Armin Medosch's blog

Photo: Skaters in front of Kiasma museum

The festival Pixelache in Helsinki was initiated by Juha Huuskonen 6 years ago. Bringing together a relatively young crowd, it has become a fixture on the festival circuit. This year's festival was about 'Architectures of Participation' thematizing the tension between media art, open source and what is known as Web 2.0. Ravensbourne Postgraduate Studies lecturers Lisa Haskel and Armin Medosch presented Open Source learning techniques at Pixelache.

Experts in Japanese cinema will immediately recognize that Tokyo Drifter is the title of a classic Japanese yakuza movie directed by Seijun Suziki in 1966. But 'drifting' is in Tokyo also a permanent state of mind for the jet-lagged visitor. After having been to Tokyo in 1998 it was the exhibition OpenNature at NTTICC which brought me back to this great city again, and I enjoyed every minute.

The Independent newspaper today has a review of the Laurie Anderson performance we all went to. What strikes me as a bit odd is that the reasons the reviewer gives for not liking her performance too much at all are exactly the same reasons why I actually enjoyed it very much.

So, for example, he criticises her for having a certain mannerism in the way she delivers her text. But the 'buts' and 'ands' with which Laurie starts her sentences are part of the way Laurie does things and has always done things. Thats part of her very personal technique of delivering her lyrics. Love it or leave it, but thats her style.

A few years ago locative media were the talk of the day in the media arts scene. Thanks to the Bloggersphere and investment by major international digital corporations such as Google and Yahoo now everybody can be, oh, so locative. You are already storing all your photos on Flickr, aren't you? Now you can annotate your Flickr photos using Google Maps, the new map service by Google. A website called Geobloggers lets you annotate your photos with longitude and latitude coordinates and overlays them with Google Maps. This weblog posts a number of scripts and explanations how to do that. I hope they win the Prix Ars Electronica. My only question is, why are all those images so non-sensical? Does the combination of digital cameras, flickr and other photoblogs only accellerate the end of the image?