NAPLES

Step two of the Italy adventure consisted of two main ingredients: pizza and Pompeii.

ROME

Stage one in the Italy adventure was a night train from Munich to Rome then a blur of a day rushing from site to site to site. Beautiful. Loved it. Lots of rain, thunder, lightening, but we narrowly avoided the flooding. Bling old and new, fountains everywhere, fabulous creamy risotto... 

Italy to Wales

Hello from Lamezia Airport in the south of Italy! Once to get to Wales I will do a FULL update! Internet access has been non-existant in the small town of Tropea where I have been living for the last week... but just as a taster, here is a picture of the island of Stromboli as seen from the beach...

ZKM

After a mildly harrowing night train ride from Vienna to Karlsruhe, we spent 3 days at ZKM centre for media art which is housed in an old ammunitions factory. This was my first visit to ZKM having heard about it for years and I was damn impressed... the scale both physically and the amount of exhibitions, art works and catalogues they generate is incredible... I saw three shows, Medium Religion, YOU_ser and Bit all of which were very interesting. We had a tour of Bit with curator Darko Fritz, just a stunning show. I'm posting 3 images: the robot bible-writer is from Medium Religion (beautiful, so delicate), the big light wall is an installation in the ZKM main foyer by Rosalie, and an image from ZKM from the outside. The glass cube building contains studios for the Music and Acoustics department....

heaven

Finally, bed, coffee and wireless, my idea of ....... The last few days have been a busy blur of traveling of being programed round the clock, hence the silence. So will try and catch up. First... THE LIGHT LAB. We took a visit to this very cool space at the Department of Building and Environment at Danube University. The lab is a dome made of lights that can be controlled to represent the exact lighting conditions of any time of year, any time of year, bright or overcast - where you can test what the interior lighting will be of a building. You make a scale model of your proposed building, put it in the middle of the dome, adjust the settings and hey presto. Aside from its general usefulness as a tool, for an installation artist its just a very interesting and unusual space!

Krems: things on buildings and a nice door

Krems

Todays's lecture with Slavko Kacunko was at the Krem's campus so we took the train from Furth Palt to Krems, and walked through the town to get to campus.

Print collection at Gottweig

The monastery has Austria's largest private collection of historical graphical art. The collection has over 20,000 pieces and dates back to the first reported acquisition in 1621. A digitization project is underway and many pieces are now available for view in an online database - and can also be ordered as beautiful reproduction prints! Get your orders in for Christmas!

University of the Danube, Austria

I'm here in Austria for my third module in the Media Arts Histories program which runs between two locations: the main University campus in Krems and the Gottweig Monastery in Furth. Yesterday and today we have lectures with Erkki Huhtamo from UCLA on a variety of topics related to media archeology. Lectures at the monastery involve a 30 minute hike!

Safely arrived in Cardiff, Wales. In the bosom of family.

traveling again...

After 6 days in Regina I am on my way again, this time to the UK for 2 days and then on to Austria for 2 weeks.... Currently in Calgary airport.

Apologies for the total lack of post over the last two weeks, I have been consumed with art making... Check out my show at:

http://uregina.ca/rvk/residencia_corazon.html

Dinner last night - Restaurant Edgargo

An indescribable La Plata institution... and yes, those are indeed shrunken heads.

The Zoo

Yes, Zoo's are bad but unfortunately they remain a guilty pleasure. I actually set out to visit the Le Corbusier house (one of only 2 in the Americas) but it was closed and the Zoo was near by so... I did meet a bunch of free animals wandering around, all of who were persistently friendly and kept following me. The duck and the capabara (?) I had to really shake. Other than these new pals, and given the original plan for the afternoon, I was more enamored with the zoo architecture than their inhabitants. The condor cage is a HUGE metal structure that is basically an oversized bird-cage, really striking as a piece of sculpture. But yes, some of the animals seemed utterly depressed and I couldn't even bare to look at the tiger.

some buildings...

Football

Estudiantes de La Plata won 2-0! Incredible stadium, overwhelming soundscape, electric atmosphere. Loved it!

Residencia Corazon