databeautiful

“A characteristic issue of megacities is the difficulty in defining their outer limits and accurately estimating the population.”
Wikipedia: Megacity, accessed March 28, 2008.

world map from SAS in-flight magazine, Fall 2007

If you were to ask in 2000, in what cities did I get most intelligent and challenging questions after a lecture, my answer would be London and Berlin. This was to be expected. But then things started to change - rather quickly. The intellectual pyramid of the world started to get flat. If were to ask me again the same question in 2004, my answer would be Hong Kong. I was there for 2 weeks in September of 2004 giving a number of my lectures, and the questions i got after every lecture were simply amazing. I had a feeling that people understood my ideas better than I understood them myself, and every question would send into a delightful terror. Terror - because I did not how to answer them. Delightful - because I was seeing in action how globalization and internet has shifted the relationship between a handful of old modern centers of cultural power and every other place.

Equally strong were questions I got after my lecture done via teleconferencing in Columbia in November 2004.

Today is March 26, 2008. I am Mexico City for a Computer Art Congress 2008. I just got back to my hotel after a full conference day and a two hour car drive back (well, Mexico is the largest megacity at the moment, so this part was not unexpected) with two undergraduate students. They study at a new program in digital art and animation at Tecnológico de Monterrey Campus Estado de México. During the long car ride I had one of the best intellectual conversations of my life. Of course, students did not know everything - but they intuitively understood what were the key cultural issues facing digital culture today. When I would explain things, they understood me before I would finish a sentence.

Fernando, a media artist and curator from Mexico City showing his works on his iPhone

Compare this to my reception during lectures in London and New York last year where the audiences at some of the most well-known educational institutions (which I would not name) had real difficulty understanding what my talks were about (and consequently, none of the questions really got into the meat of my talk).London was particularly shocking: almost every question from faculty members involved Walter Benjamin. Why did not I quote or referred to Benjamin? I replied that while I have lots of admiration for Benjamin’s work, I don’t think he can help us to understand the some of the particular details of cultural changes now: such as the relationship between the interface of After Effects software and visual aesthetics of moving images created with its help. Although I don’t remember the literal text of the comment which followed, it was along the following lines: maybe I should dig deeper into Benjamin because somewhere he certainly says something which will help us address such current topics…

As they say, the world is getting smaller. Of course, it is also getting bigger. It is also getting more dense, more networked, more mapped (technologically), more shared. At the same time, it is getting less understood, less mappable (cognitively), and less shared.

This week I am in Mexico City staying in Condesa DF hotel which was the first “design hotel” in this city, and it is still going strong.

The next morning after my arrival I went to the patio for breakfast - and run into my friend Boris Groys.

Originally from Russia, Groys is the author of many fantastic books on art and culture. In my view, he is one of the most original minds of our times. Most of his publications are in German, but there are also two in English: just published Art Power and the classic The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond.

The next morning I had even less “statistically probable” meeting - Michael Nyman. He is also staying in Condesa hotel with a few young people who are helping him to create his first hour long film. The film using footage Nymon shot during his travels and his original music. I was invited to visit the room which became an editing suite - meaning three people including Nyman sitting with Powerbooks. We had a nice discussion about metadata, spatial montage, organizing large amounts of media material, and editing principles of Nyman’s film. I showed the group my own Soft Cinema, which, just as Nyman film, was inspired by “city films” of the 1920s such as Vertov’ A Man with a Movie Camera.

Wow! I am curious who i am going to run into next…