Over the last couple of years I’ve become increasingly interested in a few Masters programs that offer technology and interaction theory and design along with research and arts practice. I’ve also thought idly about studying sociology, sustainability and urban design too, you know, just because I’m interested in way too much different stuff.

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.

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 .

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:

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’s 12 Meter Power Chord at Styx Project Space

Played and at Styx on a cold and snowy day.

Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible.

~ Carl Jung

(communicate)

My incredibly learned and lovely friend Dr Aliese once tried to explain Deleuze to me and I’m pretty sure her description involved “he talks about teacups but I’m not really sure he was talking about teacups at all”.  Then again often my thoughts do return to tea, so she could have been talking about something entirely different. However, since that discussion, Deleuze has been a philosopher that I’m terribly intrigued with but intimidated by.

Impressively, there happens to be a copy of Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus beside my beau’s bed*.  Last night while waiting for dinner to cook (roast chicken pieces with vegetable risotto and salad), I made my way through most of the introduction.

As a result of my first foray into Deleuze my head is currently abuzz with rhizomes and how nicely the concept ties in with the graphical representation of relationships and their tangly nature. An integral quality of rhizomic forms is that a node can be removed, but the rhizome still exists as a entitity despite being altered.

I guess that one of the things that is drawing me to explore concepts of friendship is that I have a tendency to cut myself out of a localised friendship group and to then propagate new networks once I reach a new town. There’s a strange sensation of feeling a very strong tie to the older and more established rhizomes of friendship even when you are part of a new structure / waiting for a new one to grow of and towards you.

Today especially, I’m feeling the drain of not having an immediate and close connection to many established friends and colleagues. Language differences are a little overwhelming and the cold of Berlin encourages me to make connections between trying to grow plants in winter and the challenge of meeting people and feeling at home in a new town.

[I'm not sure how I'm meant to play with these concepts, thoughts and connections, but I'm sure I'm meant to be doing something with them.]

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*I’ve been assured that my beau has actually been reading the book and doesn’t store it there [just] to impress the ladies.

Or “These are not the droids you are looking for”.*

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!

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As part of BarCampSheff I quickly curated an hour’s worth of videos from the brilliant TED.com. If you know me personally you’ve probably already heard me rave on about TED. If you’re coming to battlecat.net as a result of meeting me recently you’re probably not yet converted.

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.