His petri-dish patty will be made from a mixture of fat and cow muscle grown from stem cells in a culture of foetal calf serum (that’s blood plasma without the clotting agents) – a technology trialled in February. It may sound less appetising than a Big Mac – but it could bring huge environmental benefits. Producing beef this way results in a 96% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to rearing animals, and uses 45% of the energy, 1% of the land and 4% of the water associated with conventional beef production.

and

The Space Merchants by Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth

My most distinct memory of The Space Merchants (last read back in 1996) was the test-tube grown meat “Chicken Little”.

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.

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.

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:

So I’ve got electronics and German organised, but what else should I specifically learn? I’d love to learn everything in the world including lo-fi stuff like permaculture, bookbinding, letterpress, pattern drafting, guitar playing, cheesemaking and welding.  One of the major appeals a traditional Masters program has for me, is exactly that, it’s a program which focuses my attention in an orderly and logical manner.

How should I organise this study?

Once again, we come to focus: I don’t want to just read about ‘stuff’, I want some direction and some way to practically output what I learn.  Ultimately, I’d like to have a portfolio of work and writing to use for applications and further academic involvement which would add more letters after my name.

• Should I try to write blog posts / essays about specific topics?
• After a while should I try to centre this research around a specific topic for a more targeted document a.k.a. a thesis?
• When learning about practical subjects such as electronics, should I work to make objects that solve particular problems?
• How do I order the sequence of what I learn so as to get the most out of the experience? That is, how do I prevent myself from running before I’ve learnt to walk?

Who and what do I learn from?

Once I’ve worked out what I want to learn, where do I learn this stuff from? There are some great resources out there for self directed learning: on the internet, in books and from informative radio programs. However, since I’m a person, not a machine,  I want learning experiences, not just information, I want interaction, questions answered and hopefully some mentoring.

I already know that the School of Everything,  Couch Surfing University, Travelling School of Life, and BarCamps are great ways to meet people interested in the same things. Sadly, not everyone who has something to teach is signed up for these resources yet.  So, where do I find out about swell people who like to teach the stuff I want to learn? Do you know of any relevant workshops and conferences?*

How do I share my knowledge?

Besides a sense of direction and experienced teachers, the other core thing that institutional study has over just learning, is interaction and a shared experience with peers.

While I’m happy to hear about online environments to interact with people who are interested in learning the same thing, I’d really like to meet up with fellow ‘students’ in the real world. Once again the School of Everything and BarCamps are an ideal environment for making those connections, but I’d love to hear of those which are Berlin focused.

How do I afford this?

While I may not be paying for course fees, I’m still going to have some outgoings for books and equipment. Also, university attendance also makes it easier to get cheaper movie tickets, and funding for conferences etc.  Besides the obvious action of getting some work here in Berlin, how do I make my DIYMasters financially viable, particularly in the longer term?

Which leads to my final question:

How do I make the effort worth it?

Apart from Self-Improvement, the reason that I want to study the topics I’m interested in is because I’d love to get paid to think, play  and talk/write about those concepts all the time. At the moment I have two Bachelors degrees, experience working in video games, e-learning and bartending and a smattering of knowledge about the topics I’m actually interested in long-term involvement with.

How do I give myself a practical and theoretical grounding that will help me be recognised as someone who knows and creatively works around the issues of friendship and society in a technological, globablised urban environment?

In the long run, how do I make my DIYMasters a foundation for an interesting job or an actual funded Masters or PhD?

*In or near Berlin and for cheap or free.

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!

I want to explore the nuances of friendship and the distinctions between strangers, acquaintances and friends.  I’m not yet sure whether to do this as artistic practice or to follow it academically or professionally.

Inspiration:

• Futuresonic ’08 – Matt Jones of Dopplr “Kill ‘Friending’ and the binary recording of relationships”
  • Started me thinking about the nuances of friendship – online we click a button to say Yes, we’re friends, but how do we recognise and acknowledge friends in real life? What are the qualities we look for, how do we ‘know’ that person x is a friend?
• James Boardwell’s talk at GeekUp Sheffield (July ’08) on “internet sensibilities: remodelling humans”.
  • A couple of slides in particular grabbed my attention – the comparison of the way teenagers record degrees of friendship. Girls did this very consciously and frequently with people they knew moving in and out of a layers / circles of friendship.
• Moving from city to city – I’m able to socialise easily and know many people I count as friends around the world (NB: friends here implies various levels of intimacy and “bestness”). I now seem to have an innate ability to start interacting with anyone of any age – but can I do make even better connections with people?
  • When thinking of this event I was wondering what techniques other people used when interacting with others, especially in new cities with unfamiliar languages and cultural conventions.

Things I Remember Saying, Questions I Remember Asking:

• How I became social: When I was 18 my boyfriend Ringo gave me detailed instructions on how to start talking to people. “Compliment them on their clothes, make a comment about something nearby and then ask them questions about themselves”.
• How does one know when they are friends with someone?
  Possibly because they are traditionally associated with economic obligations, I feel that romantic relationships and business relationships have a formality associated with them that isn’t just about marriage and business contracts. First kisses and handshakes are an “informal” way of starting something.
• Could there be a biochemical and therefore evolutionary reason for why we’re friends with some people and not with others?
  I’m particularly interested in this – how come we just don’t get on with some people who have many similarities and shared interests with us?
• Do other people find it difficult to stop being friends with other people?
  Are friend ‘breakups’ as codified and formal as those with romantic / sexual partners or with business relationships?
• Do friends expect certain behaviour from each other?  Eg. in a romantic relationship there’s usually many conditions – you shall not kiss / touch / flirt / have sex with another person.
  Interestingly the major problems I’ve had with friends have been when I’ve broken some type of friendship condition that I was unaware of.
• If we can become “friends” so easily online – why are we now unable to talk with our immediate community of neighbours?
  Someone whose name I never caught mentioned that when he moved to a new house he left cards with his immediate neighbours and felt that that action actually reduced the interaction he had with them.
• Does anyone else find public transport an amazing place to meet people?
  General consensus: Yes, but not on the Tube.  Lucy from SY was very happy to admit to being the crazy talkative lady on the bus. (Go Girl!)

I Remember Other People Talking About:

• Guy Dickinson talked about how his grandmother had been remembered as being a good friend.  He thought it was primarily to do with the fact that she rarely talked – most of the time she was listening to other people.
• GD – very conscious use of “social skills” (i.e. that done by salespeople) would often put him off talking to them.
• GD – Fine line between Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) and people who are naturally good at interaction and who make eye contact, ask questions etc without it being an act.  (further reading: The Game by Neil Strauss)
• GD – Differences in business behaviour across cultures eg. US far more overtly “networked” with cards and working out who was known in common. In France meetings more likely to start with general conversation so that those involved had developed some deeper connection than just business.
• Dan Donald – talked about how there are layers of friendship. Some people you can see once every couple of years and still be amazingly close. Other people can be around you every day but still not be a friend.
• DD – mentioned the book The Politics of Experience by RD Laing and in particular how it discusses the ways we interact with other people.
• Social Networking
  Inevitably this discussion turned away from traditional friendship and mutated into a talk about social networks and online reputations.
  • GD – had for a while made sure he was the only Guy Dickinson up the top of Google.
    Also he felt that his daughter used Bebo in a different way to Facebook as she was ‘friends’ with him on one social network and not the other.
  • Emma Persky spoke at length about how she uses different social networks depending on how she knows people.
    She uses Linked In to manage connections with people she knows professionally and from conferences and  Facebook for connections with ‘real’ friends. Uses Twitter to follow anyone she’s interested in regardless of whether they’ve met before.
    Has two business cards – a professional one courtesy of her employer and a personal Moo card.
    Interestingly she’s happy to share a lot of personal details such as address via the web implying a large amount of trust in social networks.
• Lucy and Emma from Screen Yorkshire were also active participants, especially about offline relationships.
• Lucy mentioned that she has can maintain a limited number of friends.
  This led to talking about the Dunbar’s Number and whether it had changed, relative to the speed with which we can keep in contact with people.
• The reference to Dunbar’s Number also tied in with Malcolm Gladwell’s book “The Tipping Point”

Things I wish I’d mentioned

• I still feel guilty if I give someone “best friend” status – it’s like I take the word very literally and can only have one very close friend at any one time. Taking the Dunbar Number and limits of socialising into consideration, is it possible to have many very close and good friends?
• Love / Hate lists in primary school. Way back before social networks or even the web existed my school friends and I used to keep lists of who we liked and who were our sworn enemies and would move them in and out as they changed status.
• I really like how Flickr connections are recorded by default as ‘contacts’ and that being recorded as a friend or family requires a separate click.
  For a while Facebook made it compulsory to list how you knew someone and that had to be confirmed by the other person. Did this classification of ‘friend’ annoy people?
• Learning how to talk to dogs in different languages is important – it’s a great way of meeting people.
  • For the record the German for ‘sit’ is sitz and in Finnish it’s istu - Can you help me out with any other languages?

Further Reading:

• Derrida – The Politics of Friendship.  I only just found out about this today. It’s on my wishlist if anyone wants to gift me, but I’m not exactly looking forward to reading an entire book written by Derrida.
• Malcolm Gladwell – The Tipping Point. A great book which introduced me to Dunbar’s Number and social roles like connectors and mavens.
• Just found online: Is a Social Media Friend Really a Friend?

UPDATES:

• I recently spoke with someone about this topic and they mentioned that children are always actively making and breaking up with their friends. The woman I was speaking with had worked in a primary school and had noticed that as children they were very contract-minded about why they would stop being friends with each other. eg. “Mark wouldn’t share his candy with me! He’s my best friend and best friends always share candy.”
  Why and when does this outlining of what you expect from your friends become more unspoken?
• I’ve also just read the most amazing article which references a book called Friendship Processes by Beverley Fehr:
  

  With intriguing accuracy, sociologists and psychologists have delineated the forces that attract and bind friends to each other, beginning with the transition from acquaintanceship to friendship. They’ve traced the patterns of intimacy that emerge between friends and deduced the once ineffable “something” that elevates a friend to the vaunted status of “best.”

  Friendship: The Laws of Attraction, Why Some (And Only Some) Friends Stick

• I’m still overwhelmed by how many people I’d met in the three months I spent living in Sheffield and how enjoyable it was to catch up with them as well as meet new people at BarCamp.
  Revisiting Sheffield has really helped to reassure me that I’ll make as good a circle of friends in Berlin given enough time. I’ll report back on my progress at BarCampSheff 3.0!

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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.

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.

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