So in a more whimisical vein, I’d like to pay homage to the humble bucket… probably the tool we make use of more than any other here on da farm.

We have stainless steel buckets for milking and feeding, ex-packaging buckets for bucketing duck water onto the gardens or filling up with windfall fruit or carrying tools back and forth from the shed or filling with dirt or making stinky compost mixes or ferrying cowshit. We have red buckets and green buckets and white buckets for sterilising feeding equipment or filling with soapy water for washing the cow’s udder. We have 5 identical buckets fixed to the wall of the animal house for 5 little calves to feed from.

Buckets are such a feature of our lives, and such a symbol of production, reuse, recycling, sustainability that we decided to honor the bucket by naming our business after it. Yes, we have a business. Small and simple, few clients as yet, and kind of flakey, but we do need to generate income, since we are not self sufficient and the farming at this stage is all expense and no income.

Media production is my other *thing*, the *thing* that has been my life for many years, as an artist, producer and teacher. While having a screen life is not my idea of fun, it is what i *do*, so my grrl and I have created BucketMedia, to do that do through…

This is Bucket:
What’s in a name? Well if it’s full, perhaps apples, or water, or animal feed, or milk from a just milked cow. Perhaps the bucket has a hole, eliza, and is therefore a leaky vessel, but it can still ferry things of many names and meanings, and perhaps you can use the hole as well as the container, to slowly drizzle liquid on a garden. Bucketmedia has it’s computers in the old bails (note that bail is also the name for the handle of a bucket) on a permaculture farm in the hinterland of byron bay. So we think that buckets are a fine technology and use them every day and indeed have many of different colors lying around. They are most excellent for collecting kitchen scraps to feed to animals. They are a basic recycling tool. What does any of this have to do with media? Nothing and everything. We make use of technology in the same way we use buckets, for a multiplicity of purposes, appropriately and inappropriately. We make of it what we can, and use the leaky part as well as the whole container, for we like things which challenge boundaries. Also, we just like to say the word “bucket”. It feels good to roll around the tongue and can be used as an expletive when the going gets tough. Bucket. Use it.

What does all this mean? We make websites. Yes, bottom feeders that we are, we scavenge work where we can! Charlene has brilliance in her, so that’s a bonus, and i have grunt, so we can bash together something better than passable. Using only buckets! Anyway, once we have a link (well, we do - bucketmedia.net but there’s nothing there yet), I’ll let you know…

Loving you, leaving you, more soon

Vxx