FBi's Canvas

So much time, planning, effort and money - and back room deals, of course - go into planning. But imagine if you had the opportunity to be part of the 'building' process without having to get your hands dirty. Well, a group of 10 Sydney artists are working on it, with a project called Air City. It's an inflatable architecture, but it's part of the public lab at this year's Underbelly festival, so it's a work in progress - three of the artists, Tully Arnot, Charles Dennington and Xiaofu Wang joined Matt Levinson to discuss how it was going.

How often do you think about the fact that Australia’s currently at war? Allied troops have been fighting in the Middle East off and on for twenty years, but for most of us those distant deserts are little more than brief video footage of sandy landscapes that we absorb before the weather on the evening news. We’re bombarded with images of the area but we rarely engage with what they really mean in an enduring and thoughtful way. Phillip George who wants us to contemplate that strange contradiction.

Starting up an independent magazine is a big job. And these days it’s usually driven by a passionate interest in some niche area like, say, music, film, fashion or books, and to be honest, it’s more likely to wind up as a blog. But there’s a new magazine in town, and it’s a long one, full of culture, arts, music, fashion, poetry and stories. It’s called PAN Magazine, and Matt Levinson spoke to two of the ladies behind the project, Emma Dallas and Anastasia Freeman.

In an art exhibition, the artists are always the star of the show but do we ever consider why they're the star? Who creates the exhibition and how do they know where to best display a work so its exhibited correctly? Claire Lewis is an assistant curator at the MCA who is about to open a group show at First Draft Gallery that she's curated herself and she joined Emma Swift on Canvas.

You know that scene in American Beauty where the neighbour slash love interest shows Thora Birch the video he's taken of a plastic bag wending and warping its way in the wind and he says it's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen? It's a moment people loved to poke fun at. But there's a lot to be said for finding beauty in the discarded, banal little fragments that everyday life is filled with, and Emma Swift was joined on the line by Vin Ryan, a Melbourne-based visual artist who's spent a great deal of time doing exactly that.

Sometime in the past year or 3 we passed a milestone. Around the world, more of us are living in cities than aren't. And looking around this city, like many others, it's a scene of grey, black and mushroom coloured structures. In many ways, that landscape of architectural structures and shapes has fired the work of our next guest. Caz Haswell is a sculptor, although she works in two dimensions as well as the more common three. And in recent shows, her work has become a whole lot more organic.

Years ago, I saw Aphex Twin play a show in Sydney. Kicking back on a lounge chair tapping the laptop in front of him, he seemed barely aware of the raucous scene of a crowd going crazy, several giant sized soft toys racing around the stage, and the overwhelming cacophony of his bleeps and beats. After the gig, people speculated he was playing computer games - he was so disengaged from the show. That plays into his 'whatever' kind of public profile, but it won't be all that foreign from anyone who goes to electronic gigs. But it wasn't always that way. And one artist working at something quite different is Pia Van Gelder.

Graffiti is illegal - there's no question about it - but seeing the work of Sydney street artists like Beastman, Phibs, Jumbo & Zap or Ears, it's instantly clear they're not just punks tagging walls for the sake of it. Their work adds colour, texture and life to the tapestry of our city, and one guy that recognises their contribution is artist, beatboxer and film-maker Luke Cavalan, otherwise known as LC Beats.

Pop up shops have been the buzz phenomenon this past year or so - and they're mostly an opportunity for labels to get rid of stock quickly, or a cheap outlet for new retailers. But a couple of sisters have taken the concept and seriously shifted it, making what they've called "a fantasy dress up box" that's inspired by some surprising stars. Rachel and Claire Fuller are the proprietors of Bams & Ted, and they joined Matt Levinson on Canvas.

One of the biggest names at this year's Sydney Writers Festival is Lionel Shriver. In an almost 30-year writing career she's turned her sometimes cruel and always exacting eye to high school massacres, marital infidelity and her new novel, So Much For That dives into the meltdown that is the US Health Care system. Shriver joined Elmo Keep to talk about her 'lean and mean' years as a relatively unknown author, her years working as a journalist, and the future of journalism in general.