Tuesday, September 25

 

 

The day started with another Jitsi meeting between Aga, Ilpo, Oliver and I, in which we finalised the arrangements for meeting the speakers on Thursday evening. It finished when Aga had to leave for Kamppi.

I answered some emails and then left to join Aga in Kamppi, where she will supervise the installation of an exhibition in the little gallery space on the platform of the metro station. I had to meet Ade, our first Job’d worker at the top of the escalator. I had decided to do this in order to see how the process actually worked in practice.

She found me before I had even seen her coming. I handed her her Job’d rucksack, and we went downstairs to meet Aga, who had disappeared. Eventually she turned up with Bec, one of the artists, and a security guard who opened the doors to the exhibition. Ade and I had not managed to find them and so we both evinced surprise when two of the windows turned out to have hidden catches.

We enter the space and look around. Behind me I can see a turret. The top opens and reveals a circular staircase going down into the dark. It also reveals a warning sign. Aga explains that you need breathing masks to go down, although I never fully understand what lies at the bottom.

I photograph the three of them in the tiny gallery as trains arrive going in both directions.

Once everyone knows everyone else I will leave them and head back to Arcada. I will meet two students and answer more mails. I will then turn my attention back to the blog post, now safely ensconced in Scrivener.

Just before I leave for home I will receive an email telling me that the book I contributed to Culture, Democracy and the Right to Make Art now lives on the web in a free-to-read edition. I will check it out on the Bloomsbury Collections website.

I will classify it as grudgingly doing just enough to count as doing something. You cannot download or print the book, although you can download each individual chapter. You can therefore make a pdf of the book, but only by using a “professional” version of Acrobat, or some similar tool, to combine the laboriously downloaded chapters.

This will not prevent piracy; it will merely inconvenience people who have shown an interest in the book. You can download my chapter from here, and I point this out because it will save you reading the rest of the book – which defeats the purpose of the whole anthology, and makes a nonsense of the work Alison and Gerri put into it.

We could file this in the cabinet marked Unintended Consequences if we decide that we feel naive enough.