posted
  • place: Kristiinankaupunki, Finland

splendid day

Except for a walk around the town in the morning, everyone hung around the summer house the whole long day which drifted into evening and very slowly into the blue twiLight of the Arctic summer. There was grass to rake, logs to stack, trees to cut down and such activities. Anything was a pleasant undertaking as the temperature were well into the 20sC (70sF). Absolutely splendid. Helena, with some assistance from Timo (on the grill), prepared a delicious lunch which was a festive family occasion, Erkki making a variety of toasts and, after dinner, he played the accordion and sang with Timo. In the early evening we set a net out in the bay. Floating in the row boat on a placid and shimmering evening ocean, Jim, Kaisu, and I talked about the materialization of the object. We made a huge bonfire on the beach in the late evening, burning tree-fall and stuff from the yard. I make a short video of Kaisu while we drink champagne. It was somebody’s birthday. I can’t remember whose.

portrait, [?] and [?] with Erkki at the summerhouse, Kristiinankaupunki, Finland, May 1996

posted
  • place: Pori, Finland

Jim’s dinner

This day is spent writing, from early morning into early evening. I never even venture outside, content instead to look out the kitchen windows and experience outside that way, from the warmth. Plenty of email correspondance to take care of (at the Digital Chaos event in Bath I will do a dinner performance, among a few tens of other things to deal with). Anna comes over for dinner — I had wanted to give her some contact addresses in the US and talk a little more about her trip — we plan to meet in NYC the first week of July. Yet again Jim prepares a superb dinner — lamb, salad, potatoes, a nice Bulgarian Cabernet Sauvignon, coffee, and Belgian chocolate. I indulge myself and show the three of them parts of this web site, which, I nervously note, is expanding daily. I wonder when I will get in trouble with the ismennt sysop or server controller? Anyway. I continue.

I think when one is too involved in making strict rules about what is right and what is wrong, or this is art and this is not: when a wall gets set up, one is cutting out a lot of interesting experiences, maybe some important parts of ones self. Then if you realize that this or that prohibition doesn’t have to exist, you suddenly discover another dimension to your life. In a way this relates to how we must learn to live together in the world. — Geoffrey Hendricks

posted
  • place: Pori, Finland

Anna’s cabin

Tervetuloa Suomeen (Welcome to Finland)! Waking up in Pori, Finland, a town on the mid-western coast about five kilometers from the Baltic. It is still cold and gray, heavy clouds full of water. I sleep in until 11 in the morning. Each day of this travel seems harder on my body and mind. But, I suppose a 21-hour day is nothing to pretend is easy. In the afternoon, Jim and I drove to the seaside at a deserted resort near Pori. We walk into the wind down the beach long enough to feel the presence of the earth. The strong and chill wind blew all of the day. Where is spring here? A sauna and dinner is planned at Anna’s cabin in the forest at Noormarkku, about 10 km from Pori. It is a short drive on a sandy road to her beautiful cabin where she lives with her son. Her cabin is one of many buildings of a major estate owned by one of the wealthy Swedish-Finn families involved in the paper/forestry business. It gets colder by the hour and ends up snowing. I thought I would not see any more snow until next winter after the white stuff that dogged me in Vienna a few weeks ago — no such luck. However, the sauna takes the edge off the chill. Birch boughs from last summer – with leaves on them still: vihta in Finnish – are used to slap the body, stimulating the circulation of blood to the skin. They are soaked in cold water first. We roast sausages over the sauna stove to eat for dinner. Anna is managing one of the famous houses, Villa Mairea, designed by the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, near Pori, and, she is preparing to visit the USA for the first time in June to research a number of similar architectural sites. We will meet again in New York City on the 4th of July…

God, the sky is beautiful. And so still. Just the sound of water, near and far. And the wind has died down with the setting of the sun. — Geoffrey Hendricks

posted
  • place: Stockholm, Sweden

crowns

This morning I went into town to the Konstfack (aka, the University of Art and Design), where I had lunch with Hans Hedberg and Olof Glemme, the two full-time faculty at the School of Photography. They showed me slides of student work and the facility which is modest, but includes a bit of digital equipment. They have only 14 students and the program is only for a Masters Degree, not undergraduate work. The school just recently got on-line, with a server and a LAN-line to most the terminals. I never got a hold of Art Node people today, either the phone was busy or no one was around, so I ended up sitting in yet another café, writing myself into a depressive frenzy of self-negation. Not the best way to spend an afternoon, and I topped off the rage with some french fries from McDonalds of all places. I don’t know what has gotten into me … Maybe just too much travel and too little work being done. I think living (the last six years) in Iceland has damaged me, broken my power in a way. For all the intensity it precipitated, it left me without the ability to concentrate and work hard on producing Art. Maybe I never had those characteristic to begin with. Okay, I won’t dwell on things like that here. There are more important things to talk about. For example, tomorrow it is King Karl XVI Gustaf’s 50th birthday, and there have already been quite some celebrations going on in the media leading up to whatever happens tomorrow. The last day of April is also a celebration of the coming of spring (or the ending of winter, whatever), something like the May Pole parties of Germany.

Our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death. — Pascal, Pensées

Stockholm is an interesting and rather complex city. It seems on the verge of becoming too urban compared to other Scandinavian capitals, and the architecture has a certain heaviness that Vienna, for example, doesn’t have. It could be merely the building materials which are predominantly the dense, dark, ancient granites from the glacially scoured Nordic shield. And the fact that today was cold and overcast. Spring will be held off for some days, it appears, even though the trees are desperately trying to bloom. I do imagine in full-tilt summer Stockholm is beautiful and very pleasant like Helsinki. At any rate, I am enjoying every minute I spend here.

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen, Denmark - Malmö, Sweden - Stockholm

control freaking

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.

posted
  • place: Vienna, Austria

last day

Sadly, my last day in Vienna. I do laundry, and clean the flat in the morning. And then I go out to meet Mathias at TELLER. We eventually make it the the Hochschule für angewandte Kunste where he is a lecturer (he was hired by Roy Ascott when Roy was starting up the department there back in 1991 or so). They have a great computer lab, all the way to an SGI Reality Engine (at least I think that’s what they call these huge blue boxes — rather reminiscent of the IBM mainframes that I used to work on way back in the deep past of engineering…). We were unable to get online for me to send mail, however. Long story. We met Sylvia and Jon at a secluded restaurant behind the MuseumQuartier for some traditional Viennese dinner and then took a slow walk through the First District to Schwedenplatz where Jon says is the place with the best ice cream in all Austria. The evening was warm and there were crowds out everywhere, like in the middle of summer. I never did get a chance to get to the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, so it will have to be a virtual trip, eh? Such convenience! Same with the exhibition that Mathias is working on at the Kunsthalle — about the history of the techno-wonder-machine…

For (Walter) Benjamin to quote is to name, and naming rather than speaking, the word rather than the sentence, brings truth to Light. He regarded truth as an exclusively acoustical phenomenon. — Hannah Arendt, in the essay about Walter Benjamin, Men in Dark Times

posted
  • place: Vienna, Austria

teller

Today I spent money, shopping for food until Monday evening when I arrive in Copenhagen. I went to the central market, a garage-sale-heaven, although I didn’t pick up anything except some food, it was fun walking around making some sound fragments. It seems most of the sellers are Eastern European and Turkish, which reinforces my impression that Vienna really is a unique intersection of East and West. Most shops close at noon on Saturday in this good Catholic nation, and almost nothing is open on Sunday, so if you are without food, you are without food! I met Mathias and Sylvia at their place for coffee (on the balcony, no less!). Summer is completely here, the trees behind their block opened perceptibly during the afternoon — during the few hours we spent cleaning and painting the new studio, the leaves on the trees doubled in size. Spring this year in Europe is explosive!

portrait, Roberta, Fatih, Mathias, and Sylvia at Teller, Vienna, Austria, April 1996

The studio, (named TELLER after a sizeable neon sign over the front), is a former tailors shop across Sebastianplatz from their building, which they secured from the landlord who, in the end, worrying about officialdom, gave it to them rent-free. It is looking good! The weather is fantastic, and we had a quiet dinner of Mathias’ lasagna back on the balcony, accompanied by the thin crescent moon and Venus who still holds brilliant sway in the evening sky.

The works of art which are being created now, in these days and years, emerge from an environment highly polluted by an autistic break in all forms of conversation. Those who should hear each other do not hear each other, those who need to talk the most do not talk, and those who are talking, do not tell the truth. — Ivana Stefanovic

posted
  • place: Disley, England

strolling

after making the week’s bread, Jim takes me out for a stroll through the local countryside, the manor house, the sheep, the abandoned tower.

posted
  • place: London, England

futureshocks

Here we go. And so on. In the west of London, not far from Shepherds Bush and Ravenscourt Park on the District Line Tube. Hanging out with Joanna Buick, a friend from ISEA94 days — we met at the Symposium in Helsinki. She’s presently a tutor at the Slade School of Fine Art which is part of the University College of London as well as a tutor-counselor at the Open University, the largest open learning institution in the UK. She is running a class called “Living with Technology” which encompasses an innovative scheme to familiarize students with the impact of technology on daily life. The class is run using the internet, audio and video tapes and hard copy materials, as well as occasional tutorial sessions for students who live in the area. The Open University has tens of thousands of students studying around the world. Pursuing her own work, Joanna’s been doing developmental work on Virtual Reality systems. more “futureshocks”

posted
  • place: Southampton, England

art@Dialogue

I gave a public lecture similar to the one I gave at Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts last month entitled art@Dialogue and other Realities where I explored the various aspects of dialogue in the process of art and life. I have come to understand, or at least, to justify my extensive travel as an “art” process in itself.

When God gave the first humans consciousness, he whispered advice under his celestial breath as they shivered their way out of Eden; ‘obscure theyselves’. Every tribe or half-simian with the ingenuity has since learnt to brew or distill fluids and vapors to occasionally relieve themselves of the intolerable jabber of thought; to numb their magnificent senses just enough to sensually smudge judgment and nerve.

A good bar is sanctum to this need. — Brian Catling

Bar-hopping here seems to be a regular daily pastime, although I suppose one never sees the stay-at-homes, those who don’t imbibe. The norm for those who do is to stop by the local pub for a few pints of the local bitter or stout in the evening after the workday is done. It involves a lot of standing up, and with my great weakness for Guinness Stout, it is dangerously enjoyable! I have become a bit famous for my drinking habits — markedly, when I order one water after the other, with an occasional Guinness mixed it. For me it is a serious question of remaining properly hydrated — between the ubiquitous tea (a diuretic) and the alcohol, I insist on consuming at least as much water as beer or whatever… And having a glass or two of water well in advance of the morning tea.

Dinner with David, Sarah, Michael, George

posted
  • place: Tilmanstone, England

official launch of neoscenes travelog @ a facist manor

Here in the countryside village of Tilmanstone, Kent, in a Manor House once owned by a family who were Fascist organizers in the UK. I’m staying with David and Francis. Francis picked me up yesterday at Heathrow on my arrival from Iceland on an early morning flight. I was in Iceland for three days only, having flown there from New York on the 13th mainly to visit with Loki.

Everybody slept in until noon, something I haven’t done since I can remember! Usually up at 7:30 am. I was exhausted from jet-lag and a late night dinner with friends in Reykjavík and just the accumulated stress of travel. David had also just returned from New York City — on tour with a group of his students at the Winchester School of Art — we had already met at my friends Stefan and Ellen’s flat in Tribeca last week — but that’s another story…

Today we went to Deal, a village on the coast near Dover, for sandwiches at a caf.

There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

“Make ’em dry” is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, “make ’em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing ’em once a week.”

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs at Saturday lunchtime that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They’re not altogether clear what those sins are, and don’t want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat. — Douglas Adams

Then on to Canterbury for a stroll around the exterior grounds of the famous cathedral. We also visited with Lizzie and Jeffrey and their son Thomas not far from the cathedral. Jeffrey is a long-time member of the Brit-Rock group Caravan, is a member of Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and is currently touring with the French pop legend Renaud. Thomas is nine and is into hypnotism and Pharaohs and he showed me a family album of photos of his grandfather who brought the first Model T Fords to Chile in the early parts of the 20th Century…

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

Partners

I removed the body of work “Partners” from the site and finally got the film developed and scanned in with the shot of Jon and Ed (of OTiS/SiTO fame) in Montreal at the ISEA 95 gig. We were on our way to lunch and got there too early to be served. So we sat in the bar for an hour before realizing they were letting folks in through the back door to eat without us knowing… Then it poured rain on the way back to hotel. Needless to say, the next lecture was STEAMY!

I also added a page of links about Iceland, for your information.

posted
  • place: Manhattan, New York

ISEA 95, et al

ISEA 96 will be held in Rotterdam and promises to be an interesting get-together, returning to the Dutch roots as it were.

Lots of new things after ISEA 95 in Montréal!

Bonnie Mitchell ran the ChainReaction project out of the CyberPort of the symposium…

It was good seeing Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast of OTiS fame. We had some meals together, caught some of the exhibitions surrounding the symposium, and habituated the CyberPort. It was great finding out more about the inside of OTiS and all the work the our beloved Ed does (OTiSians all know this anyway), and some interesting stuff about Jon’s Web work. I admire these guys immensely. They hacked away all week at the newest OTiS project MONGOCOSM… Check it out! And they are implementing an enormous globe-encompassing plan to totally revamp OTiS via EGADS (Electronic Global Art Databasing System). WOW! Can’t wait to see that dOOds! Yeah, it was a good opportunity to ask all kinds of questions about the higher levels of coding/hacking work that both of them are adept at — I learned a lot. Soon I will develop and post a picture of the two of them at the site of a major crack in the earth’s surface right there in the middle of Montreal…

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

precursor to travelog

I had wanted to add some kind of documentary section to my Web Space detailing my current three-month travel in the US, but access to the Internet has been spotty, and right now I have just gotten dial-up access through Internet Express, a small service that has around 5000 clients and serves Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

I added a few new postcards on the postcard page.

I made a page that lists some current networking projects (no longer extant).

Dinner conversations, digital fragments from an ongoing audio project of dinner recordings will be featured here as soon as I have the chance to get some converted from analog cassette tapes to digital files…

posted

Welcome to Iceland

Directed to friends arriving in May from the US:

Hello folks WELCOME TO ICELAND!. Also, (this from Magga), please buy a case of beer (any kind) (for each person coming in — and even if you can meet somebody in the plane that is stopping, get them to buy a case also) in the duty free shop in the Keflavík Airport. The duty-free store is after you clear immigrations, downstairs right next to the baggage claim, before you clear customs… Sounds complicated, but the airport is brand new, very modern and easy to manouver through. We will reimburse you for everything in US dollars or local currency. With Budweiser’s at US$8.00 each in a bar, and if you wanna drink on your visit… Just follow the Icelanders… I always used to wonder where they all disappeared to at the baggage claim area… Sound desperate? Well. If customs question you closely, say you are bringing gifts to friends, and are going on to Europe…

And, don’t worry about your baggage in the airport. You have left NYC far behind. Remember, this is an island in the middle of the North Atlantic, there is no place to escape to… You have entered a relatively crime-free zone (unless you elect to hang out in the fisherman’s bars at 3 ayem of Saturday night…)

Tri-X B&W film, 135-36 (under $3.50 ea)
EktaChrome 100 daylight/tungsten 135-36 (under $6.00 ea)
Kodachrome 40 Tungsten 135-36
Kodachrome 64 135-36

30/45 minute voice-quality audio cassettes

Fuji/Sony pro quality Video Tapes (VHS) 30,60 minute

Answering-machine loop tapes (over 1 minute)

Maxell or Sony Metal 90 or 100 minute cassette tapes (under $3.50 ea)
Maxell UDXLIIS 90 or 100 minute cassette tapes

M&M’s

Corn Meal (Indian Head), exotic spices and condiments, mustards, healthy grains, rices…

exotic cheeses (Parmesano, Romano , Brie)

exotic liquors (Herradura Tequila!!!)

posted
  • place: en route New York City, New York - New Jersey - Washington, D.C.

in transit, The Tunnel Diner

on the road, The Tunnel Diner and a loaded vehicle, Jersey City, New Jersey, May 1986

Max, aka SGT PPPR, aka Sergeant Pepper, sporting KXLU (schizo radio on the left) and Suicidal Tendencies bumper stickers, carries me through the Holland Tunnel from Manhattan to Jersey City. A ritual meal stop at the The Tunnel Diner* seems auspicious, that’s exactly what transpired: fortified for the New Jersey Turnpike. Some hours later, after fighting the East Coast traffic, land at Randy’s place in Adams Morgan, DeeCee, for a stop-over before heading west.

*The Tunnel Diner: 184 14th St. Jersey City, 1942 Paramount and 1950s Kullman remodel. Famous for its commanding location at the Jersey City entrance to the Holland Tunnel, the Tunnel Diner is a fascinating illustration of mid-century diner reconditioning. In addition to building new restaurants, diner manufacturers also reconditioned old diners that were traded in, and even renovated other diners on-site. Although the details of the Tunnel Diner’s building history are not well known, its current condition reflects a 1942 Paramount, most visible on the inside, and a late-1950s Kullman remodel most apparent on the outside. The diner, which played a role in the 1996 Al Pacino movie, City Hall, also comes with a towering, vintage vertically arranged diner sign. Unfortunately, it may be too late for the Tunnel Diner. Despite being set on a river of nonstop, outbound tunnel traffic, the diner closed in 2007, and was soon after slated for demolition. It nonetheless still stands –maybe- albeit surrounded by chain link fence, and that’s never good.