Just finished my second talk. No more talks to give. I am happy.

On the stage now is Amy Alexander as the Ubergeek performing live a wild mix of music and using a wireless computer keyboard to control extreme whitespace, a perl script popping out tons of lovely colored terminal graphics. Pretty nice to look at.

It is interesting to see how the „geeky“ design is gaining ground in the art sphere. The beauty of naked tty visuals is somehow telling a story from the mysterious and hidden depths of the electronic machines which somehow pleases the Zeitgeist.

Finland, Finland, Finland. The country where I want to be.

When you think of Helsinki, what is the first thing that comes to your mind? For me (and probably for you as well) it is the movie Night On Earth by Jim Jarmusch. It is a great piece and tells the stories of five taxi drivers in five different cities around the world: Los Angeles, New York, Paris, Rome and – guess what – Helsinki.

The episode in the finnish capital is funny although it is by far the darkest of the five stories: three guys get a lift by a silent taxi driver. One of them is totally drunk, sleeps and his friends bring him home. During the ride, they tell the driver about his „sad story“ (got fired, his girl ran away etc. pp.) The taxi driver is not impressed and tells his personal story which is so dramatic that the passengers find the the fate of his friend no longer that moving and leave the taxi without taking care of him anymore.

Well, that doesn‘t sound funny but the perfect storytelling abilities of Jim Jarmusch make it a worthwile episode which blends in perfectly with the other (also great) international taxi rides making it one the best movies I have ever seen.

Calling a taksi in Helsinki is not without a thrill now. So far, the drivers were very responsive, helpful and even funny. I am looking forward to even more taxi rides in the remaining two days of my stay.

I feel if I have never been introduced to the concept of „Sauna“ in my life at all. Just went to a party – in the context of the READ_ME festival – and apart from many people drinking a lot I also discovered a self-made hut made out of transparent plastic standing in the backyard. It had an oven inside and I thought „what a wonderful idea to have a warm room at the party“.

I called it „The Sauna“ but I didn‘t really expect it to become a real sauna at all. After some time I returned to the backyard to discover a naked crowd gathering in it (the tent was steaming like mad) singing and dancing inside following the karaoke text that was projected on a screen, k3wl.

Remote places have a tendency of being really wild. Finnland is really a part of this.

Auto-Illustrator is a funny graphics tool. It is meant to produce vector graphics but it is adding some kind of unexpected features to what you do. It has got some intriguing features (like the „Penalty of death“ for refusing ugly graphics :-) and generally tends to do something else as originally intended.

Auto-Illustrator is written in Real Basic. I don‘t really like Basic (as a programming language) but it is interesting to see what people actually achieve using this specific incarnation.

Paperikori is an SMS based story writing system. You hook on by sending a SMS to the system and you can subsequently write SMS messages that continue the story already told by other people.

Well, at least this is how it is supposed to work. I just sent my initiation message but I did not get a reply so far. Nice project idea anyway.

Uhh. Don‘t believe the Internet!

I was clever enough to bring my own AirPort Base Station to READ_ME and to hook it up to one of the network ports on stage allowing me to liveblog from row four.

Sitting in the audience blogging about what is going on I was suddenly surprised to hear my name being announced although I was expecting to be the last speaker. What happened? Well, the organizers changed the order of the speakers and of course this change was reflected in the printed program that was given out to everybody.

But it wasn‘t changed in the online version which I was reading because I refuse diving into dead trees when I have Internet. Social glitches in a modern world.

Frankie the Robot

Slub seems to be strange word. I can‘t find any convincing translation to german in my favorite translation machine. Seems to be one of these untranslatable slang words.

However, Slub is Alex McLean and Adrian Ward that produce sequencer software for the Mac and Unix. Quite cool realtime manipulation of loops and tracks. One of these tools that look too complicated when you encounter them but might transform itself in a powerful tool once in a hand of somebody who knows what he is doing. Their music is pretty gabba-rish, loud and fast. Machinery. You can feel it. Perfectly matched by synchronized ASCII art.

Tony Scott is a programmer and developed the hobby of collecting glitches. His web site describes this as „GLITCH ART. The aesthetics of digital corruption“. But Tony insists he is „a programmer by trade“ and not an artist.

Glitches are to be seen in the context of The Aesthetics of Failure.

Very interesting talk, very nicely presented. He shows some pictures of various types of glitches including background noise, lightning and distorted TV signals but focusing mainly on screen shots of software and hardware crashes, RAM maps and other interesting stuff.

He explains: „a glitch is any outcome, generated by a complicated process but which is deterministic“. So the computer, being complicated but deterministic, is the ideal birthplace for glitches.