the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::
traces pathways and actions encountered and undertaken
Vilnius in the rear-view mirror, up at 0500, taxi to the airport, as we leave the Academy hostel, a few of the girls are returning after a night’s partying, I guess. Tired all day after that early wake-up and very late evening last night, not much done but some organizing of things for the next week or so.
(00:05:24, stereo audio, 10.4 mb)
It ends up that we two are the only ones to take a sound walk. The rain started last night and continues most of the day. She takes me to her favorite church, the one without any gold, because gold doesn’t have anything to do with God. She genuflects deeply on entering, on leaving. It is pouring rain, she wants to go get some boots on at her house so that we can walk to her favorite place along the river. The cobble road is flooded and we use our umbrellas to block the splashing from cars as they noisily drive past. She walks ahead of me. The door to her flat doesn’t work properly, so she has to call her room mate to open it from the inside. It’s dark, there is a cat. It is warm, humid inside. I have to take my sunglasses off to see everything. The rain drums on the windows.
Outside, the water drains into a hole in the ground right next to a manhole cover. Later, we go to look at the river which has risen at least half a meter since morning. Then we slowly walk back to the workshop space to continue preparing for the DIY plug-in-party happening tonight.
(00:04:26, stereo audio, 8.5 mb)
Food, equipment, installations. The students are enthusiastic and energized despite the sporadic and unfocused situation. Day slides into evening, and the party begins (or continues).
The workshop begins erratically. Thirty minutes late, time already runs down. The first impression is, wow, mostly young ladies attending — somehow a bit of a (nice) surprise, given the techiness of the subject.
We end up at a rather raucous student march through the city, well, not raucous, maybe noisy, around five hundred students. They marched from the Parliament to the University where they push their way into the administration building and barricaded the university professors in their offices. This for the fact that the professors did not oppose governmental changes to the free education system. I believe it all stems back to the Bologna Accord which seems to bring much harm to the system. Although as we later talked about, the system of standardization can bring systems lower than the standard up to a higher standard. It’s all relative. In general it appears that the Lithuanian system is a bit at a bottleneck, with younger students expecting more than their professors can offer in terms of open-ness and progressive thinking. And, following the lead of the Accord that is bringing all schools into a bachelors-masters-PhD sequence like the US, so the neoliberal ideology of the US is perhaps bleeding into these newly reconstituted and impressionable states.
Will reactions to the Bologna Accord finally bring back some serious student activism in opposition to its blatantly globalist/capitalist view on education? It’s not clear, forty years after the ’68 movement. They need a more effective theoretical platform to work from in terms of the broader view of what education should be, compared to what it actually is. so it goes.
In the evening we are brought to a hot gallery opening — clearly a scene, to be seen, to see. Brazen and blatant art market-ism at it’s very pretentious worst. I won’t even repeat the name of the gallery or the curator, for to name is to bring more attention to the blighters than they deserve. And clearly the local art/culture consumers are mesmerized by the imagination of London come to Vilnius. uff. This can only have a negative effect on the local cultural community.
flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.
lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.
got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970’s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.
Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.
(00:03:38, stereo audio, 7 mb)
We stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. The garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. Stone walls + narrow streets + no speed limits + bad roads = intense noise levels.
