The state of my tech



Everything around me breaks - it's true that I keep things longer than most people - I don't see the point in getting more new, planet polluting stuff just for the sake of it, but right now I'm in a rubbish tech avalanche, and hey! Why don't you join me for the ride?

It started when my son stuck 2-4 hairpins into the DVD drive of the second laptop (he currently only uses the numbers 1, 2 or 4 and when we asked him he said 2, 4) Immediately after that, my DVD player (the one connected to the telly) died, I never expected that one to last, the on-screen info was misspelled).

Sunday our router died, but we still have our mobile "broadband" from Telia which isn't very broad, it's never been above one meg. We still have the DVD playing capacity of the first laptop, that one's all right still, the plastic casing is crumbling, though. Thank you apple.

But then, RIGTH NOW I wanted to plug in some speakers at the uni where I teach and when it didn't work, I unplugged them again, only to leave part of the mini-jack lodged inside, so now that laptop has no voice. It registers that a mini-jack is plugged in, so the speakers have been shut off.

Sigh.

Subconscious art at Aros Art museum - a rant

Since moving to Aarhus, I've been baffled by the dumbed down attitude towards art here. First off, theres the shop at the art museum Aros. What they mainly sell is cook books, nick-nacks and babba-pappa toys. Not that there's anything wrong with either cook books or babba-pappa toys, there's just no connection to the art - it's like any other slightly out of it "design" shop, catering to slightly out of it customers. You could argue that a shop isn't an important part of the museum, but why not use this amazing opportunity to continue the vision you have for the museum in the shop Like they brilliantly do at Design Museum in London? You learn about design in their shop - at Aros, you learn about cooking with a Weber grill.

In town, the galleries aren't helping either. Far too near to my home a gallery called "Art Snob" has opened, here's a few of their paintings

And there's a gallery that advertises: "design your own painting" - send them a holiday snapshot and they get their band of Chinese craftsmen to copy it onto canvas - I'm tempted to use this service to see what they'd do with a broken jpeg or a gif animation.

So, on to the good stuff:
Tomorrow at the smaller and edgier art museum Aarhus Kunstbygning the graduation show of the art academy opens, including work by Ea Borre whom we'd very much like to work with for a secret club, but until then, I recommend going back to Aros where they currently are having an interesting exhibition of subconscious art. (a notion nicked from Matt McCormick's brilliant film "The Subconscious Art of Graffiti Removal".)


some of the work on display at Aros a few days ago

The piece sits somewhere between perfomance and sculpture, and that's an interesting place to sit. I've been back to see it a couple of times and it is ever changing, but the magic of it is that you rarely see anyone changing it.

Trust me. Start looking at subconscious art - and be honest about it, don't do it wih a snidey, ironic twinkle in your eye - and your world will become a lot more agreeable.