Morning. I take it slow. After the performance I went out with a small group of students and Jim and Kaisu. The two of them left early, and I ended up with the students until 2330. I then went back to MUUMediaBase to try and get some work done. Got back to Tapio’s around 0130 — totally exhausted. The performance went well, although there were a number of problems — like, no data projector was available, and nothing was ready, so I was happy to have arrived two hours early. Oliver helped set things right, though. There were about 15 people there.

Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project. The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, for that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?

At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
– Pierre Birot

And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.

Well, I leave London, thankfully taking a taxi with Joanna to the Underground station — she was heading out for a meeting her Open University students, and I am carrying the full compliment of my belongings because I go direct from Bath to Heathrow for the flight to Iceland tomorrow morning. I transferred at Paddington Station to a train to Bath, arriving after some delays around 1330. Taxi to the Bloomfield Hotel (the organizers of the digital chaos cyber conference are covering my expenses — other wise I could not have afforded to even come out to the conference — thanks!). Rail tickets here are expensive like in the US, and I am rapidly running out of money. I am afraid that each time I use my Visa card it will be rejected or so. I drop my bags and with the sun strong enough for me to break a sweat, I walk into the center of town to find the Hub Intercafe, the headquarters of the Conference, where I meet Stella who gives me a Mac to play on while waiting for Johanna Nicholls and Heath Bunting to show up from a meeting. Still had trouble logging into my home server in Reykjavík, but I finally succeeded after remote-logging into one in Colorado, dropping into the Unix shell there and connecting from there to Reykjavík. Don’t ask my how or why it worked when a direct connect didn’t … Not too much mail had built up, but it was good to check it anyways. Heath and Johanna showed up shortly, and I met a few other of the digitalchaos crew — Stanley Donwood, Stella (the hostess at the Café when I arrived) and so on … Heath was interviewed on the radio by telephone at the Hub, and after that I had a beer with Johanna then took a leisurely stroll around Bath as there were a couple hours to kill before the evenings activities.

We have flown through the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes — But have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth as brothers. — Martin Luther King

For the dinner convocation that I called for the evening, I make a very short toast that began with a quotation from the German writer and activist Martin Buber and continuing along the lines:

Heath did put up a small gallery of some of the participants at the festival (I’m the last to the right on the first row…), but this poor shred of cyberspace has long since vanished.

Another long, interesting day. (A girl dressed in black on the train into town, with a rhesus monkey on her back reading Kalil Gibran’s The Prophet). I went directly over to meet Mats at ArtNode in the afternoon. I never got a good connection working, though Mats was generous enough to let me hack for a few hours. It seems that their access provider doesn’t have a good server, nor do they give good technical support — I was suspicious that it was a problem with the PPP configuration and the modem init string. At any rate, I was able to download what email I had waiting and upload the string of messages I had been nursing along the past ten days. However, Fetch wasn’t working, so I couldn’t upload these very pages which was very irritating as I need to update and renew these to make them even marginally interesting … So goes the InfoSuperCrawlingWay… Email brings this from Gunnar Viglunds, a former student of mine in Iceland:

Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music. Music is THE BEST

this from Mr. Halfler Trio hissef, Andrew “don’t-find-me-and-I-won’t-look-for-you” McKenzie:

… he who is in you is greater than than he who is in the world … [1 John 4:4]

and this from the painter, Carol Sutton, in Toronto:

No foe, no dangerous pass we heed, Brook no delay, but onward speed, With loosened rein; And when the fatal snare is near, We strive to check our mad career, But strive in vain. Could we new charms to age impart And fashion with a cunning art The human face, As we can clothe the souls with light, And make the glorious spirit bright With heavenly grace. — Jorge Manrique

I then went directly over the the Academy and found the performance space without much difficulty. Bettina will be sending me the name of the artist — the title of the performance was “Body as Space.” Mats Hjelm was there, and it turns out that he is working in the Video Department there at the Academy. Also in attendance was Monika Larsen-Denis, who studied up in Iceland at the Academy a couple years ago. Bettina and a friend of hers and I hung out after the performance talking with different people, and then headed to a noisy/hip/cool bar in town. I just made the last train from Stockholm to Barkaby that evening, but that arrived after the last bus ran, which meant I was destined for sore feet after the seven kilometer walk back to Selma and Martin’s place. Ouch!