berlin bye bye

i've been gone over a week already, but i feel like i didn't really give berlin a proper goodbye. perhaps because i was holding out a little bit of hope that i might get the residency i was shortlisted for. perhaps because i never fully said hello. perhaps i've never fully accepted how much it seeped under my skin.

it was like being with a lover that was a convenience, until the day you realise you're in love with them.

anyway, as a tearful goodbye to the place, here are the top 5 things that i'll miss about berlin:



dancing every weekend. 
apart from new year's day, i danced until the wee hours at least one night on each weekend i was in berlin. i think i've written about berlin's dance culture before, but it is awesome and inclusive and far-reaching. it feels like it's ingrained in the city and its infrastructure. i think it's why i feel so awesome too - all that booty-shakin' has to be good for you, right?



the M10 tram. (otherwise known as the party tram.)
i lived near it the whole time i was in berlin and it made getting home from 4/5am dance-fests enjoyable. and it connected me with kreuzberg, friedrichshain and (strangely) schoeneberg, where friends lived. actually, i'll miss the whole of the public transport system. it may not be as zippy as the underground in london, but it's far-reaching, consistent and runs until way late. [although it's pretty expensive for berlin.]



berlin time.
berlin runs on a different time scale. and i loved it. 3am bedtimes are not unusual. 11am is 'early' and stuff is open, running and available after midnight. what a concept. given that i often do my best work between 11pm and 3am, it was a revelation to be in sync with the place i lived



so much art to see.
even it was a bit shit, there was ALWAYS something interesting to see. there wasn't a sense of an art clique, and i very rarely went to the same gallery twice. i saw a lot, but there were still some great spaces or shows that i didn't get to see. and that feels pretty good to me.



the cheap awesome turkish food and sloerm
ok, so this is a bit superficial, but goddamn the turkish food was good there. and cheap. i really will miss the felafels and the haloumi from bagdad, ali baba and the felafel king. not to mention the baklava and gözleme.

and sloerm, run by the awesome stefan, was my local. i was a regular there, they knew me, collected my mail when i lived upstairs, made good strong coffee (a bit of an anomaly in berlin) and the best muesli ever. the two resident birds, paula and leo, were always cheerful and i will miss the relaxed homeliness off that place.



** obviously these things do not include the awesome people i hung out with.
shout-outs to oehmchen, käthe, lisa, peter, nawid, anna, jules, dominique and dan, alessandro, sarah, tim, on-yau, christian, david. matt and sonja.





and for good measure, here are the top 5 things that gave me the shits about the place - ie, things i will not really miss:

this contains content by --- it is not available in your country.
in theory i support GEMA, but i cannot tell you how fucking annoying and counterproductive  it was to have blocked almost every music video (or video containing the slightest hint of licensed music). the first few times, i thought it was kinda funny. like - tee hee, look i can't watch a justin bieber video - but then it eventually really got to me. just ask me about jay-z's 99 problems..

mobile phone plans.
the UK and australia seem to understand mobile communication so much better. data is included in pre-paid packs, mobile numbers are easier to obtain and the rates are much, much cheaper.


no credit cards
i really wish i knew this before i arrived, because i would have sorted my money situation completely differently. i came with the incorrect assumption (see!) that credit cards (specifically mastercards, thanks to my bank) were accepted everywhere and it would be convenient to just put everything on that card.

nope. germans don't do credit cards. they have an overdraft on their savings card, but no credit cards. i got stuck a few times, with a conveyor belt full of groceries or electronic equipment, or art supplies before i figured out that it was pretty universal, and not just my local kaisers, media markt or boesners. it kind of blew my mind a little. i kind of understand it, but as a traveller, it was pretty fucking annoying, i can tell you. and there's something about the protectionism of it that i find a little creepy too.


the postage system.
actually, i love deutsche post's reach/pricing/availability and the fact that my local postamt was open 6 days a week until 8pm! but the thing that annoyed the hell out of me was the confusion between delivery companies and the narrowness of delivery options. if you're name isn't on the door, it's pretty hard to get something delivered. there is a real reliance on living arrangements and you can't just receive mail anywhere, at anyone's place - you have to be on the calling card. it's a bit annoying if you're transient, or you want something delivered to a non-residential address, say.


no free museums
like the EC business, i have come to accept that it's just like this in germany (and continental europe as a whole), but sometimes, just sometimes i wish that the big state museums would have been free. it would have been nice every now and again to take a friend to the pergammon without us having to fork out €9 each time, even for the permanent collection. having said that, it has made me incredibly grateful for the free national galleries/museums in london and back home. huzzah.


i do know that i will be back in berlin as soon as i can, and hopefully on a regular basis.

and in the mean time, keep a chair warm for me.

last art in berlin

december and early january have not necessarily proven fruitful for mucho art viewing here in berlin. that is partially because i decided to hibernate a little and bake gingerbread instead of being a dutiful artist/blogger and traipsing around the galleries. it is also de rigeur for the art scene - everyone shuts down after the middle of december and has a little pause. in australia, that pause is for 6 weeks - just enough time to come here and inhale as much contemporary art as possible. i'm not sure what the peeps in galleries here are doing in their 2-week break, but suffice to say, there's little art to be seen.

however, i have managed to squeeze in a few last-minute sightings and pilgrimages before i start my journey back home to australia next week. here is the last art i saw in berlin. well, for a while.

permanent collection at the bode museum




the sculpture museum ia an amazing mashup of grand design - it's all neo-classical vaults and domes and grand ballrooms, intersected with heavy doors, marble columns and dark green walls. some of the sculpture is a bit repetitive, but it was an opportunity to reiterate my art history education. i could really see the progression of skill and understanding of the human form from the gothic (of which the most amazing work of the time was clearly architectural), to the intensity of baroque sculpture.



i made some interesting notes about the significance of drapery between the 14th and 19th centuries and will be taking that into my future work on fashion.



there were some ridiculous expressions of baby jesus, and i just loved the gothic virgin mary, who had double chins. there were some amazing hand-gestures going on in the baroque period, with one particular sculpture reminding me so much of wyld stallyns that i had to try really, really hard to stop a giggling fit.

my favourite of the museum was the tiepolo cabinet - a room of frescos from the villa volpato panigai. i still can't quite work out why tiepolo and his awe-inspiring foreshortening and dramatic ceilings don't get the kind of acclaim and line-ups that mr buonarotti gets at the vatican. but, given that i was in the room on my own for a large amount of my time there, sometimes i'm grateful for the ignorance of the masses.

last symphony III at vereklasen/werner





i really like where this series by sound fair is going. the last performance by olaf nicolai was one of my top 5 exhibitions of the year.

this work, by annika eriksson wasn't quite as sharp, or as engaging. admittedly, i didn't stick around for the whole 2 hours this time, but it seemed to be about the randomness and relative un-sophistication of a sound performance (theramin performed by non-professionals, it seems). glorifying failure again.

the format of the performance - darkened room, spotlight, amplifier - did appeal to my sense of 'code' around performance and sound-listening  - where the audience is primed for something that may or may not happen.

the divide between static sculpture and an active, relational work was muddied, which i liked a lot.

but ultimately the form of a theramin performance, the ironic or impending failure and the overly heavy anticipation within the room was not deep enough to hold me for so long. i'm willing to concede that i may have completely misread the show and, as such, now appear like an ignorant kunstbenause fool. it happens sometimes.

however, if you are reading this and you live in berlin, subscribe to the soundfair or VW newsletters and go to the rest of their events, because they will be amazing.


cory arcangel at hamburger bahnhof





i saw this show a while ago, but didn't get around to writing about it, so apologies if this is all sooo last decade.

i quite like what cory arcangel has done in the past. i had the fortune to be curated into an online video exhibition with him last year and think that his use of remix/collage/selection in tech-pop-culture is heading towards great.

i do get the feeling that everyone else in the world thinks that too, so this show felt a little premature - a little too much fawning over the pretty young thing.

there were two very clear, awesome works in this survey, though: a bound dissertation on the history and structure of the JPEG file compression format - which explained in depth, but in laymens terms about what a JPEG really is. aesthetically it was rudimentary, but i just loved the ethos and the detail behind the work. it also, obviously, places the JPEG in the popular realm and something to be understood. for me, it signified that the jpeg - the slighly inferior image format - will be around for a while. just like VHS and DVD. huzzah.

the other work, which is typical of his video pieces (and a whole lot like other rad remix chix, soda jerk) is the recomposition of a johan sebastian back piece (goldberg variations), using found footage from youtube of people playing musical instruments. it is a split-screen work and is, actually, really rad. it's exhibited in a nice, big, black box and you can just enjoy the original piece, the genius of his editing and the sheer abundance of video imagery of people playing music online. pop culture 101.



ben byrne at experimontag

i continue to learn a lot about australia sound art. even in berlin. actually, given the number of australian sound artists in berlin, that last statement is not as shocking as intended. last monday i got the chance to meet and see ben byrne play at madame claude's. from the robin fox/8-bit style of music, his crazy chaos pad pieces were mind blowing. arhythmic, the compositions were an amazing sight to behold, as ben played this small piece of technology with the same proficiency as a concert pianist.

i also discovered that ben is writing a PhD on the relational aspects of sound art and engagement, which i'm very excited about. but that's just a personal geek-out moment.


nan goldin and edward kienholz at berlinische galerie

a few weeks ago, i was locked out the the berlinische galerie because the auditorium was so packed with people wanting to hear nan goldin speak, that they had to shut the doors. it was one of the weirdest art moments i've had to date.

anyway, i finally got around to actually seeing the show - a survey of work she did in berlin in the early 90s. i love nan goldin. i think her style and the spirit with which she captures the fucked up scenes in new york (and berlin) are amazing. the way captured ordinary people's dark, ugly and yet attractive vulnerability in front of a camera influenced a stack of us in art school. and she proves to me that terry richardson and larry clarke are just misogynist hacks who use this kind of aesthetic to justify child porn.

a nice bonus to checkin' out the nan goldin was getting to see the kienholz' installation the art show. i bloody love what edward and nancy kienholz do. the first time i saw a work of theirs at the MCA a while back and since then i have keenly followed what they've done. this work is an hilarious critique of the art scene, whilst obviously being a loving homage to their friends too. the figurative forms are something that the dada kids would have loved to see i think - human bodies covered in drippy varnish with automotive airvent faces, blowing hot air out to the world. their hearts are transparent electronic circuits, replaying art theoretical diatribes when you push the button.






interestingly, i think the installation manages to overcome a us vs them dynamic by being interactive. you're allowed to touch the sculptures (to push their buttons) and, being life-size, you enter into the 'personal space' of these art scene heavyweight effigies. suddenly you're in control and are on the same level. which means that all the power of their philibustering is sucked out of the situation.



and that's the end of it for a while here. turns i'm totally not ready to leave berlin - which has caught me by surprise. and yet i know that when i get to hug my mum and my family and my awesome buds back home, it'll be alright.

but just so you know, berlin, we're not through yet.


image credits: nan goldin images from the spiegel website

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.

berlin breakfasts

i don't think i've really posted about thoughts about berlin since i've been here. perhaps that's because it's taken a while to gather them. and still they are a bit wacky.

but one thing i do love about this place is the breakfasts.

and not just to actual food, but the nationwide committment to the partaking of frühstuck. in every cafe, even if the coffee tastes like suspension of sand, cork, dishwater and the faint whiff of coffee essence; the breakfast will be great.

i spent the first two months having breakfast from this viewpoint, at rooftop studios.





i finished up my residency there last week and kind of miss my little morning ritual looking over berlin, but thankfully the breakfasts in the new place have been just as amazing.

here at home

that's alicia - she came and stayed for a few days - living through a house move, an exhibition install, the ensuing come-down and a shit-hot peaches concert. as well as the typical grandma-style life i lead.

or at the cafe downstairs, sloerm. that's pronounced 'slurm', for all you futurama fans.



they don't have a set vegetarian breakfast, but i've been making one up and it's pretty special. although they put sliced carrots in the müsli and i can't quite work out what the deal is that. maybe it's 'cos they're good for me.

regardless, berlin is still all about the awesome breakfast.

guten appetit!

a perfect day to chase tornadoes (red)

For those of you in Berlin this weekend, I'm doing a little intervention/performance as part of SuperKaleidescope's exhibition, A Perfect Day to Chase Tornadoes (White) at the Kunstquartier Bethanien in Kreuzberg.

It's the final day of the exhibition and let's just say that the work will be a goodnight and goodluck gift.

The exhibition is open from 11:00 - 18:00 and i'll be there most of the day. Come and say hi.

art fair mania

don't they know we already have too much information? maybe it's some kind of ploy where if you blast a stack of data at people, whatever sticks is worthwhile remembering.  like i mentioned in another post, there were six art fairs on this weekend. i only managed three because i went to berghain until 7am and couldn't manage more than one on saturday.


sunday was devoted to dancing in the streets, so i didn't attend any art fairs. and, because there was so much to absorb, i'm only going to talk about two on here: art forum and preview - because that's the kind of girl i am - binary.  and, i'm even going to review them in the reverse order that i saw them.


well, it's my blog and i'll do what i like.

berlin art fairs have a strange feeling about them, as berlin isn't a city that is swathed in collecting cash. all the big money for art investment happens in the south/west and so there's this strange sense of futility or abandon about them, backed up, perhaps, by the fact that frieze and the london art fair extravaganza is next week, which is where the money comes in.

preview
my understanding of preview was that it was the emerging art/gallery fair, so i was quite suprised at the prevalence of painting and digestible sculpture. not really a lot of boundary-pushing. in fact, i saw more of that at art forum, really. my summation from preview was that the only thing that was really 'new' about the fair was the economy behind it; without long histories or financial support/investment/weight behind them, there was no risk being taken. 


i saw more 'risk' from artist being supported by the bigger galleries. in fact, it reminded me that risk is actually the privilege of the privileged - with art, collecting, setting up a business, gambling, eating.


a few notable exceptions, obviously.


riflemaker
this is a gallery i love in london and check them out whenever i can. if i'm completely honest, i don't think they showed the best work that they have at this fair.  i spoke to one of the staff and it was their first time at a berlin fair, so perhaps it's a little bit of putting feelers out for them. but they did have some good work by artists anonymous, who i haven't seen in a while and a beautiful paper-based animation from a rotary contraption by juan fontanive, whose bike film i saw a while back.


galleri maria veie
the only gallery, in both art fairs, to really deal with the site and to take control of it. maria (who was super-nice to talk to) and her artists built an amazing ante-chamber within the small booth space as a space to view the excellent video by and also as a work of art itself. it was like a unicorn mixed with high math geometrical sculpture. super-nice. and it crowded out the space in a way that made it attractive - you had to line up to get in (almost). for me, this shows a boldness and a level of engagement that is not only attractive in an artist, but in a gallery. go team.





galerie leuenroth - daniel behrendt
these paintings were a.mazing. i literally gasped when i saw them. almost sculptural paintings of super-flat post-war architectural facades - walls, with a simple window. or just a wooden window, they gave a life and a stickiness to these utterly depressing spaces. and it's pretty much the only way i would ever spend more that 0.12 seconds looking at such a space. they were so divine. and a combination of matte fine finish, with thick, lush, trowel-finish. seriously, if you buy painting, buy these. they're amazing.




foundation for promoting contemporary art - michal smandek
a nice, simple work: model for a sludge leak made from glass and concrete, then the documentation of a larger version done in an old industrial space - a constructed black ooze coming out of the wall. always poignant (hello gulf of mexico, hello hungary)

actually, most of the eastern european galleries were killing it - making the most interesting works/exhibits overall. i guess it's unsurprising, given the history of eastern-european risk-taking in art, but i will still a bit intrigued.

kunsthaus erfurt

two nice works about pixelation - a site-specific coloured paper installation by martin pfeifle, which cheered the whole place up to no end and a series of beautiful triangular pixel drawings by DAG. i'm not always a fan of pixel drawings, they can be a little dull, but these were such a perfect combination of abstract, form and system that i forgave and fell in a love a little.

a few other things i noticed:  a surprising number of amateur signage. boo. not a lot of women artist. boo. not a lot of politics. boo.

so, that's my review of preview.

art forum

art forum is pretty big. and although not as big as i imagined there was still soo much stuff to see, as there is in any art fair, so i made sure i prepared, had my list of galleries/artists i wanted to see and launched in with as open a mind as possible. 

by the way, the architecture at the messe in berlin is out-of-this-world awesome. built in the middle of the fascist regime (1935-37; Richard Ermisch), it is furnished like something out of a grace kelly movie - i felt like we all should have been wearing dinner suits and maxis.

in the middle of my rounds, i went to one of the talks, held on the mezzanine level and moderated by texte zur kunst, which was one of the highlights of the day. i think the onsite discussion and critique is a really important part of the commercial nature of the fair, each connected to the other.


overall it was just OK. a few excellent works, some nice chats with peeps i already knew (from australia and london) and interesting to see the focus away from painting and more towards everything else.

so, highlights.

johnen galeri - tim lee


just a small photo-based work, but after seeing his daad exhibition and now this, tim lee is now one of my new favourite things. a diptych recreation of  the merce cunningham poster from 1953 with tim as the solo - in his trademark grey button-up shirt, black jeans, thick geeky glasses and salary man haircut. hot.




DUVE
one of the only other galleries to really deal with the space well - a combination of aluminium geometric shapes and video/sound work of a ballerina en pointe. a beautifully dichotomy of soft/hard and understanding of space by Jen DeNike and Sarah Oppenheimer.

roslyn oxley9
as one of the consistent big guns in australian art, unsurprising that the artists that rosox had on board were great. hany armanious, mikala dwyer, michael parakowhai, newell harry and his palindromic neon. awesome.




häusler - fred sandback
i know he's been gone a while, but the guy continues to float my boat with his site-specific geometric/spatial works and diagrams. they had a small red work between the two walls at häusler that made my heart skip a beat.




yvon lambert - douglas gordon
excellent conceptual works - especially the two wall-text works - both abandoned mid-sentence: one of graphite i am the director of my own downfall and the other carved into the chipboard, i am the author of my own addictions. i liked the form of the latter, but thought that the words were a little overstated. and vice versa.

arndt - ralf ziervogel

a suite of small exquisite and depraved drawings presented really cleanly - on with a black right facing page on a series of small shelves, squished right into the corner. quite an easily digestible format, but with the right amount of gross to make it interesting.

pianissimo - ingo gerken

this was the kind of show that people who aren't artists, or aren't that into art history would hate. but i loved it - it was a stack of responses to conceptual works from history, mostly really well done in a quite subtle and understated way. i laughed out loud. for real.


he added his name/birth year to the top of list of saatchi exhibitons, entitled my life and the saatchi program, he added a purple strip of colour to an image of ellsworth kelly minimal paintings, and a photo of a john baldessari image with a post-it note as an echo of the plain interrupting the plane. see? art geek stuff.

contemporary fine arts - max frisinger

i met max in hamburg and his work is on a similar plane to australia's ash keating. although max still trawls the streets for rubbish by hand. it was great to see his works sell out and interesting to see how he had 'contained' a practice that is usually site-specific, or at least very gallery-site-specific.






and i also really liked the sector focus intiative in the middle of the grounds, which had a series of emerging spaces who invited another emerging space to join them and both of them had booths that backed onto each other. it acknowledge the community aspect of independent spaces and made for an interesting study.




i did come away from the forum a) feeling like australian artists still match up with the best of germany, especially when we're rigourous. and b) that an art fair is an art fair is an art fair. having said that, i've not been to the biggest three: frieze, basel or the armory, but i wonder how different they really are.








image credits: ralf ziervogel installation at arndt, from the art-forum-berlin site. newell harry reverse missionary (nerveless rats hesitate/as venereal theists rest) from the roslyn oxley9 site.

dancing in the streets again.

today i spent the afternoon pretty much back at the start of my masters research: in a silent gig in public, dancing to music with a bunch of people in headphones. public/private/public.

the first time i did it was at ars electronica 2007 and it kickstarted my investigation into sound in public, the role/symbol/place of headphones in public and the ensuing 2 years' masters degree on all things related.

today was a silent parade for climate change, organised by 350 org and it was mad-fun.

what better a place to dance on the streets as part of political action but in berlin! berliners LOVE their electronic music and LOVE dancing (i should know, my club-induced sleeping patterns are getting ridiculous). it was awesome.



the vibe itself was fantastic - i dipped in and out of different shared experiences with it, giving it a diversity of engagement that really floated my boat, and made for an even more enjoyable and thought-provoking afternoon.

of course, each of these points of together/alone with the parade had slightly different aspects of public/private/public politics:


through the media
i had to join the parade halfway through. so with twitter and their hashtag, i connected with the parade halfway through. connecting as an outsider to the crowd using social media + political engagement, easy - media studies 101.

full engagement
then, i joined the party. i danced my arse of for a while in a group of others all dancing and enjoying themselves with a cracking soundtrack and lots of clapping, w00ts and smiles. we were all in this together, for a common cause and enjoyment. and we were surrounded by a bunch of people who weren't sharing, but engaged with curiosity - watching and wondering and maybe feeling a bit like outsiders. [more on the 'outsider' aspect of such a situation in a minute].

separated engagement
as the parade moved, i grabbed my bike, headphones still in range and rode on ahead, physically separate from the crowd, but still sonically and technologically engaged [wirelessly]. it was pretty special - i was riding in my own space, listening to music on my own, unable to see/hear others, but just knowing that they were there. i think this experience is exactly why the internet works.

and i had the fuckin' coolest extra little public/private/public moment -  i'm riding away from the crowd, passed the polizei van escorting us and one of the officers has the headphones on (so he can keep track of what's happening, i guess). and HE'S DANCING TOO!! i gave him a mega smile + bodacious wave and kept riding.
private citizen + public representative togetherness moment. swoon.





separated, but with one other
another lone bike-rider with headphones caught up with me and together we were riding, dancing, w00ting and throwing our hands up in the air, having our own little private/public/private dance party. in fact, i think that confused people outside the 'gig' even more - just two crazy girls dressed in black, on bikes, wearing headphones, dancing like maniacs with each other. but it was another one of those moments of sharing an experience with another person, as part of a wider crew, that was just priceless.

observer
i decided to do a part of my listening to the city project as part of the parade, so once the crowd stopped at the park on spandauer straße, i turned the radio headphones off and became an observer. my observation was largely based on what i could hear (which is hilarious when you're hearing what everyone else cannot), but it was still as an outside observer. there were lots of people also observing what was going on - some knowing a little bit about it, some not knowing and quiet alienated, others unknowing, but fascinated, or nonplussed. interesting levels of understanding and public engagement.

one thing i noticed is that having 'outsiders' is an important dynamic to an event like this. it generates curiosity, a point to engage, thought and 'difference'. the alienation is not didactic, or perhaps even intended, but i did notice that because people couldn't (or didn't have to) engage, they stood around and watched, thought and perhaps envied the process. i know that the advertising peeps crave that juicy experience a lot, but as an artist and activist, it was the first time i understood how it could be used for good.

full engagement again.
and, right at the end, i put the headphones back on and danced with the crowd for another little while. the level of dancing reduced by the time we got to the park, some just opting to lay back in the glorious autumn sunshine and listen, but the sense of common and einheit was still very strong, without a harsh word, or forced action in earshot. brilliant.

it's a perfect day to chase tornadoes (white)

the view out my window today

the exhibition opening tonight at kunstquartier bethanien, featuring a stack of australian artists in berlin. 

curated by kim fasher and presented by the super kaleidescope girls.

listening to the history of listening

yesterday sarah mosca and i went on a mission to teufelsberg in berlin - to the old NSA listening station. a proper structure for sound/listening in the public realm.





and oh my god, it was fucking amazing.



we had a string of excellent luck: the weather was great, we found our way ok, dodged fences, security and ticket inspectors.



we were like two of the famous five off on ad adventure. we even had a packed lunch - a thoroughly modern version of 'slices of ham and lashings of ginger beer'.



the station was unbelievable - visually and acoustically.



sarah and i did an impromptu quasi-performance of sorts, fucking around with the zany acousitcs of the listening dome - something that both blixa bargeld and alice hui-sheng chang would have been proud of.



i then tried to squeeze in a quick listening project of the lift shaft before die sicherheit arrived. fingers crossed i can go back soonish.

here's wikipedia's history of the place, just to put it into perspective.