Friday, November 25

 

 

I spent most of the morning in a meeting with Liisa and Tomas, discussing plans for the Stories Of… event next May. We needed to know whether or not to apply for a grant from Kulturfonden to fund it. In the end we decided to adopt a more radical plan. We will challenge the students to create a week-long event with no budget at all. They will have to barter, beg or borrow everything they need, including performers.

I found time in the afternoon to make a small but tricky change to the Convivial Mechanics website. I rewrote the loop on the Events page so that events automatically fall into future events or past events. While I did this Oliver contacted me and told me about Livecode, which he described as a crowd-funded update to HyperCard. I left Arcada feeling pleased on both counts. I had completed a task I had had hanging over me since I created the site, and I might have the opportunity to play agin with my all-time favourite piece of software.

At 15:30 I met Naa at Itis where crowds swarmed everywhere in search of Black Friday bargains. Naa wanted a dvd player, but this proved almost impossible to find. Instead wqe went to Power and bought a 3D Blu-ray wifi player that also plays dvds if you ask nicely. Interestingly it has an app that allows you to stream YouTube and other online videos directly to the television. This pleased Naa.

Now we have joined Irma at HAM, to see the Yayoi Kusama retrospective. A lifelike mannequin of Kusama stands at the top of the stairs to welcome you. We spend an hour and a half wandering around the exhibition, enjoying it more and more as we go through it. Irma and I both really like her current paintings which, apparently, she paints every day.