implementation v you v posters from chris

• an electric can opener
• an old vacuum cleaner
• a blender

Maybe it’s just because there was a bunch of smoke, but I actually enjoyed tonight’s interpretation of John Cage’s Variations VII.  Apart from the smell of some really hideous perfume on a woman standing nearby, the room smelt like melting plastic and burnt out motors.  It was a bit like guitar strings breaking, but still not quite rock and roll.

I’m probably still suffering the negative associations of a past relationship, but my back gets incredibly tense at the thought of much noise related art practice.  Then again, don’t even get me started on the terrible things that can be done with visualisations.

It would be easier to say that I just don’t get some types of media art , but something must fascinate me about it, because I keep on thinking about it and what I want to do as a practice within the greater new media field.   Nothing elaborate, but damn it, if I am to do anything I at least want to do it well.

Maybe one day I’ll actually work on one of my ideas.

As part of the greater DIY Masters / self-organised learning project I’m attending LIWOLI 09 in Linz, Austria.

LIWOLI is an event exploring the crossovers between art and the FLOSS community.  I’ll be recording a series of interviews with participants about self-organised education and how DIY / autodidactism intersects with university education. As many people in both fields have self taught skills I’m looking forward to the responses.

I’ll be asking my interviewees to explore ideas like these:

• Does one have to attend a formal institution to become an Artist or Technologist?
• How important is a sense of community (mentors, teachers and peers) to a learning experience?
• How important is it for learners to hack and remix their knowledge?
• How can “free” learning work alongside formal institutions such as art schools and universities?
• What elements of the FLOSS movement are most relevant to the idea of DIY / self-organised / “free” learning communities?
• What are the most valuable experiences we take from formal learning?
• Can we create similar experiences outside of formal institutions?
• How can we enable more people to have valuable learning experiences using readily available resources?
• How can people share their experience of learning as well as the knowledge that they are acquiring?
• Autodidacts and self-learning have always existed, but how can society make this learning journey easier?

Get in touch if you’re heading along to LIWOLI or if you have any suggestions of what I should check out in Linz.

Over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly interested in a few Masters programs that offer technology and interaction theory and design along with research and arts practice. I’ve also thought idly about studying sociology, sustainability and urban design too, you know, just because I’m interested in way too much different stuff.

Then lately, as you might have noticed, I’ve become rather interested in friendship and how society and community forms.  There’s a little bit of sociology in there and some psychology too.  Considering that friendships form in physical space and online, I can then tie in the urban design and digital / media interests too.  Representation and recording of relationships? Well that connects the art and design threads too.

Learn by aaronschmidt

At this point, it seems like a big ask to find a graduate program that allows me to explore all the above (and more) without paying vast sums of money and moving location yet again.  So, I’m going to try and create my own part-time, unofficial ‘Masters’ program right here in Berlin.

To start with, I know a rather handsome guy who can teach me electronics. This teacher also has an extensive library incorporating philosophy and reference materials such as my current textbook.

I’m starting on a intensive course in the German language come January, so I’ll actually get some formal learning too.

After those two immediately available topics, I’m in need of some direction, so if you have answers to any of the following questions, please comment away:

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Or “These are not the droids you are looking for”.*

The theme for my first ever Bar Camp this past weekend in Sheffield was “community and conversation.”  Conveniently, most of the people in Sheffield I wanted to catch up with or get to know better were at Bar Camp. Even better, one of my best friends from Adelaide and another friend were down from Newcastle Upon Tyne for the weekend.

Since I was returning to a place where I’d briefly lived yet made a number of great connections, it felt fitting to run a session on friendship and how to move to a new town.

My original title for this session was going to be How to move to a new place, make friends and influence people. On arrival at Bar Camp Sheffield I realised that I wanted my session to be more than a presentation: how could I get people to turn up and talk about how we meet, become friends and influence each other? So I cunningly threw in a Star Wars related title.

My suspicions about who turns up at Bar Camps were justified! There was a crowd of geeks… Then, without notes or a sequence of events I had to run my session.

I’d initially thought about running this as a presentation complete with slides and er, planning, but I wanted to play with the unconference environment of Bar Camp and in the end settled for a more impromptu conversation-like session which I tried to direct with some questions.  I felt that it was a style of discussion that worked particularly well with the topic.

As a result, my slightly disjointed notes are from memory.  I’ve tried to record key elements of what I said, what I wish I’d said and how other people responded.  If you have a better memory and can tell me something I forgot, or have something that you wish you’d had a chance to mention on Saturday, please leave a comment below.

It was a great experience for my first ever BarCamp – I’m looking forward to seeing how future events shape up in comparison (free beer and food?!). Thanks so much to Jag, Ian, Jay and Josie for organising such a lovely weekend!

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As part of BarCampSheff I quickly curated an hour’s worth of videos from the brilliant TED.com. If you know me personally you’ve probably already heard me rave on about TED. If you’re coming to battlecat.net as a result of meeting me recently you’re probably not yet converted.

TED initially stood for the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference, but now the requirement for their speakers seems to just be passion, whether the topic is physics, mushrooms or the developing world.

I could have chosen an entire day’s worth of TED talks – but these are the four I chose:

• Johnny Lee Demos Wii Remote Hacks - The most truly geek video in the selection… But Bar Camp’s not just about geeks… Right?
• Hans Rosling – The Best Stats You’ve Ever Seen – At a data representation level, this is also pretty geeky and very cool. Primarily it’s great information about the variations of poverty in the developing world. And Hans Rosling is just so passionate – I want to give him a hug.
• Malcolm Gladwell on Spaghetti Sauce – Great talk about flavour, food science, marketing and design. Though I feel Malcolm Gladwell is at his best when he’s writing.
• Sir Ken Robinson on Do Schools Kill Creativity? – A huge shout out to Guy Dickinson who insisted that I include this video. This talk always brings tears to my eyes.  Ken Robinson’s talk was first video to be featured on the TED vodcast and is a great start to the many hours of passionate and interesting talks available in the TED archives.

Thanks to TED’s great usage policy we were able to show the videos without breaking any laws.

• How can common sense be taught (and understood) in a society where there is no term to describe “common sense” in the local language(s)?
• What methodologies can be taken from online social networks to distribute ideas and knowledge in remote environments where access to technology is incredibly limited and literacy skills are still rudimentary?
• In the “real world” what do you consider to be important when becoming someone’s friend? (This is in opposition to Facebook, MySpace etc when you can just “add” friends quite randomly.)
• Lee! Give me the goss on Sheffield!

The last two months have been strange. Good though.

I arrived back in Finland one year to the day after leaving. And my plan at that point was to stay here for a month or so, to make some side trips to visit friends living elsewhere in Europe and then to go home. I had sworn to myself that I would not want to stay away from Adelaide for any longer than 3 months – to do so would be in contradiction to what I stand for. I had plans you see, plans to save my hometown single handedly and to make it an exciting and dynamic city that draws young people from the world around. I had to go back home and do that.

I still do have those plans, but somehow they’ve become terribly confused in the last few months. Friendships that I’d begun when I was first in Helsinki became even more strengthened. There were offers from my old boss to work at a new club he was going to open – only a week later I became adamant that I’d never work in a loud bar again. At the same time Toph (who I worked with at Ratbag) had moved to Helsinki too – I had yet another friend to hang out with in this town. Then, I started to think – if I don’t want to work in a nightclub, but still want to stay in Europe for the summer – what could I do instead?

I also made other new friends and went to Pixelache Festival which ultimately deserves an entire (very belated) entry of its own as it sent me on a 10 day bender on the internets as I read and linked and thought [almost] far too much.

Suddenly I was overwhelmed with information about art, technology, collaboration, sustainable travel, ubiquitous computing and subcultures. I was reminded that my loves of gardening, urban design theory, architecture, craft, literature and culture actually can be combined with my technical background. Even though traditional games programming hadn’t been the ideal career for me, that didn’t mean that being a geek was a bad thing that needed to be completely written out of my life. Most importantly, I began to realise that there could actually be work that I would love to do if I combined my technical background with urban design. Most importantly this work could tie into the slowly gestating radelai.de concept: how can cities and towns best use communication technologies (web, mobiles, social networks) to become more vibrant and sustainable communities?

This of course is great. After a couple of years in the professional wilderness I have a path to follow. But after a bit of research into Urban Design degrees back in Adelaide I found out that I can’t actually start studying Masters until the beginning of 2009. Which has left me with 9 months to kill.

So I’ve been thinking once more about working somewhere in Europe for that time. It would give me a chance to live overseas again, I would be earning money – and there is so much more work related to my long term path in Europe. But I have two major problems: I left my house in the care of a housesitter with NOTHING packed up AND all the jobs that I’m seriously considering would be permanent positions. And before any of you suggest that I take up a job “permanently” and then quit 9 months later… Well, I’m pretty terrible at lying (even by omission) and that course of action would not really be in my best interests.

But then again, to not take the opportunities for doing this kind of work would also not be in my best interests – particularly when I could learn so much at any of the companies that I’ve been looking at. Would working towards this goal be better than formal study?

Ultimately I need to go back to Australia to organise my “stuff”, but after that, I’m not really sure what could happen.

I really am trying to summarise far too much in too few words – when ideally I should have been blogging about this all along, though my Twitter and Facebook updates have been fairly confusing reading for a lot of my friends!

Anyway, what I started out to say was that decisions about “home” and life are difficult, and even when you think you have plans, a path and a place to stay – your situations can change drastically.

Today, I went with Toph to the airport, just two months after he arrived in Helsinki to start a new stage of his career. A week ago, he found out that his mum was sick and understandably he chose to go back home to Australia for at least the next two months. I truly hope that everything goes well for Toph’s family, and I really am going to miss hanging out with him here in my other home, Helsinki.

Back in the sunless days when I lived in Finland, I started thinking an awful lot about how great Adelaide is. Then I realised that I only know a tiny bit about my hometown. I have my favourite parks, streets, beaches and cafes, but unless someone else tells me about something new, I rarely explore outside my comfort zone.

Being a geek I had an idea for a website about why Adelaide is so rad, so I bought a rather fun and cheap german domain about 6 months ago*. But I needed more content for this website than I could just write myself. So ultimately the plan kind of stalled…

Until this morning when I decided to finally design a very simple logo, and to actually get the radelai.de domain to work properly… [still waiting on this - my apologies, but i'd appreciate positive problem solving vibes to be sent this way...] … And now I’m all inspired again and hungry for content to put onto the web.

radelai.de : got balls? by Fighting Tiger.

Which is why I’m emailing you. I want you to help me with content for radelai.de.

What are your favourite things about Adelaide? Why do you choose to stay here or come back even though you’ve moved? When you’re entertaining visitors to Adelaide, what do you show them? Which deli makes the best bacon sandwich? Is there really a secret vat which makes the best tasting Farmers Union Iced Coffee? What are your favourite places in the hills and further afield?

So, are you interested? Have you and your friends got [metaphorical] balls?^

Let me know your ideas!

Articles should be between 100-500 words in length. If you can supply images to accompany written content that would be lovely. Over the longer term, video / podcasting content would also be sweet…

At this point of the project, payment is unlikely but notoriety and my everlasting gratitude is assured.

Yours,

Pippa xo

In a move almost as embarrassingly bad as crying out a previous lover’s name whilst shagging someone else, I accidentally wrote Ratbag Games on the delivery instructions for my new Nintendo DS Lite.

I have to admit that despite working in the games industry – I don’t really play games that often. Though, working on the principle that the DS has converted a lot of non-gamers to addicts I thought it might be a worthwhile tax deduction. But the DS isn’t just for games as I’ll be getting the web browser eventually, and one of those brain training types of games as well as Animal Crossing.

Luckily Nintendo industrial design is almost in the same league as Apple – so my shiny black DS will sit very happily alongside my iPod and presumably a black MacBook sometime in the future.

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