Its all about the balcony

Its all about the balcony. For instance, I am sitting on my balcony in Lund, wrapped up in a blanket writing this blog entry on a beautiful, sunny February day. I have just returned from my second trip to Berlin since I’ve been here - but this trip was definitely not of the tourist variety. Transmediale is an arts festival that happens annually in Berlin and as a class, we had planned to go for quite some time. The time was finally upon us and we left last Sunday to spend a glorious week geeking it out in Berlin. By arts festival, I of course mean technology related art, and so after settling in to my friend’s apartment, we headed out the next day to a great place called C-Base.

CBase:

Imagine all the fun stuff I’ve told you about the barge but in a building, a big building, in Berlin. It operates as a night club most nights but is decked out to look like a space ship. We settled into some old aeroplane chairs and watched as people set up numerous interactive installations. The night was filled with projections on the walls, exploring the entire space, which was decorated with old circuit boards (complete with blinking lights behind them), a fun members-only area including a big storage room full of geek goodies (old technology waiting to be re-used), and a wall of knobs which was of no end of amusement to me. An event called ‘dorkbot’ was going on that night and we got to see a woman who had sewn in LEDs, sensors, and other fun things into every day items and had woven wires into her knitting, it was pretty impressive. She was wearing a corset that lit up along the boning lines, in a fluorescent light, but that had 220V running through it so her advice was to please not spill a drink on her, as she’d most certainly die. Next up was a few cool things, notably, an awesome hovering helicopter thing controlled by tons of arduinos, and my favourite, an interactive step-pad dj-ing system. Does this sound familiar? It should. Imagine DDR but instead of following steps, you’re creating a beat and background music the more you jump around. I had a blast.

Buying Tickets at Transmediale:

That night, we arrived back to find our friends waiting for us at the apartment. Luckily the amazing tenant, Rylukka (please excuse spelling) had taken care of them. We all headed to bed, oh, sidenote: haha, my friend had arranged for two apartments, which was great, but upon arriving at the other apartment, we found it to be under renovation. We ended up with everyone in the living room of the house, with four mattresses, and it turned into a bit of a camp out, so thank you people who were ‘camping’. I thought it was a fun setup, good for class bonding, but of course, I wasn’t sleeping there, so I probably have a very different point of view. Anyway, the next morning, starving, we all headed out to buy tickets from the House of World Cultures, or World House of Cultures, I wasn’t quite sure on the translation. We followed the directions, ended up in a forest, followed some road signs, and ended up on the other side of nowhere, asked two people for directions (in German) and finally marched a hungry-death-march back to the venue. Upon arriving there, we encountered more bad, bad design. There is a massive entrance way, leading to a set of very large stairs, that you are obviously supposed to climb to the beautiful entrance, so we climbed. We walked around, twice. No entrance. Walked back down the stairs and found the only way to get to the entrance (which was hidden under the stairs) was to climb down an embankment, into what in the summer would be filled with water, trudge along, and climb out the other side, and then arrive at the doors. I’m going to copy/paste part of my report in here so don’t mind the bullet points. Here was ticket buying:

The process to buy tickets:

1. Purchase tickets online
2. Realise that this isn’t possible
3. Call, then make email reservations to purchase tickets
4. Find the House of World Cultures ( good luck!)
5. Prove you have reserved tickets by email. Note: there are no email stations at the ticket desk.
6. Prove you are a student without a student card.
7. Purchase Festival pass (70 Euros)
8. Pre-book tickets for events the next day, so long as they’re hosted by the House of World Cultures. If they are hosted by Transmediale, but happening elsewhere, one must go elsewhere to pick up pre-booking tickets for the separate venue for the following day.
9. Realise that if you do not travel ridiculous lengths to get pre-booked tickets, then you will find yourself in the situation of wanting to attend a sold-out event (even though the festival pass has already been paid for).
10. Carry loads of tickets and a festival pass around with you everywhere, playing a game of cards every time you try to go to a room, event, or installation.
11. Become insanely frustrated and discouraged.
12. Wander (somewhat) aimlessly between exhibition, lounge, and auditorium while waiting for next lecture or show to start.

To say the least, it was difficult. I was told it was very “DDR” - Which no, as I learned, does NOT refer to dance dance revolution, and no, the DDR museum is not what I’d hoped for, the dance dance museum but rather a museum to some political party. Who would have guessed? I mean honestly. So after snapping at each other (insane hunger, frustration and confusion to blame) and then snapping at the ticket attendant, and apologising because we were hungry, we headed off back home to find food. Transmediale can be described very easily. I’ll go more into Cbase and CTM later, but for the “Transmediale” part it was... an exhibition centre, a lounge, and keynotes. There were a few notable pieces, a video of a massive wooden clock that was changed every minute by actual construction workers, very impressive; a news feed fed through a loopy looking LED structure, (see photo) and the whole Electronic Boutique section was great actually, responsive video systems, a structure which detected data flowing through the air, and moved via little cute printer motors to represent the information flow that we cannot see, and an assortment of inner tubes functioning as chairs. The rest was mediocre at best. Maybe it was amazing art, but from my perspective, I wanted to interact with things, see them do something, be immersed in them, and that really didn’t happen. It was just a museum for strange stuff otherwise. And please, take note Transmediale people: I have seen better Keynote presentations from sixth graders, at least they use visuals. Reading your highly academic article to a massive audience for an hour constitutes itself as torture, not enlightenment. Props to the mad scientist, he was entertaining at least.

Back to Berlin:

This trip was all about (for me) getting to know the city, or at least part of it, through the eyes of my friend because he knows the good spots to go to, and this I did. It was great, it was unhurried, and fantastic. We went to an internet cafe with amazingly presented food (even you would be impressed Heather) for ~5 -7 euros per dish, and we stayed there for hours and hours working on the internet. (Sounds boring I know, but we finally got to work on some stuff that had been neglected). Then there were all the amazing little restaurants...I HAD SUSHI! GOOD SUSHI! Oh thank you awesome sushi place, which was right beside Morena. Beside the sushi place was an awesome Thai place, and beside that were two 2nd hand shoe stores with hundreds of heels. It was the best city block ever. We even found a cute little bar, Maria bar, which had beautiful caipirihnas. We all went to an Indian place one night which had fantastic curries and five of us ate, appetizers, drinks, curries, tandoori chicken, et al, for 80 euro. That is impressive. I love Berlin and not just for its amazing food and great prices, but for the neighbourhood, it was so incredible to see all these awesome little ethnic places jumbled into one tiny area, all with a strong sense of character, the French cafe with a very French menu, and little lace bits on the walls, and amusingly, (there are a TON of Danish people living in Berlin) Danish writing all over the bathroom walls, in the French cafe in Berlin. It was fun.

Another fun aspect was meeting up with our other friends from school who were staying with someone in another part of the city. We met for dinner, and after a very painful text messaging-in-Danish/English conversation, we met with them and headed to what I thought was a restaurant that looked like a house, it turned out it was someone’s apartment and they host dinners there every Thursday. I thought it was a great experience, there were 7 of us, which was 2 more than expected, and we all had to cram into a living room with two other tables of people, there were about 25 people in the apartment total, including the hosts. The dinner was salad, cabbage rolls, and a chocolate mousse, and it was super, super ‘gemütlich’ - cosy. It was so much fun. It was just really a neat concept and one I’d love to do when I buy a place, or places as I’m planning to.

The next few days were spent meandering through the neighbourhood, attending Transmediale events and going to Club Transmediale which was a big club hosting some of the partner events. Like C-Base, it was a partner club, and had WAY better stuff than Transmediale. The menus at the bar were electronic scrolling things in an untraditional way (looked like projections but weren’t), the walls were covered in drawings, the chairs were made from cardboard, folded up to support weight, there were amazing laser projections on the walls, there was a hallway dedicated to Habbo Hotel, there was a giant car crash made out of wood, which you could climb in (see photo) and be a part of, there was a dj-ing stand turning not records, but lego, where the lego colour and size dictated the sound that came out (yippee!) and there was a thing called the sonic wargame with a crazy man in the centre, directing 5 sets of DJs on a battle of sounds that they were making as the others were playing, it was insane but so interesting.

We spent the last big night out as a group going to C-Base to watch the performance that made the trip for us. This was performed by a group called O2L and the Shaidon Effect with Picamotics. One of these groups, I think O2L were the dance pad/Djing people who were providing the background music and live drumming. Then there were the dancers. Dancers did their thing, doing cool dancy movements, but the cool part was that their movement was tracked by infrared , and fed into a projector, which then played it back with a 1-2 second delay. Essentially, there was a ‘shadow’ or outline of the dancer, so it looked like the dancer was dancing with someone. This was turned into a fight scene, where the dancer would throw a punch and duck and weave, and by the time she was ducking, the shadow was throwing a punch, so it looked like she was fighting with her shadow. It was brilliant. There were other aspects including body tracking and playing different beautiful effects, it was really impressive. The night continued to include us heading out to another club, Tresor, which turned out to be a massive, literally massive warehouse, with long scary corridors that was a huge techno club. It had 3 floors, multiple rooms, and a lot of fog. Here, all sorts of ridiculousness occurred including my two friends with shoulder length hair convincingly switching clothes and identities for the evening, Swedes going insane, and really letting loose, so much so, that their pictures ended up on a website, me losing a game of psychological tetris, and a mad stampede to collect drink tokens so that we could get our euros back. It was quite bizarre.

On Friday and Saturday the metro system decided to go on strike so we didn’t get out much except by taxi, which was surprisingly cheap, as taxis in Scandinavia are so expensive, I was happy. Saturday night turned into the ultimate designer night, as my teammates and I sat down to discuss some ideas for our most recent assignment. After an offhand crazy comment from one of the members, a project began to develop and from 10pm until 4am, we worked on a concept, discussing all aspects of it, and ending with a working prototype. “It needs to be more funky” will be our explanation for the programming process. We were all really excited about this project and went to bed knowing we have something really worth pursuing that we’re going to develop in this module of school and hopefully will present to Transmediale for next year.

The following day was a relaxing day of exploring a flea market, discussing our project, me trying to learn some Danish and ending with a dinner prepared by the people in our apartment, consisting of a bean soup, curry, and brownies. A truly odd assortment, but it was tasty. Combined with a lot of Berliner beers, it turned into another interesting conversation where my lovely Swedish friend admitted it was great to be outside of Sweden, going insane and having fun, which he really, really did a good job of. We played music from our prototype as the background music to the dinner and surprisingly it didn’t get on our nerves, which was a great sign, meant that we actually have something. We headed out to get a mojito from this place that had been discussed often, the Russian cafe. It had brilliant mojitos and an interesting atmosphere of almost-jazzy but kind of tough-antique interior. Following this we headed out to the official gay bar in the neighbourhood, which was as fun as promised. It had red faux-fur walls and ceiling, and more decorative chandeliers than a cheesy lighting store. The bartender insisted so much upon shaking his booty while pouring our drinks that half of them went on the floor, and the other half I poured into my friend’s lap at a truly inopportune time in the conversation. I’m sorry, again for that. Nonetheless, it was a fun time.

Monday was cleaning and leaving day and we visited the cafe and thai restaurant one more time. There’s probably a million things I’m forgetting, and a few I’ve left out on purpose, but it was a great trip, it was good to get away with the team, and so much fun to see everyone really get away and let loose, especially the Swedes, way to go guys. Everyone had a fantastic enlightening moment of some sort and it was really awesome to see that. And how is it ‘all about the balcony’? There was a balcony at the apartment in Berlin that was also quite perfect, just sitting there and observing the world as it is in Berlin.

Until next trip...

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