I got a bunch of accessories for the office among which a bike stand:

On Monday I also finished the Thinkup hack I wanted to present at the Berlin Hack ‘n Tell.

Tuesday was another long sprint on saba and then off to the event. The presentation went quite well and I think I managed to hit both the technical rationale behind the hack as well as its longer term implications.

On Wednesday I wrote up the Thinkup thing over at Monster Swell: “A full Twitter index in your Thinkup” and requested my full history from Twitter.

More saba. On Thursday I went to a book presentation by Jonas Westphal at the FES about the society amidst digital change. It is good that these kind of books are being written to make palatable the socio-technical changes to people not so well versed in these developments. I have several similar reports like this at the studio by the WRR, RMO and by Rathenau.

I also embarked on my first experiment in Taobao shopping (inspired by Jan Chipchase). If this is succesful, I’m quite sure this will be the first of many more.

And finally on the weekend it was the gallery weekend here in Berlin and I took the chance to visit half a dozen in half an hour.

The week before last (I’m running one week behind), was a good weak. Easter Monday was spent cleaning up the house which is now finally fully operational and fit to live in.

Tuesday was spent getting back on top of work.

In the evening I got tipped of by Mathias Schindler that there would be a talk in St. Oberholz about the value of free knowledge. I visited it but it was more of a free for all with the writer spouting their well trodden arguments (and quite a bit of gibberish) and Mathias doing much of the same.

I have written before about how copyright in Germany is locked up in a fierce protectionist policy that benefits only those that have something to lose and not those with something to gain. Germany’s cultural production is not even that interesting for the world at large, but the biggest reason to maintain it: it employs a lot of people. The debate right now is strangely being dominated by ‘Tatort-autoren’ which is odd since the show is on public television and quite dull.

The transition to more dynamic (i.e. not as strictly regulated) copyright is underway and the more the powers try to protect copyright, the more they expedite its demise. It still must be painful for the Tatort man and all those in his camp to be so very much on the wrong side of history.

Also, I’m going to talk about our agency working model —the “Heist” model— at an upcoming Hybrid Talks.

Talking about copyright, on Wednesday the Pirate Party hit 13% in a national poll. I’m also going to present about open transit data in the Abgeordnetehaus Berlin alongside Stefan Wehrmeyer and other notables on an invitation by the Greens.

At the end of the week I went to DAM to see the Blind Sequence Trust exposition by Joan Leandre. I wrote about my impressions of that exposition which is very much recommended seeing.

I also wrote quite a bit about theater that week it seems. A piece about what you should see in the Schaubühne and a piece about the German/Dutch theater debate I attended at the Deutsches Theater some time ago.

I also fixedbetter Tijs’s version of the Anobii to GoodReads exporter and moved my books over there where you can find my reading. And I wrote a bit about how Jan Chipchase’s experiment pertains to the design of withdrawn objects.

The end of the week was marked by an impromptu visit by prof. Scheiber to Berlin which was celebrated with pints of Augustiner and Korean food.

De serie video’s Blind Sequence Trust van kunstenaar Joan Leandre speelt in DAM nog tot en met 5 mei.

Leandre is een kunstenaar die al decennia lang bezig is met het gebruiken van computer 3D engines van allerlei vormen om verhalen te vertellen en emoties op te roepen. Het werk zoals dat in DAM te zien is, is lastig te plaatsen, maar zowel de beelden als de muziek zijn bijzonder goed uitgevoerd waardoor dingen die niets met elkaar te maken lijken te hebben, toch weten te boeien.

De geavanceerde 3D engines die nu beschikbaar zijn maken het ogenschijnlijk makkelijk om complete werelden te schetsen en te manipuleren. Werelden die zich alleen niet houden aan de regels van de werkelijkheid maar er zelf eentje creëeren waarin alles kan. Leandre put uit science-fiction en de natuur voor zijn werk en maakt daar uitgebreide bewegende collages van.

Het hergebruiken van deze 3D engines zorgt voor een verwarrend resultaat. De artefacten van 3D engines zijn terug te zien net zoals de billboards waarmee bomen worden gerendered en de particle systems die normaal gesproken zorgen voor explosies, rook en vuur. Buiten de game-logica geplaatst krijgen deze effecten een totaal andere lading.

De artiest zelf geeft in dit Rhizome-interview allerhande verklaringen voor zijn werk maar zoals zo vaak bij dit soort dingen, klinkt het naar wartaal. Beter is het om zelf naar het werk te kijken en je te laten meevoeren.

Yesterday night I went to see Maß für Maß (Measure for Measure by Shakespeare) at die Schaubühne here in Berlin and it marked the first occasion where I saw a play directed by the intendant of that theater Thomas Ostermeier himself (see this Guardian piece for a bit of background).

Picture by Arno Declair

Up until that moment I had seen lots of pieces by other directors at the same house which were —I’m afraid to say— quite boring, almost all except for this one: Die Macht der Finsternis by Michael Thalheimer. The dance pieces that Falk Richter makes together with Anouk van Dijk are also very much worth watching, but not theater really.

Maß für Maß has its issues of course but as said it is astonishingly better than the other plays at the same venue. It is one of Shakespeare’s predictable problem plays. So predictable in fact, that you could remove the final half hour and you would not want for closure in the story. At times this performance is too much aimed at the aged and distinguished Schaubühne audience whose tastes and sense of humor diverge somewhat from ours, but that is to be expected. What was most refreshing was the uncompromising physical brutality of several scenes. A welcome breath of fresh air, not to mention the splashes of water, in a local theater climate that prides itself on stuffiness.

A week or two ago I attended a discussion at the Deutsches Theater ‘Holland in Not’ that was organized because of a recently published book “Der Kulturinfarkt, vom Allem zu viel und überall das Gleiche” that proposed to close half of all theaters in Germany.

That prompted quite a bit of debate in the German cultural scene as well as the discussion at the DT. The event hosted by the Deutsches Theater brought together notables from the German theater scene and invited Alize Zandwijk (head of the Ro Theater) and Johan Simons (intendant of the Münchner Kammerspiele) to explain the Dutch situation to the gathered Germans.

What had to be laid out again for the audience is that German and Dutch theater are organized very differently. In Germany the theaters have their own ensembles that play a broad range of repertoire in their own house but seldom or never visit other houses in Germany. That means that in a certain area you know what you will get, but you will also never get anything else. In the Dutch situation, groups are separate from theaters (though some have their home venues) and each play is performed on tour through the Netherlands. Theaters are free to program whatever they want. When it comes to funding and entrepreneurship, the Dutch systems is already operating quite lean with a lot of free groups and experiments creating a lively theater scene (most of which is going to disappear). In Germany theater is concentrated in monolithic houses that are endowed lavish budgets.

Explaining just those differences, which some panelists also had to come to terms with, took a lot of time. The rest was filled with rallying the known entities against the barbarians outside of the gates. No amount of misrepresentation or reassurance was spared to achieve that goal. Alize Zandwijk and Johan Simons played their role of cultural asylums seekers well supported by the Germans proclaiming loudly that they will never let it go so far.

What happened in the Netherlands (the Times has also picked it up) was inevitable in retrospect. I wonder if none of our artists have ever read The Art of War. It stands to reason that if you neglect your allies, let your supply lines wither and do not maintain your fortresses, you open yourself up to attack from any rag-tag band of marauders that happen to be in the area (or in government). That is what has happened to an arts sector that had become utterly complacent and lax thinking that they were beyond dispute. Such arrogance will and should be punished.

Things move much more slowly in Germany and abrupt cuts will probably not happen. Some budgetary restrictions and reorganizations might well benefit the theater landscape here if employed with vision but even that seems unlikely. The Dutch example is useful to scare off critical discussion of the scene here.

Alize Zandwijk made a defeated impression and was quite incoherent. Simons remarked that as an intendant he enters into a dialogue with the city, develops a discourse and as such has a lot of authority but if he has to leave, his institution will not be diminished. The intendant of the Deutsches Theater showed that he is on the ball and wants to nip sentiments such as the ones in the book in the bud.

However well intentioned the debate was, it did at no point leave the realm of cliché and touch the real issue at hand: the devaluation of authority everywhere in society. Authority that intendants in Germany are used to having and will probably have for decades to come because of inflexibilities built into German society. In the Netherlands that same authority has evaporated and none of our culture heads know what to do without it.

One panelists said the audience based grants that are planned in the Netherlands will be the purest form of commercialization of the arts. You could call it that, but you may just as well call it a democratization that has been long overdue. Not trusting people to be able to make the right choices is rarely a good idea. Telling them that you know what is best for them based on an authority that is no longer justified in this day and age is a sure fire recipe for disaster.

As if to emphasize that notion, the gathered audience —having listened to over an hour of turgid debate— was not allowed to interject afterwards. With such an attitude the fortresses of high culture in Germany may be stormed as well.

Post Scriptum

The last couple of years I have seen an insane amount of theater compared to everybody I know. I should be one of theater’s staunchest defenders but having seen so much with so little change, risk and openness I find myself being their biggest detractor. Simons mentioned that the Brandhaarden they played in Amsterdam had been fully booked. If anywhere in the Netherlands there is still a market for the arts and left liberal politics it is indeed there.

From that same festival I had recommended the Kane trilogy to a friend but given it’s rather high ticket price and the fact that theater is a hit and miss affair, I found myself advising spending that time and money playing Mass Effect 3 (at the price of two theater tickets) as a better investment overall.

It is no secret that I think games are the most important cultural carrier of our age but my issues run deeper. A sector that says it creates culture of societal importance, but that cannot mount a viable defense for itself refutes the premise. It shows that what you pay for as a spectator and a tax payer is not much more than self-importance.

Last week was crazy hectic, notwithstanding the fact that I was ill at the same time. Sickness and deadlines are not fun, but thankfully both were survived.

What had to be done was the prototype iPhone app for the first playtest of saba. Which was finished in the nick of time with programming sprints that ended later and later into the night.

Then it was a train on Friday to Amsterdam for the Open State board meeting followed by the more general strategy day on Saturday. A lot of fun was had and important things were discussed during the weekend (see this write-up by Natasja Trifkovic), which makes it all worthwhile, but some downtime would be welcome at this point.

We live in perhaps one of the nicest parts of Berlin I am finding out. It has every thinkable amenity: highly specialized stores, a diverse assortment of restaurants and cafés with some real gems. Our house is smack in the center of this in walking distance of three major U lines. If you talked to me recently you probably know where this is at, but for the purpose of this blogpost I’m going to play mum.

Tourists are few and far between and those that make it out here seem to have a purpose about them. It was noticeable when I took some Dutch friends for breakfast around here that the proprietors’ reactions bordered on the annoyed. Rightly so. The part of Berlin where I’m living has been doing fine and does not need to become a tourist/expat infested over-gentrified hipster slum.

We invite new arrivals to go to the same places everybody else is settling in —I hear Wedding is going to be the next big thing— and please don’t bother us. We may hold out another comfortable ten years over here.

Last weekend I saw Husbands by Toneelgroep Amsterdam director Ivo van Hove in the Schaubühne in Berlin. I was not unequivocally enthusiastic about the play, though it has a boisterous quality that has stayed with me these past days.

Picture © Jan Versweyveld

The Germans on the other hand have not deigned to give the play five minutes before deciding it is trash, see Jule Löffler for Freitag and Sascha Krieger. They stumble over each other and their poorly worded mischaracterizations to denounce the play, calling it boring, grotesque and poorly founded.

This seems to be another case of German traditionalists having a hard time dealing with modernity. Husbands is more entertaining than quite some plays I have seen at de Schaubühne —some of which were ordeals to sit through.

The play is an adaptation of the movie by John Cassavetes which most of us will never get around to seeing. The stage design is in the modern style that we’re used to from Versweyveld and the ensemble gives it a high octane raucous (as in ‘fuck yeah!’) treatment.

Each actor also has a head mounted camera that is displayed intermittently above the stage, translating the cinéma vérité to the theater. Translating it so well that for me the first person view on the screen was more compelling to watch than the overview below.

Music, especially music by Bruce Springsteen, also plays a large role in this adaptation. The Boss perfectly exemplifies that feeling of being a son of the most powerful country in the world that also happens to make the best music in the world. You would think Germans were more familiar with this American Exceptionalism even if from the receiving side.

Being in that position and then confronted with mortality offers some hints to the husbands’ behaviour but they seem mostly the mannerisms of old men. Main stage theater in the Netherlands seems rather obsessed with the middle-aged. I couldn’t care less for them, but theater seems as shaped by market forces as anything.

Last week Peter Robinett sent me a link to this Times article that would seem a bit far fetched if it wasn’t mostly true. The headline (“a Limp Domestic Economy”) doesn’t really cover the article because it describes how massively things have improved in Germany. If I can believe stories, the situation here used to be far far worse. That however is no excuse.

Rule fucking (the Dutch ‘regelneuken’), protectionism and arcane laws still apply and add up to create:

This economy is overregulated, intended to insulate insiders from competition and deeply resistant to change.

But mostly we’re ok. And there lies the exact problem. If indeed the current positive climate preempts further reforms, that will be institutionally stupid.

I was mostly going to blow this off until last week upon returning from Spain I got a letter from the Finanzamt asking me why exactly I needed a Umsatzsteuer-Identifikationsnummer (USt-IdNr.). I had submitted a form for my personal incorporation here in Germany and checked the box that said ‘I need a USt-IdNr. for doing business within the European Union’.

Then, as if the fact that I checked that box would not be enough reason by itself, as if there is a scarcity of natural numbers (ℕ) in the German administration, as if both the people working at the Finanzamt as myself have nothing better to do than spend time on these minutiae I had to get in touch again to confirm that ‘Yes, I really want and need that number.’

This is shameful and if the German administration manages to complicate even the simplest of interactions, I don’t want to know what they do to the rest.

Last Wednesday I was at a gathering by the Institue for Internet and Society here in Berlin in collaboration with Deutschlandfunk called “Berliner Gespräche” about how the internet influences society.

What struck me mainly was that both a professor from the panel and a commenter from the audience held the position that the internet is in fact nothing new. That it is just another medium/channel for people to communicate through. Citing Clay Shirky, I would say that more and faster information flows are in fact different. More fundamentally the internet is the manifestation of a vast new kind of object that interacts with other objects (such as us) in a myriad ways. That alone makes it something new and very significant.

I was asked by somebody from Deutschlandfunk to comment on the proceedings of the evening and I gave them my superficial outsider’s view about privacy and journalism and how the status quo of both is vastly different in the Netherlands.

On the way home what stuck with me most is that every online entity comprises within itself a subjective view of how reality works and how it wishes to interact with that reality. Facebook has notions about the desirability of privacy that permeate through all of its interactions with its users. This is the same for any websites. They are simulations that run on a subjectively chosen subset of reality just like games do.

The tool that we often employ when talking about games is Ian Bogost’s concept of ‘simulation fever’ that says that subjective simulations cause people to either accept or reject the simulation based on their position. The critical alternation (or altercation if you will) between acceptance and rejection puts the user in a moral frenzy termed simulation fever.

The subjective values that websites impose most clearly on users right now are their views when it comes to privacy but there are a slew of other values that are inherent in any web application which users may or may not accept when using them. If you must generalize —as a populace— the Dutch mostly accept those subjective realities while the Germans mostly reject.

The Dutch use sites as means of communication and self-expression while grosso modo ignoring the consequences of corporate ownership. While Germans forced by social pressures to use sites such as Facebook, try to mitigate their complicitness by employing sabotage and other defensives strategies.

There is in both countries a minority of people who are aware of the issues and use these services critically. For any meaningful discussion about the internet, they the most likely people to turn to.