Jules Lister

Club Transmediale
Both the music events at night and the day programme at the asylum/school place. Club Transmediale seemed to be where all the energy was coming from, though the conference part of the main event at the weekend might have been livelier than the exhibition by itself.

Yasunao Tone
Like sitting in the middle of a storm being conducted by a friendly but bonkers professor.

The Bank of Common Knowledge –
interesting to see the application of online forms – open source, forums and so on – as the inspiration and model for face to face structures of “knowledge transfer” . Whether those models would work or not is something else.

Richard Barbrook –
Discussion: How Enthusiasts, Amateurs and Hobbyists Shape the (Music) World
This could have gone very wrong for me because I hate listening to people presenting an argument by quoting Marx (or anything else) as the holy scripture. But the fact that there was only him being interviewed, rather than two people, meant there was time to warm to him a lot more as he ran out of lecture-power and started to draw on his own observations.  The “everyone can/should be an artist” position is pretty much where I stand, and certainly one of the things that’s potent about creative technology is that it’s given lots of people lots of opportunities to make and share things, but I think there have to be rule sets to enable that, so finding out that there is a Situationist board game was very timely and interesting, and I’m going to look it up.

Ambiguous Signalscapes
This was the eye tracker piece in the exhibition – you looked at a blank grey screen and then what appeared (to me at least) to be mountain ranges sprung up where your eye had landed. I think I wilfully misinterpreted this a bit, but it seemed to be about things not existing till they’ve been seen by whoever makes the map, and there is a long connection between maps and conquest.

Flat Pack Stools
at Club Transmediale. I wonder how much they cost?

Not

Bill Viola
“Step between darkness and light through water, almost like a sort of birth, or a death, which might be the same thing!”
Thanks Bill, deep.
Trite emotion, hammy acting and fake old-master-painting-style lighting.

Reichstag dome
At first glance this looks great, but then, especially when it’s lit at night, you see long rows of little figures, all trudging heads bowed in single file up an endless spiral, and about the best you can say is it looks like the mechanised hell in Metropolis.

Andrew Wilson