Ten days later, and I am still offline, having significant problems with my Internet connection. Frustrating and aggravating when I have to deal with long-distance communications regarding my work in Finland in the coming weeks, but otherwise, a kind of relief. Loki has found me, in the time I am here, as an ideal Father — because I am around all the time and can play all the time. But today, he and his mother head back north to Akureyri, so I will not see him until the beginning of July when I return from Finland. I am tired today, sad to see him go. I am no ideal Father in this case. The last ten days have been full of activities, some of them welcome, others a bother.

Again up early and have a quick breakfast with Björn. Then I have to jog to the bus to the train station in Copenhagen. Board a south-bound EuroCity train (as all German-bound EuroCity trains, this one has a name, the Karen Blixen, who was the Danish fiction writer and author of Out of Africa.). The train boards a ferry at Rødby in southern Denmark for the short crossing to Puttgarden. Suddenly, after leaving the train car to walk up to the deck of the ship, I am shocked by Germans. Loud, aggressive, and self-possessed. It is something of a let-down, after the simple drunkenness of the Swedes and Finns on the other ships. Welcome to Germany. So it goes, on to Hamburg where I change trains to the Gorch Fock heading to Nurnberg via Köln, which is where I get off after a total ride today of only 9 hours. The Köln Hauptbahnhof and the Dom next to it, that familiar island of madness is a rather comfortable sight as we slowly cross the bridge over the Rhine from the east. Volker is there to meet me with news of complications in the arrangements for the performance/lecture I am to do at the Ultimate Akademie tomorrow evening. The original flyer handed out had the wrong date and day which confused everyone, and so the hasty reprinting with the correct times doesn’t get around to many people. Then it turns out that on Friday night (tomorrow) when the performance is to take place, there is a big opening in Bonn of an important woman artist who is active at the Akademie. Such is life. We head to Rösrath and have a beer, and then retire to Volker’s place. I am burnt after about nine hours sleep and some 36 hours of movement in two days. I can still feel the ship movements embedded in my body. that will wear off with a good nights sleep which I get. Volker heads to his girlfriends place, so I am left alone in a quiet flat to check email and sleep. It is then I discover that internet communications to Iceland are down, and remain down for the next two days, as far as I could test from Köln. Never did find out what was going on, but I couldn’t raise any of the Icelandic servers I knew about.

Early train to Tampere where I was to meet with the Director of the School of Art and Communications. I left Tampere at around 1400 to arrive in Helsinki in time to take the ferry to Suomenlinna and get the key for the Nordic Art center guest room from Anders. We had a short chat about things — the Nordic Art Center is in the midst of a major restructuring after the Nordic Council of Ministers decided to close the organization in its current form. Anders is hoping to streamline the center and transform it completely by next January.

Another very long intense day. Jim wanted me to meet some of the people at the Tampere School of Art and Communications where he is doing a special 6-month intensive study course on Environmental Art in Tampere, so we decided to drive over there for the day. The weather has turned sunny, almost completely clear sky finally. We headed out and had gotten about 45 km from Pori when the battery of the car went dead, stranding us on the road in the middle of the woods. We had to walk a few kilometers to a gas station and on the way overhead there were two new warplanes (recently bought from Amurika) dog-fighting in the puffy clouds. Expensive play. We got some help and then drove the car on to Tampere after sitting for a coffee at the gas station while the battery charged. The school, like all others in, Finland is extraordinarily equipped with the latest and hottest media equipment. SGI, Pentiums, Macs, Beta Video, photo labs, production studios, and so on. Jim was able to collect the Director of the school and the Department Heads for me to meet, which was a nice treat. We took a short walking tour of Tampere, admiring the funky architecture and the clearness of the Light. I was able to jump on a networked Macintosh at the school, although it didn’t have FTP client-software for me to upload these pages which are now more than two weeks behind times, I was able to take care of email — this while Jim ran some errands he needed to take care of. Aimo, the Head of the Photography and Imaging program met us at 1600 to show a CDROM project that the students there did in collaboration with Atelier Nord and the Art Academy of Trondheim. The three of us then went for a beer. Before leaving Jim and I decided to check out a SVHS video camera for the weekend — the equipment storage room of the school is unbelievable! I have hardly seen such a conglomeration of expensive machines for the production of sounds and images ever in one place. Students also have their supplies like film, tapes, disks and developing paid for, too! Good deal!

Another long day. This morning Björn and I were up at 7:30 to catch a bus to the hydrofoil to Malmö, and then another short bus ride to the Academy. The hydrofoil took only 45 minutes and cost an astonishingly miniscule 15 DKK (= 3 USD). Competition in action. The Malmö Academy has exceptional facilities in an entirely new building. Everything was highly organized and secure with locks on all door except for the bathrooms. I was scheduled to give a lecture at 13:00 and I indeed did do just this. They have a decent lecture room with a video projector and assorted techno-goodies except for the fact that one amp channel and speaker had been fried, so I had to play video and audio works on one channel. Such is techno-life. My host, the Academy Principle, Gertrud Sandqvist I had met last year at the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Art and Technology in Helsinki. At the lecture she sat in the front row, not particularly unusual until the question-answer session at the end — she mediated between me and the students, choosing students, modifying their questions, and ”interpreting’ my answers for the students. More than odd, it was quite an show of the psychology of control. She seemed unable to allow the students to interact without her dominance. Sad for them. I understand now her reputation which is not great, on this very issue of control-freak. Oh well. Björn meanwhile was meeting some former students. We ended up taking different trains — I had the First Class EurailPass, and could ride in style, though flat broke.

At the moment I am sitting comfortably on another one of these new high-speed European trains. This one the X2000 from Malmö to Stockholm. First class, they even serve a dinner. Not bad. I sat across from a senior Quality Control engineer from Eriksson, Inc., one of the largest companies in Sweden dealing in telecommunications. We had an interesting conversation about technological developments in Scandinavia and Europe, as well as photography. Already here in Scandinavia things have a feeling of organized and peaceful order, with a level of social wealth that is simply not available further south in Europe. There is far more competition in the telecom business which is bringing (for example) good internet and telephone services at reasonable rates. Education is well-funded (though conservative) without the need for academics to be constantly begging for national resources.

Warmer still today. I worked on the PowerBook for the morning, but had to get out to enjoy the weather. Took a leisurely stroll back to Public Netbase and spoke with Konrad shortly, checked out the library they have downstairs and then went back to check my email at the university … It struck me today, what a strange path this is, this Mad-Tech-No-Mad I have become. At the same time as experiencing a real existence in a rather large variety of places, I have a double life running through email and the Web which extends the range of my experience to each of the many nodes to which I am connected. Of course it is a question how much the impressions sent from others via email make an impact on my daily existence. Sensory input is limited to the reading of the texts that carry the sentiments, logging into a computer, sitting for some time reading from a screen, and so on. But certainly in my internal existence, these communications form a web of, what can I call it, emotional intensity within which my daily existence is suspended. Not that it is womb-like in the sense of encompassing, isolating, or stabilizing, but it forms an ethereal internal tableau upon which the momentary impressions of reality play out. Difficult to describe. I have experienced a similar situation when engrossed in a good book while on holiday, where the reality of the written text becomes intertwined with the other, more direct, sensory input, resulting in a compound memory of place, one that is intimately tied to both sets of stimulation. How can this compare to existence without this more-or-less instant form of communication? I have traveled before in situations where I have gotten no post, no telephone, and, of course, no email. It is hard to recall exactly what it was, but it does seem that there was a similar level of internalization — probably relating to my own personal psyche. Still the daily writing, writing that, as I call it, is a chanting, the chant taking the form I keep to the center, comatose or I keep to the center, not comatose. I find that the writing is a self-conscious manifestation of internal uncertainty that seeks to contain as a vessel the total accumulation of experience and what is to become the memory of the time. The impact of rapid communications with others around the world broadens the intensity of the situation by making the cumulative text expression (both incoming and outgoing texts, as well as text remaining within my journal) dynamic and dialectic: containing the powerful ritual of call-and-response. It does not devalue or lessen the impact of momentary sensory experience related to a Place, instead, with careful attention, is allows a means to fix real events in memory and share them with others likewise. There is a point, though, where one wonders about the amount of time is required to sustain this kind of active networking (a networking that has no goal, in a way, no ultimate purpose other than as carrier of this experiential content, a ritual sharing of stories).

The nomad is not neccessarily somebody who moves: there are travels in which one does not move, travels in intensity, and even from a historical point of view, nomads are not those who move like migrants, on the contrary, they are those who do not move, and who start nomadizing in order to stay in the same place and free themselves from codes. — Gilles Deleuze