It’s a beautiful clear night in Kogarah when I make my way to the Town Square – there’s a parked car in the middle of the street and a man hemmed in by bright-eyed children spinning pink fairy-floss onto a stick. There’s a fortress… There’s a gated night market within – and we wait as people gather and mill.

At the opening moments the shadows before us suggest a world of creatures and inventions and inventors – a man arrives with a collection of brown cardboard boxes labelled as Boron… there are moving boxes, robots – and as the gates open we are invited in to experience all there is to see and do at the night market – have a service check up – make a light painting – watch a group ensemble dance – be re-invented/re-costumed by a woman in a knitted dress – peak into a box to see a luminescent dancer – watch as a machine delivers a marble through a series of convoluted pipes and corrogated cardboard – you can force a robot to paint and how and what to paint with what part of his body – you caneven be in control of a video-game man who will dispense silver balls into the audience.

It’s a beautiful and bizarre world of installation and performance. Where we are asked to imagine how we will invent and re-invent our future.

This is the result of many weeks of hard work, harnessing the creative energy and imaginative power of 120 young people supported by a team of professional artists and the result is spectacular. This is the first major project under the new artistic directors Caitlin Newton-Broad and Howard Matthew – both ex-expats freshly returned from living in the UK. This was a project whose wheels were in motion under former Shopfront AD TJ Eckleberg – and with the assistance of many city councils and funding bodies, schools and arts organizations has flourished into a bright and beautiful world.

For more info about the process behind the presentation check out the blog :
http://machineatlas.shopfront.org.au/

But if you can, head down to Kogarah Town Square it’s on tonight and tomorrow (That’s Saturday and Sunday) it’s free and it’s fun and utterly surprising… I had a blast!