Picture of Exiguous Cube

Here is a picture of my Exiguous Cube in the Monash Uni Faculty Gallery.

Exhibition: 30x30x30

I have a piece called Exiguous Cube in the 30x30x30 Exhibition
at the Faculty Gallery, Monash University, Caulfield, Melbourne.

When: Opening Fri 21st November, 5-7pm.
                 Exhibition 21st Nov - 5th Dec
Where: Faculty Gallery, ground floor Building G, Monash University Caulfield Campus (opposite Caulfield Station)
What: The exhibition is for works that are no bigger than 30x30 cm or 30x30x30 cm, from staff and students in the Faculty of Art and Design, Monash University.

My piece is made out of Lego bricks.

To make an Exiguous Cube in two steps:

Step 1: Add bricks. Place 2 x 4 Lego bricks at random in a 29cm x 29cm x 29cm cube, until no more will fit.

Step 2: Remove bricks. Choose a brick at random. Apply a test: the brick passes the test if it can be removed while leaving the eight corner blocks connected to one another. If the brick passes the test, remove it. Continue choosing bricks at random and applying the test until no more bricks can be removed.

The result is an Exiguous Cube: all the eight corner bricks are connected to one another, but if any brick is removed, the corner blocks won’t all be connected to one another by continuous chains of Lego bricks.

I wrote a computer program to carry out steps 1 and 2, and then built the structure produced by my program.

A censored Internet

The Australian Federal Government is planning to censor the whole of the Internet. This is not just about providing a "child-safe" version of the Internet; that is only part of the plan.

The other, and really objectionable, part is to censor the Internet for everyone, by requiring all Australian Internet Service Providers to block sites on a secret Government blacklist. The Government is also trialling "dynamic" filtering, which attempts to block sites on-the-fly on the basis of content.

As has been pointed out, this will do nothing to block pornographers, who have plenty of ways of evading filters. What it will do is:

• Slow down the Internet and make it more expensive for everyone. (Of course it is already slow and expensive compared to what is available in other advanced countries.)
  
• Block at least 1% of sites that have nothing objectionable, because the filtering software got it wrong. (1% is the lowest figure in the trial referred to below.)
  
• Give the Government extraordinary power to control what we can view.
• Give the Government the ability to read our bank information and the like, as the https protocol can be read by filtering software.
  
• Possibly give the Government power to censor email as well as websites, as one of the filters trialled by the Government has this ability.

Despite Government denials, this looks like the Great Firewall of Australia to me, and to a lot of other people.

For more information:

• http://nocleanfeed.com/ - lots of links to further information, and suggestions on action to take.
  

• http://www.acma.gov.au/webwr/_assets/main/lib310554/isp-level_internet_content_filtering_trial-report.pdf - the Government report on the filtering trial in Tasmania.