History
Airstrip turned 10 years old in 2008!
Airstrip is a young dynamic company, devoted to pushing the boundaries of new media. Our principle income stream is from code and design. Airstrip has trained with industry leaders in Australia, and Germany. We are also fervently autodidactic, teaching ourselves the required skills on the move. We love to learn, its the greatest feeling in the world!
The name airstrip comes from a dream. Matthew dreamt of aeroplanes taking off and landing in his driveway, and upon waking realised the name Airstrip. Since then he has travelled internationally for exhibits, artist residencies, conferences and for the sake of travel. The name Airstrip inspires plane flights, and surely it has provided.
A bit of History
Airstrip began in 1998, in the pre-dotcom crash era, when websites were low bandwidth, flash was something really new, and CDROMs were the thing everyone wanted. At the time we specialised in Director programming (thanks to years of experience with Peter Hennessey and Patricia Piccinini at Drome), and one of our first major projects was with Senojweb (now Chocolate designs). The project was for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a CDROM that went Australia wide to every school. Airstrip authored the final master version that was to go out and print 100,000 copies.
We were also early adopters of Flash. Oh how glorious it was to write actionscript 1.0 in Flash version 4, what an advancement of technology that was! Our first major flash project was an animated artwork by Matthew Gardiner, called Temple of Dreams. Matthew was an untrained animator, but persisted, and created 3 x 3 minute online episodes. Hand drawn, scanned, outlined and animated, the Temple of Dreams played as part of the 2000 Next Wave Festival.
Matthew began lecturing at Swinburne around 2001, teaching Director, and later Flash. He fed his students ideas about code modularity, repetition, data representation, and origami. This important stage of development taught Airstrip fundamentals in design, communication and good code. It had to be distilled to be teachable, and therefore developed refined understanding.
Airstrip moved into web application development with Drome. We did our first Content Management System with PHP3 and MySQL for Melbourne premier dance company www.chunkymove.com (their site has since been redeveloped several times). We've since stuck with php and mysql, and we still believe it to be perfect for fast, flexible web development.
Somehow, mostly through our passion for doing it, and through good fortune, we've become leaders in Australian Origami. Airstrip became a publisher in 2005 with our first book, Folding Australia 2005 Origami Convention Book, and now organises and runs Folding Australia Origami Conventions, biennially. Our first 'real' publication, through Hinkler books, titled Everything Origami, features designs from Australian origami designers, and we think every home should have a copy. Airstrip has provided custom origami designs for advertising, graphics, exhibitions, and even robotic origami!
