Yesterday I went to see this art exhibition, Electrohype, here in Malmö. Billed as “the fifth biennial for computer based and technological art,” only a few of the exhibits really fit what I would consider “computer based” but most of them were pretty interesting regardless.
Ralf Baecker, Calculating Space, 2007
→ No CommentsTags:
One cool thing about Sweden is that it has relatively strong legal protections for freedom of speech and online privacy, especially by European standards. As a result, it’s something of a hotspot for peer-to-peer file sharing and copyright infringement. The other day, I slept in the same basement as one of the Pirate Bay admins. I felt a little bit like I was in the presence of internet royalty.
The pirates in Sweden have even created an organized political party to lobby for changes to copyright law in Sweden. Recently, the youth wing of this party, Ung Pirat (Young Pirates) received around $159,000 from the government bureau tasked with giving money to youth organizations to encourage young people’s participation in politics. Ung Pirat is apparently the third largest youth political organization in Sweden, and the money is distributed according to membership.
→ 2 CommentsTags:
I’ve been invited to be a guest blogger at hackerspaces.org. They’re a cool bunch of people, based out of Vienna, where I met some of them. The site is an attempt to maintain an up-to-date database of hackerspaces worldwide and provide resources for those running hackerspaces or interested in starting their own hackerspaces.
It’s a pretty cool opportunity, and I’m excited. The hackerspaces.org people’s interests dovetail very well with the focus of my project. If you’re interested, you can read my introductory post, although if you’ve been following this blog regularly, it will contain approximately zero new information for you.
[Read more →]
→ 3 CommentsTags:
So I’ve done a few things that merit longer, better posts, but I haven’t really written those “good” posts yet. Oh, my kingdom for a counterfactual computer (where the mere possibility of my writing such posts would mean that they were already written).
In the absence of reality-bending quantum effects, I’m going to slap together a collection of links and brief anecdotes in order to try to keep up my regular posting schedule. Consider this my “really coming into his own as a blogger” post.
Tonight You Belong to Me (ukulele cover) from buriednexttoyou on Vimeo.
Dave Hoffman is awesome and much better at the ukulele than I am—I am still working on it. He’s also not bad at harmonizing with his evil doppelgänger (you can tell the evil one by the beard). I’ve been looking for a good excuse to link to him for some time now, and I’ve decided if there’s one thing this blog is sorely lacking, it’s ukulele musical interludes. That’s as good a reason as any. Anyone who enjoys eccentricity in their creativity should check out his site.
→ 1 CommentTags:
I’m in Berlin now, again. I like this city, and I’m starting to know my way around since I keep winding up here. Unfortunately, it’s freezing cold. Berlin is about 400 kilometers almost due south of Copenhagen, but it sure doesn’t feel it.
I killed myself getting over from Malmo to Copenhagen to try to catch a bus, and I managed to miss it by 5 minutes! Even more gallingly, I discovered that the same bus actually passes through Malmo on its way to Copenhagen. Epic Brendan Bus Fail.
Luckily, the bus stop was right next to the train station, and there was a train to Berlin for only about €5 more than the bus.
So that’s the unromantic logistics of my life. I also interviewed one of the guys from The Research Department, and I need to write that up for the hackerspaces blog. In Denmark, I hung out a bunch in Freetown Christiania, which is probably the coolest thing I saw in Copenhagen. It’s certainly worthy of its own post, when I get a chance. Things keep happening, though.
Tonight, I’m supposed to be going to some party/art exhibition thing with one of the girls I met in Ljubljana on the Pirate Bay bus. I guess some of the Pirate Bay/Piratbyrån people are going to be there/presenting an exhibit there. If it sounds like I’m vague on the details, that’s because I am. I’m also hoping to get up early tomorrow to check out the Technical Museum here in Berlin, which I missed last time.
→ 2 CommentsTags: