Somewhere between Munich and Ljubljana

It’s interesting how the the incidental vagaries of how you feel at a particular moment can affect your decision-making. Because I was booking the train to Ljubljana just after my lengthy train/train/bus/airport floor/plane trip to Berlin, I sprang for the extra €20 to have a fold-out bed instead of just a seat thinking “At least I’ll get a good night’s sleep”, not really factoring in that I’d have about a week’s worth of perfectly good nights in Berlin and feel much less burnt-out by the time I was getting on the train. Had I booked the train the night before I was leaving, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the bed. Nevertheless, I appreciated me-from-one-week-ago’s generosity. German trains are quite nice, and mine was very comfortable. It even had an electrical plug so I could use my laptop without running down the battery.

The only problem with this plan was a little boy in the compartment across from mine who was way, way too interested in watching me playing little games and watching movies on my computer. I tried to say ‘hi’ but he seemed only to speak German. His wide-eyed staring was starting to creep me out, so I tried to dissuade his interest by opening up the most boring program I could think of: a text editor. I tried to work on composing my first quarterly report to the Watson Foundation. But when he maintained his rapt interest in the face of a screen of text, I put the computer away and switched to a book.

The Munich train station seemed nice enough. This was actually the third time in my life I’ve transited through Munich without ever seeing anything of the city. Since it was about 6:30 am, I avoided sampling the beer Munich is famous for and instead bought a bottle of “still” water for the five-hour train ride to Ljubljana.

I put “still” in quotes because true non-carbonated bottled water doesn’t really exist in Germany. The water “mit gas” is quite bubbly, while even the “still” water is very lightly carbonated. I remember once a few years ago asking a German woman why they don’t have actual still water, you know, like tap water? Her reaction was one of disgust, “Eww, to drink such flat water, it would be like…well, do you have in English, the expression ‘like licking the sweat from the balls of a dog’?” I assured her that while no such colloquial phrase existed in English, the meaning was exceedingly clear.

The ride to Ljubljana was very scenic, passing through sections of the Austrian alps. I got most of the way through “Marching Powder” a totally insane true story about the craziest prison in the world, and a great read I was given in a Berlin hostel. My first impression upon arriving in Slovenia was how clean, developed and modern it seemed. I knew basically nothing about Slovenia prior to arriving, but I suppose I had sort of been expecting it to conform to some composite stereotype of a post-communist Balkan state. If anything, the opposite is true. Ljubljana is a charming, modern capital city (and actually slightly more expensive than Berlin). Budapest has fantastic architecture and history, but also a kind of eastern greyness that wore on me over time; none of that is present in “the LJ” as some of the younger residents refer to it.

I did meet another guest, an American from Hollywood. He works for Jerry Bruckheimer’s production company, scouting new scripts, or books that can be made into scripts and then finding “punch-up” writers to improve the scripts or rework the books into scripts. Shockingly, despite this description he was not at all intolerable! Going to school in LA for 4 years, I’ve run into my share of “Hollywood people” before, and usually despise them within minutes. This guy seemed genuinely open, curious and friendly; he wasn’t arrogant or trying to impress me, and didn’t even tell me what he did until I asked. We went to the Slovenian National Gallery together (it’s free on Sundays) and he seemed genuinely interested in my (admittedly minimal) knowledge of different art styles, and the classical mythology / Christian iconography depicted therein.

Monday, I went to the opening event of the Hack, Act, Interact, Progress (HAIP) festival at an art gallery. It was very busy, with a variety of international artists and interested onlookers. There was free wine and little cracker/bread snacks. The local media was also out in force with photographers and television cameramen wandering around. The TV cameras were particularly intrusive. I was pleased that the media thought a tech-art event was worth covering, but I got kind of sick of the camera guy with a bright light following me around, apparently trying to get footage of somebody “experiencing” the art or something. Every time I turned to look at him, he gestured at me to keep looking at whatever I was looking at before. Finally, I pulled out my own camera and snapped a photo of him.

Observing the observer

I’m not much of an art critic, so I don’t really feel at all qualified to judge the artistic merit of the exhibits at the gallery. For anyone interested, there are much better explanations of the different exhibits available on the HAIP website. Several of them were sort of glitch/feedback-based, taking initial input from an Andy Warhol film, a video camera trained on a screen showing the output of the camera, or a “silent” 1920s recording by the futurist Luigi Russolo, and then processing the input with various digital or analog mechanisms before outputting it to screens or speakers. The results were interesting-looking, and usually obnoxious-sounding.

A Short-lived Fault In The System

Description of the SoundBarrier exhibit

Another project by a Polish  artist involved stealing a video surveillance camera and setting it up in a train station, projecting the camera’s video, and motion-tracking software output on the wall for passers-by to see. I though this was an effective, if very blunt way to draw attention to the ubiquity of surveillance present in modern society.

Another piece had several pillars topped with little globes. The globes would light up, flicker and make noise in response to being touched by audience members. It was kind of fun, but I had a tough time figuring out exactly what the underlying idea was, or how exactly the globes’ response was keyed to the input.

Pufination (aka glowing globes thing)

There was also a video showing two previous projects involving “neurofeedback technology”. Basically, a participant wears a low-resolution EEG headset that monitors activity in the premotor cortex. By imagining moving certain body parts, the left hand, for example, the subject can pass commands to the computer. In one project, the input was linked to Google maps; in the other, they used thought-commands to compose an audiovisual performance.

As a neuroscience major, I find the idea of controlling a computer with thoughts alone undeniably cool. It also has potentially very important applications for paralyzed people. Sadly, they didn’t have the actual EEG setup at HAIP to play with, just a video of people using it. I did get the chance to try this system personally at Wired NextFest last year in Los Angeles, and I can tell you there’s a long way to go before thought-input is anywhere near as convenient as a mouse and keyboard. It takes a fair amount of focus and concentration to generate the necessary brain activity. Further, EEGs are a very noisy input source. It’s basically just a bunch of electrodes on the outside of your head, so all sorts of minor movement of your eyes, eyebrows, forehead generates electrical activity that interferes with the signals from your brain. As a result, the system has to be sort of dull and unresponsive in order to avoid mis-cues. You have to think pretty hard about moving your left hand for a pretty sustained period of time (5-15 seconds) before you can make a left-click, for example.

Another project I thought was really cool in theory, but somewhat underwhelming in practice. Titled The Black Box Sessions, the idea was to have a special, improvised performance for an audience of one. I entered a completely dark room alone, and peered into a peephole on one wall. Inside was a display of a night-vision camera trained on me. It was kind of a cool shift in perspective to watch myself watching myself, but that was all I saw. Talking to the artist later, there were supposed to be computer-generated images added to the camera view and improvised music performed by musicians in another room. There was a lot of ambient noise from the crowd talking in the next room that might’ve drowned out the music, and it’s possible I didn’t wait long enough for the visual part of the performance to happen.

I also met a woman named Katja who’s the PR director for Kiberpipa, the main organizer of the festival. She was very friendly and welcoming, and actually invited me to give a talk later in the week.

There were several art exhibits set up at Kiberpipa as well. HT Gold was a glitched-up version of an old C64 video game called Hat Trick. Anyone who wanted to could mess with the joystick, which would produce different interesting colors and sounds. Another piece called System Cassio:Pia reminded me of a Dalek; it had all sorts of blinking lights and TV screens displaying short clips from movies and music videos. A project I thought had the potential to be really awesome was a thing called “Culture Robot”. This involved a projected map of Ljubljana (with “free” or “open” cultural spaces highlighted), and these little insect-like robots built from a CD base with wire antennas attached to collision sensors. The whole thing was surrounded by a rectangular wood base with other movable obstacles, and the robots would roam around, bouncing off the walls and the obstacles. It was cool-looking, and I liked the robots, but it would have been about 200% cooler if the robots had actually interacted with the map in some way. As it was, the map was just a superfluous background.

Perhaps as a result of over-exposure to all the glitch art, my camera started going on the fritz, producing some rather interesting glitches(-art?) of its own. I’ve included a few of the (totally unedited!) cooler examples below, but it was actually really irritating to never be sure if a picture I took was going to come out or not. I guess in the days before digital photography, that’s how every shot was. Regardless, the photos of System Cassio:Pia and Hat Trick below were not taken by me but rather by the festival photographer, Tea. More actually-good photos can be found on the Kiberpipa photo archive.

The other big thing on the first night was the arrival of the Pirate Bay bus. For reasons of pure awesomeness, some of the people associated with the world’s largest bittorrent site (and its mother project Piratbyrån, the Bureau of Piracy) have decided to cruise around Europe in a modified Stockholm city bus as an “experience laboratory”. I really enjoyed the Pirate Bay/Piratbyrån people. For one thing, they took themselves about a third as seriously as anyone else at the festival (with the possible exception of Monochrom…I’ll get to them). It’s not that the other participants weren’t fun, it’s just that they mostly saw themselves as real artists with serious or semi-serious artistic endeavors. The Pirate Bay people seemed to be in it almost entirely for the lulz.

They were several hours late arriving at the festival, having just driven in from Bolzano, Italy. A slogan painted on the back of the bus cautioned “Slow on the road; fast on the net”. After arriving, one of the guys from the bus performed a “traditional folk dance of the Kopimi [read: copy-me] people,” which involved wearing a colorful knitted outfit and dancing randomly waving a “ceremonial sampling wand” to a repetitive, sample-looped piece of music. One person I talked to complained that this performance was just thrown together from some crap they already had on this bus, which I thought was sort of the point.

The Piratbyrån performance brought to a close the first day of the festival.

The first talk was by a woman named Eleonora Oreggia. She has an idea for something she calls “Virtual Entity” which would be a universal, shared, collaborative metadata system for files. She wanted the system to be decentralized, automatically updating to take into account new revisions of the file, and allowing for people to comment on it. She gave an example of the problems with current, static metadata systems: if she uploads an early version of an artwork, without filling in all the metadata, and somebody downloads that file, then later when she finished the file and fills out the rest of the metadata, then anyone who downloaded the file earlier would have bad, incomplete/out of date metadata.

I’m not sure I fully understood everything that she was proposing. Much of her vocabulary seemed strange to my ears, she talked about metadata being the “soul” of a file, mapping the relations between files as the “DNA of the files”, and proposed calling the segment of the metadata containing the initial creation information “the kernel” (after the presentation, I suggested she choose another word, since “kernel” already has a pretty well-established meaning in the computer world).

It’s kind of a cool idea, and there are a lot of problems with current metadata systems. But it seemed more like a thought-experiment than a real project to me; I don’t think she understood just how freaking impossible her system would be to implement. For it to really work the way she imagined, you’d either have to add network-aware code to every content-authoring and editing program in the world, or somehow convince people to go to your website and manually update data all the time. Not to mention the requirement for it to be decentralized would require a whole bunch of different servers, or some sort of peer-to-peer component on people’s computers. Even currently popular metadata systems are a mess of different, incompatible formats, so I don’t see how you’d get people to standardize on yours.

She had some interesting ideas about authorship, “What you create does not belong to you,” which is not an unheard-of position. I think you can make strong case that artistic creations somehow belong to all of humanity. Should da Vinci have been allowed to destroy the Mona Lisa if he’d wanted to?

At the end of the presentation, she had sort of a collaborative exercise where she wanted us to think of examples of various types of data. She proposed that all data be “divisible in four substances” she tentatively identified as TEXT, AUDIO, IMAGE, VIDEO. This grouping seemed kind of problematic to me. “Where does a compiled binary file fit?”, I asked. Somebody else wanted to know whether MIDI instructions were text or audio. Is a PDF file text, or image? What about archives that contain many different types of data? What about steganography?

One guy noted that ultimately, data is just data, and maybe you should just group everything into Ones or Zeros. In any case, I wasn’t really sure what the point of the taxonomy exercise was. If you can play it with a video player, it’s a video file; if you can edit it with a text editor, it’s text; if you can execute it, it’s an application.

The next talk was by a Dutch woman named Rosa Menkman who creates glitch-art, mostly video. I thought her presentation was pretty cool. She showed a Mario 1 speedrun video, which is a pretty vivid example of people who make extensive use of glitches: jumping backwards because it shows one less frame, double-jumping off walls, abusing flaws in the game’s collision-detection to move through walls. I’m not sure if speed-running counts as hacking, but it certainly involves taking a known system and pushing it to its absolute limits.

The slides for her presentation were pretty cool looking. They looked like what happens if you open a MS Word document in a normal text editor (you can try this yourself with notepad), where you get some readable text, but also a lot of gibberish and symbols from misinterpreted formatting information. She opened with the quote, “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it the right way” (I doubt you could do much damage with a chalkline, but the idea of using things in unintended ways is sound) She talked about the “In-Between manifesto” which includes tenets such as “We react to the spirit of our time”, “We celebrate the percieved accident”, “We make meaning through imagination”.

I thought the idea of appreciating and re-interpreting what would normally be seen as negative failures of a system was an interesting one. She did admit, though, that not all glitches are wonderful, some are boring and you just want your computer to work. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a BSOD is just a BSOD.

The final lecture of the night was from Michael Schweiger from the Austrian Community Radio group Radio FRO 105.0. I’ll be honest, I don’t really think that terrestrial community/free/pirate radio is very important, especially in the developed world. Schweiger talked about the use of Community radio as a place for open expression, to give a “voice for the unheard” and “room for experimentation and discursive reflections,” which is all well and good, except that all those purposes can be much better served by the internet. You’re much more likely to reach somebody who’s actually interested in what you have to say by setting up a globally-accessible website than you are by running a low-power FM station.

During the Q&A section after the presentation, I raised this question. People responded with the example of islanders in Tonga who are using community radio to communicate and share information between islands—which is great, I think radio is better than nothing in situations where internet infrastructure is sparse—and reaching people in their cars—which, unless you have a high-power transmitter, means reaching them for ten or fifteen minutes while they’re in your broadcast radius.

Almost all of these stations also do webcasting, and maintain websites with archives of past broadcasts. To me, that’s basically an admission that the terrestrial broadcasting is unnecessary. Actually, to me, the most interesting part of the radio presentation was a demonstration of a cool graphical timeline browsing system on the radio fro website.

I think non-commercial radio has a place for bringing greater exposure to independent musical artists, and stations like NPR usually do very good journalism, but in both cases, the fact that they broadcast on the airwaves is kind of incidental. There’s some cool things happening with TCP/IP-over-HAM radio, but traditional AM/FM radio seems like such a throwback medium to me.

At the end of the night, the Pirate Bay guys showed up with their bus, and took anyone who was interested on a rambling tour around Ljubljana. The driver stopped at any local city bus stops we passed, and we tried to entice any local Ljubljanians waiting there into boarding the bus. A few of the bolder Slovenian teens actually did take us up on the offer and rode along for a while. “I feel like I’m living in a cartoon,” one of them commented. My camera was still misbehaving, so many of my best shots were destroyed, or at least that’s the excuse I’m going to use for the generally low quality of the photographs from our bus tour. I also took a grainy, low-bitrate video that lets you hear the strange, repetitive circus music and sort of get a feel for the atmosphere on the bus:

Download Link

The bus also featured a lot of post-it notes and painted phrases like:
“Home Killing Is Taping Industry Music”
“Eye Ball the Media”
“401: Solutionartemporary.com”
“S23M Homepage: Under Construction”

After the ride on the Pirate Bay Bus, I headed over to an American ex-pat’s house to watch the US election results.

Sheena Macrae talk:

Wednesday was a lecture from a Canadian video artist named Sheena Macrae. One of her big things is taking films or TV shows and finding ways to condense them or re-present them. She showed a sped-up version of Pulp Fiction: the entire film accelerated to play in 5 minutes, set to Misirlou, of course. It was actually surprisingly watchable. She also showed an accelerated version of Gone With the Wind, with pauses for the moments when Scarlett O’Hara says “I’ll think about that tomorrow,” a line she repeats three times in the film. Ms. Macrae also presented a compressed version of one whole season of the TV series Dallas. Rather than simply speeding it up, she layered all the episodes on top of one another, so you’d wind up watching an entire season in the time of a single episode. She showed another little pastiche with the characters from Dallas constantly drinking.

She said she’d chosen to work with Dallas because it was such a universal cultural touchstone, and popular all over the world. This may be true, but it’s also totally before my time. I’ve never seen the show and know next to nothing about it (Who Shot J.R. was from Dallas, right?).

A Small Contribution to the Genesis of Everyday Life:

Afterwards, was a performance entitled “A Small Contribution to the Genesis of Everyday Life”. This was another sort of glitch-feedback project, that involved hooking the performers up to electrodes and then having them move around and touch things. The results were displayed on the projector, but also on a CRT monitor, which puts out a lot of E&M, further contributing to the feedback. Also the output was apparently “fed-back” to the performers themselves: in other words, they would receive electrical shocks depending on what they were doing.

PASH:

On Thursday, there was a presentation by Martin Kohout of some of the artworks by a group called PASH (for novelty’s sake, their website has “opening hours”. The time-check is implemented in javascript and based on your local system time. If you want to get in “after hours” you can just change your clock). They seem to do a variety of real-life exhibits and purely digital pieces.

They showed video shot by some visitors to an installation of theirs called Ombea, which I thought was really good. Basically it’s a spooky/atmopheric room, with the lights (and some hidden speakers) wired to computer control. They use a couple cameras to monitor how much guests are moving around in the room. The more they move, the darker the room gets, and the louder and more frightening the sounds from the speakers become. The effect is actually quite scary. In order to get the room to be bright and quiet, participants have to overcome their natural inclination to run around frantically in response to the frightening stimuli (there’s also an “emergency” killswitch, to stop the program, if it’s too overwhelming for somebody).

I also liked the fact that as part of the presentation, Kohout talked about some of the technical challenges they faced. For example, using the cameras to monitor movement, they had to figure out how to not have the system be affected by the changes in lighting levels.

Another artwork they presented is called Moonwalk, and the medium is actually YouTube. It’s basically an infinitely-receding set of YouTube progress bars. Sadly, YouTube has added an extra button to their interface since the video was made, so it kind of breaks the illusion a bit. Still worth a look, though.

What Burns Never Returns:

The next talk was a presentation called “What Burns Never Returns” by Italian choreographer Alessandro Carboni. This presentation was kind of all over the place, and I wasn’t sure what to make of it. He started out talking about visiting different cities around the world, particularly in the Guandong region of China, looking at differing levels of density. He talked about “Rarefaction and hyper-density” and “Generative Dance and dynamic space”. Then, abruptly, we were back in Europe—London, to be precise. There was some stuff about Brownian motion and wanting to “explore the city in a methodological way”, which didn’t really make sense to me, because what they were doing wasn’t really a Brownian random walk.

As near as I could figure, they gave a guy a little box which randomly said “turn left” or “turn right” at random times, and sent him out to wander around London. They tracked his motion with a GPS device There was also some stuff about using a cube as an approximation of a human body, and they had a parallel project where a dancer was given randomized instructions about moving his body at the same time as the walker was wandering the city, the dancer was moving around the dance floor in response to these commands, like some kind of teched-up game of Twister. There was another version of this with several dancers where there were like 5,000 little wood blocks set up on the dance floor as well. The dancers would knock the blocks over as they moved.

Near the end of the presentation there was some stuff about memory formation and mirror neurons. As a neuroscience major, these are things I actually know a little bit about. I have no idea what they had to do with any of the other stuff in the presentation.

The description given in the program is this:

WBNR is the second phase of a three-year research project ABQ: from quad to zero.
The project is an extensive investigation of the body and the city, of an organism, a doubly mutated system in which deformed territories, structural glitches, and uncontrolled code cohabit with each other. They create new dynamic maps of places in continuous transformation. Through the creation of a work Platform, several researchers work to apply a method of analysis and composition to choreography focused on the specific urban context of the city and the theatre stage in which the performance takes place. Proceeding analytically from space in its different typologies, from the territory of the body, the flows, dynamics, agents, and movements that constitute it are quantified and codified. The process of exploration and generation of the flows is assigned to the dancers who, through data collection systems such as GPS, motion capture, and sensors, interact in real time with diverse spatial levels: the town, the stage, the body, the machine. The aim is to elaborate a single system of choreographic composition, capable of interpolating all the collected data into a set of choreographic instructions. WBNR is an immeasurable choreography between body and territory, an exploration of the city and the body, reimagining new modalities of analysis and new paths of investigation in order to reflect on the anthropological and socio-cultural transformations of the individual, and on how technology, infrastructure, places, and people are organized in the contemporary urban space.

If you can make sense of all that, you’re brighter than I.

I almost feel bad being so critical, because I’d talked to the Italian guy a couple times during the festival and he seemed like a cool guy. But if he (or others from his group) are giving a similar presentation again they really need to pare it down and simplify: pick one or two ideas and focus on communicating those clearly.

A Cable Plays:

This was probably my favorite of the performances. The two performers were seated in front a pegboard with bundles of yarn. They were instructed to behave as if they were playing a game, but given no actual directions or rules. They took turns laying out threads of yarn across the pegboard to enclose various spaces. Meanwhile, a webcam captured an overhead view of the board and fed it through a computer that would add dynamic elements to it before projecting it on a screen. Early in the game, little rotating ouroborus-things would appear and then expand to fill the areas hemmed in by the performers strings. Later, little balls would bounce around in the enclosed spaces. The collision detection was pretty well implemented, and it was often hard to tell just by looking at the screen which elements were “really” there and which were completely computer-generated.

Club night:

Thursday night, there was a “club night” dance party at a place down the street from Kiberpipa. (IMPORTANT TRAVEL VOCABULARY NOTE: In Central/Eastern Europe, “nightclubs” are strip clubs, and “discos” are dance clubs. As a rule, they do not, however, play disco music. This information may save you embarrassment/confusion.)

The club night was actually really cool. Some of the artists DJ’d or VJ’d (the Rosa Menkman, the Dutch glitch-artist was one of the VJs, and her stuff was really good.). I found that I actually like techno music when it contains samples from 8-bit video games. You can hear a lot of the music that was played on the website of the label 8-bit Peoples.

This was also where I first really noticed one of the odder little details of life in Slovenia. Apparently, there’s a law in Slovenia that if you don’t get a reciept for something, it’s free. This applies to everything. So even very small purchases that you wouldn’t necessarily want a receipt for, one is printed anyway. You aren’t allowed to decline it. Because virtually nobody wants a €2 reciept for a single beer, or whatever, the bar rapidly becomes cluttered with tons of abandoned reciepts. The bartenders spend a lot of their time printing off reciepts, then sweeping those same receipts up off the bar and placing them in little baskets off to the side (I’m assuming they aren’t allowed to just throw them out? In case somebody comes back and demands their reciept?).

The first presentation was from Anders Carlsson of the blog Goto80 (eye-searing color scheme warning). He talked about the 8-bit demoscene and about chip music. He gave the presentation on an actual Commodore 64, and showed off some demos from the early 90s (keep in mind these are running on hardware less powerful than your phone). He talked about the demoscene as a “bounded culture”. They’ve been around since at least the late 1980s, but there’s been no real academic or journalistic interest, and very little crossover into the mainstream art or music worlds. Demos are shown at “demoparties”, not in art galleries. Occasionally, mainstream musicians will sample from the demoscene, but that’s about it.

Mr. Carlsson said that the focus in the demoscene was “craftsmanship, not art,” which I thought was an interesting distinction between the art scene and the more hacker-focused demoscene. The goal of a demo (especially in the 8-bit scene) is to push limited hardware to its absolute limit, and show off what an amazing programmer you are. To squeeze the maximum performance out of obsolete hardware means coding at a very low-level, in assembly or machine code (‘bare metal’ coding) and taking advantage of undocumented features of the hardware.
Another interesting thing about the demoscene is that authorship is protected by ostracizing offenders, not copyright lawsuits. As Mr. Carlsson explained, it would be “lame” to take somebody else’s code, or try to copy something that somebody else was doing. Recently Nelly Furtado and producer Timbaland sampled tunes from Finnish Amiga/C64 demo and have incurred the wrath of the Demoscene.

Another presentation was from a group called “Time’s Up” based in a waterfront warehouse in Linz, Austria. They seemed really cool. They’re a non-profit group with members from many different backgrounds interested in the “intersection between art, technology, science and entertainment”, and they construct “experimental situations”. They showed video of exhibits from their 2003-2004 “Sensory Circus,” which had a lot of different sort of mechanical and electronic constructions that visitors could play with. The goal of the Sensory Circus was to sort of disconnect people from their ordinary interactions with their senses and force them to approach the world in a new way. So, for instance, they’d have people walking around wearing a video-helmet with a camera facing backwards. Or a mechanical bicycle-like contraption that responds in unfamiliar ways to riders attempts to pedal forward, or steer it. The presenters explained that they were interested in creating “social hardware” and were more concerned with “the relational ‘why?’ than the technical ‘how?'” (To a true hacker, this is heresy: the how is the why)

The real crux of the presentation, however, was an uncompleted projected entitled “Twixtville”. The idea behind Twixtville was something like town-as-art. As explained in the presentation, Twixtville was to have been a “temporary, lived-in, ongoing, interactive, open, semifictional, proto-urban space, without governance.”
It would be a sort of make-believe town, inhabited by artists and fictional characters (or artists playing fictional characters?) with back stories and histories, and real and fictional conflicts. There would have been parties, workshops, and symposia (“I love symposia!”).  There also would have been some sort of online component to allow people to interact with the denizens of Twixtville.

Sadly, the project is now on hold indefinitely.  The main reason being an inability to secure a suitable location to host Twixtville. It’s too bad, because it seemed like an interesting idea. There are some examples of sort of temporary art communities, such as Burning Man in the United States, but the Time’s Up people said that they really wanted Twixtville to different, because it would be residential in that “people would really live there,” as opposed to a sort of festival.

The presenter is Johannes Grenzfurthener (who wears a literal black hat) from the Austrian group Monochrom. He describes the nine members of Monochrom as, “electrotechnicians and designers and linguists and philosophers”. Monochrom started in the late 1980s on the FidoNet BBS, then later published a sort of print fanzine/yearbook about “technology, politics, art crap, whatever we thought would be interesting,” and later expanded into a variety of other formats: robots, short films, t-shirts (“I was a copyright violation in a former life”), musicals (“We really did a musical  about computer programs who check the credit rate of an Austrian criminal”).

They also function as collectors and archivists of “late capitalist” culture. They collect typos: “timeslut,” “what the duck?” “charmobyl,” “censorshop,” “Isreal,” “landlard,” “congratulatinos,” “border feces,” “Untied States,” “pythong,” “the merciful goofness of the Lord,” “In god condition,”. They collect “bad restaurant art”, strange phrases overhead while walking down the street, and “applied office arts” otherwise known as “office doodles”. My favorite was the flowchart/sketch “Files–>Data–>”

Additionally they do real life pranks and games, setting up a “great firewall of China” littered with the “heads” of Chinese dissidents in front of the Googleplex in San Francisco. They held a “Nazi petting zoo” (a petting zoo where people could pet Nazis, not a petting zoo run by Nazis) so that Austrians “can finally embrace history and hug the Nazis.” They organized a session of “massively multiplayer Thumbwrestling,” experimenting with different network topologies for the game.

In San Francisco, they organized an “Arse Electronica” festival (a play on Ars Electronica) devoted to technology in the adult industry and published an anthology “pr0novation: pornography and technological innovation”. This is not as goofy as it sounds: porn has been at the leading edge of innovation in home video recorders, digital photography, and of course, porn was the first “killer app” for the internet (only within the last couple years have social networking sites overtaken porn sites in leading overall web traffic—when someone creates a porn/social networking site [besides myspace], it will probably kill the internet).

The title and main topic of the presentation was “The Innermost Unifier: The Corporate Anthem” and he transitioned to this subject via a pretty amazing sock-puppet show summarizing their view of the way corporate culture has evolved over the years. Then, Grenzfurthener presented a variety of internal corporate loyalty anthems (part of a large archive he is amassing). He sang along enthusiastically, enjoining the audience to accompany him.

The funniest part to me was his presentation of the 1940s IBM anthem, “Ever Onward IBM” complete with lyrics thanking Thomas J Watson for his creation of such a wonderful company to work for. 1940s IBM was presented as the prototype of the old-style, hierarchical corporation. This was pretty hilarious to me, because, of course, it’s Thomas J Watson’s money that’s paying for me to travel around the world hanging out with Austrian art-philosophy-hackers. I was perhaps the only person in the room able to un-ironically join in a hymn praising old man Watson for his glorious vision. But hey, what the hell, “IBM supports Linux 100%” right?

Another of the corporate anthems with personal resonance belonged to the Dutch firm Phillips. Earlier this year, I visited Eindhoven, birthplace of Phillips and visited their first lightbulb factory there. Demonstrating the evolution of corporate songs over the years, the Phillips anthem from the 1980s has no lyrics about serving, or about thanking the wise bosses, but only about feeling good working for the company.

Although Herr Grenzfurthener barely touched on coding, and only obliquely on technology, I think his was in many ways the most hackerish of any of the presentations. He displayed an astonishing breadth of interests and ideas, and Monochrom clearly has an exceptionally firm grasp on the hacker concept of “ha ha only serious”.

The next day, Saturday. Grenzfurthener and his Monochrom compatriot, Günter, led the festival participants in the creation and deployment of a “sculpture mob,” hastily constructed DIY public art. First, we had a training session where groups of three were given five minutes to construct a sculpture from a pile of junk wood using hammers and nails. Then one of the observers was appointed “art critic” and proceeded to critique the creation. My group produced a flimsy rocket ship-like piece that half-collapsed when we attempted to move it. One of the observers, a Frenchman, tapped into a deep well of snooty French art critic stereotypes (think this guy on the LA NPR station) and pronounced our piece a phallic (phallic in the art world being anything that is longer than it is wide) tribute to the fledgling Indian space program.

After the training session, we retrieved from Kiberpipa some pre-assembled wooden roadblock pieces (“The New Kids on the Roadblock,” as the piece was titled) and set out to find an appropriate location to deposit them in Ljubljana. First, we tried to leave them in front of the rather-unimpressive (but surprisingly nudity-friendly) Slovenian Parliament building, but a security guard came out and yelled at us, “Hey, this is the Parliament!” so we feigned ignorance and moved on.

Somebody suggested leaving them in front of the US embassy, but the consensus was that a) nobody goes to the US embassy in Slovenia so no one would see them, and b) we were liable to find ourselves accused of terrorism.

Finally, for maximum attention, it was decided to leave them in the middle of the central square in Ljubljana, Prešerc. We dropped off the payload and then dispersed in true flash mob fashion. People did seem to notice the new wooden objects, and little children especially enjoyed climbing and playing on them. They remained in place for all of Saturday, at least. We dropped them off in the early afternoon, and they were still there when I passed by Prešerc late in the evening. By Sunday around noon, however, they had been removed. Such is the transitory nature of sculpture mobs.

Rather notably, Presen Square (“Prešerc”) is dedicated to France Persen, Slovenia’s greatest poet. There’s a giant statue of him on one side of the square. Any country that erects heroic statues of poets instead of generals is ok in my book.

A guy named Paule Ečimović gave a talk about “Hacked Varieties of the Pong Computer Video Game Experience,” which was really cool. He showed the original version of pong, some of the later ports, and then some modern “hacked” versions, including my personal favorite, Plasma Pong. It used to be hosted here, before the author was sued by the withered husk of Atari (who somehow still have a legal department?), but you can still download it here and I highly recommend it. You’ll need a medium-decent computer though, Plasma Pong re-imagines the game of pong if it were played on a colorful, fluid field of plasma. It incorporates a pretty heavy-duty fluid dynamics model and fancy graphical effects.

I really liked this talk because it was one of the techiest/most hackerish of the presentations. Paule is a true old-school computer nerd. He’s Slovenian originally, but has lived and worked in the Bay Area in the US for many years. Later at the conference, we talked for a while. I told him about the electromechanical pong rig, which he hadn’t heard about, and is, as far as I’m concerned, the definitive pong hack (at least until somebody makes a pong game using actual plasma). We also talked about the Clock of the Long Now, which I think is one of the coolest projects ever. I kind of want to work for the Long Now Foundation.

Andraž Sraka talked about Kiberpipa.net, an attempt to build a free, self-contained wireless network in Ljubljana using ad-hoc mesh networking and packet radio technologies. This is very similar to what the freifunk.net group is doing in Berlin, the Kiberpipa people are actually using some software developed by freifunk. The tone of the presentation was actually sort of melancholy. According to Sraka, the group had all the hardware, bandwidth and technical expertise they could need, but what they really lacked was interested participants. He said their network had stopped growing, and it was tough to find people interested in helping out or even willing to let people install an access point for them. Apparently high-speed internet service in Slovenia is very cheap and widely available, so many people don’t see the need for a free wifi network.

My own talk was mostly just an explanation of who I am, what the Watson Fellowship is, a recap of my travels to date, and a few of my armchair sociology observations about the different groups of people I’ve met. If you’ve been reading this blog, you’ve already been exposed to a much more detailed version of everything I covered in my talk. If you’re a true Brendan McCollam Completist (please seek help now) the slides from my talk are available here, and the video of my presentation is supposed to be up on the Kiberpipia site at some point. I would appreciate critiques/suggestions on presenting style. I have to give a much more involved, formal version of this talk next year when I return from the Watson.

Tuesday evening was a round table discussion of “The Hacker Ethic” as a concluding event of the festival. I had planned on simply observing, but found myself sucked into participating. I also found myself reluctantly playing the role of the voice of geekdom defending the concept of the “hack” from co-option by the artists. There’s video of the discussion here. I thought I did a medium-alright job of laying out my views, but I probably could’ve done better. There was a point where somebody raised the question of “does a hack need to be hard in order to count as a real hack?” and I was pretty emphatic that it does, but most other people seemed to disagree with me. On further reflection, I think what I really meant is that a true hack needs to be non-trivial. The difference between “non-trivial” and “hard” is perhaps a subtle one, and I did a rather poor job of communicating this distinction during the round table.

Another random fun fact about Slovenia. Despite how much I like this city/country, I could never, ever live here. The “normal” working hours for Slovenian people are from 7 am to 3 pm. Absolutely brutal for a nightowl like myself. Since joining the EU, some companies are now working “European hours” of 9 to 5, but it’s still an exception to the rule.

No, I didn't start flying a sign for Graz in front of the opera in downtown Vienna.

It’s also (for me at least) an emotional rollercoaster. As you’re waiting, you’re being rejected by dozens and dozens of cars passing. It’s easy to start getting bummed out and dejected. I even got as far as starting to mentally compose the blog post about how I failed at hitchhiking. It took me almost 3 hours to get my first ride out of Vienna. Although for part of that time I was waiting in the wrong place, and I spent about 30 minutes getting a coffee and warming up in McDonald’s.

Then, when somebody does pick you up, you feel totally elated and awesome. It certainly didn’t hurt that both of my rides yesterday were reasonably attractive women in their late 20s/early 30s. My first driver (from Vienna to Graz) had a really nice little Garmin GPS navigation device (with a less impressive suction-cup mounting system). We didn’t use it much since it’s basically one autobahn straight from Vienna to Graz, but I’m a fan of expensive electronic gadgetry on principle. It’s also reassuring because if your driver has her own fancy gizmos, she seems less likely to try to rip you off for yours.

My second driver was super nice—the kind of nice that doesn’t seem like it exists outside of books and movies until you occasionally encounter it. I must have gotten very good at giving off the friendly/harmless vibes, because within about 5 minutes after picking me up, she took me home to her house to meet her two sons (8 and 9). She didn’t strike me as a crazy, irresponsible mother, either. Her kids were friendly and well-behaved. They seemed amused when I introduced myself in English and shook hands in a grown-up fashion.

She told me she stopped because her mother is Slovenian; when she explained to her boys that she was going to help me get to Slovenia, the younger one asked, “Is he going to visit grandma?” which was cute. She actually made me dinner (!), and then drove me (out of her way!) to Maribor, which is the first town over the border big enough to have a real train station.

By then, it was starting to get  dark, so I didn’t think I’d get another ride. I bought a train ticket from Maribor to Ljubljana for €7.73; even with the added cost of a sharpie marker, it’s still a lot better than an €80 Austrian train. The whole trip took about 9 hours, but, crucially, none of that time was spent on a bus.

Hitching out of Graz ('SLO' is an EU abbreviation for Slovenia), I'm impressed I managed to get the leaving-Graz sign in the background.

On A2 headed South. I hastily made this more-general sign when "Graz" didn't seem to be working.

Austria is crazy-beautiful, and warm(ish)!

My first driver and car

France Prešeren statue in Ljubljana. The figure above Prešeren is his great unrequited love and poetic muse, Julija Primic.

I have to say, I kind of admire the fact that Slovenians have a poet, and not a king or a general as their most beloved national figure. I also think Prešeren sounds pretty awesome: it’s almost as if he deliberately set out to embody every single stereotype of a Romantic poet.

Born to a peasant family, Prešeren had a great and tragic unrequited love for Julija Primic, a wealthy merchant’s daughter, who features prominently in his work. He married, but still carried on affairs with other lovers. He tried to take his own life at least twice, and went largely unappreciated while he was alive, only to be posthumously hailed as a genius. Oh, and of course, he was an epic and notorious drunkard.

In fact, the Slovenian national anthem takes its lyrics from a poem by Prešeren titled Zdravljica (A Toast) that’s largely about drinking (I feel I’m in no position to criticize, since my national anthem is set to the tune of an English drinking song). The Prešeren poem (in translation by Janko Lavrin) reads as follows; the bolded section is used in the anthem:

The vintage, friends, is over,
And here sweet wine makes, once again,
Sad eyes and hearts recover
Puts fire into every vein.
Drowns dull care
Everywhere
And summons hope out of despair.

To whom with acclamation
And song shall we our first toast give?
God save our land and nation
And all Slovenes where’er they live,
Who own the same
Blood and name,
And who one glorious Mother claim.

Let thunder out of heaven
Strike down and smite our wanton foe!
Now, as it once had thriven,
May our dear realm in freedom grow.
May fall the last
Chains of the past
Which bind us still and hold us fast!

Let peace, glad conciliation,
Come back to us throughout the land!
Towards their destination
Let Slavs henceforth go hand-in-hand!
Thus again
Will honour reign
To justice pledged in our domain.

To you, our pride past measure,
Our girls! Your beauty, charm and grace!
There surely is no treasure
To equal maidens of such race.
Sons you’ll bear,
Who will dare
Defy our foe no matter where.

Our hope now, our to-morrow –
The youths – we toast and toast with joy.
No poisonous blight or sorrow
Your love of homeland shall destroy.
With us indeed
You’re called to heed
Its summons in this hour of need.

Live, oh live all nations,
Who long and work for that bright day,
When o’er earth’s habitations
No war, no strife shall hold its sway;
Who long to see
That all men free,
No more shall foes, but neighbors be.

At last to our reunion –
To us the toast! Let it resound,
Since in this great communion
By thoughts of brotherhood we’re bound
May joyful cheer
Ne’er disappear
From all good hearts now gathered here.

Ironically, the holiday today was much more of a quiet, sincere cultural commemoration than a raucous party. Basically, everything was closed except museums, which were open and offering free admission. I went to the Natural History Museum and the National Museum, where I saw what might be a 55,000 year old flute made from the bones of a cave bear by Neanderthals. Although the providence and purpose of the object are somewhat disputed, if it is a flute, it is certainly the oldest musical instrument ever discovered.