5 minutes after I posted my entry on moving, I receive a comment from which I gather that a spamblog has hijacked/copied my post on an apparently totally new Wordpress-spamblog of which I am not going to give the URL to prevent further idiocies…

Why? To install spyware? Have me click? Speaking of total wastes of times that make the world a worse place to live this sort of stuff must be in the top 10.

I was actually going to write that it’s not so bad with the Digitenne single tuner as I thought. I can turn on the timer of the videorecorder and turn off the tevee and still have it record. I just have to make sure the tuner is on & tuned to the right channel. Phhiewww. I’m not as stupid as I thought I was.

I hate it. I hate it. Not even because of moving the actual stuff. I hate it because one has to move one’s connections, or getting new ones. And that is not so easy. Transferring the telephone and adsl of F. turns out to be a big deal. First one simply tells KPN to move the telephone + adsl to the new house. She did that on the 6th of january. There is a physical phone-line in the new house. So it should be easy enough. But according to the administration of the cables that line is taken by an old adsl-connection. (The formers tenants have canceled that months ago, but nevertheless it’s still in the administration). Because KPN does not have a monopol they are not allowed to put their signal on that line. Result: they have to physically make a new line. (Dutch: “bijlassen”). Okay, fair enough, although it shows how much extra useless work is created by this system. But, the KPN ‘lost’/forgot that an adsl signal should be put on the line too, because there was a problem and then xs4all and KPN were waiting for each other (or something along that line). I made a fair amount of calls about it today – and surprisingly I was helped quite well, although the result was mostly finding out that something had gone wrong in the process. Yesterday the extra line was made (physically). The analog thelephone signal was put on it. It works fine. But no adsl. Turns out that the whole administrative process of moving the adsl starts only from today. And that process takes 3 weeks. Sigh.

Second: there is no cable TV in this building. Well, there’s a coax cable somewhere in the cellar but that’s no use (this appartment is on the 5th floor). So I decide to go for Digitenne. I cannot live without cycling on tv. Digitenne has at least both Belgian channels. But here I make a mistake. I get the ’single tuner’ and what I did not know (nor read about anywhere) is that it is impossible to programme one’s videorecorder to record a programme using a single tuner. Huh? It seems total nonsense to me – I mean, as far as I’m concerned one could put the videorecorder in between the tuner and the television. But that doesn’t seem to work with this system. So much for progression. Sigh.

For the rest it’s all plug’n'play. But well, I’d rather have a bit less plug’n'play and a bit more of simplicity. One doesn’t have a fight with technology – struggling to make it work – but with the (instutionalized) packaging of the technology. Grrr.

Am here at the Jan van Eyck, writing. But it feels as if I have already left this place, as if the year is over. (Well, some days left en a few thousand words to write & edit).

2007 has started already. In the sense that 2007-activities have already started.

If this mood continues I think I will not go for any last goodbye-bike-rides. If this mood continues then, it will mean that I will not go for a bike-ride once in December.

To be honest, I can not imagine that will become true.

As I write this, I begin to feel the desire to go for a ride. (But it’s dark and it’s misty now).

I bought an ipod-nano — for all the train travelling I’ll have to do next year. I must say, it’s such a stylish & fashionable thing that I feel very tempted to cover it in ugly stickers.

A typewritten letter by Thomas Pynchon, scanned, at the British Telegraph, concerning some plagiarism-allegations against Ian McEwan:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/12/05/nwriter06big.gif.

So after the crazy schedule of last week — with a (2 day) workshop Social Software in Arnhem, a full Ubiscribe-day in Maastricht and a public lecture in Groningen — involving lots of travelling and intensive working hours… I collapsed. Flu? Virus? Just worn out? Spent friday till monday in bed, not being able to do anything. Only on monday I did a bit of reading and watching googlevideo-BBC-documentaries.

So sorry I was not here & sorry the comments were kept ‘on hold’ so long.

Now it’ll be only writing. (Five days less than I had hoped).

Last days in Maastricht, before I return to Amsterdam.

Picture showing me at the Mediamatic RFID-workshop, having a headache. Rob calls it “Arie hit by the implications of it all”.

Zondagavond: Maastricht - Amsterdam, halverwege tot de ontdekking komen dat je fietssleutels in je winterjas zitten die je niet aan hebt vanwege de uitzonderlijk hoge temperaturen. Geen zin in de tram na 2-en-een-half uur trein, 50 minuten wandelen naar huis. Maandagochtend: 7.15 - 8.05 lopen van huis naar het station. 8.17 trein naar Arnhem, die is te laat, waarmee je eigenlijk al weet dat je te laat op het werk (gastles) zult zijn. Trein is vol, je staat maar gelukkig kom je een kennis tegen (Paul van de Rock Supplies, wat de reis veraangenaamt en verkort). 9.45 aankomst (20 minuten te laat) op Arnhem. 10.00 stoptrein naar Presikhaaf. 10.15 voor de klas. 15.58 stoptrein Nijmegen. Stoptrein Roermond. Stoptrein Maastricht. Aankomst 18.45. Lopen naar de Jan van Eyck. 19.10 Aankomst.

Donderdagavond. Terug naar Maastricht. In de afgelopen 4×24 uur zo’n beetje 24 uur reistijd (rekenend van zondagavond 19.00 tot vanavond 19.00). Dinsdagavond: Maastricht - Amsterdam. Woensdagochtend Amsterdam - Groningen. Woensdagavond Groningen - Amsterdam. Donderdagochtend: Amsterdam - Arnhem Presikhaaf. Donderdagmiddag Arnhem Presikhaaf - Maastricht (Kanne). En bijna elke trein reed met (kleine) vertraging.

Just a quick ‘reminder’: the web has been around for 15 years now… since August 6th 1991.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5243862.stm.

And in a sense it is still so crude… Things that people 15 years ago thought would be easy to do in 15 years time, is still impossible or difficult. We have MySpace where we’d hoped (well I certainly did) to have good and usable authoring tools to deal with the richness of texts, images, music on the web. But what do we do, we copy them and throw them into separate folders into folders.

Look at Sophie, a software project of the Institute for Future of the Book to understand what I’m getting at: http://www.futureofthebook.org/sophie/SophieIntro.pdf. I’m afraid I have to say that I don’t think Sophie will succeed (I mean: become successful = widely used), but the complaints voiced in it are spot on.

(I try to use VoodooPad, I tried DevonThink, I am blogging, but still everything is a mess until I write / have to write a text for a magazine, or do a presentation or lecture). (Hence my interest in Knowledge Management ;-)

(Browsed around a bit on MySpace; it is easy to understand why it’s so successful: it’s all about identity-construction, music plays an important role in that for teenagers, apart from the ‘profile’, the ‘friends’-thing, there’s the possibility to have music playing &c. &c. But I find it equally easy to imagine that in 2 years time MySpace will be abandoned, when a new gulf of teenagers starts to use some other service. It will survive, of course, just like so many other profile-sites for chatting & dating survive. (I might be wrong — I’m mostly wrong when I predict something). But it won’t be deemed as important as it is now. I don’t think people generally feel a commitment to a service like this).

This comes as a real shock. Last week the young Dutch poet/blogger/thinker — I don’t know what I should call him — Jeroen Mettes ’stepped out of this life, voluntarily’: http://n30.nl/2006/09/blog-post.html. I missed that it had happened, not having visited his blog, or one of the other Dutch blogs on poetry for a week and a half. I never met Jeroen Mettes, never e-mailed him, never left comments on his blog — yet I always read what he wrote with more than great interest. I knew him by his written words only. He was an ‘original voice’, a voice, that made me long for the future of literature, a future that his words, his poetics, I imagined, might shape.

Especially since the Upgrade night I have the feeling that I am really missing out on something.

First by skipping all of the crossmedia festival that’s now on at the Westergasfabriek in Amsterdam — okay, the programme is quite ‘American’, commercial, focussed on “the creative industries’, but amongst so much one could pick out the good bits & I’m sure I would’ve met many people I know.

Secondly be skipping the Re:visie exhibition & performances at the Centraal Museum in Utrecht — with a.o. Telcosystems and Bas van Koolwijk + Staalplaat Systems on saturday 30th. The exhibition is still on till the 8th, so who knows…

Thirdly, the Amsterdam Underground Festival: — but I might be there on sunday, and see Federico — who’s also doing some stuff there: http://www.amsterdamunderground.nl/und/.

But I really have to write, write, write, in my studio at the Jan van Eyck.,

http://www.revisie.org
http://www.crossmediaweek.com
http://picnic06.typepad.com/
http://www.amsterdamunderground.nl/und/

Wrt “the creative industries”: there’s some sort of an ugly hype around that word. The creative industries as saviours of the economy, the city etc. (There was this influential book about how creative industries and artists are necessary for the blooming of inner cities, The Creative Class? I mostly immedialtely forget about that sort of stuff, but even I got the queries in my mailbox from researchers stating that I belonged to the creative class and that therefore they’d like to ask me some questions. It was proper academic research yet I hit ‘delete’.)

I prefer not to look at the ‘marketing’ side, the self-advertisement, the lobbying, the self-promotion, the politics that are going on in order to get to the big European funding, or get in the big investors. I honestly also do not see what would be so different now. Of course we have design, we have innovation, we have technological research, we have the arts, we have entertainment-development. But we have always had that. The difference might rather be that where innovative research took a time span of thirty years, fifty years, they’d now take a time span of ten years…to look ahead. (That at least is what I heard an old aerospace engineer state at the ASCA-conference last june). I am not interested in business models. I am interested in use.

Btw: the arts do not belong to the ‘creative industries’ — although they are closely related, might operate in the same field, use the same sources and even work in the same labs. What the arts aim at is the reverse of what the creative industries would like to produce. The creative industries might think that they are close to the ’spirit of innovation’ of the arts, but good art does not aim at usable, clearly defined results.

That said I must stress that I do not believe there is some sort of pure art. Neither is there a clear-cut boundary between the arts & the creative industries. There should be no clear-cut boundary, not even in theory. There is cross-pollination (sp?), collaboration, adaption, sabotage ;-) — and the products of the creative industry migth be very aesthetically pleasing, as art can be. The difference is in the way of applying, in the application. Theoretically the difference is an ‘ideal’ one, one that does not exist in reality. (Cf. Dewey).

Maybe I shouldn’t say too much about these issues. It’s a bit the same with the web2.0-stuff. I am not interested in the hype, not interested in deconstructing the hype. (The investors that hope/hoped to make money by selling their social network-thingie — bought from a small group of software developers — to either Google of Yahoo. The investors of Yahoo and Google, only there to make money. It’s about huge virtual money-transfers, about trust in the future ‘inscripted’ in stocks &c. And that still is a world I am not able to get. Which is to say that I understand how it functions, yet my frame of mind finds it — (in the way it is currently ‘organized’) — so utterly perverse, so ‘full of shit’, so far from what I would see as going toward a good society, that I (emotionally) can only wish it to collapse as soon as possible).

(Note: I’m not so much against single ‘citizens’ investing money in a project or industry, or a person honestly investing money in Google because he likes it, and hopes that it will develop further because it’s a good change of the world. But the big investors are in it for money and run when they’ve collected their “share”. It’s the same sort of ‘not getting it’ as that I honestly, emotionally do not understand how somebody can ever earn enough money to own a superexpensive car (though rationally I get it).)

So I leave that aside and look at the bright side, the open source side ;-)

Anyway, to stop ranting: what I am interested in is in how and why people use the tools and functionalities that have become available to them, how and why they adapt and change them, how they flock to them and how and why they abandon them.

Uploaded (to my flickr-account) about 30 more photo’s of arrows, letters and other signs painted or sprayed on the road to indicate cycling routes. When I first got the idea to make an inventory of these signs around Kanne, I thought I would end up with 25, well, maybe 40 photos. I have now 64 (haven’t checked for doublures). I did not upload all of them. Moreover, I estimate that I haven’t photographed about 20 yet. My idea to also give an indication of the route itself will probably never be realized. And certainly I will not supplement this series with photos of all the other signs for cycling routes (stickers, forgotten plastic arrows on traffic signs, the various ‘fietsknooppuntenbordjes’ &c.). http://www.flickr.com/photos/ariealt/.

I have now visited Dublin three times and a larger part of my recollections of Dublin consist of sitting on a bus or sitting in a car going from one end of the city to another. Dublin is not an easy city to get around in. The city centre may be fairly small, and places like the grounds of Trinity College very agreeable, the rest is a nightmare of cars, cars, cars, and the public transport is absolute shit (’sheit’). Only if you happen to live near a DART station and have to go somewhere near a DART station it’s okay. But the DART goes from Howth to Greystones, along the coast, which is great if one likes to go for a cliff walk (from Bray to Greystones or v.v.) and not so great if one stays in either Lucan or Blanchardstown.

But… the cycling scene seems to grow. Not only are there more cycling lanes, I have the impression I saw more cyclists than a year ago. I always have to look at the bikes in cities that I visit & I’m often (if not always) impressed by the courier-scene. Most of the bikes in Dublin are cheap mountainbikes and city-bikes — often extremely dirty. (One wonders if it’s worth while to clean one’s bike in Ireland where it might rain every day). Last year I think I saw one track bike.

This year I spotted:
– a guy with a small rucksack, in full cycling gear, going downhill a big road, to the north of Dublin, on a track bike. Yes. He rode pretty fast. Impressive. It looked like he came back from a race, and still had a long way to ride.
– a courier track bike with a chainwheel (is that the right word for: ‘tandwiel’) on both sides of the wheel: so one has two gears, pre-derailleur style, when one puts the wheel in the other way around.
– a girl on a custom blue racing bike, sawed-off ‘guidon’, brakes, a full pignon, without shifters or a derailleur — though with the spring & little wheels to keep the chain under pressure. Changing gear would be possible by hand.
– her boyfriend on a beautiful trackbike with sawed-off ‘guidon’.
– and for the rest about five or six couriers going through the traffic on track bikes — which I think is more impressive, conisdering the Dublin traffic, than the New York-couriers.

A fairly large part of my stay in & around Dublin was taken up by ‘family-related-stuff’ — the family of F. that is. F’s godson (son of her sister) was christened on sunday. I attented 2 masses: saturday evening mass & the christening on sunday. I was amazed, if not shocked by how quick these masses were done over with. Rushed is not even the right word. On saturday there was literally no pause between the blessing at the end and the words “that’s it, see you next time”. The priest hurried off to see the football match. The whole thing took 35 minutes. The only ‘music’ was the sound of coins in the collecting baskets, heard while the prayer for the confession of the sins was said. One positive thing: the reading from the Scriptures were done by women.

I have a protestant background & as a kidI used to go to church with my parents every sunday. We went to a beautiful church (the Grote Kerk in Almelo), where at that time Rev. Otten was preaching. There was always an elaborate liturgy — Otten would say or sing a sentence, the community would answer, then the organ, then the small choir. Very well orchestrated. The same thing for the singing of Psalms & Songs. A few years later the small choir became so good that they would perform things like the Angus Dei as composed by — I think — Buxtehude. So although a protestant church, there would be a very clear sense of tradition and beauty that a lot of people only associate with the Roman Catholic church. The sermon — as far as I remember — was really an interpretation of the Scriptures, often touching upon Jewish traditions (that Otten was particularly interested in). It’s not that I liked going there (I rather did something else on a Sunday morning), but these sunday mornings have certainly had a positive effect on my ideas of the Church and religion.

The christening on sunday took place in a church in Lucan. Renovated a few years back, the organ was taken out. The music during the christening came from a tiny cassetterecorder (and was some sort of Irish new-agey-folk-music). The church owned a beamer to project texts in big white letters on Powerpoint-blue background against the wall. (It was not used during the christening). The priest did not know the name of one of the two kids being christened and basically no-one, including the priest had any clue of the order of the proceedings — the priest flipping back and forth through the leaflet and at one point asking a person to read from the Scriptures, the person being very surprised since the indicated passage was not his to read. (F. — who’s a firm believer — was disappointed about this priest).

Well. I guess all this only showns how deep Catholicism is ingrained in Irish society.

– walk: Blanchardstown ‘Waterville’ - Blanchardstown Village, busstop
– bus: Blanchardstown Village - Dublin Airport
– plane: Dublin Airport - Schiphol
– train: Schiphol - Amsterdam Lelylaan
– tram: Amsterdam Lelylaan - Jan-Pieter Heijestraat
[food in Amsterdam, picking up the mail &c.]
– bike: Wilheminastraat - Amsterdam Centraal
– train: Amsterdam Centraal - Maastricht
– walk: Maastricht train station - Jan van Eyck Academy
– bike: Jan van Eyck Academy - Kanne

Not counting waiting times (long, as I arrived far too early at the airport), walks at the airports and stations, & walks so short they’re not worth mentioning.

No delays whatsover. Gorgeous weather.

I read two papers (Guardian of saturday & tuesday), half a Henry James story, checked 51 e-mails, wrote 4 and waited till I arrived. It took the whole day, from 10 in the morning till midnight.

Back to Amsterdam for a meeting of the jury of the ISOC Awards: http://www.isoc.nl/awards/. I’m a jury-member for the ‘Internet & the arts’-award. Nominees are:

Jan Robert Leegte: http://works.leegte.org
Joes Koppers: http://usemedia.com
Wilfried Houjebek: http://socialfiction.org/palimpsest
Peter Luining: http://ctrlaltdel.org
Niels Schrader: http://www.nielsschrader.de
Danielle Roberts: http://www.numuseum.nl

On friday I’ll fly to Dublin for a short visit. I’ll be offline for a few days then.

I’ll be here the next two days: http://www.actingouttechnology.be.

The area around Kanne — where I live this year — is cycling country. Every day groups of cyclist pass by my apartment. Almost every week there’s a ‘toertocht’ (organized cycling tour) in the area, starting from Oupeye, Bilzen, Tongeren, Vlijtingen etc. In Belgium these rides are — apparently — marked out by spraying signs on the road. Especially at the few places where one can cross the Maas (Meuse) and the Albertkanaal, the road is full of these signs, some old, some new. Riding around the area one comes across the signs everywhere and often I follow the signs for some kilometers.

I’d like to make a full catalogue of all the different signs. I’m a worthless photographer, luckily this is a fairly easy subject. I’m uploading the pictures at my hardly used Flickr-account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/ariealt/.

Of course I’m following all the current stories about doping & cycling. The entanglement of sport and — hmm — “experimental” medicine is fascinating. It is a big ugly mess too. What has changed in respect to former times (let’s say pre-’80’s) is that no-one questions anymore that ‘doping’ does make you go faster, makes you stronger. It’s taken as a scientific fact (and in most cases, it is a proven fact, I think). But if the pro-peleton is also a — half illegal — laboratory for experimental medicine, did medicine ever learn anything from cycling?

(yes, that EPO does work &c.)

Some knowledge, that is later used for ‘good’ purposes? This would be scarier than a peleton of stupid junkies taking dope to perform better — because it would mean that sports is really a laboratory, and the sportsmen guinea pigs for the ‘human good’.

As I mentioned Braxton playing with a noise-punk band, yesterday, I guess I’m allowed to mention today that The New Yorker features an article on Yamataka Eye and The Boredoms, from which I learn that Jeffrey Deitch has discovered them too, and will host a Boredoms installation in his gallery next year: http://www.newyorker.com/critics/music/articles/060807crmu_music.

(Yes, I’m wasting my time, browsing & blogging).

(Good friends of mine have followed The Boredoms since 1987. I saw them twice in the early nineties. An audience of what, twenty? thirty? forty? made them play three encores. We had beer with them backstage. “Those were the days”.)

Ha, in twenty years time Jeffrey Deitch will host an Oorbeek-installation!

That’s what it feels like, a bit: been there, done that. So now I can say: I have performed at the BIMHUIS, with Oorbeek and Koichi Makigami (what a sweet person he is, and what a performer!) I was nervous, I stayed in the dressing room for 2 hours, rehearsing.

Then, on stage, everything was fine & went fine. Heard quite a few good reactions, both from people who’ve seen us a few times (and probably would not hesistate to tell us if it was terrible), and from people who saw us for the first time. Sold a few cd’s. The audience was mainly a sunday afternoon crowd — it was the jew’s harp festival & I don’t think all of them enjoyed our way of making music. The chaos of it, the noisy bits, the changes from soft to loud to soft, the piecing together (or coming together) of various fragments. But it was pretty packed — and that felt, well, good of course.

It felt strange as well: in the past I’ve seen so many concerts of improvised music & free jazz — in the old BIMHUIS — by groups far better than us, for an audience of like 20. I don’t know what that means… I guess it means that this festival was marketing success. (The jew’s harp festival received al lot of publicity). So I wonder how many in the audience did think — let’s go for a nice sunday afternoon concert, and then thought, oh my god, what a terrible noise!

But it was a great joy to play with Koichi Makigami. And he, of course, was the star.