Another long day. This morning Björn and I were up at 7:30 to catch a bus to the hydrofoil to Malmö, and then another short bus ride to the Academy. The hydrofoil took only 45 minutes and cost an astonishingly miniscule 15 DKK (= 3 USD). Competition in action. The Malmö Academy has exceptional facilities in an entirely new building. Everything was highly organized and secure with locks on all door except for the bathrooms. I was scheduled to give a lecture at 13:00 and I indeed did do just this. They have a decent lecture room with a video projector and assorted techno-goodies except for the fact that one amp channel and speaker had been fried, so I had to play video and audio works on one channel. Such is techno-life. My host, the Academy Principle, Gertrud Sandqvist I had met last year at the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Art and Technology in Helsinki. At the lecture she sat in the front row, not particularly unusual until the question-answer session at the end — she mediated between me and the students, choosing students, modifying their questions, and ”interpreting’ my answers for the students. More than odd, it was quite an show of the psychology of control. She seemed unable to allow the students to interact without her dominance. Sad for them. I understand now her reputation which is not great, on this very issue of control-freak. Oh well. Björn meanwhile was meeting some former students. We ended up taking different trains — I had the First Class EurailPass, and could ride in style, though flat broke.
At the moment I am sitting comfortably on another one of these new high-speed European trains. This one the X2000 from Malmö to Stockholm. First class, they even serve a dinner. Not bad. I sat across from a senior Quality Control engineer from Eriksson, Inc., one of the largest companies in Sweden dealing in telecommunications. We had an interesting conversation about technological developments in Scandinavia and Europe, as well as photography. Already here in Scandinavia things have a feeling of organized and peaceful order, with a level of social wealth that is simply not available further south in Europe. There is far more competition in the telecom business which is bringing (for example) good internet and telephone services at reasonable rates. Education is well-funded (though conservative) without the need for academics to be constantly begging for national resources.