blog.plugimi.com ( Sascha Pohflepp )

Katharina just pointed out to me that confused and unfocused contain exactly the same letters.

I just tinkered around with Yahoo’s Pipes for a while and I must say, I find it pretty awesome. The possibilities of manipulating flows of information (quite literal like flowcharts) without the need to code it yourself are endless. Definitely an interesting way of channeling and shaping the ever-increasing amount of information we produce into something more controlled. I can’t wait what brilliant mashups and sets of rules people will come up with over time. It’s just really really powerful.

So I went and made the most obvious thing: I threw all my feeds together to create a custom Sascha-superfeed.

Just think of it as a narcissistic Frankenstein’s monster of information: all the Blogs, Homepage, Flickr personalities, del.icio.us and posts from WMMNA in one place.

The lovely people at Flasher.com have honored Blinks and Buttons with their Flasher Creativity Award 2007 and I’m very happy about that!

They also made an interview with me in which, besides other information, you get to see some of the stuff on my walls.

Unfortunately, I have been grounded for more than a week. I missed the Design Interactions show at the Royal College and could just passively engage in all the sweet controversy around it. But – I’m almost as good as new and there are a few things to announce: There will be a presentation of Blinks & Buttons at Transmediale Salon, Saturday 3rd at 15.30h.

On the 8th of Feburary, there will be the opening of We Are All Photographers Now at the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland. Buttons will be in the show and there will also be a symposium on changes in photography on Saturday the 10th, featuring Régine Debatty, Derek Powazek and myself.

Lastly, it was my birthday yesterday and Linda’s will be soon, so we will celebrate on Sunday the 4th at NBI. Everyone friendly please feel invited!

might hopefully soon change, since I want to try something new. I got a real nice Fender Squier (still a Korean one) J-Bass plus an amp for very little money on eBay and my friend Murat promised to give me lessons on it.

1* I seriously considered becoming a pilot, maybe until age 15 when I somehow forgot about it. I especially was into fighter planes and used to be an expert on all kinds of versions and special armaments for specific planes and mission types. Once at an airshow, I told the pilot of a Belgian F-16 some feature or fact about his plane that he actually hadn’t known before. I guess he was really scared of me. I still love flying a lot and I cannot understand why people would ever opt for an aisle seat when asked. One day I met this 22-year-old guy who was 1st officer with Lufthansa. For a second I really regretted not having pursued this kind of career and I hope to have the opportunity to get a pilot license at some point. So, if you ever need to know what kind of plane is behind you – I can still tell you from at least 15.000 feet distance.

2* I have no clue where my name originates from or what it means.

3* I once met Michael Jackson in a small video rental place in the suburbs of Cologne. At the time, around the mid 1990s, this was highly disputed among my friends, but I swear that it actually happened. He was visiting Phantasialand, a theme-park near Cologne which he really loves, to donate them a carousel. He was staying downtown and on the way back, he apparently thought that they would need some videos for him and his entourage. His bodyguard’s other boss, rents an apartment above the place, and this is how this unlikely situation came to be. So there we were, my dad, me and two random teenagers practically locked in with MJ. This lasted for maybe 30 minutes and when they started getting ready to leave, I decided to collect some trophies. First, I got an autograph on a gift coupon of the store. Then, as he was on his way out, I got really bold and actually managed to shake his hand. He seemed a bit surprised, but was very nice and said “thank you” or something similar in a very high voice. He looked pretty good though – no holes and stuff.

4* I was at least twice considered a threat to my fellow students at elementary school and early at high school. You have to keep in mind that this is late 1980s middle-class West Germany, at the height of the pacifist and green movement. The second time, of course, was because of my mentioned fascination for military technology. The first time though, was just because of the fact that I had got a C64 for Christmas at the age of six and was by far the first student to have one. This alone, and a vague fear of everything technology was enough for some of the other students’ parents to call in a parent-teacher conference to figure out whether I would now be evil influence on their offspring or will even be made into the brainless enemy of humanist education by that machine. My parents had to actually defend themselves for giving me the opportunity to explore the future. From today’s perspective, this seems so ridiculous and this attitude makes me very very mad when I still encounter it in people.

5* I don’t play an Instrument, but I want to.

Aight, so I’m tagging Jonah, Richard, Burak, Ralph and Harm!

A quick follow-up on today’s workshop with Brian Eno:

He’s a very smart and gentle person and I’m glad about that. Since I witnessed the moronic Matthew Barney, I’m always a bit anxious about meeting people whose art I like. Even more peculiar with Brian Eno since he has created at least two pieces of music that through some circumstances I hold very dear.

The workshop was basically constructed around a game in which people had to come up with impromptu and unusual pieces of art in order to identify the different theories and preoccupations about art we all have and then try to vaporize them in a falsification process. It was also meant to make us question what art actually is and why the students do it, arguing that this question is rarely asked in art schools. I much agree, having the impression that in art classes people spend more time debating about techniques and technology than about the motivation and impact of their work, because it’s such a personal issue for many. So this game, or competition, was divided into two parts: show your piece and then talk about it while getting a certain amount of points for both. This was pretty interesting since it nicely displayed the gap between what something is able to express without words and how the reception of the same thing might change when the concept behind it has been thoroughly explained – the score sometimes doubled.

One group actually presented shit. Bags with poo. They never revealed whether it really was theirs or if they scraped it off the dog-ridden Berlin sidewalks, but come on! This is 2007 and not 1967 and besides the fact that poo is hardly shocking anyone, I would never have the nerve to go for that and I was actually pretty embarrassed about their bluntness. They said that they shat for the prize, the first score being about the unusualness of the artwork, which was honest though. Still I was kind of angry about the whole thing.

I believe we did a good job in finding a consensus about what we think is art, but I felt that we pretty much failed at the first part too. What we could agree on, are basically three requirements: there has to be someone, let’s call him or her the artist, who creates something or declares it to be art, often through a performative act. There has to be something which we call the artwork, but this can also be an idea or eventually every conceivable thing, living beings included. Finally, there has to be someone else, let’s call that audience who feels affected by that artwork in some way. This someone might be a single person, even the artist him or herself. So what we get as a result, is basically a triangular relationship in which something is happening, which we would then call art. We think of this as a kind of resonance between the artist and the audience, with the actual art and the world around it as the space and medium in which this resonance happens.

So how to display the space that resonates? We stuck with this physics-derived metaphor and chose air, where, being the medium through which we perceive, this resonance is happening. We got a plastic bag and tried to inflate it but eventually just turned it upside down so it would form a volume that contained a few liters of air. It was a rather beautiful bag, but, as I said, it pretty much failed in terms of conveying our idea. Its sculpural quality was recognized and honored, but the conceptual side of it was only understood when explained, so it couldn’t stand on its own. I really profoundly doubt that obscurantist conceptual art (which we probably could be found guilty of as well with this piece) can live without explanation. Sure it can as long as people buy it, but it will leave the vast majority of its audience clueless. What eventually won was a project that made all the audience dance through the building. I think they probably deserved it, especially since the sight of us dancing made the almost pathologically expressionless and somehow very sad doorman nearly smile.

Two more thoughts from the following discussion –

“In art, often price determines the value whereas mostly value determines price.” That is an interesting statement, if you consider how the art market works. I don’t know how this came to be, but I suspect that so much has changed since the time when art was something much more measurable through the assessment of skills and materials, that you probably need some parameter to gauge quality with. You can negotiate a price, but you can’t discuss about money, so it’s some kind of secondary quality that gets attached and reevaluated every now and then in relation to the market which is probably a factor in itself.

Unfortunately, we just did the very first part of the falsification process and the only theory about art we couldn’t falsify was that art has to have an effect. I deeply agree with that and I was really happy about someone actually making a point for that. If it doesn’t affect anyone (who may well be the artist) it’s nothing.

I will also post a recap of Brian Eno’s lecture Before and after Darwin on WMMNA as soon as I find the time!

Yay, I got a Buddha Machine from Deczka for (postally delayed) Christmas! Brian Eno loves them. Brian Eno also gives a workshop in Berlin tomorrow. I will participate. I am excited!