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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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)

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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

yesterday (monday) i was in Lyon. it has one of the cosiest bookshops i’ve ever seen, called Le Bal des Ardents. it looks and feels suspended in time

then i went to the local art museum