Concrete Dialogues is a collaborative online writing project, created for young writers in Perth, Western Australia. The project organises the creative works of 16 to 30 year olds according to geographic location on a digital streemap of the Perth Metropolitan region. Submissions are based on specific locations in the city and suburbs, which become hyperlinks across the digital map. The result is a psychogeographic portrait of our city--a mosaic of writing that uncovers the darker doorsteps of the intersections you know, the romances in the parks you drive past, the characters of the suburbs you can't place.

Concrete Dialogues is a rare opportunity for young writers in Perth. It is somewhere they can exhibit their work and come into contact with other writers. Follow the journey of other site users, create your own journey through the streets and short stories, or contribute your own writing about a school in Whitfords, a riverbank in Rossmoyne, a carpark in Darlington...

The Concrete Dialogues Project is supported by ArtsWA, the Australia Council and the Department of Land Information Western Australia.

Beyond the Web

As well as this website, Concrete Dialogues is also a print zine and a series of collector cards that you will find around the streets of Perth over the next few months. The zine was produced from the best of the initial submissions to the site, and it's very pretty indeed. Keep your eyes on the street to snare yourself a copy, or get in touch if you'd like to pick one up.

Your Tour Operators

Co-Editor / Site Developer / Project Manager

Patrick Pittman

Co-Editor

Richard Southern

Art Director

Natalija Brunovs

Supporters

Street Mapping Data

Department of Land Information

Office space, support and sustenance

Papercut Media

Hosting and Bandwidth

Pixelbox Networks

Thanks

We are forever indebted to Jane Mitchell at ArtsWA and Jodi Cant at the Department of Land Information ‹ thanks for your persistence and help in navigating the mazes of government bureaucracy. We owe the existence of the whole project to Nicola Evans, Jill Jones and the Literature Board at the Australia Council. Thanks to Chris McCormick for his programming brilliance, without which this would have been an infinitely more difficult and less beautiful project, and to Jacob at Papercut for keeping Patrick and Nat sane. Cheers to Sunny, Jill, Katrina and the Propelarts team for their help in getting us off the ground, and Renee and Stephanie at ArtsEdge for getting us out to schools. Thanks also to Julienne van Loon, Marcus Canning, Roland Leach and Claire Pannell for your support, and a huge thanks to all the open source developers who produced the brilliant software that allowed us to produce such an amazing project on such a tiny budget. Lastly, thanks to all those who contributed works for the project - both the zine and the website have turned out better than we could have ever imagined and your writing sparked light into some very dark corners of this fair city.

Technical Info

A nerdy note from the Developer

This site has been under development for over two years now. The web has evolved along the way, and I've tried as best as possible to keep it on the cutting edge. The site you see now may appear simple from the front, but there's all kinds of craziness going on behind the scenes. I'd love to know of any bugs you may encounter, as this was essentially developed by one person -- dialogues@concrete.org.au is the place to email any problems you find.

Satellite imagery and map functionality is provided via an integration of Google Maps and the open source UMN MapServer, using geographic data generously provided by the Western Australian Department of Land Information, one of our major sponsors.

All of this is accomplished with a mix of Javascript, AJAX, PHP, SOAP, and some (hopefully) fine XHTML compliant markup. If that means anything to you and you're interested in the implementation, please get in touch and I'd be happy to bend your ear.

Oh, and it's all built on top of Papercut Media's awesome Dreamgirl web application framework, which has been a major part of my day job for the last several years.

Patrick