[ 22:46 monday 6 july – haggerston road, london ]
twenty-three photos from foo east in cambridge massachusetts. two days of intense discussion, invention and inter-disciplinery ping pong. aaron and i did a session on “the next democracy”.
view the full set here
: c :
[ 16:29 saturday 27 june – haggerston road, london ]
twenty-six photos from cambridge, halibut point and wingaersheek beach in massachusetts. i was in the area for a week at the start of march.
view the whole set here.
: c :
[ 20:30 monday 8 june – liberdastrasse, berlin, germany ]
the front room of timur’s house is a cross between a bicycle repair workshop and a bohemian salon. on one side of the room there’s a big shop window onto the street, currently displaying a selection of linus’ mumpelmonster booklets, badges and political pamphlets. behind this five bicycles stand in various states of undress, two upright, two upside down, one on its side. the other half of the room is occupied by two desks, a sofa (my bed), book shelves and assorted computer and audio machines.
my previous visits to berlin have been in the midwinter fastness. now the snow and heavy skies are replaced with vibrant foliage and street culture. the transformation is marvelous. yesterday i went cycling with timur, weaving around the backstreets from kreuzberg up to mitte and into the north of the city; lapping up his observations and commentary as we went; darting off occasionally to explore an alleyway or buildings that caught my eye. we stopped to visit the courtyard of humboldt university where timur is (supposedly) studying. there we were surprised to find ourselves confronted by a dozen tv cameras and journalists huddled with a solitary figure dressed in a monk’s cowl with a placard on which was written “europa: der kontinent der melancholie”. nothing was really happening. it looked like everybody was waiting for something. the scene was somewhat difficult to understand.
then in a moment of inspiration timur proclaimed “maybe angela merkel is coming here to cast her vote in the european elections!”. scarcely were the words out of his mouth then the lady herself ambled in, flanked by a couple of bored-looking security guards. i grabbed my camera and started snapping. merkel passed the protesting monk and through a door. timur and i were right behind her. a porter muttered at us in german but didn’t seem particularly bothered when we pushed past. so we watched as she collected her ballot paper, went to a booth, cast her vote and reemerged. then she walked past, just a foot away from me, gave a brief statement to the journalists outside in the courtyard, and was gone. i’ve never had any strong feelings about mrs merkel but i found her overwhelming sense of ordinariness rather charming. there was also something friendly about the lack of heavy security or protocol. i couldn’t help but reflect how different it would have been in london.
by some fortunate synchronicity mako and vajra were both visiting berlin (from massachusetts and california respectively). i met mako in an anarchist bar at two in the morning, talked intensely about the struggle between scientific method and intuition, then went off to dance with jan, claire, timur and adeline in a pink-fur-lined gay club in kreuzberg until dawn. vajra i found at a cafe in the north of the city and we cycled out together to the eye-popping soviet war memorial in treptower park.
each time i come to berlin i’m struck by the sheer civilisedness of the place. this afternoon timur, linus and i biked out to go swimming at badeschiff, an open air swimming pool stuck out in the middle of the river spree. what a magical idea. after a chilly swim we reclined on deck chairs, observed warily by a heron and some ducks, and absorbed the comings and goings of the city around us.
: c :
[ 17:00 saturday 23 may – haggerston road, london ]
i’ve uploaded a set of twenty-three photos from london taken during february and march. the aerial views were on a return flight from california when the flight path, time of day and weather conditions conspired to give me perfect views of the whole city from east to west.
the snow came at the beginning of february and lasted almost a week, by far the best snowfall i’ve experienced in london. the shots at columbia road market were taken over an hour and show the changing light as the weather changed and the snow started to fall.
sergio, pradeep and i spent several glorious hours on london fields constructing an enormous snow totem which was taller than us.
meanwhile my roof terrace was transformed.
view the rest of the photos here.
: c :
[ 22:37 sunday 3 may – asinara, sardegna, italy ]
seated on a rock in the mirror-flat sea several feet from the shore. i leapt here from the white sand beach of cala sabina, ghostly pale under the half moon. the limbs of the bay stretch in from either side, silhouetted against the star-spattered sky. the nearest artificial lights twinkle on the coast of sardegna twenty-five miles away. i can make out the town of porto torres by the concentration. the only sound is the gentle shush and heave of the water moving against the rock and sand.
this island of asinara is one of the most strange and beautiful places i’ve been. it’s ten miles long and five miles wide with a human population of no more than forty. in 1885 the freshly-minted italian government designated it as a high security prison and relocated its community of five hundred shepherds and farmers across the water to sardegna’s nurra peninsular. shortly afterwards a quarantine station was opened for mariners with contagious diseases.
during the great war austro-hungarian prisoners of war were interned on asinara. five thousand of them died here. the ethiopean imperial family was incarcerated on the island during the italian occupation of their country from 1936 to 1942. during the 1970s the facility was used to intern high-level mafia criminals. with poetic irony certain of the judges leading the prosecutions against these same figures also took up residence on asinara for their own safety. in 1991 the island was designated a national park. in 1997, after one hundred and twelve years, the penitentiary facilities were closed down and people started being permitted to visit under strict controls.
what remains is an environment of astonishingly pure nature punctuated by grim abandoned penal structures. the combination is jarring, emotionally confusing.
just two days ago, sitting in the trampery, i decided to escape from london for the weekend and impulsively acquired a return flight to alghero in north-west sardegna. i made no plans for what i’d do once i arrived. claudia kindly sent me a message with a few suggestions. as soon as i arrived i became curious about asinara. in alghera i asked people if there was somewhere i could stay on the island. a lady in the council office said she thought visitors could stay in the old barracks.
so i rented a car and drove fifty miles to the tip of the nurra peninsular where i stood looking across to asinara. there was no sign of a quay or ferry so i drove back south to the nearest town, stintino, and picked my way down to the compact harbour. i learned that there was one boat each morning crossing to the southern tip of asinara. someone also had a mobile phone number for one of the people working at the barracks on asinara. it took several attempts to get through but when i did i was told i could stay.
not wishing to spend the night in stintino (which felt one-dimensionally touristic) i continued south and arbitrarily took a side road to a tiny hamlet with the fabulous name of noddigheddu. this consisted of seven single-storey stone houses arranged around a green. one of the houses was abandoned and the roof had caved in. an elderly lady called giovanna had two rooms where people could stay. i dropped my bags and continued down the dirt track to the coast. just before sunset i was walking on the long deserted beach when thirteen flamingos appeared magically and noiselessly in the azure sky above me, wheeled slowly around where i stood watching, then returned the way they’d come.
this morning giovanna plied me with sardo biscuits and told me some of her family history. her great-grandfather had been a farmer on asinara, part of the community forcibly depopulated by the state in the 1880s. after breakfast i drove back up to stintino and down the track to the quay. the boat was waiting for me. i leapt aboard and we were away across the sparkling water. arriving at fornelli i hitched a lift up to cala d’oliva at the north of the island and dropped my rucksack at the barracks. then i set out on foot and spent the rest of the day walking. except for the three staff at the barracks i haven’t seen another soul.
this is a tough landscape of granite outcrops and hardy low shrubs populated by wild donkeys, goats and birds. about five miles north from the barracks i crested a hill to find a jaw-droppingly beautiful view spread in front of me. a shallow white-sand beach with turquoise sea breaking against it, low woodland behind the beach, a headland extending to the east surmounted by a crumbling genoese watch tower. this was cala d’arena. i picked my way down through the scrub and reached the beach. there was no sign anyone had been there in weeks. the only footprints were from birds and donkeys. the detritus washed up over the winter remained undisturbed.
my excitement at the opportunity to explore and photograph was in conflict with my reluctance to disturb the pristine environment. i trod lightly and sparingly with my heart in my throat. i remembered the excitement in kirmo’s eyes when we walked through ancient untouched forest in lapland. after exploring the beach and the lagoon behind it i picked my way along the rocks to the watch tower then came back over the scrubby headland to the beach. i discarded my clothes and swam in the chill clear water. my first swim of the year. the current was quite fast at the edge of the beach so i did not go out far.
later on, back at barracks, i was served dinner alone in the mess. nobody else is staying. then i walked out to the rock where i sit and write now. tomorrow i want to hitch a lift down to cala reale to explore the cluster of old prison buildings there.
: c :
[ 01:38 tuesday 28 april – haggerston road, london ]
another five sets containing one hundred and twenty four pictures. this brings me up to date with everything i’ve got scanned. needless to say another shelf of exposed films has accumulated meanwhile, begging to be sent to the lab.
: karnak :
25 photos wandering round the overwhelming temple complex during the afternoon into the twilight when all the tourists were gone.
: valley of the kings :
15 photos biking out from the west bank with ahmed to the collossi of memnon and up and through the edges of the western desert to the valley of the kings. climbing up to the ridge above the valley to be rewarded with amazing views over luxor and the desert.
: california :
36 photos in san diego to collect an award for trampoline, with shemoel and his friends in san francisco, walking with vajra above muir beach and musical experiments at point reyes .
: bil conference :
33 photos of the bil conference in long beach with quinn, asheesh and friends.
: noisebridge :
15 photos at the noisebridge hacker space in san francisco with quinn and shemoel.
: c :
[ 14:55 sunday 26 april – haggerston road, london ]
last weekend i made a stretcher for antonio’s splendid painting and got it mounted. then yesterday i hung it on the wall above the piano where it seems to fit quite comfortably. evidence beneath. you can see stromboli at the top right with the god eolo blowing over it. on the rock an octopus, a hermit crab and a salamander. neptune’s symbolic trident hovers at his side and he holds a piece of coral in his hand. a ghostly dolphin jumps behind him.
: c :
[ 01:23 thursday 16 april – piscita, isola di stromboli ]
here i sit at the little table in front of the window where i have spent so many thousands of hours typing at successive computers. the window is open, admitting the rush and scrape of waves breaking on the beach beneath. the lights of a yacht several miles out glitter against the dark horizon. the air hangs still and listless, hung between the passing maestrale and the coming scirocco. these are weeks of constant change and volatility for stromboli.
just before eleven i set out on the mule track to punta u brunzu. as is my wont i carried no torch. the night is moonless but once my eyes have habituated themselves the starlight is enough to sense the outline of the path in peripheral vision. i enjoy the heightened sense and alertness that comes with this. one’s feet become like cats’ whiskers, sensing with each step for a loose stone or unexpected root, ready to reply in a moment by switching weight or springing aside. in the absence of artificial light one walks in a world bounded by stars and the wide horizon, whilst a torch shrinks one’s awareness down to the immediate cone of light. tonight the island’s air is thick with the perfume of bushes and shrubs still verdant from the winter’s rain.
having reached punta la brunzu i spent an hour and a half sitting on the helipad watching the volcano. two craters emit a continuous red glow, the pulsing light indicating that magma is close to the surface. one of these, to the ginostra side, erupts every fifteen minutes or so with a broad orange fountain of lava several hundred metres high. the other, to the stromboli side, erupts less frequently with a narrow white-hot jet of similar height, accompanied by a terrifying report and roar. walking up the sky was clear and bristling with stars. as i reached the helipad the whole sky became covered with cloud and within ten minutes not a star was visible. an hour later the cloud dissolved as swiftly as it had appeared and the full panoply of stars was revealed once more.
when i arrived on saturday it was serene and sunny. that night a strong scirocco sprang up and easter sunday saw huge waves crashing on the beaches at punta lena and scari. the waves were breaking over the quay so the island was completely cut off. the evening brought heavy rain. then on monday the wind and waves subsided but later in the day a maestrale sprang up and blew through the night throwing the sea against the rocks here at piscita. this in turn dropped off and tuesday was a glorious day of intense sun. everyone on the island has changed colour, myself included. again today again was hot. tomorrow another scirocco is expected.
to my delight caroline was was able to come over from saturday until tuesday, joining the small group of friends who have visited me on both islands of st agnes and stromboli. meanwhile almost all my stromboli friends are here and there has been the usual thrill of catching up with each other’s lives and adventures. it remains a thing of wonder that so many years after i left the island and returned to london it still feels like i have a life here. after two days gathering threads and absorbing myself into the island’s rhythm it’s as if i never left. every time i come here i’m confronted with this parallel life and the opportunity to pick it up again. but every time it’s clear to me that my path still lies with the complexity and abstraction of my other life and to that i willingly return.
this visit has been particularly freighted with memories. paolo kindly let me stay in his beautiful little house on the lava promontory overlooking spiaggia lunga, which was my first house on stromboli. i lived here for my first six months, my first winter. at this table i wrote the specifications for the school for social entrepreneurs’ learning web in november 2001. in this room i was joined by friends from all over the world to celebrate the arrival of 2002. in this room i learned of michael’s death in january 2002 and constructed my simple shrine as a focus for my mourning.
it was cold on monday evening so i lit the wood-burning stove. i remember it being delivered from lipari and installed by paolo. the only other time i’ve stayed in this house was in june 2003 when sergio and i stayed here for my final week before moving back to london. we organised a huge dinner on the terrace for my friends. sergio and i cooked far too much food including a vast rice salad which ended up being fed to the fishes.
tonight is my last on stromboli for now. i declined several dinner invitations to be here on my own. this afternoon i collected the huge painting of neptune that antonio’s been working on for the past year. it will hang above my piano in london.
: c :
[ 01:16 thursday 9 april – haggerston road, london ]
jonathan taps away at his laptop beside the table whilst i patter away on mine atop the piano. in the kitchen one of the strange ayurvedic teas sergio brought back from sri lanka is boiling away. this one consists of tiny curled pieces of peppery-smelling dark brown bark which must be boiled until the liquid reduces to a fifth of its volume. already it’s a thick stinky black soup. previously i inflicted a different one made from stewed wood chippings on adam and tree. their verdicts on the flavour: “basement” and “sauna” respectively.
at the weekend i started transferring all my wanderer despatches going back to 1999 onto a new platform. i’m having to copy and paste each post manually, set the correct date and time and remove blojsom’s maddening markup. i’m up to 2007 so it should soon be ready to unveil.
meanwhile here are eighty-four more pictures from the beginning of this year.
: berlin (xii 2008 – i 2009) :
23 photos from the chaos communications congress and new year with timur and his friends
: luxor (i 2009) :
49 photos of backstreets, village life, the nile and ruins
: aswan (i 2009) :
12 photos of aswan and the enchanting island of abu
: c :
[ 17:09 thursday 26 march – virgin flight 11, london to boston ]
arcing across the ice floes towards nova scotia the cabin crew distributes a meal they badge as “breakfast” or “a light snack” depending on the time of day. today the latter. the meals are identical either way. inflight time has a structure and grammar of its own, blithe to the daily cycle of hamlets and cities far beneath.
each time i cross the north atlantic i’m fascinated by the changing character of the sea ice. at the moment i’m seeing it frequently enough to start discerning its language of structure and motion telling the seasons as surely as the cycle of buds, leaves and blossoms with which i’m more familiar. the monolithic expanses of white i saw a month ago are now fractured and stretches of blue are beginning to gaping amidst them. from my vantage point eleven kilometres in the air patterns become evident. as patches of ice become detached from a larger body and float out into open water they form T-shaped units with graceful curlicues at the branches. these units sometimes form convoys, each element smaller than its predecessor. flying, whilst destructive, permits us to appreciate aspects of the earth’s beauty that are otherwise imperceivable.
this is my fourth trip to the united states since the start of the year. the first was in mid-january, immediately following my return from egypt, when i travelled to san diego to give a talk and receive an award for trampoline. the weather was serene and sunny but i was obliged to spend all but a few minutes inside a conference hall. from san diego i flew to san francisco to attend meetings. i was staying with shemoel so each evening when my trampoline work was complete we recorded songs and experimented with different ways of combining acoustic and electronic sound elements. one day we drove up to point reyes to meet sara winge at the home of bart hopkin, a friend of hers who invents instruments. bart showed us some of his creations, which ranged from a plucked string instrument with strings were connected in triangles to wind instruments where corrugated tubing was used to generate standing waves. shemoel demonstrated one of his sound sculptures and we showed how live processing frameworks such as max/msp can be combined with micro-controllers such as arduino to create extended instruments. after that we all played together for a couple of hours, a delicious mass of filigree sounds.
the second trip was in february when i travelled over to long beach with emma and james to give a talk about one click organisations at the bil conference. bil was conceived as a parallel-universe ted with a focus on new thinking but with open access and free entry in contrast to ted’s exclusivity and expense. i caught half a day of the very first bil in monterey last year on quinn’s advice and this year i was eager to attend the whole thing. the organisers gave me the second slot in the main hall, following a talk about privacy by brad templeton. i’d decided not to use slides but changed my mind at the last minute and threw together a deck during brad’s talk. it was a lovely event. i particularly enjoyed meeting the folks behind the noisebridge hacker space in san francisco, who drove down en masse. also a young photographer called michael strout with a great talent for lighting, who did a shoot with me in the courtyard. mitch altman was there with his brain machine glasses. they flash leds over one’s eyes and buzz into one’s ears at carefully calculated frequencies which change over a twenty minute cycle. the effect is most peculiar, one is gradually drawn into a meditative state and begins to hallucinate colours and patterns. mitch also invented the magnificent “tv b gone” remote control. entering a japanese restaurant with him on the final evening in long beach the two giant tv screens mysteriously deactivated themselves leaving us and our friends to converse in peace. on the way back to london i stopped in san francisco for one night to see shemoel. we recorded a couple of songs and decided to call our project “the dupio”.
my third trip was at the beginning of march when i came over to boston and cambridge for some trampoline meetings. it was bright and clear for the first couple of days, though there was still snow on the ground. i drove out to point halibut and traversed the jumbled granite boulders around the coast. it was hard going but this is a terrain i know and love from cornwall and the isles of scilly. the trick is to keep one’s momentum up, trust one’s instincts and resist the temptation to think about it. in a way this has become a metaphor for how i live. there is a pleasure in sensing the angles of each rock in turn and allowing oneself to ricochet from one to the next. on the third day there was a snowstorm which i enjoyed mightily. i found my way to a noisecore show at tufts university where one of the bands dressed as giant rats. i heard a performance by a minimalist cellist called jeremy harman and we got together to play the next day. late one evening i visited mako hill in somerville to better understand his position on zero-cost duplication and swap notes on web music services. he was very impressive.
this fourth trip is to attend foo east at microsoft’s research centre in cambridge. having been invited to last summer’s event in sebastopol i wasn’t expecting another chance so i was flattered to receive the invitation. i may talk about any of organisational analytics, emergent structure, one click organisations and live processing. i’m also bringing some musical kit with me so it’ll be possible to do a session with reaktor if i can interest anyone in that.
: c :
// charles armstrong // 