Day of Adventures

I'm posting this on the train from Svendborg to Odense, both in Denmark. One of the unis where I teach has a meeting twice a year with good food, better company and fun times nestled nicely among (in)formal chat about the uni, this meeting takes place in the maritime town of Svendborg and I've been there a couple of times now.

Oddly enough, this is the town in Denmark that most reminds me of London - it's a sensibility to the past, a certain reluctance to tear down and build new and it therefore offers up a nice bit of psychogeography. It also helps that the place is heavy on maritime symbols, mermaids, anchors, waves cut in wood abound. I have a troubled realationship with my old Nikon D70 and since most of my memory for the camera has either died or been hidden by my son, I currently have the capacity of four photos on one of the silly 16Mb cards that came free with something at one point or another, but here's half of what I snapped:



Soon it's Odense, birthplace of Hans Christian Andersen - I'm not really a big fan of his depressing fairy tales, but I am partial to his paper cuts. I will choose my four shots carefully - or possibly get a new card.

planning inspiration-adventure

I've organised a few inspiration-adventures for creatives or students over the years, mostly in London when I lived there - nobody seems to go on inspirational trips to Aarhus, Denmark...

Research for these was usually a mix of regular haunts (Galleries, shops, museums and so on) as well as checking listings and asking around for what was on, something easy to do when you know the place.



Now we're going on our own little adventure to Hamburg and while I've asked around, people I know haven't been able too point me to the kind of places I like, so a bit of online investigation has been needed - it's funny how finding quality info takes a while, a simple google of "cool things in Hamburg" won't do, you'll get a start, but to really get anywhere I've found that following trails works, It's been fun to research for this little adventure, I'm looking forward to finding out if my scouting is up to scratch, but I think it is.

I could get into this scouting and guiding, I enjoyed it in London and it felt good to show other creatives good stuff while getting the word out on great galleries and shops, everybody wins.

Oh, by the way, the main reason we're going is this

Why Don't You?

Back in January I was asked to contribute a task to Digital Arts' "Why Don't You?" article. (Funny, it's not the first project named Why Don't You that we've taken part in.)

We made it a project for a secret club as that made sense, sadly it's credited to me solely and I am described as an illustrator and the brain behind a secret club, while I form part of the brain, I am not an illustrator, that describes the other part of the brain, Annabelle Nielsen, far better.

Our task was to send people on an adventure and coming up with this little micro-project reminded me of a student days dreams: To constantly travel the world, live out of hotel rooms and just design like hell with whatever was at hand. This was in 1998 and traveling the world, chatting to clients on your Iridium phone while surfing the net with the other hand sounded damn cool and totally possible.



Years down the line reality is - thank God - different, but this project was cooked up sitting on a hotel room floor, the photo taken in a photo booth, so this sending people off on an adventure was made while being off on an adventure.

The adventure is about halfway down the page. and if you scroll a few more people down, you get to good friend Chris Ratcliffe of Garudio Studiage who will prompt you to build a zoo.

There are a lot of good, little project there to pick from if you need a bit of inspiration, it's funny to see the ones that are overly self promotional, but aside from that, there's plenty to choose from.