feeding the five thousand » Fighting Tiger

I volunteered at Transmediale the other week and one of my responsibilities was guiding participants on and off the stage during The Long Conversation.  It was a cruisy job and so in-between reminding the conversationalists to look at the camera (but just be natural) I listened to the talks and took notes.

The broad theme of the conversation was “futurity” and some people responded to that topic better than others.  It was set up as a chain conversation and also a little like Chinese Whispers – how would Richard Barbrook’s keynote influence the final conversation and would Drew Hemment (first and last speaker) be able to draw all of the ideas together?

Ken Rinaldo pretty much jumped on stage for his first conversation in order to respond to Alan N. Shapiro’s musings on “the car of the future”:

“I’ve got one thing to say – The car of the future? That’s called a bike.”

Inevitably there was a lot of talk of the future regarding technology, but the conversation immediately switched to people and futures once Maja Kuzmanovic came on stage.  When Joy Tang started talking with her there was even more discussion about people. I really appreciated Maja and Joy’s conversations, though I’m not sure if it was a conscious programming decision, for it seemed that binary oppositions of men / women and technology / humanity were somewhat exaggerated.

I came back about 8 hours after everything started and by that stage it seemed that people had forgotten to talk about the future, but they did seem to be talking vaguely about time. The one thing that really stuck in my mind was Andy Cameron asking Julian Oliver whether he could name a piece of media art that was timeless.

And Julian was unable to name a single piece. And quite reasonably so. It’s a really tricky question to ask anyone, let alone a media artist, particularly when he’s sitting on stage in the middle of an increasingly vague conversation, under lights and with the responsibility of looking at the camera (but to just be natural).  Julian did frame his lack of specific response far better than just anyone would  – how has it (piece of art) been mediated, what is the context of its presentation  and what is the viewer’s relationship to the artwork.

Of course, I’d be challenged to name any piece of art that is timeless and universally acknowledged to be so, for example Picasso’s Guernica is very specific to a certain time and place and the Mona Lisa (for me) no longer seems to be an artwork, it is a highly mediated, replicated and scrutinised image.

However, the question made me think and without the pressure of looking at a camera (but remaining natural), I could name two new media / non traditional art pieces which, if not timeless and significant to humanity, ARE incredibly important to me

Jesper Just's "No Man Is An Island II" (film stills)

Jesper Just’s No Man Is An Island (really poor quality video over at YouTube)

and

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Camera Lucida

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Camera Lucida (project description)

One of the challenges when talking about new media / time based / art-science-technology art works is that they can’t be [re]presented with any great ease. There is no way that poor quality YouTube videos and flat stills of quasi-scientific apparatus can replicate the experience of watching a video art piece in a dark, quiet room on a big screen or in any way convey the feeling that some amazing scientific performance was happening right under in front of your eyes.  So you’ll have to trust my judgement when recommending these pieces to you.

see also:

Ken Rinaldo’s Farm Fountain

FLOSS manual’s Collaborative Futures book

The Puma Hardchorus sing “Truly Madly Deeply“

When speaking German, one will ‘make’ a pause when taking a break from something. For example in university a teacher might say “Sollen wir eine Pause machen?” before sending students out for a 10 minute coffee and cigarette break.

Let’s just say that I’ve been making a pause on this here blog.  It’s a relatively large pause made up of inertia, wondering what happens next, paralysing fear and the overwhelming feeling that I should somehow summarise my last year in just several sentences and oh gosh I didn’t do anything worth writing about… But you know, while I was pause-making I did do some other interesting stuff. Like start building a [small] boat.

So that time wasn’t entirely wasted if one is thinking from the perspective of a blogger – “if you did it, but you didn’t publically document it, did it really happen?”.

At least I started work on The Imperial Punt.  But there’s more (unblogged things) that I did over the last year or so. I’m going to try to do this summarising thing – to make the experiences real.

• I fell in love with a bearded maths captain!
• I turned 30!
• I was given a guitar (which I’m scared to learn how to play)!
• I learnt to understand and speak a bunch of German!
• I made new friends!
• I started a really good job teaching and geeking!
• I got health insurance!
• I taught people how to use HTML and CSS!
• I decided on a graduate program!
• I became far more mentally healthy!
• I started running regularly!
• I [kinda] snowboarded!
• I made my room and apartment look lovely on a limited budget!
• I went to Linz, Austria so many times to see the bearded maths captain!
• I went to Norway!
• I knitted a lot of stuff!
• I baked cakes and learnt how to make pies!
• I thrifted an amazing vintage 1970s Husqvarna sewing machine and a great food processor!
• I bought a lot of plants!
• I started to crave Sauerkraut!
• I stopped dying my hair!
• I bought a bed!
• I had visits from lovely friends!
• I learnt a lot of new things!
  • (but that’s another list)

And on and on it goes. There’s so much stuff I’ve done – but haven’t felt motivated or confident enough to record.  And while a lot of those things are only significant to me (buying a bed for instance is a symbol that I feel really happy, secure and at home in Berlin) it suddenly feels quite amazing to write them down.  And what is particularly good is that I have done all these things in the first year of living in Berlin!

I think a lot of this thought that I haven’t done anything worth blogging is a direct result of the interest that people showed in the DIY Masters concept and my progress with it.  I feel like I owe them something and that writing about anything unrelated to my list of 100 Things to Learn was an insult to them.  So I stop writing altogether which is probably a greater insult! Foolish eh?

Far more foolish is the fear that I couldn’t mention the graduate program I’ve finally enrolled in as it’s “formal education” and very much not a DIY Masters – despite my intention being to explore non-formal, online and flexible learning (particularly Open Course Ware). For the record I’m going to be studying a Graduate Certificate in Tertiary Teaching and Learning (GCTT) online through the University of Southern Queensland.

The program is designed to enable educators in the tertiary sector who already have a degree or diploma, to acquire an innovative credential in tertiary teaching and learning. The program focuses on applying educational theories to practical situations in university and other tertiary educational settings in order to design, develop, implement and evaluate emerging learning environments.

So yeah. That’s about it. Thing I’ve done, things I’m going to do. I also wanted to publicly give myself permission to write / videoblog about whatever I want – there’s no way this can ever be an environment where I only write about one topic.  Because not writing is worse than writing about everything.

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