Friday, September 30

 
 
YEAR:  2016 | Tags:  | | | |
 
 
 
 
 

National Library, Riga, 08:50

 
 

Grant applications for the Kone Foundation need submitting today and mine collapsed in a broken heap thirty six hours ago. I have brought my laptop with me and intend missing the morning sessions in order to write a completely new one.

Andrew and I woke, washed and left, and walked from the apartment across the Akmens Tilts bridge to the National Library. Looking at it in the morning light I decide that the architecture has an appealing madness about it. I asked yesterday, thinking that perhaps the shape of the building held some historical significance, but apparently not.

I will indeed spend the morning, lunchtime and early afternoon writing a new application. This time I will write it as a personal research project and it will prove considerably easier; by which I mean only that I could not possibly have written another application for a group project in the time available.

At 15:45 I will make my presentation which I have cunningly contrived to overlap with everything I have just rewritten. I will explain about the deep structure of digital tools, and how we might construct alternatives by corralling Illich’s ideas about conviviality and using them as a goal. The talk will go well and several members of the audience will become visibly excited. I will have many questions to answer.

I will grab as many meringues as I possibly can during the coffee break that follows as I realise that I am famished. Then I will sit through a plenary presentation that looks at the early digital New Directions movement by Armin Medosch which will hook me in a way that I hadn’t expected.

As the day ends Andrew will organise a gang to go for a meal. Two Lithuanians will lead the way. They will lead the way so rapidly that nobody else will keep up with them. After losing them and then walking for thirty minutes or more trying to find them, Andrew, Grit, Mikko and I will eventally decide to stop and eat. We will spot Firenza where we will all eat designer venison burgers.

Finally we will walk to the University Arts Research Lab to watch some performances. Noise will ensue. I will amuse myself with an exhibit that allows you to use brainwaves to control a piano-like set of strings and hammers. I will discover that I can, in fact, make melodic and rhythmic patterns of notes if I concentrate.

Whatever that means in this context.