Freedom, Ghanified

Somehow I got to this gathering in Second Life, with, and about the Ghana speech of Obama. Usually it’s not my piece of cake, but via-via I got an invite (and then tp) from a friend from the crowd. The meeting was well-attended, I should say, although a higher than average proportion of Linden avatars pointed that one shouldn’t expect too much of political incorrectness or ‘playfulness’.

And yet I managed to find – if not full game, than at least some element of playful re-writing of the reality (which is what Second Life for, if you ask me). At some distance from the gathering venue there was a model of the US Capitol (no Capitol Hill though) – at least, the building was resembling the US Capitol enough for me to consider it as such.

But then my eye spotted on the top of the building a very interesting artifact, and not quite the Statue of Freedom

I really liked the way they appropriately modified (Ghanified) the statue, to fit the topic of the talk, kudos!

sonArc::ema – Jan-Peter Sonntag

Again, this is not my picture, but rather a visual stab, to learn more about Jan-Peter Sonntag later on. He and another group, N-Solab (both from Denmark Germany) presented sonArc::ema performance at the AE gala. Apparently, both teams share the same site, www.sonarc-ion.de, where a few interesting examples of the past projects can be found.

PS: While searching for more information about the artists, I bumped into an interesting site, www.mediaarchitecture.org, where they also announce the coming Media Facade Festival in Berlin, later in October; might be interesting for another project I am to run soon.

new ae building

I didn’t know the program of the event well enough (and I remember well, the site was also misleading – it says that the old building of AE will be functioning till the end of October or something). The reality was very different as you see – the old building of AE is NOT functioning, or rather it is in a full-steam transition to the new building. From this side the transformation does not look particularly impressive, but in reality the extension if very big.

The poster of the contraction company I saw nearby gives some (vague) idea of the future AE:

But to get the real scale of the project, one needs to go the other side of Danube

I later found (in the brochure about Linz as Cultural Capital of Europe 2010) the following image:

I marked with the red dot the place where I took the very first image fro, so you can try to reconstruct the total picture.

Discovering Laboral

Entrance to  Laboral, Center of Art and Technology (my translation), in Spanish city Gijón (pronounced khi-hon). We discovered it by a lucky chance, when I picked up a brochure in the touris center in our village. Honestly, I almost missed it, becasue the cover looked very obscure – see below:

But when I started to read it more carefully, I was amazed by the program that this center promissed: interactive installations, multimedia art, contemporary gaming etc etc. It all looked very promissing, and so we decided to come and see it (the city was about 80km  from the place we lived).

It took a while for us to find the place, since it is not in the center, but almost outside, near the city’s Technological University (?) and a Scientific Business Center (?? – in both cases I am not sure I know the exact names).

But finally ewe managed – to only discover closed doors:

To our relieve, the panic was premature – the center was fortunately open on Monday (when all other museums in the city are closed), and actually would be closed on Tuesday, if we would decided to come next day. So, again, lucky us – we found it, and we really enjoyed it (spent almost 4 hours there).

Basically, a number of my postings in this blog will be from, and about this center.