The turn above from Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße into Schönhauser Allee yesterday around 19:15 is where I almost got hit by a woman driving a black car with license plates LDS HS 179. Shaken but not too shaken I pursued them up the street to demonstrate my discontent and to write down the plate number.

I should have seen that they weren’t going to stop though they usually do but this was rather unexpected during a leisurely evening ride where absolutely nothing should have gone wrong.

Police will be contacted on Monday and then we’ll see how far this can be pursued.

So that cat is out of the bag: I’ve taken up residency at KANT, the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering. Peter who you may have read before on The Waving Cat just wrote the inaugural post on our freshly pressed Tumblr (tweets are still forthcoming).

I’m in the process of moving over, getting my things in order and doing all of my other work, but I do believe that we have struck upon a mix here that has all of the right kinds of volatile creativity with a solid dash of make.

I don’t know what will come out of it yet, but that is the nature of a lab like this. My main source of inspiration is the Open Coop model as pioneered in Amsterdam North where independent entities team up and create new structures from their intellectual and physical overhead. There has been talk about all kinds of ideas already but we all know ideas are bullshit. The challenge will be to narrow things down and figure what we want to do. I do think that we are heading into the right direction. Onwards and upwards.

I’ve learned my lessons: I will not go to traditional German theater anymore and I will never again book a play without first checking its duration.

Yesterday night I went to the Volksbühne to see Krieg und Frieden, five hours of 19th century Russian war drama, by the Centraltheater Leipzig as part of the Theatertreffen. I had been listening to its soundtrack by Apparat for the past months. It used to be freely available on Soundcloud and is out now on Spotify.

The excellent music and the fact that the intendant of Leipzig, Sebastian Hartmann, had made some interesting statements about the state of German theater heightened my anticipation for this play.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one drawn in by the presence of a world renowned electronic musician. The  room was noticeably younger than for instance the Haus der Berliner Festspiele the day before but unfortunately it didn’t stay that way. As soon as people around me figured out that this wasn’t going to be an Apparat concert, that in fact the bits of music were going to be interrupted by long and boring German theater, many of them left.

The music was good. So good in fact that the play suffered by comparison.

What was wrong with the play? I would give it an A for effort because that had gone into it. But still all of that effort could not improve the poor writing and dramaturgy. We got subjected to literal hours of exposition. Actors enter, they declaim happenings in the 19th century, they expect this to have an affective effect on us and then they leave. Repeat. Sometimes they do this in chorus form which makes it even worse.

The absence of gripping monologues or almost any sharp dialogue did not help the energy level of the play. I felt like I was being beat into drowsiness that was occasionally relieved by the music.

Qualitatively there were lots of good things in this bad play. The acting when it was allowed was actually really good. There were a couple of scenes that managed to be evocative and memorable. The tilting platform was used brilliantly and added interesting dynamic variations to the scenes. It looks like there are two hours of very solid theater hidden away in these five. If only the director’s creativity had been restrained a bit and his darlings been massacred by somebody.

After the main play, a third part was tacked on which should have been scrapped. The actors go into a meta-treatment and engage in extensive amateur-philosophizing. This was the part where I got my much needed bit of sleep (the room was a third empty by then). The electronic lighting and animation at the very end were added in a way that didn’t match anything in the piece. One wonders at the deliberation that went into that if any.

German theater need not be stuck in the past as proven by Ostermeier. Russian classics need not be enacted in a boring fashion as proven by van Hove. That makes the creation of this mix with its good music, quality acting, terrible indulgence and dramaturgical chaos a choice. A choice that should have been made differently.

Unbelievable how many weeks behind I am on these. That’s not wholly intended, but the last couple of weeks have been a bit busier than usual. This was the week of April 15th which I spent mostly in Amsterdam.

I spent a full day with the team on Tuesday working on KAIGARA:

I drank very awesome coffee that Angelo had brought back from his road trip along the west coast of the USA:

We celebrated shipping some projects that night with Kars and Simon and the next day I was back at Hubbub for another day of work. That night it was off to the Open State offices in Amsterdam for a bit of envisioning with our new managing director. A very solid and constructive session, well catered by our in-house team of Bite Me:

My work setup at the brilliant Koko:

The Thursday I spent working at the Open Coop and preparing my Python programming course I gave on the now defunct Gidsy.

Friday I took the train back to Berlin and it was confirmed to me again that train companies are stupid. If I take a different train to Berlin I need to pay the difference in distance even if I start and end in the same place:

And Saturday I also managed squeeze out a long overdue Recess!.

So lots of stuff and more to follow.

The week before this on Monday (almost two weeks ago), I went to a lecture by Graham Harman. Notes on that were blogged in a timely fashion.

That week also involved a one-day trip to Munich to present on the work we did for a client there. More on that on the Hubbub blog in due course.

Thursday I worked at the Kreuzberg Academy for Nerdery and Tinkering next door. I really love how Oranienstraße is coming together as a creative technological hub of import in Berlin.

The rest of the week was used developing Ripple Effect and with maintenance on GidsGame.nl.

The week before this is getting a bit boring, but as soon as the current project is over I promise that adventures will resume again.

German lessons continued even with one of our participants being back in the Netherlands:

Sun was enjoyed at last after the gruelling Berlin winter we had to endure:

And my laptop crashed again during the week and this time because I had already performed all backups and come to terms with the mortality of the device, this time the decision was quickly made to buy a new laptop. This is something I should have done a year ago.

And I’m noticing that Berlin police are very helpful if you’re cyclist. One example:

Last Monday I heard Graham Harman give the International Flusser Lecture in Berlin. The lecture was in German and for me as a non-native speaker somewhat hard to follow, but the present Germans loved it. ‘The English dominated academia’ seems to be problematic for them.

Harman put Heidegger, McLuhan and Clement Greenberg through a comparison and treated their views on the surface of things and their essence. Greenberg sounded to have been thrown in to make a connection to the art world.

Given that being can only show itself on the surface, I started to wonder whether a object based approach to ANT borrowing from programming might not be a useful analogy? The links between objects are along API surfaces that can be made to interact with each other under certain circumstances. The trajectory of an object is its internal state. A state that is in a black box that we cannot access except through the API it exposes. We may be able to open the black box but that could have unintended consequences such as breakage or discovery.

A final example that Harman gave was about writing about something such as wine. He said that by putting it into a machine, you could get a definite analysis of the wine, but lose its essence. To me it seems that a wine writer, writes about wine for humans and a machine writes about wine for machines. Presupposing that the human’s point of view is the only one that is valid, devolves to the anthropocentrism that we had just left behind us. Of course, wine to a robot is something else than wine is to us, and robots may have electromagnetic pleasures that we in turn cannot fathom, but translations can always be made however much they lose of the ‘essence’ of the object (as translations always do).

Harman’s response dives back into qualia, something which I had hoped to avoid:

@alper Not according to Dennett in his essay “Quining Qualia.” There,wine writing is mocked as not providing anything valuable for humans.

— GrahamHarman (@DrZamalek) April 10, 2013

And because of the lecture I found this book New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies and I’m looking forward to reading the interview with Manuel DeLanda that is in there.

Two week notes in one because last week seems to have been too busy to write any.

Week 313 was spent in the Netherlands with a somewhat hectic visit. I spent a lot of time at the Hubbub studio and at the Open Coop.

And of course the inevitable five (!) visits to the Village who were serving only Coffee Collective coffees when I was there:

And that Friday was Free Bassel Day in remembrance of our friend who is still imprisoned in a Syrian prison:

And then it was an ICE back to Berlin already:

I did manage to get some good writing in those two weeks. First one piece about why levying a tax on data is not a bad idea at all: Taxing data is not crazy. And the week after that about Jaron Lanier who is a crazy person with some interesting ideas: Who owns the future?

TORREON should be about finished by now. And last Friday we also forcibly launched the German incarnation of Politwoops now with an accompanying Twitter account because the SPD chancellor candidate posted something he shouldn’t have.

Also I’m doing another bout of programming education for non-programmers in Amsterdam next week with a course and a meetup. More on that in a bit.

And I finished my Recess! post.

Last week we were on something of a tear continuously shipping things (it beats continuous integration). As Kars mentioned in the Hubbub weeknotes I was featured in the rather shiny TNW magazine about the subject of gamification. Much to my surprise this issue was filled with blabbering by Gabe Zichermann. It’s not only that we take issue with the way he approaches games, it looks like everything about the man is shameful. You can read unparalleled levels of douchebaggery over at Kevin Slavin and to my dismay even GigaOM is complicit.

To my shame it took me until Friday night to write my second installment of Recess!

I also got in touch with the government of Tempelhof-Schöneberg to procure all building permits for the area which had some disappointing results. More on that later.

Hi Niels & Kars,

I’m checking in with you guys straight from what used to be Cold War Berlin. Berlin is still in a state of conflict, mostly because of growing pains and a lack of a coherent identity (today they started demolishing the last bit of that wall to make place for luxury apartments). An interesting example of that conflict on the streets is the civil disobedience and destruction themed game Camover. The idea is generally that people with balaclavas go around destroy security cameras and documenting the fact to gain points. Now as if that wasn’t controversial enough, an activist associated with it suggested to extend the game to ‘data goggles’ and destroy those of people recording your visage.

Data goggles obviously means Google Glass. Last week we had a brief discussion on twitter about why Glass would or would not be an obvious device to play games on. Say what you will about the video or just compare it to the Microsoft vision of internet connected fridges.

@kaeru @peterbihr It may turn out like the Move controller, a nifty gadget with a couple of interesting games.

— Alper Çuğun (@alper) February 21, 2013

I’m well aware of the standard arguments against AR. Kars was quick to point them out. These are very valid, but it is still an experience that can be put to a variety of uses. Just look at the Move controller’s whose limited in- and outputs enable a game as interesting as Joust of which the depths have not been exhausted yet. Similarly the hardware affordances of Glass should yield at least one interesting game.

What is the most annoying part of Joust is finding enough controllers to play it with. If Glass reaches the Android like ubiquity that Google is obviously aiming for, we can expect a very rich ecosystem to arise around this. These games will be mostly very boring, poor conversions or techno-wankery such as for instance Ingress but we should not rule out that there may be one or two good ones to pop up as well. I’ll take something that’s half as fun to play as Zumbie looks to be.

Straight up game development of course is not the most interesting thing that such a platform offers. The changes in our social interaction that such hardware engenders will probably be the most interesting hooks to build interesting playful interactions into. So the loony activist above was not that far off the mark, but let us try to be a bit more constructive.

- Alper