christmas!

so, my laptop is still in apple service centre purgatory and i'm writing this in an internet cafe on windows vista with internet explorer on a german keyboard.  i can't work out whether you should pity me, or be impressed at my committment to blogging in the face of such appalling conditions. actually, me and half the developing world are totally tight right now. maybe i should take up spamming and earn some cash, while i'm here.


so, christmas.




can i just tell you that it's sooooo awesome being in germany for christmas. it's super fluffy sprinkly white snow everywhere. candles are lit, everyone is cheery, the shop assistants offer you marshmallows when you're browsing and the decorations are rad. because it's dark at about 4pm, everything is really cosy. i went to my first Weihnachtsmarkt last week and that was the beginning of my christmas spirit.

i baked gingerbread the other day (and have now eaten too much of them - lucky i have a second batch to give away) and have wrapped almost all my christmas presents. i've made cards, wrapping paper and am all skipping and cheery and red-cheeked from drinking hot Kindepunsch (which is the non-alcoholic version of Gluhwein).

it's awesome.


and yet, weirdly, it doesn't feel like the end of the year. maybe it's the winter-thing messin' with my internal clock, but i have to keep reminding myself that there are only 10 days left of '10.

my dear friend rob has tagged me in one of those memes that are relentless, but which i secretly love. so here are my answers to that. and some extra for all the goodness for the year - to combat the ad-heavy bent on these ones.

merry christmas to all of you and big smooches for the new year.



1/ Best single thing [personal &/or professional] you did/achieved in 2010.sorry rob - my year can't be boiled down into a single awesome thing, thankfully (imagine having such a singular life! how dull...) so here's my top 5:

1. moved to germany for the second-half of the year. as all the australians and a couple of english peeps i know will attest, that is not easy. living in a city in which you're not a native speaker is hard enough, but then there's the unspoken elements of living in a place you're not culturally from that really tickle your haemorroids. the fact that i have done it, impresses me still. i haven't done it perfectly and will be heading home in feb (because of that), but i did it. and i know that i'll be back here again - hopefully soon.

2. made some really good work. it may not all have been received well, but i'm pleased with the work i made this year. and i made a lot of it, which i'm also pleased about.

3. i got some funding from the government. it was pretty handy and helped me do both 1 + 2. it will also mean that i'm going back to australia to do another amazing project.

4. went to some bloody fantastic festival/symposia this year. ISEA, ars electronic, agents/actors/applicants, thrilling wonder stories. i learned SO much and had my brain baked several times. which is fantastic.

5. danced every weekend until at least 4am from september onwards. so that may not warrant top five in anyone else's book, but it totally is in mine. i've had loads of fun and really got to see some shit-hot electronic and dancehall acts play over the last few months. it's something that i just cannot do back home and will be something i dearly miss in melbourne.


2/ Most shameful thing [personal &/or professional] you did/achieved in 2010.i would love to only have done one shameful thing this year, but i did quite a few. most of which i have either made amends for, or learnt from. but they still kinda sting too:

1. installed work that i didn't check properly. the file i uploaded to the ipod for a recent exhibition was incorrect - with parts missing and a double-time section of the the track. it was awful. and embarrasing. i learned about quality control, and taking time with making work. and having someone else look at it too.

2. took on a job then left again after four weeks when i got arts funding. i didn't handle it with the kind of courtesy that i would like to think i had. and i disappointed people i had known for a while.

3. made my mum cry. my mum and i have a good but slightly fraught relationship and this year the difficulties between us came to a head. it's all good now and we're going to be doing some awesome talking and working shit out when i get back, but that was not a nice moment.
 3/ Ad industry scandal or scoundrel of the year.
i have my opinions about a very specific 'scandal' i'm aware of, which i'll keep to myself.
but actually, there are greater scoundrels than some of the peeps involved in that anyway. actually, i think that rupert murdoch continues to be an ad industry scoundrel that has far too much control over media and public opinion. when i log out from my hotmail account and see the GARBAGE that passes for news, content or even advertising, i want to vomit. i also think that the fact that sexist, racist and homophobic content continues to pass as advertising these days is scandalous. can't we just leave that shit in the last decade, please?
 

4/ Your overall rating for 2010 out of 10.
9 there were a few weeks where i thought i was going to lose it there, otherwise it would have been a 10. this year has been pretty stellar. and, even better, i feel like next year is going to be even better!

5/ What do you think will be the most overhyped advertising related subject of 2011?
television.

i think television should be euthenased. it is already become a bigger pile of stinking turdishness, for which content isn't really being 'developed', but is being kept on life support by the drugs of advertising. the sooner advertising pulls the plug, the more that writers, producers, actors, etc, will be able to focus their money, time and energy on producing great content for more selective media: dvd, online download, online viewing and mobile content. hopefully the days of all staring at a big box on a sunday night are almost over.


5/A The best exhibitions of 2010?

again, a top 5 is in order, as i saw quite a few (and apologies for the lack of art-related posts lately. you know, iphones aren't really blogging-friendly devices, as awesome as they are)

1. rachel whiteread's drawings at tate britain. ms whiteread is one of my all-time art inspirations, so seeing her drawings filled me with such joy, hope and kick-in-the-pants motivation that i could hardly speak.

2. & (ampersand) at the daimler collection. heavy with politics, determination and a whole lot of sadness, it was a show that wasn't 100% brilliant, but the ones that were, really stayed with me for a long, long time.

3. michaela gleave. both her work at anna pappas, and her work in berlin. i've like michaela's work for aaaages, so it was a pleasure to get multiple chances to see it.

4. abby mcculloch at helen gory. stellar. standout. every work was stunning and it sold out and i was really proud of her. even though i don't know her.

5. innere stimme at veneklasen/werder. uplifting, goosebump-inducing, long and heavy with meaning. it literally resonated with me. and sat in my sonic memory for a couple of weeks afterwards.

things to not do in stockholm

miss your flight.

 because i had a ridiculously early flight back from skavsta airport which is about 80kms from stockholm, i stayed at the airport hotel. i had no mobile and no laptop and no alarm clock with me (for various reasons), so i asked to be woken up in the morning (4:30 for breakfast, thanks). i woke at the sound of my neighbour's door opening, raced to the foyer with the big clock on the wall and saw that it was 6:30. gate closed, flight departing. next one not 'til the next day.


it was like something out of trains, plains and automobiles - although i surprised myself by not swearing so much. l made it back home, 14 hours and €150 later, having learned some vital lessons. phew.

get blown up.

this super-sad story about a car bomb in stockholm was a bit shocking. not least because of the fact that peeps were killed, that the apparent reasons for it seemed a bit stretched (sweden's involvement in afghanistan is 500 troops. whilst still 'involved', that's hardly a major player from what little i know of military deployment), and the fact that me and my friend phiroze were there just a week earlier!



but on a lighter note, we had a fab time. see these pics.






















UPDATE:  my laptop has overdosed and is now in intensive care in a berlin service centre. who knows when i'll be able to get back to regular drivel. merry christmas to all y'all!

the future

a few weeks ago, i popped over to london to take care of a few things: there were a series of excellent exhibitions on that i didn't want to miss (i'll write about them later); there were some friends i needed to touch base with; and there was a little symposium about the future to attend.

thrilling wonder stories, part II was organised by geoff from bldgblog and liam from tomorrows thoughts today at the architecture association in london.* and featured a stack of writers, gamers, interactive designers, artists and researchers talking about a whole range of fiction-based ideas about the future and its possible construct.

check out the list of amazing people involved!

oh, and did i mention it was free? charlie and i were there at 10:30am, expecting a marauding mass of architects falling over themselves to be part of the discussion. turns out architects aren't quite like that.

i don't really consider myself much of a futurist - sometimes i'm disappointed when discover that i'm actually too romantic to readily cast aside old ways of behaving in favour of new innovations. but i'm  really attached to the idea of innovating and changing and mixing it all up so that we don't get caught up in our stinking thinking.

and unlike my dear friend rob who thinks that kind of talk is bollocks, i do actually believe in the idea (one i think i've garnered from bldgblog or russell davies or some other awesome brain) that in aiming way forward to gain 10, with the inherent 'backdraft' of life, you can still actually gain 3.

science fiction (inc some of its design associates like buckminster fuller and pentagram), is an excellent tool for designing for the future in this way. if you get wacky and can really design for 'a galaxy far, far away' you might just unlock something that will be functional for a building that will be great for 10 years' time.

or, free from the constraints of 'must be viable', you can end up with 'could be possible' and you start to solve problems that no one has bothered to think about yet, whilst still make them believable to an audience firmly sitting in the present day. language, imagination and concept rooted in fact. ftw.




so, the day was split into 5 sessions (perhaps a little OTT, by the end of it all), but each session started to unpick different aspects of designing for the future.

i didn't really make very objective, journalist notes like rory did, so my report of the day is going to be quite subjective and perhaps influenced by where the ideas took me, rather than what was actually said.  (if that isn't a caveat for sloppy reporting, misquoting and laziness, i don't know what is!)

the ideas which floated my particular boat i'm calling designing for hiding, the smell of the moon, and using changed behaviour through gaming.

designing for hiding

geoff manaugh spoke about geologists dealing with nuclear waste having to come up with a protocol to signify to future generations: DO NOT OPEN THE CAN!!. basically, there's a stack of toxic waste being drilled into the earth, which is all fine and dandy for us who can read a sign or two, or who have the means to be in communication with the culprits. but how do you build a vault to hide that garbage, with those 60,000 years in the future in mind. given that we've no concrete idea about what stonehenge, the pyramids or macchu pichu are trying to tell us - how can we expect the equivalent to understand what our 'wrong way go back' signs might mean.

not only did this particular feat of language and signification pique my interest, but the whole idea of designing for the hidden was exciting too.

everyone knows that if you want to hide something, put it in plain sight. the real outcome of a tunnel, maze or complex series of encryptions is not safekeeping, but a means of revelation, discovery and inquisition. the safe is the best kind of learning tool. it got me thinking of other ways to use this kind of design process. maybe the best way to teach young boys to read is to bury books in a well, or the hide ideas about sound behind a glass soundproof door.

the smell of the moon

now, when i told this story to my scientific photographer friend, of course i didn't have all the facts and he picked holes in it straight away (spoil sport), but the idea and the possibility of what this means still totally floated my boat.

nicola twilley presented a story about perception from the moon - astronauts on one of the apollo missions recalled the particular smell of the moon - that it was something like gunpowder. they brought back a sealed sample of the moon dust and no aspect of its chemical added up to smell anything like gunpowder. which means that the way humans smell on the moon is different to the way we smell on earth.

which of course calls into question our whole perception of life itself, but also about the possibilities for the actual science of earth and/or the moon itself. if we perceive things differently away from earth, whose to say that things aren't actually different here. and if the chemical properties are different away from the moon, whose to say that what we believe is on the moon is not completely different. like, what if we only see a desert of sand and dust and fuck-all, but

now all of this is fascinating from a philosophical point of view, but the reason i think this kind of 'what if' thinking is important is for other areas of existence. like the perception of power, or the perception of life itself (like the couldabeen arsenic-ingesting bacteria from last week).

which leads me onto...

changed behaviour through gaming







ed stern spoke about the splash damage game brink, which was an intense FPS multi-player, multi-level game with some amazing architectural and wayfinding structure inbuilt. he spoke about the need to really make things work - "a barrel needs to big enough to really hide behind and small enough to jump over". each level had varying levels of decay - this being based in a future in which war is being waged. the imagery was brilliant and the architectural possibilities for archiving and spatial experience were super exciting.

when talking about designing the next version of the game, ed said that "it would have more women in it" -  highlighting the fact that v1.0 was all blokes**. which had me thinking about a game solely designed on feminist or gender equality principles - it could be a completely different world: social organisation could be different, motives and spatial organisation could be altered -  imagine what that could actually look like!

and what would the kids who played that game grow up to be like, if they had already experienced a world in which women and men really were treated equal? what if gaming is used to construct alternative social dynamics in which we experience an altered perception, reinforced by haptic and sensorial memory. i mean could we equalise men and women? could the israel/palestine conflict be solved through gaming?

epic win.


UPDATE: so it turns out jane mcgonigal has presented some similar ideas, and join the company and method are also doing work on the small ways in which you can use play/gaming for changing behaviour.


*here's the chain of promotion: @roryhyde;@sheseesred;@CharlieGower + @johndodds (who watched it live on the interwebs). who sez we're disconnected, yo.


** although the lead character, i noticed, was an afro-carribean man - something i haven't really seen in macho gaming this far. not that i'm a gamer, per se - i have zero dexterity.

a list of things to do in stockholm

hi. yes, i'm sorry darling for being away for a long time. and i've rarely been in contact. i went to london and got caught up in life. but it doesn't mean that i don't love you, i promise. but i'll change all that. really, i will.


after i get back from stockholm.






eep! i'm super-excited. i know that it's already pretty damned icy here. snow in london, snow in berlin, snow in stockholm. but i'm looking forward to checking out a city i've not been to before.


i'm going with my friend phiroze, who has an amazing job and who has put me in charge of 'entertainment'. that could go anywhere, but in the interest of being a proper tourist for a few days, here's a list i've done so far...


moderna museet 


Kungsträdgården ice skating


drop coffee (i'm very proud of myself - it's only at #3 on the list!)


arkitekturmuseet


nordic museum


the office #15


boat tours of the royal canal


dark tours/rooftop tours


the globe


any other suggestions?


image credit: gorgios karamanis from flickr

hipsters v2.0

mayhem posted a link on facebook last week to an interesting article about hipsters. 

i have spent time scoffing at the hipsters, whilst feeling that somehow i was getting old and out of the loop. and yet, at the same time (especially after this honda jazz ad) had quiet feelings of shame about my own apparent hipster qualities - see the references to penguin classics, free trade and 200gsm.

since then i've oscillated back and forth again between compassion and absolute derision for the hipster thang.

hipster

hipster

hipsters

hipster

knowledge, taste and aesthetic value

these are some of the qualities of the hipster. the true hipster.
and yes, i must accept that these are qualities that i actually support, quite like in others and sometimes in myself. the search for knowledge through reading (and the interwebs), shared knowledge, touchy-feely allegiance to the less-rational and a love of art, ethics and politics are all sexy. the dandy and the fop are back in form, as is androgeny, giving us some slight relief from the male = macho, female = t&a. and colour is a thing again. all of these, i concur, are actually pretty cool.


cool for the sake of it

and yet, last week i found myself in a nightclub in mitte* - one full of hipster types - who all displayed the very worst qualities of the sub-culture: completely self-centered, focusing only on their appearance to others, insular and talking all the way through some cracking dj sets. some were so busy flaying their hair across their oversized glasses and dancing to get attention that they completely missed the rhythm of the music. this from the curmudgeonly gen-x/y type in black who danced next to the decks for 3 hours straight.

*ahem. for those that care, it was 'cos trevor jackson AND erol alkan were playing. for €12. it was brilliant!

the romantics

what i've noticed, though, is that all these qualities are that which typify the romantic era of cultural history too. that well-dressed chap, lord byron and his poetry reading, love-letter writing, mincing, curvacious dandy-types were all the rage and helped veer culture slightly away from the rigid rationalist industrialists for a while. veronica kent often speaks about a neo-romanticism in art, and although i'm not a fan of the pyramid/hypercolour aesthetic aspect of the art being seen at the moment, i agree with her.


check out these v1.0 fucking hipsters

hipsters at trust

hipster

hipsters

hipster




granted, these are just half-thoughts, but if it's even a little bit true, it's going to be interesting to watch the neo-realist courbet/manet types coming through in the next 20 years.


hipster 2.0 images from look at this fucking hipster
hipster 1.0 images from the alte nationalgalerie, berlin

good and great

today i caught up on some reading, 'cos i'm procrastinating and i couldn't help it. but i wanted to post about some of the ace things i've seen, which mostly happen to be from GOOD.


clapping your hands when you like a band - music and social media.

brilliant posters for the kent state folk festival. they sparked a few little thoughts looking forward to the time when social media and social interaction get really close. i think they're getting closer, but it's gonna be awesome when we really smush them up and really value both.



i also had a utopian idea the other day that the death of television should be welcomed and that it was only ever going to be a small invention on the way to the much bigger awesomeness of the interwebs anyway.

in fact, if i was in charge of cultural radness in australia, i'd get rid of all funding to TV content production, turn it into good production for DVD/online video/live experience and radio; chuck money back into films, gaming, online stories and books. i guess like the media equivalent of thanking a lover for a good time, but committing to a long-term relationship for the future.

but i digress.


tourism is the march of stupidity


i'm a bit of a traveller/tourist at the moment, so of course i couldn't help but LOVE LOVE LOVE this post about tourism and literature by miles allinson. miles is a super-fucking talented writer and thinker and artist-type. readings is a melbourne institution that really supports literature, reading, thinking and artist-types.

BOMF wisdom to know the difference

and then there's the fantastic and worthwhile and 'oh i wish i thought of that' Back on My Feet running program coming out of the East Coast in the US - brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.

it's programs like this that remind me that humans are not stupid. we're not heartless. and although life circumstances can freeze over our hearts and minds - at either end of the poverty scale - it is the simple, meaningful, heartfelt actions that really help us keep our shit together.

heyousebutok
oh, and just one more thing from good - a great article about the history of the word OK.
i personally love the spelling 'okeh' and am going to use it from now on.
meh, teh and okeh.
perfect.


image credits:
44th kent state folk festival posters by marcus agency from the GOOD blog
miles allinson/reading st. kilda from his confrontation with falling blog
eric fair image from the GOOD blog/lauren e. friedman [best name ever, BTW]

this week at the galleries

er, ok. you got me. it's not a week since i last posted about art i've seen in berlin. in fact, it's been ages. i kinda went into lock-down for this exhibition and pretty much didn't leave my little studio apartment for a week.

but since the opening, i've been seeing a few things here and there:

silberkuppe - living well is the best revenge

 the cutest, smallest gallery space on skalitzer straße, near chert/motto for you local berlin kids, this show was ace. an investigation into the line between public/private, through the action of jogging and everything that goes with it - including all the fashion/marketing/rah-rah-rah. in fact, a lot of similar ideas to the ones i work on with sound. the beautiful block-mounted photo letters that 'ran' through the little space were total gems.

skalitzer 140_temporary - R.E.B.E.A.T I.T


this is another great space on skalitzer straße, this time they have just a one-night only exhibition each tuesday. it's well set-up, simple and clear. last week they had two projections in the back Hof, which was brilliant and I encouraged them to do that again.

i'm looking forward to seeing what else is in the space. i might even break my own 'no more shows this year' promise and exhibit something myself..

alte national galerie - permanent collection//tino sehgal



i hadn't managed to get to any of the big olde worldy galleries in berlin until now. but, i've since bought a yearly ticket and am going to squeeze them all in before i leave. thankfully, having a friend here as a tourist kicked me in the right direction.



the presence of the ongoing tino sehgal work at the national galerie was a clear starting point. i bloody love tino sehgal's work and have now been fortunate enough to experience and engage with two of them thus far [last year at the marian goodman galerie in paris]. the work at the alte is a reproduction/replication/reintroduction of the 2002 work 'this is propaganda' - a song-based work in which the situation of a place is changed through the singing of a note by a performer.




obviously i saw some other amazing work in the gallery - my personal highlight being the caspar david friendrich paintings of the monk staring out at sea and the abbey in the oak forest. they're pretty damned exquisite and really difficult to see as paintings. i got told off for going too close, but i just had to get in an see the surface. layers and layers of varnish (and time) means that these works are photograph-esque. actually i couldn't help but think about todd mcmillan's performance version of the monk, especially as the paintings seemed more like videos than something made with goopy stuff.

the romantic paintings were also pretty amazing and i made an interesting link between romanticism and hipsterdom that i'm in the process of unpacking.




oh, and there's a nan goldin exhibition on at the berlinische galerie. we went to see her talk, but it was sold out, so instead of sorting out how to really deal with that, they locked the doors to the place. we snuck in and made it to the shop, but no further - they weren't letting anyone else in until an unspecified moment. weird, weird, weird experience i tell you.

but that raumlabour jumping castle geometry outside the place was fun!

boom box

i saw this picture on the satorialist and although i go weak at the knees in bookshops, my first thought was 'i want those boombox pics'.

they're not clever, but they're big and awesome.

that is all.

berlin: 10 shades of grey

a few days ago, dell posted 10 types of blue - a gorgeous snapshot of oz at the moment and one which shot a pang of homesickness right through me.

rather than get on a plane, i decided to find the beauty in berlin's grey. and you know what, it worked! within all the grey, there are actually some pretty stunning bursts of colour and i've decided to start actively look for the colours of berlin. not only that, but in enjoying the grey, i got a whiff of understanding about the gothic/romantic/expressionist view of germany, one which i couldn't really connect to before.

music in berlin

for most of my time in berlin, i've been doing a whole lot of listening. mostly to the ambient sounds of the public realm. usually 'outside'.

but, i've also made sure that i'm taking in as much music-based experience as i can whilst i'm here. the relationship that germans and berliners have to music is particularly interesting to me. especially as it's like a super-extended-remix version of the relationship melbournians have to music.

there is such a wide variety of stuff going on, so it's been a great chance to just dip in and out of all kinds of styles, venues and times. i could, if i wanted to, spend every night of the week going to see electro-acoustic performances. or dance to techno. or see a classical performance. or go see a rock gig. thankfully i have neither the time nor the money to do so, otherwise i'd never sleep, eat, or do what i came here to do.

but, it's been great to sample in small doses.

last week i went to a choir/orchestral performance of giuseppe verdi's requiem - part of it, the dies irae, is surely in every tim burton movie ever made. well, it was the 90-minute whole piece. all fire and brimstone and judgment day. counter reformation-styles, in a protestant church. awesome.

a few weeks ago i went to peaches' 'operantomime' peaches does herself - celebrating 10 years of her career and all the love sex gender-bending fuck-you rock-out that comes with it. it was pretty goddamm spectactular, that's for sure.

last night peter newman and i stood at schieslischer's tor u-bahn and listened to two members of  krautrock/90s slacker band, camera, absolutely kill it in the entrance to the station on a practice amp and a hollow wooden stool, with marakas on the 'kick'. it was fucking amazing, genuine and reminded me of the brilliant BBC documentary on krautrock (thanks stan!)

this week i'm off to a couple of experimental performances in my local 'hood, one of which i think will feature chris abrahams, home-town pride, and some raw composition work at ausland - a venue i haven't been to yet, but hosts some brilliant gigs.

every weekend i go dancing until at least 4am. it's pretty rad. and the relationship berliners have to dancing in a club is awesome - there's not commandeering of the dancefloor here, kids. everyone faces the front and you dance. if you're with friends, you dance beside each other, and if you're there alone, that's cool - we'll all dance with you. it's such a great public action.

and, boys here dance. pretty well, and even when it's as ugly as sin, they're doing it with committment - it's awesome. there's no sense that a guy is just approximating dancing so that he can get in a girl's pants - there's hardly any direct sleeze on the dancefloor, but it's all hot as. it's fantastic.

and there's this weird music/dance style that i've called the Berlin Skip. there's probably a proper name for it, but that's what i call it. the music is a little bit soca/a little salsa - i think it's called 'gypsy sound' and everyone dances essentially the same to it. i liked it when i first heard it and danced for a couple of hours, but now it's just too repetitive and i can't do it anymore. i need a little more variety in my dancefloor action, thanks :)

speaking of which, i've been to berghain a few times (it's massive, they dance all night, it's all about the freaks in there). although last weekend i got rejected! weird! but in a way, completely fun and part of the crazy/random/i-do-what-i-want ethos of the place that i actually really value.

interestingly, i haven't been to see a band play a straight-up rock/punk gig since i've been here. which is kind of hilarious, given my previous intensity towards the genre. to be honest, all the flyers i've seen are for pretty big american bands i have no interest in seeing, and i haven't quite plugged into the kind of venue that hosts great bands from germany. i'm sure it's out there, but i've been so enamoured with the electronic music goodness, that i figure that i'll just head to the tote when i get home to make up for it :)

before i leave, i need to go to the opera, a couple of baroque/romantic performances, and if i can, get to a stockhausen performance too.

i don't have a whole lot of music in my own collection that screams BERLIN, but the couple that do at the moment are on high rotation - black cab from melbourne, who obviously recorded their album call signs in or after time in berlin - there are multiple references to the city in their songs and the church bells they sample ring outside my apartment at 12 and 6 daily. listening to this album really adds to both the city and the album - it's like i'm really IN both of them.

the debut album from beak> does something similar - with the dark, electro-romantic-atmos feel about it, it's a perfect soundtrack to the elemental darkness, cold and wind that is enveloping berlin at the moment.