Weekend Update

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See, I told you I’d update it after the weekend; and in this case its a good idea! This week is going to be insane, we have school from 9-4 nearly every day and the one day we didn’t I was working at the preschool (yesterday). So the weekend went like this, Friday night project based outing to a club, Saturday night helping on the barge with a concert, and Sunday night, Harry Potter.

Friday night we prepared some ‘interventions’. The project we’re working on currently is to re-establish social connections between people in the night club setting. Currently, people tend to cluster in small groups of friends, and are generally closed to opportunities for social connections be it for purely social interaction reasons or for romantic ones. People tend to get protective of themselves at clubs and consider nearly every advance a threat and it is very difficult for people in clubs to meet one another. So, what we’re working on as a low-fi prototype is to develop ‘interventions’ in which we create excuses for social interaction. Some of the interventions we’re working on are to affix speech bubbles above people’s seats with statements like “Single Tonight” or “I like cheese” anything to foster conversation. Secondly, we were considering throwing a ball into the crowd and observing if people pass it around, creating physical connections which could lead to verbal interactions. Third, we are trying to get the club’s blessing to change the restroom signage back and forth between men and women; creating awkward and confused moments where people would communicate with each other for clarity. Finally, we made some tee shirts that have our mobile numbers on them with the message “SMS me!” to see if people will send text messages to us and thus establish communication. So it’s playful stuff, I quite like it, its interesting to look at the social psychology of groups and how they react to one another. On Friday we got our tee shirts together and headed over to Romy’s house to pre-game at her communal kitchen area and then head to the club. We got to the club around 10 or 11pm and it was a fair line up but nothing unusual, we got put at the front of the line because we’re working on the project, but then couldn’t get in, and as we were arguing that we’re working on the project, we need to get in (it was at capacity), a fight broke out beside us in what can only be called perfect stereotypical action. The club night was host to young people (15+) to create an environment for them to celebrate urban culture (read: hip hop and immigrants). So we have a ton of people who are not Swedish, at a club, underage (though, legally) and in a hip hop environment. Then we have a massive fight. It was like, come on, do you really need to fulfill the already obvious stereotyping of this situation by validating it? Sigh. So we moved on to a quiet hotel lounge/club around the corner where our tee’s went unnoticed but we got to sit and enjoy each other’s company at least. (See pics of Ry and I and Jonas and I)

Saturday was barge day. I headed over there around 3pm and began hauling stuff from upstairs to the next floor down to empty out my room which had become host to wires, lighting, endless electronics and some random parts. I got a fantastic workout and a clean room. All worth it. Then I helped to set up for the concert. The concert was unique, the group is called 8bit. Basically its music based on computer games and systems that were all 8bit. (http://8bitklubben.dk/) It was quite funny because there were about 30 guys there and only about 4-5 girls for the first few hours then the party filled out and became an all night geek-dance-a-thon where people would randomly tell me, “ooh I remember this music from the level in (insert game name here)” so it was fun, there was even someone there dressed up like a really bad impersonation of Ozzy Osborne, with black and white leopard print pants, a red jacket, those tiny black circle glasses and long black hair. It was special. I got to control some of the lighting on the LEDs (which are run by an Arduino program which Mads made) so basically one can control the type of display, level of variance and frequency of lights, it was fun to play with. Since everyone was having SOOOO much fun dancing, they decided to continue dancing until... nearly 6am. This was painful and so we had to shoo them out. Finally got to bed around 7 (after discussing video games, sigh) and then got some sleep. I woke up to the sounds of the meeting I was supposed to be in already in progress, so that wasn’t especially great, but whatever, it was sleep. We had the architects meeting for designing the smaller barge, and I worked with one of the guys, Thomas, we thought we were doing really well creating a gorgeous paper structure to display our idea (complete with transparent textile walls and lighting) until we turned around and saw the trained architects with perfect miniature models. I still think ours rocked! :P Sunday night was more meeting, finally getting to talk about what I could help out with on the barge and I’m very excited for the opportunities that I have in front of me. Its going to be an amazing time, and I’m looking forward to working with everyone - there’s so much on the horizon. Cryptic, but we’ll see if I can explain more in the near future.

Sunday night was nice - we had our first official Sci-Fi night (which is a tradition Jonas and I are starting) and started it with a non-sci-fi movie (ah well) Harry Potter & the Order of the Phoenix. Complete with Swedish subtitles. Woohoo! I may start d/l my shows with Swedish subtitles because it seems like a good way to learn, I was following along with Harry Potter pretty well. Though, I don’t think that “bloody hell” translates well. :P Funny English-isms.
School wise - we cleared out our classroom for an awesome soccer game the other day, that was fantastic and tomorrow night we’re all going to a Stereo Total concert, apparently its a big underground band from Berlin. All in the name of research. Beautiful.

So I think I’ll head to bed, I have about a trillion things to do in the morning.  and I have loads of pictures to add to this but unfortunately they’re on another computer so I’ll have to wait. And so will you.

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