benn:org

We are in Sibiu in Transsylvania now. Stanciova, the village we were in before, was actually in the Banat area. We went to hot springs in Baile Herculane on the way to Sibui and are heading off to more hot springs a few kilometres up, because it’s getting a bit cold here. I still need to post my big travel report here, stay tuned..

I savely arrived in the very rural village Stanciova near Transsilvania, Romania after a quite interesting trip through Slovakia and Hungary. I went with Lilly, Anka, Emma and Jim – some people that I met at Permalot. It’s phantastic, all details later..

Hello from the wonderful organic apple farm Permalot in the Czech Republic! Will have some more to say in a couple of days. It was a great seminar so far..

Berlin-Friedrichshain seems a like nice place for a little work break. I’m settling in here for a week. Thank you, wonderful 7! The last two days of Read_Me in Arhus were pretty exciting: Apart from a lot of visual and conceptional stuff there was an Oriental Slackers Salon serving tea and various sweets done by Lisa and Patrice, a live gig with a reprogrammed dot matrix printer functioning as a synthesizer playing along various intruments made out of old hardware by Lauren and Paul, a radio station playing randomly created music, a movie mincer, a concert with automated window blinds, another one with Lego Mindstorms robots and VJ sets on self-made software. The first time I saw thrilling live-coding music sessions, meaning people writing and modifying several little programs that generate melodies, hammering beats and flashy visuals while the music is playing. You can watch them coding on a projector. Mostly two or more programmers’ screens are overlayed, so that looks pretty funky already. Here is a very good article by one of the live coders on Perl Music. — Also I talked to Trevor, a rather interesting intellectual with his very own, brusk attitude.

On Saturday Yew-Sun from China/Australia/UK and me started to go back to Germany pretty late in the afternoon. After only a few minutes standing on a road going out of the centre we were picked up by a very friendly and relaxed young doctor that used to hitchhike a lot as well. He brought us to Kolding. Getting out of Kolding was harder than we thought. At the spot that we walked to people were only going to the west coast but not down to Germany. So we walked back into town. Yew-Sun did not enjoy living on the roads as much as me, so she decided to check into a hostel and take the train the next morning. I said goodbye, had a look at a citymap and walked out of the centre towards the motorway. It was getting dark and I found a nice meadow to tent. I thought of the big East Germany party near my hometown that I would miss that night, watched the moon and went to bed.

The next morning I picked some apples from a tree on the way and walked towards the motorway. The bridge over the motorway that I saw on the map the night before turned out to be a small road going through a valley under a huge bridge. No chance of getting up there. So there I was wandering the forests of Kolding, walking through rivers, cow meadows and up hills, looking up at the trees, thinking about how I could get rid of the heavy laptop in my bag through virtual desktop computing. 😉 There seemed to be a lot of horse riding in this forrest, so the paths were pretty good to walk. Finally I could see some signs of the busy service area I was aiming for. Of course the folks in their safe cars, feeling generally unsafe in this unknown, unfriendly, loud environment they have just been dropped in, gave me strange looks when I came out of the bushes with muddy feet, my walking stick and a happy face. I asked two or three drivers for lifts until shortly after an IT technician from southern Germany gave me a lift to Hamburg. He was on his way back from a fishing holiday with his friends in Denmark, and he was telling a lot of stories from his time at the German army. Shooting wooden huts to flames with big machine guns and giving out to younger soldiers obviously is good fun, I must try that some time. It was very sunny when I crossed Hamburg from west to east by public transport and on foot. I stood at the infamous Hamburg hitchhiking spot “Horner Kreisel” for only 20 minutes when a shiny Mercedes with wide tires stopped. Very, very fast we drove to Berlin. There was a big traffic jam some kilometres before Berlin, but the clever navigational system with its soft, yet a little dull and robotic woman’s voice safely directed us around it. As we talked, the driver – a young IT business man – showed interest in my technical skills and as it looks I might do a small job for him soon. Hitchhiking is like a box of chocolates!

cam.benn.org is online again. I was looking around for a good Linux webcam software for a while and for the people interested, now I use camE and I’m very hapy with it. 🙂 It gives you tons of options and runs reliable in the background. — The event started off nicely with the presentation of many different computer art projects. processing.org I found was one of the interesting (check out moovl from the exhibition). Many projects use automated Google queries as their data source and display the output in colorful ways – hmm. I suppose it’s the comfort of not having to write your own spider that makes people accept that Google filters out resp. censors many pages. Ui, tech talk! Well, good night then.. Oh, talking about Google, someone just told me he is going to start working in their research centre in Switzerland. He is one of the people with a Google query art project here. There you go..

I haven’t been blogging a lot lately, you are right.. But now I’m back in the very networked world. I left Ecotopia a couple of days ago and hitched to Kolding in Denmark where my mum finally got married to her long-time boyfriend Heino. Claudia from Berlin, a fellow Ecotopian came with me until Hanover. (Hello Claudia, I had a really, really funny time with you!) The wedding in Kolding was small and cozy, and I had lots of food. I stayed two more days with Heino and my mum at a holiday house a bit outside. Today they gave me a lift to Arhus. Now I’m here at the Read Me 2004 city camp on arts and software. I didn’t know where it takes place, but a friendly person near the university invited me to her house to find out the location on the Internet. I met Patrice and Salsaman from the Transhackmeeting in Pula in June. The camp starts tomorrow morning and is timed by a computer, the red button has been pressed, no human intervention is possible anymore at this point! 😉 Some people have already arrived and there are strange images flickering over their laptop screens and every now and then you can hear squeaky noises and distorted sounds coming from around the small, historical building. I need to cut some network cables now for the poor souls without a wireless card.. 😉

There are people from over 40 countries around the camp site and I met many friends from the years before. It was sunny the first days this week but today it’s raining all day.. I’m writing this from the nice and cute castle Loewenstein, a couple of metres from the camp. Just printed some pages for my workshop about Free Software. Have to go now, so that’s it for today.. 🙂

The Eustory summer academy is over. It was a great experience and I had a very good time with all the youngsters and the other “teamers”. My group did a good job and the presentation of our Eustory website was a great laugh for everyone. Well done, Sindre, Dana, Juraj, Ruth, Janis, Valeriya and Tomek! I really hope to see you some time again!

Next I am going to Ecotopia in Holland and to Read Me 2004 in Denmark. It’s nice weather to start travelling again, so I better go.. =)

I’m Berlin since a couple of days now. Together with my friend Lan I work at a summer seminar a bit outside at the Wannsee Forum. It keeps me busy most of the day. My group is a little quiet, but I’m sure they will defrost soon. Tomorrow we are going on an excursion to the city centre. We will meet and interview a person and include the results in the website that we are building during the week.