Interview with Shakthi Sivanathan, Director, Curious Works.

Who Are you?

I am Shakthi.

Where are you located?

Currently in Roebourne, North-Western Australia. You can see to the horizon in every direction. Normally I exist in a warehouse with Central Station and the city's skyscrapers filling out the view. You gotta love this big land of ours.

What do you do?

I run CuriousWorks. This means making my own things, helping other young people and under-resourced organisations to make things, and managing the business of making things. 'Things' = film, music, theatre, multimedia, geek objects...

What do you love?

Haloumi. The resilience of people. Magoes and well-costed, smartly-utlilised renewable energies. Kids seeing the film they just made, their face on the big screen. The kick I get out of seeing big, long, creative projects slowly come to fruition. Sunshine. Building capacity and slowly making ourselves redundant. The CuriousWorks crew! The inter-connectedness of all my digital devices. My guitar. A passion fruit on the right morning at the right time - hungover, just before a big breakfast.

How was Curious Works conceived?

Initially, because I like to work for myself, to know how each piece of work fits into the bigger plan. Wasn't interested in earning heaps of money at a job I didn't love. I wanted to start a company that made art based on ideas rather than any particular art form. I spend time developing these ideas and then utilising, with the CuriousWorks crew, the most relevant art forms and creative tools we currently have to execute those ideas.

What developments are you working on now?

All Around You is the big one. We work in an under-resourced region for three significant periods of time over three years. In that time, we work with the kids in that region, teaching them how to make their own performance and multimedia pieces. We work with cultural organisations in that region, building their capacity to use digital and online media to represent themselves and their community. By the end of the three years the goal is to be redundant - the kids can make simple, creative stories about life in their town on their own and the organisations don't need us anymore because the new media workflow is integrated into their everyday activities.

All of the work people and organisations make through All Around You is shared on an online portal. Our two focus areas for All Around You are currently Liverpool, Western Sydney and Roebourne, Western Australia, so at the moment people from each of these regions can check our each other's multimedia work on a common website. The site goes public this November so soon you can check it out too!

We also have our own creative projects. I'm finishing off a film called 'This City is a Body', which explores 40 Sydneysider's responses to the notion that Sydney is a city built on a history of migration. We're doing a projection in Melbourne this September which casts Federation Square as if it is underwater, people sailing on self-made boats between the tips of skyscrapers. I've just finished my first album and we'll be doing launches in Melbourne and Sydney this October. Early next year I'm directing an invisible outdoors performance utilising surveillance cameras in Burwood park.