In the Style of Me is a project intended to provide an art challenge to any and all artists, crafters, photographers, sculptors and other creatives. To participate all you have to do is submit a photo, scan or digital illustration of a piece of art you have done that is your interpretation of another famous work of art – but in your own style. For instance, you could collage the Venus Di Milo, sketch your version of a Rousseau, or sculpt “The Scream”. For those that need a little more prodding or inspiration, each week an artist will be chosen for participants to ‘Style’. The season...

Alchemy gets a bad rap these days, seen only as a primitive version of chemistry - its practitioners greedy fools thinking they could turn lead into gold. The truth is that Alchemy was an early attempt to understand how the world worked, and it blended ideas from religion and science. Some Alchemists believed that if they understood enough about the elemental forces in nature, they would be able to create the philosopher's stone, which would be able to turn base matter into gold. Other Alchemists were driven more by the quest for spiritual enlightenment, and saw their proto-chemistry experiments...

Religious people often claim that atheists can't possibly have a moral compass that will guide us to behave well, since we have no God to tell us what is right and what's wrong. I find it ironic, therefore, to read in today's Age an article about a Rabbi at a Jewish college here in Melbourne who "has changed his evidence about his knowledge of alleged paedophilia and conceded he was aware in the early 2000s of rumours that a former security guard had molested children". Suffice it to say that the subject of the rumours was not immediately reported to the police. What would you do if there were...

I've been developing for the web since 1994, and in that time I've seen technologies come and go. Some have been truly bad ideas from the start (like the blink tag). Others filled a genuine need (like Flash). Back in the mid-nineties, I dabbled a lot with Macromedia Director. I spent countless hours building a thing I called the ColourZoomer, which loaded an image and then let you interactively change the colours, zoom and crop it. I learned a lot about OO programming doing that. I also built an application called "The Alchemist", which was like a ColourZoomer on steroids. It let you load images...

Welcome to the new Alchemy site. The last version of this site was designed in 1997, so this new one is a total reset - 15 years in the making. When this site started in 1995, if you wanted an image gallery you built it yourself. So I did. Now, there are nice ones that you can have for free and that look much nicer than what I was able to build back then. Back in 1995, I decided to run this site as a communal gallery so I built the capability to allow other people to upload their own artwork for display. At the time this was a novel idea (I was doing it before DeviantArt came along, and all the others...

It seems to me that a lot of the problems caused by democracy (corruption, lack of representation, mindless politicking, fear and loathing campaigns, dog-whistling, short-termism etc) are attributable to the fact that our parliamentry system is based on very old technology - the idea that the only way the voice of the people can be heard is for those people to be organised by geographical areas where all will vote for a single person who will go and represent them and their area in a parliament somewhere. What this causes is a concentration of power in the hands of a few, most of whom we actually...

This is the new Alchemy site - formerly known as Image Alchemy. Click the menu items above to browse my art, music, photos and videos. You can buy my stuff as well.     The rest of this page contains blog posts on a variety of subjects. Use at your own risk.

Do you see, mesdames et messieurs, the contents of my shop? It is full of great works. The human spirit has been squeezed dry by their creation. They stand here, mute but immutable; silent evidence; the fingerprints of the human soul. You can see it in every stroke. The soul is the work's shadow. It is set in the hardened paint like the figures frozen at Pompeii, or the silhouettes of those vaporised at Hiroshima. What price shall I put on them? I'm interested in how a "realistic" image captured by a camera can evolve into something more abstract. Digital photography is my chosen medium because...