Copenhagen, Denmark.

I just came back from Copenhagen yesterday afternoon. Copenhagen proved to be a lively town even in the middle of the week. There is just so much to see, the city is full of museums and exhibitions and concerts and whatnot... so my two days there was a bit deficient for a full experience of the city. Also winter is not the greatest of times to travel!

I opened up a flickr site for photographs, which became full in quite a short amount of time, and i cannot possess a credit card as yet, so i shall have to see what i can do about it... anyway, there are pics there from the museums i visited while i was there.

Also the rickshaw on the street, all covered in snow was a real surprise... apparently they are thinking of putting rickshaws on the streets during summer for tourists to go around the city.

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Happiness.

I am happy to be back. We were in the Dålarna province from the 18th to the 21st. In a place called Fjällgården, we stayed in a house in the midst of snow snow and snow. White and green and brown and black of evergreens and dead trees were all there was against the wind blowing snow in every direction. There we had our 'Land Art' workshop. It was fun and painful while it lasted, I am glad to be back in Göteborg now!

A few photos from the trip is here.
(More photos will arrive later, and i hope to open a flickr site too)


Going thru e-mails after three days or so.. i had quite a lot to sort out (which also makes me happy in a sad kinda way...). There were many links to news items and articles besides the 'happy birthday' emails. One of them was about this study done by the London School of Economics on who is a happy nation and who is not! Apparently bangladesh is the happiest nation! hmmm... didn't see that coming... well actually.. i think i read this once before... de ja vu. well, no other link had any foggy stuff.. the rest were the painful, reality-checking kind.

The skirmish at Rajshahi University (which i also heard from Faisal bhai who is a lecturer there)
: news!

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baal

'baal' is the word in hindi for hair, but in our language its the slang for pubic hair. Also it serves as a medium for many for the release of frustration, like the use of 'shit' almost, from English. but we dare not say it in front of anyone but friends, its not as popular as 'shit'. I could get away with saying 'shit' but not 'baal'.

A friend once tried to use 'hagu', a literal translation of 'shit' to bangla, in everyday speech. He came up with phrases like 'haga diyna' to substitute 'i don't give a shit'.

anyway, i was having an avalanche of words in my head last night and i was trying to write a song with them... in the end i ended up with prose that probably cannot be put into a song, and i dare not call it poetry. i named it 'baal' and dedicated it to two of my friends who i was missing all of a sudden. they would usually be the first to sample my songs. they would be my thesaurus and dictionary and translator of english and thoughts..whatever. my vocabulary is shamefully low... english or bangla.

i went to the Gothenburg city library again yesterday. Returned the first book that amiga Alma had shoved at my face (kindly suggested) ... it was Factotum by Charles Bukowski... which i liked a lot.. it was a simple experience, didn't have to run to the dictionary or think .. deeply. :) This time i got Erasure/Fuck by Percival Everett, Nickelback's Live At Home DVD and a comic by Harvey Pekar and Robert ...someone.... the time at the library was almost like swimming. I put my head under the water... swim around, and then peek for air and go back in.... I kinda dragged Quamruzzaman bhai in with me too.. he ended up getting membership and borrowed this atlas on europe and a bangla book! this library seems to have a collection of many foreign books!

I read the comic first... not the whole of it of course... just till i fell asleep! then after finishing dinner preparations watched Nickelback. I think they suck mildly. they have good riffs and all.. but lyrics wise... and performance wise... not great. Chad has a great voice though.

And after struggling on my guitar for a while.. i went to bed and started reading on the novel. Last thing i remember was getting amused and at the same time thinking about why i was reading someone's made up story.

Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

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mp3 - Sweeet Technology!

MP3 players swap songs with strangers

Bonus Link: The Interactive Institute

-

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A Link

A documentary on child labour

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thought

life is an empty canvas at first, colored and tainted as we go on with the experiences with people and self...

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L.i.n.k.s.

2005 Adobe Design Achievement Awards

Sound of 2006: The Top 10

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2006 is here!

wow! $!%!^$!$^!#$%!$#%!#^%$@%&^#*&$

that was kinda fast! feels like it just crept up on me! Well, wish everyone in the blogosphere, atmosphere, any other kind of sphere all the best for this year. Beware, coz 2007 will be just as sudden.

Here is a pic of all the new year food! We were all gathered at Michael( Edward Patrick)'s very nice apartment for a quiet evening of food and fine Irish folk music ( ;) which we later traded for Earth Wind and Fire and later Nine Inch Nails) and good ol' chatting... and a great view of the fireworks. so this is the host (busy as ever) -



So, for pics of action... follow the link below... (sitio de mi amiga Alma)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yabbasha

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Winter leaves

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Camera

So, I am back from Denmark, and since then the
weather in Gothenburg has proved really unfriendly. Snowfall is in full steam (if i may use this word) for two days. But i braved it last night and went to check out the discounts at the electronics stores in Hjalmar Brantingsplatsen. The idea was that maybe I will get myself a cheap mp3 player. But! i ended up buying a camera!

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Link: Ninjam

Realtime Music Collaboration Software - Ninjam

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Goteborg - Frederikshavn - Aalborg

Took a cool rollin tumblin ride on a Stena Line Ferry to Aalborg yesterday. Its pretty barren place... but good to be among old friends... to see those old faces again. Hope to have a nice time here.

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Looking Back: Somewhat Damaged

That was the name of the work we did for the 'Hidden Agenda' project. An oversized comic book with the story of a person who relies on his imaginary friends - the two conflicting sides of his psyche to survive. The creations of his imaginations were really parts of him, and portrayed as real persons and the main character named 'Nadie' was drawn always as an outline except for that one page where we put in a trip back to his childhood.

None of the pages had text on them, just pictures, drawn by hand (sketches and paintings), photographs, cut outs, collages etc. Every page however had a soundtrack to it which starts when one turns the page. For this to work we made a contraption over the top which sents a signal to the computer which in turn identifies the page from the signal and plays the corresponding soundtrack.

Anyway, here are some pictures of our work:

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Looking Back: Hidden Agenda Exhibition

Ok, the exams are over! done with. Now i have time and i have been able to get some of the photos of our 'Hidden Agenda', exhibition of our term projects for the Art & Technology Project Introduction course. Martin did a good job of teaching and Mats and Palle did a good job of directing the students. All the teams worked extremely hard, wracked their brains and produced the best they could.

Here are some pics from that day...

Last minute preparations...















Opening Night:

















A little something in the bathrooms too -




Dan was his usual 'Robot Cowboy' self...

























All Photos Courtesy of
Yuan Yuan

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Going back to Monuments....

Guess which monument is in trouble according to 2006 World Monuments Watch:

http://www.wmf.org/html/programs/resources/bycountry.html


Its been a while (years and years) since I have been there. Its funny even how meaningless our movements have become. Supposing I was home at this instance and went there for a visit, would I notice its decay? If I did, would I do anything about it?

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All mixed up.

SO, the hurly burly is done (the exhibition and all that leading to it) and now the new hurly burly is on... the EXAMS. yikes. catches me off guard every time, no helping it. We had a day long exam today. first lookup about the monuments the profesori put up on the board [mostly relating to the monuments made is remembrance to the atrocities against the Jews in WWII]. I got to read up on Horst Hoheisel's proposal for one that the German govt. wanted to be for the murdered jews of Europe. His proposal was to blow up the Brandenburger Tor (Pic). Of course the proposal wasn't approved (it was in fact approved after a long time of debates and thought, and two competitions), but here is what he planned:

1. Blow up the Brandenburger Tor
2. Grind its stone into dust
3. Sprinkle the remains over its former site
4. Cover the entire memorial area with granite plates.

All the english articles/excerpts I found relating to this was by a profesori by the name of James E. Young, and here is what he said about it:

"Rather than commemorating the destruction of a people with the construction of yet another edifice, Hoheisel would mark one destruction with another destruction. Rather than filling in the void left by a murdered people with a positive form, the artist would carve out an empty space in Berlin by which to recall a now absent people.

...

How better to remember a destroyed people than by a destroyed monument?"

I thought this was really interesting, also it sheds a light on his methods if you also look at this work of his which he did earlier: Negative Form

Then we had to write our own proposals for a monument commemorating some tragic incident of the past, and also read this epic about Gilgamesh or some account of it and write another proposal of an artwork relating to something from it. And in between all that was a short/long interview with the profesori about the readings we had to do so far. So all this was from 9 am to 7 pm, and now I am very confused. We had no idea what the exam will be like, and I expected it all to end at 5pm, whereby I would go home and sleep, and start on the next exam after that, since my oral session is at 8, it would be well to be awake till that time. But now, I am confused.

And for some reason I remember the office days where we would change Asif's desktop wallpaper to some crappy dhaliwood actress' wallpaper with exuberant colors whenever he would leave his desk. Hahhaha... sorry Asif but it was a lot of fun! hhahhah

I should study again....

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Fluxus: The "Art" in life.

if artists were on the lookout for things to portray things from life in their art decided that life just the way it is suffices... then what? isn't life good enough to be art? to be thought of and treated as art?

having done a presentation on Dick Higgins (1938 - 1998) a few days back I found out about a group of artists who had this viewpoint. Dick Higgins was a man with many talents - poetry, music, visual art... and also writing about art. There he spent a good amount of time and had his own publishing house named the "Something Else Press".

He writes about the art - life dichotomy:

“In the situation of art that is in a dialectical relationship with the ‘real world’ outside itself, the art work (as in both Dada and Fluxus, for instance) directly incorporates elements from daily living – treating the making of a cup of coffee as music, for instance. The purpose of this is not, of course, to shock or proclaim originality. If it were, the artist would surely propose to mix concrete and turds and fill the pot with that. Rather, it is to see something that many people experience in a new and aesthetic way, and thus it is very important that real water, real coffee, and a real stove (for instance) be used, not the illusions of them. In this way the overall experience of art will be enriched by one’s life, and one’s life will be enriched by art.”
[from his essay Modernism Since Postmodernism]

The group of artists were scattered over USA and Europe. And when George Maciunus and Dick Higgins started the publication for the kind of activities these like minded artists, a name was given to the collective... FLUXUS, from the word 'Flux' for change. The other artists associated with this style is John Cage, Yoko Ono, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik.

For an interesting short history of Fluxus, read Higgins' A Child's History of Fluxus

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Touch Table Roulette

Some of us have volunteered to work as testers for one company here for testing touch table roulette games they have developed. Its pretty neat and right now there are some sleepless zombies stooped over it running on adrenaline. not quite.. the machine has shown some signs of let up recently and there are guys working on it now. It was running from saturday afternoon till this morning. And the objective is to keep it running for 48 hours straight. I slept some in the middle, after like round 4 which was probably at 4 am today, and woke up for round 10 around 9 am! There werer those there who had gone all the way without sleep. Some had real fun with it. For me it was fun too, but my sleeping habbits have recently not allowed me to do anything overnight so far. Lost those undergraduate habbits right after starting on the working life. Anyway, the machine is cool and soon to hit casinos in a lot of places.

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1:41an

Thats the name of the block where the art tech programm goes on.. where the magic happens or the people sleep or party... some live some visit. Well, the last few days have probably been the busiest for most of us... and its still going strong. amidst all that the bunch of guys who set out to make a website for this planet have completed it. There is also the wiki where we put our notes up for the seminar course, and the stuff about the workshops we did, and the Hidden Agenda exhibition that is coming up.

Without further adieu.... the website:
http://www.141an.se/home/

Since the exhibition is the current focus, the default home page will lead to the exhibition's page... http://www.141an.se/

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Winter Updates.

so, we are in the middle of the winter now. From bangladesh to sweden.. the winter takes a different appearance... a different degree of cool. Before arriving here, most students i guess pack their bags with the heavy stuff... to survive the winter here. I did the same. But since coming here i have been hearing the same thing about the winter in Gothenburg. More Rain Less Snow. And so far, its been quite the 'universal truth'. We had one day of snow so far! well, that taking out of consideration the 'baby snow' (tiny white fluffy particles floated around one friday afternoon), and the wet icy snow (it was raining with little bits of ice also with it), and the ice downpour.

But frankly the one night of snowfall changed the view of the city I am used to! White white white.. all around, and with the help of the street lamps things just looked bright... and beautiful. here are some pics from that night... You'll notice that the pics from my phone are the shittier ones, compared to the ones from my friends' cameras!

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