When the Chinese year of the fire horse dawned at the weekend, I was in bed, having been struck down with a horrible cold. Which was a pity, because I’m a fire horse; this is my year! I would have liked to celebrate its beginning in some way. However I’m bouncing back and determined to make the most of my year.

I’m starting my year with a four week residency at the Robert Lord Writer’s Cottage in Dunedin. Robert Lord was a playwright and co-founder of Playmarket, NZ’s agency representing playwrights, of which I am a member. Lord bought the cottage in 1987 when he was the Burns Fellow at the University of Otago, and after his death in 1992 he left the house as a residency for writers. It’s everything a writer needs to be warm, comfortable and focused on writing. My project is to progress a book about my cyberformance work, begun in 2021 but always deprioritised by other things – life, work, etcetera. And of course before I’ve even started on that, other projects are interrupting, as they do!

The UpStage team is busy again. Our lead developer Gloria has had another burst of enthusiasm for the code, and on the admin level we are busy moving hosting and domain names around the world. We have secured a new hosting sponsorship with local Christchurch-based company Prodigi, which is a huge gift as the project has no regular income at the moment.

Last year I was invited to create an installation to represent the Magdalena Project with LAFLIS (Living Archives Floating Islands) at the Biblioteca Bernadini in Lecce, Italy. It’s an exciting opportunity for me to create a permanent installation that documents the vitality of the Magdalena network in a living archival artwork and I will do a post about it soon.

I’ll be in Aotearoa until the end of March, but I’ve already got travel plans for events in Europe in April and May. On 16 April I’ll be in Graz, Austria to perform with Eva Ursprung at the finissage of her exhibition “The Art of Surfacing“, and soon after that heading to Nurnberg for this year’s Libre Graphics Meeting.

Meanwhile the state of the world continues to lurch from crazy to insane to climate chaos. I keep myself grounded by focusing on the many many positive projects that I discover each day, such as this local e-waste recycling initiative.