TRAVEL DIARY

A weblog regularly updated by Jodi Rose.

  

VIEWING ALL POSTS FOR: JANUARY 2008

Wednesday, January 30, 2008

7:41 AM
Posted by jodi rose

A friend rang last night to say 'cool photo', and who knew you had such a deep philosophical side? All those books, so serious... not just a 'trashy australian' after all. No, indeed, it's just that well, hidden depths work so much better if you stay light and transparent on the outside. No-one needs know that there's actually a constant process of reflection and filtering beneath the apparently vague fluttering surface. Butterfly effect.

The space between embodied communication and physical displacement over screen and distance has become incredibly distinct. Signal well and truly overwhelmed by noise. Dropping packets all over the place, watching the art process amp up until it reaches the inevitable moment of breakdown, or is that breakthrough? The results are still in formation, but I think it will be an interesting show. Have sent a few friends along to camp out at the Presbytry in Sydney for Thursday night, can't wait to chat with them while we're setting up the room in Berlin. Sometimes time zones are fun to play with.

I still wake up every morning and don't know where I am.
A jolt in the middle of the night, look at the space around me and feel like everything has changed while I slept, something is missing, things don't look quite right. Constant negotiation of new surroundings, being addicted to disorientation... the sense of displacement is more familiar. than any one place. It's a strange way to live. But I like it. And the friends you make through the random patterns of here there and everywhere are more than compensation for the constant life-lag.

Stayed up until 2, recording the 3rd layer of our Melb/Syd/Berlin Mprov and Alvin Lucifer tribute (misspelling is intentional) and then did the live performance remix of all the process recordings, with some of Bianca's morse code, Sumu's skype dinner, and sounds in the space.

Amplifying the gaps in communication, so that all you hear is the space between words, and random atmospheric background noise brought to the fore, (pipes, music from the nightclub across the road vibrating through the window), and sounds in transit - from a trip to Gorki Park, Jannowitz Brucke Sbahn and the frenzy of textual contact through keyboards and screens along the way. Today it's tweaking levels, recording dialogue, going to saturn for a few cables and tech supplies, trying to find a side entrance to the planetarium for murcof and andrei smirnov gig, typing up my illegible scrawled notes from alain badiou, brandon la belle and max neuhaus talks, and another skype meeting.

'between the lips and the voice something goes dying
something of anguish and oblivion, the way nets cannot hold water'

fragment of my favourite pablo neruda poem that flickered through my over-stimuilated, over-tired mind this morning. between the lips, voice, screen and sound, it's a whole other story.

Monday, January 28, 2008

8:50 PM
Posted by jodi rose

OPENING THURSDAY 31st JAN 7PM
After-party password: SPY

PROGRAM Gallery
Invalidenstr 115
10115 Berlin, Mitte
U6/M8 Zinnowitzer Str
S1/S2 Nordbahnhof

Vernissage: 19:00, 31.01.08
Opening Times: 14-19:00, 01.02.08-06.02.08

http://www.transitlounge.org/2008/

The TRANSIT LOUNGE is the archetypal transit space, the point where the hyper-global + hyper-local coincide; a location which blurs traditional conceptions of geo-political boundaries, creating pockets of international space within the borders of individual nation-states. An in-between space, it exists relative to a fixed departure and arrival point, not to the area that surrounds it.

TRANSIT LOUNGE 2008 - BERLIN-MELBOURNE-SYDNEY

In 2008, TRANSIT LOUNGE begins in TRUDE, Calvino's ubiquitous city of tourism. From the 16th of January, TRUDE will be found between the cities of Berlin, Melbourne, Sydney, as the artists collaborate remotely on the evolution of a complex, emergent structure.

The multitude of inputs, exchanges, and disruptions will be distilled in an exhibition which opens in Berlin at PROGRAM on the 31st January, 2008 to coincide with transmediale.08. Here the variations will continue to multiply as the process is augmented by the actions of visitors to the space.

TRANSIT LOUNGE is a partner event of transmediale.08 CONSPIRE...

TRANSIT LOUNGE would like to thank the Australia Council for their support.

Monday, January 28, 2008

8:48 PM
Posted by jodi rose

did I say hyper-drive?
we've now engaged the improbability drive, at warp-speed.
live is fairly frizzling with morphic resonance these days.

I couldn't even begin to summarise in any depth, so, to give a brief flash of some key points that have crackled my synapses since friday:

wake up. *(always a good strong start)
write story for anna to use in the transit lounge underground project.
weave together greek mythology; jean cocteau's 1949 film orphee; strands of our discussion in the many hour skype conferences; trude; Berlin nightclub lifestyle; and some of my own reflections into a contemporary philosophical dialogue between two people in a tunnel under a nightclub.

Berlin Orpheus

Followed by the short - only 2 hour - online conference/meeting, then the photographer arrived to take my photo for Zitty, an hour of thinking 'am I playing myself or being myself?'.

Henry arrived at 3 for our meeting with a bottle of wine and beautiful warm insouciant charm, talked about his fantastic, visionary international sound art music architecture project, Sound of Cities, listened to fresh-off-the-press music, his and Jasmina's when she knocked on the window for a visit; then cycled out into the night with Jas for dinner and conversation about Paris, life, art, love.

Saturday, woke up and made it to the 'Tuned Cities' Symposium in time for all the speakers, with the cute commentator box for simultaneous translation; high volume of inspiring ideas, projects, history and engagement with sound art and architecture. Props to Brandon La Belle for being the only speaker to even mention any women artists, let alone sound artists - very boys-zone, you'd never know a woman had even picked up a microphone throughout most of the day. Issues of gender representation aside, it was a good range of philosophy and practice, and I had the excellent fortune to hear Max Neuhaus, who invented the 'soundwalk' in the 60's, in conversation with Brandon. He had a wonderful attitude and approach, talking about how there was never a linear plan, he just went with the idea that excited him most at the time. Perfect. He was still waiting for a call about his 'aural soundgarden' after the plans were published in Domus 3 years ago. It's heartening to realise that even with someone of that stature and reputation as an artist, things still take the time they take.

Dropped into KW '5 minutes later' exhibition opening on way home, chatted with Somaya and Anna who were leaving after a hard day's filming in the underground tunnels; cycled back to Neukolln for a club night at o-tannenabaum, met Rinus and scored not one but two gigs with das kleine field recording festival, inveigled him into presenting and curating an evening for the Program sound weekend in march, and then went down to the cellar. After that. it's all a blur. Feel like I stumbled into old Berlin, the one I fell in love with 6 years ago when I first came here, and would pick up a flier for a gig and end up in someone's living room listening to extremely experimental performance sound art. There was just a fantastic atmosphere, really nice crowd of people - think you would have been hard pressed to find anyone there who wasn't an artist, musician, writer or combination of all three - danced with Jacob and Anya for hours, received invitations to a new studio opening up the road; found out that I was featured for one of the Freies Radio days, where Johannes played all the pieces on the website that I had given him from conversations at Pixelache; then cycled home feeling satisfactorily trashy.

Sunday was a little tricky, especially the three hour skype call and projection test that started at 11, but we all managed to muddle through. Went out to the 'Tuned Space' gig at Maria, heard some live binaural field recording, lush drone piece, Mattin's hardcore set and sadly missed the room tuning by Mark Bain, as I just had to sleeeeep.

Today has been more gentle, slowly working through lists and audio files and various elements of collaborations for exhibition. Had some great chats with Rob - miss having the no-input tap dancing festival bouncing around the studio together at josetti hofe - and finally getting my head around how to use these process recordings from the past week. He had a nice take on that, and following the 'weather principle'

"I go the way the wind's blowing and the clouds are forming. It's been years learning to live with things bigger than I can understand. I can't fit the world in my head." Then you can fit more in, once it's empty.

Which ties in perfectly with Henry's reminder of the Zen Koan about the Master pouring tea into an overflowing cup, and telling the student 'come back when you are empty.' Hence the unfilling of my head here.

Finally, a moment of clarity too about those levels of engagement and social awkwardness with people who have a certain self-perception.

It's about having a broad field of reference. Something small compressed into a very dense space, makes it seem bigger than it is. People with a narrow field of reference may look very big and important, and can make you feel scatty, awkward and too this or that; but it's nothing personal, just that you are outside their field of reference. And people who are interested in lots of different stuff; who have a broad field of reference, they're the ones you feel comfortable with. There's common ground to play on.

So, meet me in Trude and play with the transit loungers.

Monday, January 21, 2008

1:05 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Random fragments from a life in hyper-drive. How did that happen?


The past 24 hours have seen me ironing and mopping in the name of art... which is more than I've done in the last 2 years. Ironing vinyl to the wall for Sophie's installation, now opening a portal to the history of the building.

Still more tangents than direction. It's all very well being dedicated to living a poetic life, and the esoteric can be comforting, yet a pinch of pragmatic focus never goes astray.

Girl cannot live on bridges alone.

I had the excellent fortune to hear Alain Badiou give a lecture on art and politics to a packed room at Kunstwerk on Friday night. He talked in that hypnotic voice with lilting intonation about displacement, fragility, place, affirmatism (his new manifesto), and 'finding a place where being together is enough'.

At the moment I'm deeply immersed in the transit lounge collaboration process, which involves many hours on skype with 10 people, working towards the opening night on 31st January. Interesting threads about time, technology, place and displacement emerging.... We're trying to find a place where 'being together' is POSSIBLE.

Back to work now. Enough of this dilly-dallying around.

Monday, January 14, 2008

2:31 PM
Posted by jodi rose

thank god I didn't kill it after all....

remind me not to mess with technology again.
at least not unsupervised.

mostly my strategy of being slightly outside the parameters of what can actually be done, with the tools currently in existence, works fairly well. now and then the system falls over.

it's all part of the great anti-functionality anti-statement.
currently in production. or not. maybe it will never appear.

had a fabulous weekend of high-intensity art immersion.
'history will repeat' at kunstwerke then 'from pixel to spark' at martin-gropius bau. Both excellent, reflective, thought-provoking, inspiring, and over now. Highlights were the re-enactments of godard's (?) existential interview with a ten-year-old girl; various people with a big red flag running through the streets of berlin/stockholm (1972/2005?); the re-creation of orgreave miner's strike and police clash in 84/85 (now). See, I'm not too good with dates, but I remember faces ;)

And from the pixel show - it was a weird juxtaposition with the 'topographies of terror' outdoor exhibition in the empty lot next door, which was an old sculpture school that had been turned into a gestapo prison used for interrogation and incarceration of various political, intellectual and other undesirables of the state during the war. I was going to say that at least now being an artist/intellectual probably only means that you will have a fairly precarious existence, not being actively threatened and harassed. Then thinking of the 'new' sedition laws, the critical art ensemble and various other cases of 'national security' intimidation of cultural workers and thinkers today, guess that is a little naive. pause for thought.

back to the pretty lights....
nam june paik's candle tv was a beautiful start to the show; those strobe sculptures completely turned my head inside out; the spinning light ropes with patterns were absolutely mesmerising - and inspired ideas for the impossible bridge over the ruined pylons in kreuzberg, in planning stage with filip and maika; lost myself completely in the 'hemisphere' minimal techno tent, lying on the ground in a weird light induced transcendent state, vanishing into my own eyelids. Intense.

sparked lots of thoughts on installation and immersion in art, what works for me, what doesnt' (yes to lying on the floor and projecting on a domed roof; no to big spinning machines with 3d glasses and circular screens, floor screens, and movement sensor 'interactions'. Think there needs to be a very finely tuned balance between the composition of the work and the way the audience can interact and change it. Some of the abstract pieces were the most intriguing, while the obvious landscapes and tricks lost my interest fairly quickly. Note for the future.

Beautiful strategies of resistance from the outdoor exhibition, one in particular stayed in mind, the Kabarett Katacombe, whose director was 'vague, absent-minded, and only alluded to the punch-line of a joke.'

oblique communication 101.

Monday, January 14, 2008

2:30 PM
Posted by jodi rose

testing
testing
1...2...3...

Thursday, January 10, 2008

11:23 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Report from the old Newa (Russian) Hotel

I feel like a spy camped out here in the back room, observing people coming and going, making forays into the library at night... hosting my own secret collaboration meetings with various parties.

The bare white art facade is slowly being stripped away, in the front gallery room, to reveal and recreate a moment from the building's history. During the period straight after the Second World War, this was one of the few places left standing in the area, and became a hotbed of decadence, where you could (if you had the right connections, or booked through the artists or writers unions) go and drink champagne, eat Russian Caviar, or sleep with an officer for stockings. The next exhibition opens Thursday 17th January, with a portal to the past, quite literally, through one of the columns.

Took a visiting friend down to investigate progress, and had this fabulous comment 'Well, it's no wonder the Finns are crazy, between Russia and Sweden how could they not be'. Nice.

Talked with Sophie last night over a bottle of wine about the difference between sculpture as object and installation; how the viewer completes the piece in the latter (and to a certain extent with objects, but it's more distinct in an installation), about how to design the audience's experience for immersion, and find the heartbeat of the work. Lovely.

I have finally started to cave in to the darkness of winter, it's soaking through my pores into my thoughts. The Southern store of sunlight has apparently run down, so that now every time there is blue sky and even a glimmer of that strange golden orb, I drop everything and go straight outside to absorb as much of it as possible. Yesterday this took me on a meandering walk through the new neighbourhood, from the post office past Nordbahnhof and up towards Veteranenstrasse, where I found the most peaceful grave in the cemetery. A Japanese maple tree, edged with bamboo and smooth grey rivers tones leading you in to a simple wooden bench, under the twisty black branches and pines.

There are things to investigate further, the flohmarkt on weekends, a hardware store selling Norwegian alpaca socks, the stationery shop, a grave adorned with christmas tree decorations, the tea shop and more.
This is one of the few places I have found in Berlin with big empty lots, wide open skylines and a sense of space. Whatever the sad reasons for that, it's peaceful now, amidst the bustle and hubbub of Mitte life.

For now, it's juggling a few numbers, then sleep.

And this, just in from Delhi:

"I would like to share with you a piece of philosophy that i came across on the metro:

khali jagah ka dhyan rakhe krupya which translates literally as:

"please keep empty space in mind"

I have found this a very inspiring sentiment as i rush around the city."

And I will try. It gets so cluttered in there so quickly. Let it all go. Start again tomorrow. A friend told me that he decided to move to Berlin while on a bridge attempting to help me stream the signal via wifi. Unsuccessfully, I might add, although it was a valuable research experiment. And evidently had good, albeit unexpected results!

Monday, January 7, 2008

12:35 AM
Posted by jodi rose

notes on life in a cold climate
part two

after lathering myself into a frenzy of anxiety about moving, the deep existential exhaustion of the perpetual nomad threatening me with complete paralysis - in the event it was remarkably easy and smooth.
two trips with suitcases on the U8 from Schonleinstrasse to Rosenthaler Platz, then the M8 tram to Zinnowitzer Str and a short walk to my glamorous apartment in the back of the old Russian Hotel. It has that minimal art residency vibe and spartan aesthetic, white everything anonymous walls and empty spaces. Works perfectly for inhabiting a new life. I'm doing my best not to fill it with clutter instantly. The new desk is a haven of productivity and focus, the string red lights from Julaine are piled up in a strangely comforting shape reminiscent of atoms or planets or firelight.

Almost stacked on the bicycle trip yesterday, as the suddenly icy streets had a whole new twist. The beauty of the Jopo is being able to jump off quickly when you feel it sliding under you. The pedestrians fared no better, everyone was almost slipping over at some point.

I had the pleasure of meeting and chatting with the lovely Kiki Bohemia after the icelandic klezmer band at kaffee burger, and she told me - having grown up in east berlin, a p'berg girl born and bred - this is called 'blitz ice'. Fantastically evocative. The violin player reassured me that the blue pool is really pure, not nuclear waste after all as someone - marius - had me believing earlier this year. He also promised to find some bridges for me to play in Iceland. Excellent.

This will be one of the last posts in this format, I am excruciatingly aware of the drawbacks to lack of comments and other metadata and will be overhauling the entire project very soon. So if I misrepresent our conversation, you can write your own version, or make something up entirely. Playing with ideas about writing - authenticity and fake - from Italo Calvino, 'If on a winter's night a traveller' research with Transit Lounge. Conspiring in the secret back room for Transmediale.

thinking of ideas about the notion of home
being at home
never leaving home
offering hospitality
exhaustion
comfort
warmth

a place to call home
to rest
to stop moving
to absorb, sink in
reflect
host
offer hospitality

"observing, reflecting on and contributing to the work through a series of unpredictable and unreliable meta-narratives, subteferge and unexpected interventions."

meanwhile, the bridge plays on.......

Friday, January 4, 2008

10:57 AM
Posted by jodi rose

good morning!
it's a clear blue day, sunshine in my window still make me believe it will be warm outside, am used to the reality now, wrapping myself in the doona coat, layers of scarf, hat, gloves, and new wool socks - thanks mum! - in order to leave the house.

on life in a cold climate

Note to self:
When bicycle lock freezes, it's probably too cold to ride the bicycle.
Yes, I finally found that limit, minus 5 is very unpleasant to cycle in.

Today is a balmy minus 2, and I'm moving to mitte. With central heating. Yay. Part of the wonderful Program - Initiative for Art and Architecture Collaborations - who have appointed me their Artist in Residence for the next 3 months. They run a wonderful gallery and program of artist talks, films, readings and more, come and visit!

Guess it's time to step up and start playing that international artstar dive part for the big schmooze. Yes, Global Bridges are GO!!!!!!

Tuesday, January 1, 2008

9:30 PM
Posted by jodi rose

Lying in bed listening to the snow fall.

A blissful silence after the endless gunshot fireworks and whistling rockets of the past few days. Berlin erupted at midnight into complete insanity, bursts of sparkling colour along every street, thickening veil of smoke over the ocean of smashed glass.

That's one way to see the new year begin. Had a low-key evening at Tammi's, enjoying the spectacle from a safe distance, dancing, and finally weaving through the carpet of spent cardboard tubes and spikey shards to get home around 3, the odd stray explosion still disturbing the ghosts. Long slow morning, catching up with the other side of the world, luxuriating in the bath, hauling buckets of coal from the cellar. It still never makes the room quite warm. I begin to understand this northern european longing for the sun. Although 35 degrees celcius at 10pm is a little extreme. Whiled away a few pleasurable hours reading the whimsical advice of Cary Tennis on salon.com, a beautiful mixture of poetic and pragmatic.

"There isn't some other life you could jump into if this one wasn't up to your standards. This is it... If our passionate delusion that we are in control of life's outcome were broken, that would indeed be a kind of triumph, even though, initially, we feel broken and weak.

Don't just move. Move toward what you love.

Here's the deal. We get out of our 20s, and eventually it dawns on us: We are not infinitely strong or infinitely capable of starting over. We are weakened by disease and death and bereavement. Things change us. We are shaped by life. There's no getting around it. This is the real thing.

And after we get through a particularly nasty episode of real life, we ask, Is that all there is?

If that's all there is, my friend, then let's keep dancing.

Let's break out the booze, and have a ball."


And this, on the strange currents of desire:

"Your soul is a force, or being, that is part of you but not completely under your control. Like you, it has appetites and preferences, but unlike you it is not really very interested in getting stuff done.

Everybody out there has a soul that is drawn to certain qualities in the souls of others; not all these qualities are apparent to the eye, but the soul takes notice. There is a whole secret emotional and spiritual economy going on under the surface of everyday life.

These qualities are invisible to you.

Your soul and the souls of others are in constant communication.

Thus we go through life finding mysterious and sometimes fleeting satisfaction in encounters with others, much of it occurring beneath the surface. As we go buzzing about our big and important lives, a part of us is always seeking stillness, or strangeness, or the color red." Indeed, or all three.

A question always close to my heart:

"How do we reconcile creativity with the practical requirements of living?

To be blunt: Maybe we do and maybe we don't. But we start by being honest. We start with a self-correcting catechism of ego deflation: The world doesn't owe us a living. Instead, we owe the world. We have been entrusted with something.

The big picture is this: The debt is ours.
We got a little extra soup. We found money on the beach.

So welcome to the world. The world asks more of those in whom it has entrusted its gifts. It asks that we maintain a healthy standard of living plus devote many hours to music, practicing scales, and to art, drawing from life, working with color and meditating to keep the demons from revolt, and to writing nonsense that must be written, reading in search of wisdom or God, thinking, thinking, thinking -- and sometimes to more and stranger things: sleeping a lot to find peace, going on retreat, flirting with madness.

It is our responsibility to ourselves and to the world to do these things, to find ways to take care of ourselves, not to become a burden but to offer what we have. We must work hard at it. We must work steadily... We work quietly and steadily on our craft.

Have you ever seen kelp on the surface of the Pacific and marveled at how deep it goes, how far down in the dark, cold waters it is anchored on rocks and reefs and, who knows, sometimes on the hulks of shipwrecks? What we try to do is create surfaces that one feels are anchored deeply. You see the kelp bed, undulating in the waves, and you sense the depth of the water."

And finally, from C.S.Lewis, "We are what we believe we are."

Keep believing, keep trusting, keep imagining, and especially keep dancing! Enjoy the adventure of life as it unfolds around you with vibrant colours, unexpected tangents, and magnificent companions.