I’ve been reading around on VJing, and Vague Terrain has this great issue. I particularly liked the look of the VJs Pillow and Mademoiselle ‘video souvenir’ and the work of Jackson 2bears. The Lara Houston article is fabulous, on VJing and Simondon. Houston also draws on the likes of Sher Doruff (her work on the translocal in performance is really groundbreaking but I’m not sure how much of it is published) and Brian Massumi, as well as a lot of good field work. Researching VJing via fieldwork must be fun - maybe as good as researching surfing.

I’m not a surfer but I always thought it would be a great area for field work. When I was 14, for a couple of weeks I was a dag hanging out at Evan’s Head, one of Australia’s best surfing spots, occasionally knocking good surfers off their boards at Angourie. I’m both proud and ashamed to admit that one of these incidents left me with a kind of large dent in my leg, and the surfer’s board a little smashed up on the rocks. While there, I went to a film presentation in a scout hall (Crystal Voyager of course), by a guy who’d done his PhD on surfing. That PhD thing sounded pretty good to me - and it’s just hit me that this might have led me to become an academic.

Of course, as most people seem to know, the academic surf has been pretty flat for while. Hopefully some decent sets coming through soon.