”

The panoramic windows in the rear galley of the kitchen, where Ronnen Goren is making coffee, frame a view of the dry summer landscape that stretches towards Daylesford. Behind Ronnen, the kitchen table is covered with freshly picked apricots; more apricots fill the preserve jars lining the shelf above the wood stove; and Pia, a WWOOFer currently working on the farm, has just offered me an apricot that has been soaked in sugar syrup and dried. It is clearly apricot season.

“When David Walsh said all art is about sex and death, what he meant was that art is either about showing off or leaving a legacy,” says Jane Clark, senior research curator at Mona (Museum of Old and New Art). But sex and death alone doesn’t account for the incredible success Mona has had, attracting over three million people to a museum on the edge of Tasmania in only eight years. Mona’s appeal includes a distinctive tone, multiple voices, plus a willingness to take risks and interrogate challenging ideas.

Bangkok–based architecture studio all(zone) describe themselves as “a group of happy design professionals who joyfully collaborate with specialists across the borders of their fields and country.” Rachaporn Choochuey, director of all(zone), seems to be the embodiment of this spirit. When I meet her in Melbourne, where she is visiting as a guest of the Living Cities Forum, she is full of joy, radiates enthusiasm, and is exactly the kind of person I would want designing somewhere I might live.

In 2009 Yandell Walton took a risk. After two years of hunting for the right place, she signed a ten–year lease on a warehouse in Collingwood and began the arduous process of transforming it — half into a home and studio for herself, and half into studios for artists to rent. The risk, and financial investment, paid off. Artists moved into the studios and Yandell’s home became a hub for a community of artists to work, socialise, share ideas and exchange art.

When Kirsha Kaechele arrives at our interview she asks if anyone has a jacket she can borrow. “I have one,” I offer, “but I’m afraid it’s leather.” “Oh, is it invasive deer leather?” she asks. I tell her it’s second-hand, so I really don’t know, but I doubt it. “That’s fine,” she says. “I’m a complete hypocrite. I’m not a puritan, but sometimes I get inspired and try to live really well.”

Melbourne projection artist Yandell Walton’s ephemeral installations probe the impermanence at the very heart of existence. Always responsive to the architectures they inhabit, her works invite viewers into speculative scenarios that allow us to see and experience things we otherwise could not.

From the run-down old terrace they bought in Brunswick 15 years ago, artists David Rosetzky and Sean Meilak have made a modernist-inspired home filled with light and exquisite attention to detail. The compositional instincts that are evident in both David and Sean’s work are also found in the home they’ve created, and reflects their shared love of design and simplicity.

Where I live there used to be a photographic processing factory, the largest in Australia, so I am told. I know this because Mrs. Harper, who lives down the street at no. 12, keeps a photo of the old factory on her wall. ‘To keep the history alive,’ she says. But the photo and the building appear dead to me: heavy, motionless, stubborn[1] — devoid of people, and even of trees.

There is a story about Marcel Duchamp setting a bicycle wheel on top of a wooden stool in his studio in 1912 and then leaving it, unnamed, to sit quietly in the corner. He ‘found solace in making the wheel turn while… gazing at it like “a fire burning in a fireplace”.’[1] That wheel, like many before it, began a revolution, and the rest, as they say, is history.

In the gallery a beam of light glows within the darkened space, reflected from mirror to mirror, drawing a line through the intermittent haze and producing a constellation of circles. It radiates out, like a golden record, like a signal hoping to find a receiver. Continually emitting. Continually waiting.

In 2007 Isaac Julien’s three-screen installation Baltimore (2003) was presented at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI). Coming to the art world from a filmmaking background, Julien brought a cinematic approach to his gallery work that was invigorating and felt like a rebirth of cinema. His editing style – distributing a single narrative across multiple screens – combined with a high degree of technical sophistication, set the work apart from other video artworks of the time.

In the 1920s Downtown Los Angeles was the centre of a thriving metropolis. The city boasted a booming financial district, numerous high-end department stores, the Broadway Theatre District, Downtown Jewellery District and luxury hotels. As the century progressed, however, the Downtown area slumped into significant decline.

Philippe Parreno: Thenabouts is an orchestration of films, lighting, sound and sculptural elements, choreographed live by an ever-present ‘host’. ‘Thenabouts’ is a word borrowed from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939), a masterpiece of modern literature – notoriously difficult to read. In Joyce’s novel, and in Parreno’s exhibition, time exists as a malleable, cyclical entity, co-joined with space in reference to Einstein’s four-dimensional continuum, spacetime.

Zoe Scoglio is thinking about time. Contemplating a continuum stretching from the Big Bang through to the present and into possible futures in which humans may no longer inhabit Earth, Zoe’s art presents a perspective that contextualises our fleeting lives within this vast cosmological timeframe. Melding video, sound and performance in works ranging from single-channel video pieces to complex participatory performances, Zoe’s interdisciplinary practice has a distinct focus on materiality.

In March in the year 2000, Daniel Crooks was sitting on a train, travelling to a teaching job in Berwick, Victoria. He did this twice a week, Footscray to Berwick. A total of three hours a day; six hours a week travelling on the train. Crooks would use this time to read, research, plan his courses, do some paper programming, do some more paper programming, and think about making new work. But he felt there must be a better way to spend the time…

As an environmental maverick, Tim Jarvis is a busy man. If he’s not undertaking expeditions to the North or South Pole, completing the first unsupported crossing of the Great Victorian Desert, or building an exact replica of the James Caird lifeboat to recreate Sir Ernest Shackleton’s 1916 voyage, he can be found doing public speaking tours across the US, promoting his books or documentaries, or working as what he calls “a sustainability innovator” for Arup projects.

In a world saturated with mass media messaging and imagery, how do we define ourselves as individuals in the face of increasingly globalised popular culture? This is territory that Candice Breitz has been investigating for nearly two decades through her photographs and video work.

“Every culture has a unique set of solar mythologies and this project seeks to be a platform for both the expression of traditional symbolism and the emergence of new stories.” — Rafael Lozano-Hemmer

Following Yelling at Stars,1 their 2008 transmission into space from the Sidney Myer Music Bowl, collaborators Willoh S. Weiland and Nicky Forster have created Void Love, an online soap opera that takes us on a journey into deep space via disaster, romance, dark matter…

After all the hype, the books, television shows, plays, performances, magazine articles and academic interrogation that have been spawned by the incident2, it remains impossible for us to know the motivation behind Issei Sagawa’s murder and cannibalisation of Renée Hartevelt in Paris, 1981.

Make a move, play the game, take a chance. When we play, we act and this action is essential in our lives, not only within the realm of games and entertainment but as an attitude to life…

The beautiful elasticity of the works of New Zealand artist Daniel Crooks expresses a deep fascination with both the materiality and theory of video as a visual medium representing movement in time…