Final countdown

It´s over now. A five weeks course consisting of four workshops and a weblog reflecting my
experiences and moods come to their end. What lasts? I don´t know. I did lots of stuff I wasn´t used to do. I opened my mind. I learned. I got to know some great people. I had the privilege to work in groups that combined the most widespread skills and a real nice team spirit. Last not least I had fun. Not the worst balance to strike after five weeks.
Only a few sentences about today: Many things were going on at K3. Some I missed because they were too early in the morning or to far away. But I still saw a lot of good stuff, an awesome children´s book, a hilarious 'secret tree', a test of wine from unexpected countries (Iraq, North Korea etc.), a dark room and so on.
Finally we had our presentation. It worked very well. Maybe our chosen time wasn´t perfect because at 14.15 on a friday most students are either at home, on their way home or they are really in a hurry to come home. Nevertheless we did our stuff, feedback wasn´t just overwhelming, but as it Kami said: "Hey, that´s life".
Life goes on, but this Blog ends exactly HERE.

The end is neither

Nacho did a good job on his computer this morning. Now we are back on the map - returning from our video idea which had needed more time than we had. It´ll be an interactive map and we are on the finetuning for the final presentation, talking about slogans, colors, effects, fonts etc.
Yesterday an Interaction Designer named Björn gave us some new motivation and inspiration. Our special maps could be a worldwide phenoma, he said. But first we have to finish it on the local scale.
Tomorrow this workshop and the whole course ends. It will be a final firework of 20 different projects. I hope to find the time to see as many as possible.

Don´t look back in anger

Our project goes on. We do our best - returning from a deep valley of frustration yesterday.
Leo rescued some of the recordings, Lisa motivated us, Nacho got the programmes he needed. Everything´s getting better again, let´s see what tomorrow happens.

Anger

Fucking shit! What a start of the week.
There is our brave little group who managed to make the taciturn people of Malmö talk and there is a stupid little box pretending to record everything while deleting most of it. This sucks!!!
But how can I complain while Juan broke his camera?
Now we have to scale down our high expectations. How often this happens in ones lifetime, but - being honest - you never get used to it...

Words don´t come easy

Another day of many small steps. It´s so easy to take pictures, buildings, trees and signs can´t complain. But if it comes to people it´s getting harder.
Come on, people of Malmö, talk to us! We are really nice and we won´t sell your picture to the yellowpress. So tell us your little stories and we make a fine piece of art out of it.
If only everybody was as communicative as the Malmö hobos - you almost can´t stop them talking and they are never in a hurry.

Small steps forward

Puh. Exhausting day! Malmö is a comparable big city if you discover it by bike and by the advise of people.
Lisa liked our changed plans very much and so we started quite confident.
After a while we had to accept that not everybody was interested in talking to us, some were in a hurry, some didn´t want to be recorded, one guy told us honestly that he had "no memory" (!!!). Nevertheless we moved from one point to another, talked to people, recognized new sites and took lots of pictures. I enjoyed it very much but I wish I spoke some better Swedish. Leo and Juan had to do most of the talking. Tomorrow we´ll go on. Then we are going to split our group for practical reasons. Making mental maps takes its time.

Free mind mapping

Lisa is right. She wants us to put more of a concept behind our idea and to leave the mainstream of touristic points of interest a bit.
New plan: Let people guide you. Ask them for places they like/don´t like/find interesting/typical etc.
Idea behind: Every suggestion forms a piece of the puzzle of an alternative city map. It´s not about finding the beach or the Turning Torso the fastest way. It´s about discovering new sights of Malmö and giving meaning to places maybe ignored by all the others. The total view consists of all the different individual views. We don´t decide where to go. The last person talking to us decides. We don´t only see the places. We connect the places with the words of people. We want to make maps in mind visible.
Now we are looking forward to getting our sound recording equipment tomorrow. Where are we going to then? We have to ask.

Discover the city

Meanwhile we´ve decided to make our very special map of Malmö. Lisa liked our idea of combining pictures and sound. Now we checked a "normal" map, talked about special, usual and unusual places, ways of presentation and divison of labour. If it works like it should it will be good fun and in the end we´ll have to show something respectable. Of course there are still many details to be settled.
But we are good in time.

Picture it or video reality?

It´s all a question of creativity again. But I´m running out of good ideas.
Now it´s time for our final project. We have one week to plan it and four days to make it.
It´s group work. Our group consists of Nacho, Jaume, Juan, Leo and me. We had a first conversation with our assisting teacher: Lisa, she´s an artist. Then we had to brainstorm for hours, only interrupted for a modest meal. We decided more or less to do something with fotos, sound and/or video. An interactive map showing the "Faces of Malmö" together with typical sounds was one idea. Firstly we thought about writing a song (four of our group play the guitar) and making a music video, but we haven´t got enough time to deliver reasonable results. Now it could be kind of a dogma-short film or an absurd ad.
Tomorrow we talk to Lisa about it. Maybe we get some better ideas. Suggestions are welcome!

Malmö moves

The world is our playground. Which commercial was that again? Our playground or better our dancefloor was Malmö. We didn´t dance too much on that floor. But nevertheless we moved a lot. Maybe it´s not just unique to walk in lines, to build tunnels, to fold paper planes, to let your mobile ring or to say hello to every stranger on the street. But hey, if you are a centuria, doing all these simple things together, it gets a certain power. We couldn´t be ignored by other people. Some copied us - if such a big group is doing something, it can´t be that wrong, right? And while we were greeting people we even spread kind of positive energy.
After 80 minutes we returned to be individuals. Although it was lots of fun I even had missed that independend state in this short period of time, e.g. while we were supposed to march. Maybe that´s one reason why I didn´t do military service.

Highflier plans

Choreographies. Normally not one of the words that attract me very much. If someone talked about choreographies I thought about annoying musical scenes or boring underwater ballet.
Erik and Magnus from the "unsworn" taught me how fascinating choreographies can be. A crossing in Tokyos business district Shibuya becomes a stage, every two minutes when hundreds of people start walking. There are many more possibilities, of course the Nazis had their mass coreographies and nowadays treadmills are part of cool coreographies in hilarious music videos. Unsworn also showed us own choreographies, a great idea was the "Orgmobile", an "human powered vehicle" consisting of eight people carrying another dude.
To slow down a bit we were invited to the "Södergatan Slowfox": Walk 30 minutes on a track you´d normally need only three minutes for, don´t talk and, if 100 others do the same, it lookes just like a zombie film shooting.
That way prepared we had to think about our third assignment: "In the city - the ballet". We are the directors and the actors at the same time. In groups we had to create parts of tomorrows "ballet" and all of us will act together on the whole course. Our idea: Standing and throwing a paper plane. If 100 people do that at the same time it could be an interesting impression. Even when we tried it in a group of eight, people were staring at us and took pictures. That´s our part, one out of nine. Let´s dance tomorrow.

Showtime

Yes, our project. We had pictures, text and videos about our yesterday´s experience, we put another sheet on the wall, presented our film on the laptop since the projector didn´t work. In my opinion it happened all a bit too fast, group one, group two, next group...
I think all in all 12 to 15 projects were described, very good ones, some who didn´t work, some that surprised me. Examples? Well, one group scaled down people, pretended to transform a part of the park into a giant mice trap. I liked that one very much. Another group made people eat buns and took pictures of it. Yummie!
Obviously the Kungsparken Malmö had been kind of an adventure park yesterday, people had to talk, to eat, to write, to hug, to climb, to think and so on. Some projects did even continue on their own, Kami told us about people huging today in the park.
Tomorrow starts the third workshop, the "unsworn". Third time is a charm, they say.

Not just a wall, but...

Sometimes ideas change a bit. Sometimes your plans go wrong. Sometimes you have to improvise.
Today was sometimes. We had no stones, no camera and no perfect place to place our wall. But then we found a rope. And a ladder. And a tailormade bridge. Instead of laying bricks we blocked the bridge with the rope and the ladder. It hadn´t to be a wall made of stone to fulfill its mission.
We had blocked the bridge for just one minute as the first people were coming. Older people who were quite confused asked around and expected us to clear the road. But since we didn´t really react, they made it their own way, climbed the rope with or without help, helped others to lift their bikes, interacted. For some of the people the obstacle seemed to be to high - they returned and chose another way. Some took their time to think about this problem. Some were maybe asking themselves if they did something forbidden by crossing this blocked bridge.

All in all we had many different reactions. We changed a very small part of the park and we confronted people with something unexpected. We showed that for some people a rope and a ladder is like a border, like an unspoken rule they are not willing to break. Others dared more, crossed this small border smiling.
It´s all a question of perspective which walls are too high and which are not.

Social artworks

"No one has the intention of building a wall", said Walter Ulbricht, the first Secretary of the Socialist Unionist Party of the German Democratic Republic, two months prior to the erection of the Berlin Wall.
We have the intention of building a wall. In Malmös beautiful park. It´s because we want to make people interact, help each other and so on. The more I´m thinking about this idea, the more I like it. We are a small group, only three guys. There were several other projects I could imagine to join. I finally ended up in the small wall group. I like it to belong to minoritys. Makes you special, somehow.
The wall won´t be very high, 50 centimeters maybe. What will happen? Will police stop us? Will the people of Malmö tear down that wall? Or is this small obstacle tall enough to make people change their everyday behaviour, at least for two minutes? Maybe they help a mother to lift her pram over the wall, maybe not. What a new aspect: A wall as a symbol of readiness to help.
I think it is both an interesting social experiment and a piece of art.
I´m looking forward to building that wall.

Walkie-talkie

Today we were going for a walk. We went through Malmös park which is by far bigger and more beautiful than I had it recognized yet. We were about ten people, the sun was shining, we talked about a little bit of everything and finally had some coffee.
But why? If it comes to why-questions I love to quote good old Bernie Shaw: "You see things; and you say 'Why?'
But I dream things that never were; and I say 'Why not?' "
Why not? Occupying space by walking as a group can be performing art. We performed as if we knew what we are doing. Our eyes were wide open. Our mind hadn´t finished its widening process, I guess.
Next week we are supposed to transform a part of the park we walked through into a object of our art. Almost everything seems to be possible.
But firstly we have to talk about it. Then we are going for a walk again.

Reset

Day 5, kick-off for workshop 2. Three members of the "New beginings" (sic!) project introduced us into their widespread work (own photomontage on the left, picture from www.nbgngs.com included). They started with a new type of handwriting (s.th. I´d really need) and a bench that seemed to be quite uncomfortable. Some notice boards made from recycled materials didn´t impress me that much, some unique basketball hoops were much better. A radio project reminded me partly of Bertolt Brechts "radio theory". Another one was about walking, talking and eating - add sleeping and my life is described almost completely...
What will be our task? Think about own projects, discuss and have fun. That´s how I understood it. Since I like to talk (and to walk and to eat and to sleep) it´s maybe not the worst job to do.

Another pic on the wall

Wow, what a bunch of good ideas! Today we put all the pictures with our usefull inventions on the wall and had a look on the others stuff. I must admit that I liked many of the inventions and I saw at least ten accessoires I could use, too. The rainy Malmö climate seems to pamper people´s sense of creativity. My favourite: The Poker Claw. Future profession: Professional gambler. Place your bets.

The reinvention of the umbrella

What´s the difference between good and bad ideas?
I think it just depends on the way you are able to sell them.
In my case I had to "sell" my "Cambrella". I told about the problems of an photo journalist who has to work at a place with lots of rain - like Malmö. Then I presented my invention.

Kami and the "uglycute" guys were really kind and said that my idea was good. It was a relief to me. The ideas of the others seemed quite fascinating to me: One guy invented a vest for office chairs with all the necessary accessories in it. A girl introduced us into her plans for an artists mask - she´s sometimes in the mood to bang her head against her paintings and this should protect her somehow. I love that creative climate!

Tomorrow is the big presentation - if the large notice board will arrive in time...

Ugly, but sooo cute

I have to be creative. That´s nothing I´m afraid of, BUT am I creative enough to invent a product the world is eagerly waiting for? And if the answer is "Yes", will I be rich soon?

Everything started in purple. Markus Degermann and Jonas Nobel (picture on the left, sorry about the bad quality of my mobilephone-cam), two guys from the "Uglycute" project, introduced us into their work and they began with the picture on the right (source: www.uglycute.com), showing an exhibition in the Botkyrka Konsthall. "Uglycute" things aren´t supposed to be beautiful in the regular terms, nevertheless people love them.
Even if some furniture or other stuff seems to be pretty basic there is always much more behind.
It´s all about "transforming the normal" into something special, I´d call it "transnormal". Hardboards become "Artboards" and when it comes to terms of commercial arts, Annell Ljus + Form is not selling lamps but light.
I mostly agree with the uglycute philosophy. Well, I wouldn´t buy a Fiat Multipla or a Peugeot 205, they are too ugly and only a little bit cute. But in general - what a cool attitude: "Hey, I´m at least cute!"

Finally we got our task: Inventing and designing a low tech product that doesn´t look like anything else. Nobody should know its purpose but it should help us in our future profession. My profession will be journalist and biro and laptop are already invented. But I also have to take some pictures from time to time and rain can really suck while I´m doing that. So I decided to invent an umbrella for my camera. I´ll call it "Cambrella". That´s quite creative for someone who is not that deep into the design business. Normally my creativity just reaches from more or less unique headlines to the open ending of a good report.
But now I invented something "transnormal". It has just to become physical.

Let´s get started

What a lovely day to open a blog.
Something I wanted to do for years, now I have to, for my course "Art, culture and design".
What can I say about this course after half an hour of introduction? Many things will be new for me as a journalism-student. I didn´t think too much about design within the last years.
But I´m always interested in new experiences and this is definitely a brilliant chance to broaden my horizons.
This is supposed to be a multi-medial blog. Not at the moment, but next time I´ll bring my camera to K3!
I´m already curious to know what expects me on monday.