step 3

step 2

We hope to see all `berlin-bloggers´ tomorrow....

GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

PHOTOS OF GALLERY DEMOLITION PART 1

IN TRANSIT

sitting in changi airport, almost back in berlin. Sitting in the transit lounge of the worlds biggest transit lounge, this is the worlds most generic city. full of shopping malls of tourists buying things that aren't really that cheap, longing for some lost tax free day.

In the midst of all of this are moments of intense localness, usually related somehow to food. Places that recall the rest of south east asia. Hawker stalls and plastic chairs, big chilli crabs and steaming bowls of katong laksa. beef kway teow in the redlight district.

I love airports though. After days of trying to work out a strange city, the airport feels like home. Like a decompression chamber getting you ready to enter your old/new world.

time to board.

Greetings from Jasper and Isabelle

This is a project Izzy and I did together in September last year. You might remember these hot pink dinosaurs when they were small wooden toys . This installation was of six works that sat outside Customs House in Sydney for Art and About 06. They are made out of marine plywood, perspex and metal and sit on 280kg steel plates.

First "Hello" from Alma in Berlin

Hello to everybody,

my name is Alma, I live in Berlin and will be one of the blog moderators, though I'm still wondering, what a "blog moderator"really IS - but as we all are more or less dealing with "floating subjects and identities" (and what is THAT?) I'm sure that I will find a way how to generate a floating moderator...

I'm very happy to take part in the Transitlounge 2007 - in 2006 I was a visitor and I liked the way how Miriam and Katie managed it to focus more on processes than on products (everybody is speaking about that - but only a few people are able to realize it).

Apart from my interest in processes I'm also linked with Transitlounge by my research project on tourism and art. In my opinion every artist that takes part in an "artist-in-residence-program" is a kind of tourist - so most of you will soon follow some of the tourist's paths in Berlin. As your steps are led by images and imaginations about Berlin I'm interested in the way how you now create your "mental map" of Berlin (before you go there), how you will realize that map and how you will surely always change and re-create it (when you're here) and last but not least how you'll reconstruct "Berlin" when you're back in Australia.

That's why I don't plan to be your guide - I suggest that it'll be better the other way round: Maybe I could follow you and your steps and you will be my guide. I want to be a kind of shadow - but an active one who speaks to you, who asks some questions, who collects your images and words and who tries to connect them a little bit. So that's my first step in trying to be a moderator: to create a visible and unvisible shadow.
Hope you'll like it.

Happy to see you soon
and best wishes from Berlin

Alma

feet up in the lounge?

After a bit of a warm-up on the winter chill in Japan, a few weeks in Sydney's not-so-summer paves the way for a return to doonas and beanies in Berlin. Got some new sounds from the back of beyond and a yen for collaborating 'round the Transmediale melee and through February's return to the great indoors. Das Kleine Fieldrecording festival should be a hoot and some abstract sound action for the month in the Lounge should rattle the rafters a little.
Was good to get the low-down and put some faces to the virtual identities at the meet-up in Newtown last night and looking forward to discovering the Berlin contingent's ideas.
More words presently when I'm not in a room full of adolescent network wargamers letting one another's avatar-blood. $%@# internet cafes....

first post from hugo

For me Transit Lounge will be the launching point for a travelling scholarship through which I will be learning from informal settlers (people building their own pieces of the city, usually out of desperation and without official recognition) and the urban professionals who are working with them. After Berlin I will spend the next 18 months in Bangkok, Tijuana/San Diego and Caracas (Venezuela) working with and learning from architects, community organisations, artists, urbanists and the communities of informal settlers themselves.

I will be interested in how informal processes are at work in Berlin. Due to the short period of stay and lack of language skills this is bound to be relatively superficial and naive, a situation i am looking forward to exploring...

Kenzee, I am also very excited about the potential for collaboration and cross-pollenation. I always loved Katie and Miriam's idea of taking up where your predecessor left off, drawing the feet from someone elses legs...

Good luck to those starting off, can't wait to see all that you do.

h