Volunteer at transmediale

We are looking for committed and motivated volunteers to help us run transmediale 2026! In return for their support, volunteers will receive a free Festival Pass and insights into how the festival works ⚘

► https://transmediale.de/en/news/call-for-volunteers-2026

there was a homeless woman who often sat near Clapton passage. she never really asked anybody for anything. she sat on her blanket greeting people. and then she was not there. some weeks later, flowers and cards started appearing. that’s how i found out that she died, and that her name was Tracey. last weekend some locals organised a memorial: the plan was to release paper lanterns, one for each year of Tracey’s life. it looked very pretty at dusk. several dozen strangers showed up to do this for her.

but it was a windy evening, so the lanterns refused to go up. one got stuck on a tv dish. another one up a tree still covered in dry autumnal leaves. someone had to climb and extinguish it. lanterns travelled all the way down the passage – right where she used to sit – and into traffic. it got completely out of control. it felt very urgent. more urgent than Tracey’s problems were ever taken when she was there. and now it’s forever too late.

there is also a nice homeless man, Stuart. he was there. his spot is at Hackney Central station. he is applying for accommodation, but he’s very low down the list.

i feel too awkward to ever talk to homeless people. which by extension means that if it ever gets very bad, i accept that it will be too awkward for others to help me. the awkwardness deepens until it’s unmentionable. little atoms we are. rip tracey

optional viewing if you'd like to see This Is Hardcore performed in a Tiny Desk Concert

exquisitely odd venue/song match if you ask me, was not on my 2025 bingo card

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x_KlY-AegeE

optional animal this friday is a capybara covered in green algae near the Uruguay River's dam. the actual story here is that creating artificial bodies of water results too much algae, which is not cool for the fish.

on this particular occasion this particular capybara is not not rocking the look – i consider this punk

current status

if this gets 1 like, i’m turning it into a drawing 🙃

thursday listening: Snowflakes are Dancing by Isao Tomita (1974)

classical music on analogue synths

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRRk7JChSts&list=PLGltXnm_5ITYjEwdJ_lWgQBr0kwWcpYbW&index=4

dear friends, it’s the last day of my employment! the work was challenging and unrewarding. i learned a lot, primarily about sadness and loneliness, but some service design as well. i wish to learn of it no more.

wiping my work laptop was cathartic, though i struggled to disable ‘find my mac’ for a good 15 minutes. let’s hope my next job brings some joy and meaning. but if not, honestly, i’m ready to be a grant-applying phd-writing barista. absolutely do not mind either way.

i’m going on a big trip to Switzerland and i will be posting about my every step bc i can. so prepare your eyes for arts

<3

a͓̽b͓̽s͓̽o͓̽l͓̽u͓̽t͓̽l͓̽e͓̽y͓̽ f͓̽r͓̽e͓̽e͓̽ !

ok so

i took a train to Paris (2.5h), and then another train to Lyon (2h).

while i was offline, a pending message on telegram had an animated “…” at the end. i looked at it for a long time.

***

Gare Du Nord metro has formulas on the walls (making sure scientists don’t lose them? happens with me and my wifi password all the time) and a long text in french by the artist Liam Gillick. i’ve been researching him recently, so i had to google what’s going on. turns out these walls just turned 10, installed in Nov 2015:

‘A series of equations modeling oceanic and terrestrial atmospheric fluxes will be placed on colored solid areas painted on concrete […] a theory at the root of science on climate change.’
– source

it did not register with me at all as design or public art, because it looks kind of drab. i thought maybe there was a polytechnic university nearby. my only clue to this being art was the artist’s name. but then, this thing was quite a bit brighter when new, and actually looked a lot like brat.

***

a group of nine transport policemen entered the otherwise empty carriage i was in. then they dispersed. it’s a strange feeling, to be outnumbered by police.

***

another thing with France is that they just don’t put station names up on the stations. they also don’t say them in the voiceover: ‘We will soon arrive’ – that’s enough information.

***

in Lyon, it’s as cold and dark as in London (hot take: many places in Europe have an equally miserable winter, brits are just better complainers)

***

i did not follow my own plan to go to a Chinese place, and went instead to a small Nepalese restaurant called Bodhi. i ordered octopus with wine and it was a 10/10. i left thinking that i should really get into commodity fetishism

***

finally, the mirror in the hotel bathroom got the backlight button exactly at my face level (i am tiny) (the button doesn’t work)

For Boris Groys, modernism was characterized by a desire to surpass the present in the name of realizing a glorious future (be this avant-garde utoptanism or the Stalinist five-year plan); contemporaneity, by contrast, is marked by “a prolonged, potentially infinite period of delay,” prompted by the fall of communism." For both [Peter] Osborne and Groys, a future-oriented modernism has been replaced by a static, boring present (“we are stuck in the present as it reproduces itself without leading to any future”)." Groys points to the secular ritual of repetition that is the video loop as contemporary art’s instantiation of this new relationship to temporality, which creates, he argues, a “non-vhistorical excess of time through art.”

Claire Bishop, Radical Museology