Over the last year, one of the things I’m most proud of  is having stayed put. I didn’t move to a new country*, I barely took any planes and apart from regularly visiting the bearded maths captain [BMC] in Linz, Austria, I was VERY stable. For me at least.

Even though I fell head first, properly and oh so significantly into love with the aforementioned BMC, I didn’t suddenly drop everything and move to Linz. Considering the catalysts for the last two moves to Sheffield and Berlin, this is incredibly surprising.  But maybe, despite having no regrets and being rather grateful for those experiences in their own odd ways, it appears that I’ve learnt something.

Or perhaps I feel at home.

And when considering learning from my experiences or finding a home, I should add in finally. I mean, to move countries on the spur of the moment for a man is romantic, but to do it twice (in one year, and for different men) is not just careless, but also incredibly foolish. I don’t know what Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell would say about a third time, but considering how she felt about the loss of a parent, I can’t imagine she’d be very kind. So maybe I should focus more on the fact that I feel at home in Berlin, and one of the things that has helped that has been that I’ve been very happy in my apartment.

I’m in a great position in Kreuzberg, my room is south-facing and full of light AND has nice floors, and the bathroom and kitchen, while not perfect – do satisfy my requirements by having a good, hot shower and a stove and oven that don’t suck.  I’m friends with several of my neighbours and know almost everyone in the building by name and have babysit half the kids and shared cake with their parents. And until recently, I had managed to maintain a relatively good relationship with my flatmate, only to have it sour from some hideously poor communication on their behalf in the last couple of weeks.  Myeh. I could go on for hours. But I won’t.

Anyway, I might be looking for a new place to live and that honestly petrifies me.  Of course there are the general considerations of whether there’s enough light to keep my happily provided with Vitamin D,  and building repair and cost which are tempered somewhat by the bright sides of maybe finally having a native German speaker for a flatmate. But then there are some more Berlin specific challenges to deal with, like whether I would end up with coal heating and what discount supermarkets are nearby.

I’m unlikely to move away from Kreuzberg, and from all reports coal heating is rarely in use in the former West German parts of Berlin, but I’m wary.  I spent a month in a coal heated sublet when I first moved to Berlin and despite the coziness of having an actual fire in your bedroom, the novelty of hauling fuel and old ash up and down stairs and waiting 3 hours for your room to defrost is over in about a week.

More realistically I’m worried about what stores might be nearby. I’m pretty sure that besides the weather and the state of the S-Bahn, discount supermarkets are one of the most frequent topics of conversation amongst people living in Berlin. Unlike weather and public transport which are more universally recognised, the matter of Berlin grocery shopping is very localised and has its own language: Is Netto or LIDL better? Does your Penny Markt actually carry any stock? Is visiting ALDI a soul destroying experience for everyone? Which place has the best range of organic goods? Why did PLUS close? Why is Edeka easy to forget about? Do you find visiting the Karlstadt basement (a ‘proper’ supermarket) akin to a religious experience for you?

Of course, there are proper supermarkets which have everything you’d expect in a store – but due to both cost and convenience, most people end up shopping at their nearest discount store only to find that it doesn’t carry certain products. Then, because they have a favourite type of cheese or coffee they end up schlepping to the store that does stock it anyway.  In the end you develop favourites, and even though it’s a little further away than a couple of other supermarkets, Netto seems to have won me over, they’ve got a good  range of organic food that I can actually afford, stock Spreelinge pickled cucumbers and have a proper section devoted to baking goods.  So that’s another reason why I love my apartment and am hesitant to leave it, I might end up far from a Netto store.  And what would happen if there was only an Aldi nearby? I’d be liable to turn suicidal.

* Unlike 2008 in which I started in Adelaide, re-visited Helsinki for 4 months and would have stayed if I’d been able to find a job I loved, moved to Sheffield in the UK temporarily and then, after making a temporary stop for a couple of weeks in Hong Kong and Hanoi, went back to Adelaide to properly pack up before moving to Berlin. Eek.

I volunteered at Transmediale the other week and one of my responsibilities was guiding participants on and off the stage during The Long Conversation.  It was a cruisy job and so in-between reminding the conversationalists to look at the camera (but just be natural) I listened to the talks and took notes.

The broad theme of the conversation was “futurity” and some people responded to that topic better than others.  It was set up as a chain conversation and also a little like Chinese Whispers – how would Richard Barbrook’s keynote influence the final conversation and would Drew Hemment (first and last speaker) be able to draw all of the ideas together?

Ken Rinaldo pretty much jumped on stage for his first conversation in order to respond to Alan N. Shapiro’s musings on “the car of the future”:

“I’ve got one thing to say – The car of the future? That’s called a bike.”

Inevitably there was a lot of talk of the future regarding technology, but the conversation immediately switched to people and futures once Maja Kuzmanovic came on stage.  When Joy Tang started talking with her there was even more discussion about people. I really appreciated Maja and Joy’s conversations, though I’m not sure if it was a conscious programming decision, for it seemed that binary oppositions of men / women and technology / humanity were somewhat exaggerated.

I came back about 8 hours after everything started and by that stage it seemed that people had forgotten to talk about the future, but they did seem to be talking vaguely about time. The one thing that really stuck in my mind was Andy Cameron asking Julian Oliver whether he could name a piece of media art that was timeless.

And Julian was unable to name a single piece. And quite reasonably so. It’s a really tricky question to ask anyone, let alone a media artist, particularly when he’s sitting on stage in the middle of an increasingly vague conversation, under lights and with the responsibility of looking at the camera (but to just be natural).  Julian did frame his lack of specific response far better than just anyone would  – how has it (piece of art) been mediated, what is the context of its presentation  and what is the viewer’s relationship to the artwork.

Of course, I’d be challenged to name any piece of art that is timeless and universally acknowledged to be so, for example Picasso’s Guernica is very specific to a certain time and place and the Mona Lisa (for me) no longer seems to be an artwork, it is a highly mediated, replicated and scrutinised image.

However, the question made me think and without the pressure of looking at a camera (but remaining natural), I could name two new media / non traditional art pieces which, if not timeless and significant to humanity, ARE incredibly important to me

Jesper Just’s No Man Is An Island (really poor quality video over at )

and

Evelina Domnitch and Dmitry Gelfand’s Camera Lucida (project description)

One of the challenges when talking about new media / time based / art-science-technology art works is that they can’t be [re]presented with any great ease. There is no way that poor quality YouTube videos and flat stills of quasi-scientific apparatus can replicate the experience of watching a video art piece in a dark, quiet room on a big screen or in any way convey the feeling that some amazing scientific performance was happening right under in front of your eyes.  So you’ll have to trust my judgement when recommending these pieces to you.

see also:

Ken Rinaldo’s Farm Fountain

FLOSS manual’s Collaborative Futures book

The Puma Hardchorus sing ““