MA IM: Final Expo

Last week we had our degree show and although it was good to see weeks and weeks of work culminating in an event like this, I feel a bit sad about the end of the practical part of our course. So yes, we had an exposition, not to mix up with an exhibition, which means that we were meant to show work in progress and explain our methodologies, rather than worrying about a polished presentation of our projects.

Exhibitions (or expositions) are funny. Preparing an exhibition is like renovating your home. It's all about banal practical things and about getting it done with all the necessary tools within an unthinkable amount of time. It's the time when the simplest things go wrong. It's when the simplest things make you feel proud of yourself. You will laugh, but this was the first time in my life I drilled and put up shelves on a wall. The first time I painted furniture was for my BA degree show. Anila didn't allow me to cut the wood though, saying that it's too thick and that it might be dangerous if I've never done it before. At lease I was allowed to hold it, while she was cutting )

Our last crisis and problem solving meeting on the day before the opening.

On the opening day I expected the whole set up to go wrong, like it so often does. Funnily, the shelf which previously refused to carry the weight of the massive 1950's radio, held it for another three days of the expo. Even all the mini dvd player were working fine, except for one, which decided that is despises the disc inside of it shorty after the opening, although both of them were getting along fairly well for the last 4 hours before it.

I remember that preparing our BA degree show one of our tutors used to say: "I don't want to see anyone drilling on the day of the opening!!!" Ha, she would have died, if she had seen our technician Alan drilling DURING the opening and putting up a shelf for Bayan's projector...(due to several unlucky circumstances) Just to give you the taste of our organisational skills and the charm of DIY. 

As some of you already know, my project is about human extension through media around 1940s-50s-60s the time when radio was of a political importance, when people went to the movies 3 times a week, when first telephones and TVs came into people's homes, etc. It's also about rethinking our current relationship with computers, our hanging on the phone in public spaces discussing private matters and many, many other things. It's about questioning the impact of media on our social, cultural and political life. 

Ok, enough talking! Let me show you around!

Ta-daaaa. Four sets of interviews, three illustrations, a 1950's radio, rotary-dial telephone,

camera and a don't-know-which-year Morse signalling thing for ships. 

All tidy and waiting for the first visitors.

One of my interviewee - Graham's mother.

Anila listening to one of the interviews.

An interview with Ilja's grandparents and with Lena, in Russian only

The radio is still working!

Shu Lea - the organiser of the Moving Forest ( I wrote about it here)

Bayan and Anna

And now some other pieces. Unfortunately, I only have a few,
there were actually many more...

Aesthetically the most beautiful project, in my opinion. A huge room was full of these old dot-printers, all making incredible noise and printing different patterns of letters and signs. 

The project explored the idea of permutations. 

Getting data from a sunlight antenna which was standing outside...

 Operating two water pumps through a data base of tracked mood values...

Anna K's project documentation in the old bathroom

Marco and Bayan

Marco's project was about the way ill people perceive colours. After helping me with the 

documentation of my first workshop at Time and Talents, he decided to do a workshop there as well.

Bayan was projecting words in Arabic on different sites in the city.

Tom worked with a speech recognition device, which would look for word "money" while scanning through different radio stations and print the relevant sentence... The printer stopped working one day before the opening. Typical behaviour...

  

The next day. Celebrating Tom's birthday.

And the last day. The radio goes home!

@темы: Goldsmiths, Arts

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HOW IT WAZ: Soft circuit graffiti at Moving Forest

I'm back from busy craziness and I can do some blogging now! Last Wednesday I participated in the Moving Forest project, which turned out to be very noisy and a lot of fun!

Getting organised at home

...and finally it works!

For the Act 4 I went to Chelsea College of Art and Design to set up my table for stitching. 

There were plenty things going on, like a number of music performances (some of them right behind my back)

Onigiri force supplied everybody with yummy onigiri. 

Graham, my tutor, was showing his Invisible Airs project (together with Stephen).

Emilie with her noisy instrument:

As for me, luckily, I had quite a few participants, all being very enthusiastic about stitching, which made me very happy. I even got some men on board, who were not intimidated by female majority. So every one started stitching one of the 500 slogans for the Moving Forest with cotton yarn, as electrical thread is very delicate and is not suitable for free-style stitching. (Physics is strict!)

As I expected, stitching with "normal" thread took ages, so we did not have much time left for soft circuitry. Nevertheless, you can admire some beautiful luminous and non-luminous pieces here: 

Three hours of Act 4 passed by incredibly fast, culminating with a weird sonic experience behind my back and a neighbour complaining about the noise! Huge fun!!!

  

@темы: Arts

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Moving Forest & Soft circuits

In November I wrote about a workshop, which was led by MzTEK as part of preparations for the Moving Forest project, where we built electronic weapons / musical instruments and went out to a park to annoy people on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

This Wednesday, 4 July the main part of the Moving Forest is taking place and all MA IM students are welcome to participate. A couple of words about the MF:

Moving Forest is "a twelve-hour sound art opera of betrayal and rebellion" taking place on 4th July and "culminating in a spectacular series of disturbing performances in Chelsea College of Art Parade Ground; a one-day coda of debate.

It was first presented at Transmediale.08. Berlin 2008. Moving Forest makes use of all media, bringing together diverse visual/sonic/electronic/digital/ performance artists along with writers, walkers, coders, hackers, mobile agents, twitters, networkers and the general public to realize a contemporary version of a classic play."

So basically it is a framework for various arts projects and I expect it to be fun and have a great time! More information here: movingforest.net

The next bit of the story concerns MzTEK, which is a collective managed by a couple of fantastic girls, one of whom is an ex-imiant (that's how students of MA Interactive Media call themselves ). They organise all sorts of women-only workshops, to encourage female interest in technology and computation.
In April I attended one of their workshops, which was again part of another bigger project. And they showed how easily you can make soft circuits! That is sewing with conductive thread, connecting battery with any other electric elements you like. Isn't it brilliant? Wearable technology!

Sophie's soft circuit on Emilie's lap

All pictures below and the very first one were taken by Emilie Giles

The reason I am writing about all these things, is that the girls inspired me to organise a get-together during MF, to make soft-circuit graffiti together. Again, inspired by knitting-graffiti artists (e.g. Olek), I've been thinking about stitching-graffiti for ages. Hugely supported by lovely Emilie from MzTEK, I'm now preparing a SOFT CIRCUIT GRAFFITI session. If you are around London you are mostly welcome to join! We will stitch Mathew Fuller's 500 slogans, which is a libretto for MF, and then spread it on the streets! Let's invade,  intervene and misbehave! Rock'n Roll!

See you!

@темы: Goldsmiths, street art, Arts

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And yet another workshop

Yes, yes, last week I did another mostly exciting workshop with people who are visually impaired (again at Time & Talents). Most of the participants were again from South London and a few of the participants used to work in a factory for blind people, which was charity based, as far as I understood. 

I was a bit nervous before this meeting. First, I did not know if people there lost their sight with  the age or if there were born blind. And second, I was afraid to say something silly concerning visual media, like to start asking about photography (which actually did happen to me in the very end. I asked a gentleman if he liked taking pictures with his mobile phone...umpf).

But people turned out to be incredibly lovely. They made me feel at ease and I had a wonderful time with them. It's such a rewarding work! You just feel so pleased when your interviewee enjoys your company and is happy to talk to you.

During this session I spent more time on individual talks rather than trying to discuss something with a whole group, which was eventually a good decision, I think. It also enabled me to listen to people for a longer period of time and gave their stories space to evolve.

What was interesting, is that the strategy of bringing an object worked much better in this workshop than in the first one, for obvious reasons. People were so excited to touch a telephone and were much more open to play around with it than the first group. It also brought up more comments related to telecommunication.

As for the core of my research, I found out that, naturally, audio-media like radio is much more relevant for this group. Or that there is such thing as a "book-machine" (which is just a DVD-player with a bigger storage capacity). One gentleman is supported by a computer in various manners: he makes notes about every single detail concerning the household, because of a bad short memory. And you may ask how he saves and retrieves this information. The answer is simple: through voice.


I wanted to publish this almost a week ago, but there is so much happening around my project at the moment that I am behind with its documentation. The next post will probably be on our degree show, it is already in one week and a bit. Lots and lots of work ahead! Eek!

@темы: Goldsmiths

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Extending memories and personal skills

On Monday I had my first proper workshop related to my final project. I visited the Over 60s Group of the social community Time and Talents in Rotherhithe, who were so kind to let me do it. The aim was to tease out older people's memories about old media and above all the way they influenced them in every-day life.

Rule number one: in this country nothing ever works without tea and biscuits!!!

Getting ready: projector highlighting my nose - works fine. next step?

Passing around my rotary dial telephone 

(which I actually do use at home) to evoke memories.

And a camera from the 50s...

The best part about this workshop was again individual talks to people. This is when the elderly feel the attention and interest around them and thus open up, eagerly telling stories from the past. 

What was really interesting is that indirectly I started tracking the specifics of social classes. Most of the participants were born in the 1930s-40s and spent their whole life in Rotherhithe, which means that they were either dockland or factory workers, pub cooks, etc. The docklands was one of the poorest areas in London in the middle of the century, people used to live in slums without electricity and bathroom in the house until 1960s. (I accidentally got this background knowledge by watching an exciting BBC documentary The Secret History of Our Streets, you can still watch it if you are in Britain.)

So naturally, most of these people did not have a particularly intense relationship with media, they had to work hard and spent most of their spare time outside rather than in the house. Another point which suddenly makes all the elderly very passionate is when they start talking about the youth of today and how impossibly often they use their telephones. I found it very amusing to hear an old lady complaining about young people discussing on their mobile what they are having for tea, while being in the supermarket. "I mean, why did not they just sit down at home and write a shopping list?"

I had an idea for the final exposition (which is by the way just in 3 weeks, aaaah!), but my tutor didn't like it at all. So I will have to come up with something new. And, what is much more important, do more research on this topic and think of different strategies. I need to figure out what is the most essential and interesting part of the research. Basically, I need to filter the crucial aspects of extension through media in the middle of the 20th century and how they differ from now...

More more more to come! 

@темы: Goldsmiths

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Street Art in L

A small personal update of street art spotted in the street of L. Inevitably started to memorise artists' names. Welcome to an open-air museum with a constantly changing exhibition  

Relatively new ROA in Shoreditch.

STIK

DON

PEZ

MAU MAU

And random...

"Please wait here until you are useful. Thank you."

Not really street art, but...

@темы: Exploring London, street art, Arts

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Kicking off my final project

(Warning! Not very entertaining and long, but not really academic and dry either.)

PROPOSAL
Technology progresses and mutates rapidly. What was broadly used in the beginning of the 20th century has become obsolete and forgotten. Putting my investigations for the major project in the theoretical framework of the Extended Mind and assuming that technology is a mean of active externalisation of human cognition in the environment, I propose to contemplate on the following question:

If it is true that our cognition is actively extended through modern technology, then which means of extension were appropriated by older generations? Which technology was available to them and how did this relationship differ from the modes of extension available to us today?

Looking for possible answers to this question, I want to address the histories of human relationship with machines and technology with means of media archaeology, in hope to unravel the past and gain a critical perspective on current developments.


STRATEGIES
Reviewing my documentation of the second term, I decided to return to my initial idea of working with elderly. On the one hand I see here a possibility to learn a lot about the extension of mind through technology from a different angle: a distanced view on this relationship, narrated by a different generation might open up a new perspective on our current situation. With a growing number of young people who were born when PCs and internet were already around, it seems to be very important to listen to the generation which can remember the establishment of such truly revolutionary media as radio, analogue photography or telephone in the household. Especially, we should use this opportunity as long they are with us and can share these memories of massive changes provoked by new technologies. Hence I seek a critical engagement with externalisation through new media, rooting my research in media archaeology and looking for parallels and insights which are relevant today.

I believe that working with people externally from the university will challenge me to communicate my ideas more clearly and develop a stronger yet at the same time more accessible concept, on which I will be elaborate in a series of workshops. It will also challenge me in the process of getting in touch to people, trying to break through organisational structures, formalities and unforseeable circumstances, but I regard it as a part of the project. In this unprotected environment I will probably be expected to act more confently and professionally and feel obliged to represent a profound understanding of the topic.


METHODOLOGIES
One of the methodologies which I will use for documentation, will be a picture diary, which will help me to ease my cognitive process through illustration of my flow of thoughts. I expect this strategy to help me illuminate the different facets of the subject.

My research strategy will mostly comprise individual talks to the elderly, which I will try to enrich by focusing on different objects or situations. I will also look into different types of archives with documents dealing with media of the first half of the 20th century. Taking these talks further, I intent to offer one or several workshops, where I will elaborate on the topic of my research with a group of the elderly and ideally with a youth group in a separate meeting. I hope that collaboration with other people will breath life into my project, helping me to prove, dismiss or reconfigure my assumptions.

@темы: Goldsmiths, Arts

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False Memory: last term's projects

Another set of experiments we did, was directed towards exploration of false memories.

My first tiny exercise consisted of writing a letter to Anna K (the Greek ), describing situations and evens which never took place, connecting them to Olympic games and the myth of Prometheus. Luckily, my tactics worked: when Anna read the letter, she was confused and felt is if she had a light form of dementia.

In our bigger experiment we wanted to engage people actively in constructing false memories, which would at the same time deal with cultural memory (= memory shared by a broad circle of people, e.g. historical events, films, books, etc.). Our tutor gave us an idea to look into Stalin's famous practice of retouching of the repressed from all photographs, thus intending to erase them not only physically. This inspired us to let people rewrite a document of historical significance to question its authenticity and the whole concept of media as a credible carrier of memory. Initially we wanted to do it with Mein Kampf, to change history in a symbolical way, but Graham said that this will most likely to take us into a wrong direction. So eventually we decided to go for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as it was written 1948 after WWII and we thought that actually a number of new issues evolved since then.

For this purpose we created a website, where you can still rewrite a paragraph or two if you wish to update the history.

----------------http://annablumenkranz.de/medium-memoria.php-------------------

And hurray, I did something technical after a long break Had to refresh my humble PHP. That's why on some screens the webpage looks a bit dodgy. Still need to work on it...

I posted it on Facebook previously, so I want to thank everybody who participated! I received some interesting suggestions on topics like marriage, education, etc. If you want to, I can publish a best-of list.

The third term has started and my head is totally occupied with plans for the final project. But it takes so long to set up a framework for it. You always need so much time if you want to work with people. But, as I read somewhere a couple of days ago: "If you want to get somewhere fast, walk alone. If you want to come as far as possible, walk together."

@темы: Goldsmiths, Arts

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Sensational Memory: a set of mini-experiments

As my final term just started yesterday, it's time to share my adventures from my previous term or everything will get lost and suppressed by the new stuff.

From end of January until March I worked in a group of three (with a girl from Greece and another girl from Saudi Arabia) and had to face my "germanness" in organisational things, which I was never aware of before. (For instance, what is a person who spent the past 10 years in Germany supposed to say to the Southern concept, that meetings should not be planned and that they just come at some point?) But all in all, the group work was fun and adventurous.

We decided to investigate media and memory, although our first set of experiments doesn't seem to relate to media at all. But remember, media and technology are always involved in everything ) The videos bellow document our explorations of memory and senses.

With our first experiment we aimed to explore perception of retro-technical sounds (like modem dial-up, telegraph, typing machine) put out of context in Hyde Park. Yet we couldn't put it entirely out of context, as looking for a place to hide the laptop we didn't find anything better than... a rubbish bin. While you watch the video, please note: it's just Queen's police. You must admit, that this is disappointing. Not even a proper one. We were told that we need Royal Permission to conduct any art experiments in Hyde Park.That's why the soundtrack of the video - "Her Majesty is a pretty nice girl" by the Beatles.

Apparently, getting in trouble with police is the best thing you can do, when you study anything related with arts at Goldsmiths. The story was a big success in the class.

Sound Bombing. Exploring Sonic Memory.

The second video doesn't really need explanations. Still in Hyde Park.
And this time we didn't even get in trouble

Take a sniff and tell a story. Exploring Olfactory Memory.

And finally, in our third experiment we blindfolded our participants at Brick Lane market, who were supposed to guess the nationality of cuisine by smelling or sometimes tasting the food.

Tasting Memories. Mapping Smells.

And after all of that I became an expert in public interventions... or NOT :-)

@темы: Goldsmiths, Arts

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Поздний визит

Пару недель назад нагрянули мы двоём с моей прекрасной гречанкой Анной в Илюхин офис, чтоб есть гречку... Нет, чтобы забрать бедного мальчика, который остался последним на фирме в столь поздний час. Время ожидания мы провели не впустую, на Анну нашло вдохновение и мы устроили фотошут

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And how was your 23rd of February?

Amazing +17°!

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My favourite shop

Two weeks ago we went to Greenwich again. And going to Greenwich means passing by Lush Designs, a lovely shop with brilliant illustrations by Maria Livings and Marie Rodgers. They print them on lampshades, kitchen towels, cups, plates and and and. It immediately became my favourite shop: so bright, filled with dimmed lights and inspiring images.

When I saw those kitchen towels I knew exactly what I want to do with them. You must agree with me that it would be a shame to use them for the dirty kitchen work.

-

Now our home is (almost) perfect!

And a small Sunday walk:

Last weekend we discovered this secret spot 

on top of a shopping center. Going up...

...walking on the roof and enjoying the view!

And some sculptures in a dusty display window.

 Oh wait a minute, it's an architectural concept. 

St. Paul's from the double-decker's point of view.

Walking around Borough market, we spotted this food store for nostalgic German immigrants. It never occurred to me that you can miss something apart from rye bread and good old sausages. But apparently some people do miss weird chemical Dr. Oetker mixes. The whole setting reminded me of Russian food stores in Germany. It had the same pseudo-nostalgic atmosphere, trying to substitute homesickness with long-forgotten food items.

Have a nice weekend! 

@темы: Exploring London, Design

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My marginal notes

Some lectures are just so inspiring:

Oh yes, almost forgot to mention my main source of inspiration: a place to be during the final exams.

@темы: Goldsmiths, Scribbles

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Peckham - Zimbabwe - India

In our second term we have to define our minor projects, ideally addressing our final project in the last term. As we are supposed to support each other as much as possible, I joined Anila for the first empirical research for her project.

I'll try to describe Anila's background, so that you understand, why we did this strange stuff on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon. Anila is an Indian from Zimbabwe, who moved to the UK when she was 18 and is an English native speaker. She did her Bachelor degree in Arts and works as a curator for various arts projects, festivals, exhibitions, etc. For her minor project she wants to dwell upon the political situation in Zimbabwe. For this purpose she decided to concentrate on the electricity as a source of power and control, because the government frequently turns down the whole electrical supply of the country. For a start she was advised by Graham to pick some wood around her home and then lit a fire and try to cook something, to experience what the lack of electricity actually means.

So now you know, why we headed to Anila's place, had a cosy lunch and then strolled around the house for hours, gathering wood in various parks and carrying a huge bag around. The journey took us through Peckham, one of the dodgiest areas I know in South London. (Well, it's big, but most of its parts are really poor.) It was interesting to see all those beautiful Victorian houses and to know that they are partially inhabited by people who are not well off at all. 

On our way, Anila told me about her grandparents who travelled all the way from India to Zimbabwe, where they settled down, about the Indian cast system, about Indian villages in Zimbabwe and their traditions. But this was just the beginning of the family story. Later her aunt and her mother moved to the UK, her mother married but after several years fled back to Zimbabwe with her children as the marriage turned out to be.... difficult.

This way Anila and her sister grew up on a farm in Zimbabwe and were lucky to attend a progressive mixed school. In all other social structures of the country people were separated according to the colour of their skin: white, black or mixed. Much later, an 18-year-old Anila was sent out to the UK, when her mom discovered that she smoked, which was a terrible scandal. Not the worst punishment, in my European eyes...

I sneaked into a Lidl to buy some German rye bread and wurst. Anila looks perfectly organic in this environment. In fact, I should have bought her instead, she is definitely not genetically modified.

 This walk was an exciting muxture of an intimate family story, distant countries and cultures and at the same time a tour through the dodgy South London.

And of course everything ended with a cup of tea and a piece of carrot cake!
We couldn't lit a fire and cook in the end, as it was already dark and late when we got home.
The End.

@темы: Goldsmiths, Arts

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Back to my Goldsmiths World

The endless flow of essay-writing eventually came to an end and has been taken over by a new term accompanied by fresh thoughts and naive resolutions. After spending one week in the library, I was very happy to be able to attend the lectures and the seminars, which officially started a week ago.

The only positive thing about sitting in the library is the view.

Zoom in and look at the OTHER London on the horizon.

The lovely old building with the white front in the middle is my Lab.

The whole building is a former bath and still has a swimming pool ambiance  

in the back. You can sneak into the ateliers of fine arts students, which are 

in this huge bath part at the moment.

Today we were doing a 6-hour workshop on data base philosophy, as I would call it. We spent a lot of time unravelling cottons of different length, colour and material (some of them even wet and smelly, from Graham's boat), thus trying to understand the principles of data storage in a data base, categorisation of items and the human need for putting everything into a specific order in general. After that we built our own "cotton data base", wiping the whole room with strange connections and knots, letting some cottons even hang out of the windows...
I came home with a headache, thinking of spatial and temporal approaches to map the architecture of a data base... On the other hand, I noticed that essay-writing helped me to take this masochistic relationship towards philosophising-till-your-brain-hurts to a new level of brutality.

Tomorrow we'll have a guest lecturer Steve Goodman, who is a professor and at the same time a DJ. He has done a lot of research on sound in relation to power and analysed governmental sound terror and torturing techniques as well as many other interesting things. Check out his book "Sonic warfare. Sound, effect and the ecology of fear." Hope it's gonna be exciiiiting.

Greenwich park on my first free Saturday for ages

Exploring Shoreditch markets with Anna & Anila on a sunny Sunday

Have a lovely week!

@темы: Goldsmiths

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German Christmas markets and British clichés

Last week-end's visit to Hyde park. Christmas market turned out to be a mixture of what it is supposed to be plus Oktoberfest. 

Mmm, mulled wine or Glühwein or...

читать дальше в моём блоге

@темы: Exploring London

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My hacking week-end

Last week-end I participated in a hacking workshop for women only. Our boys were really upset about being excluded and I still don't quite understand why they weren't allowed to join. But apparently it's a way to get more women involved in electronics... Anyway. 

We didn't really have time to hack into any device, but we created some sound-guns as I call them. 

First step: electronics 

You can see a battery, a switcher, a speaker, lots of wires and other things. On the left is a light sensor, which defines the electronic sound: more light means a higher tone and the other way round. Typical girls: nobody, even the workshop organisers, knew how this electrical circuit works exactly, we just had a guide HOW to do it. I wasn't lucky, I was among the first ones to finish the circuit but mine just refused to work. So when everyone was nearly finished with designing, I still struggled with this part. After several hours, when I started replacing all elements, I discovered that the breadboard (the white base with holes) literally MELTED under one of the elements... 

Second step: design 

It didn't have to be martial, but since provided material for design consisted of pipes, it was meant to be. Yes, you probably could have made something like a flute... But it's so much fun to make a gun in terms of invading a public space.

Third step: testing in public 

On the second day, when everybody was finished (except for me, because my instrument refused to work when I just started designing the instrument, so I had to take someone else's gun), we went to a park and marched all the way through it like an army, annoying people who tried to enjoy their sunny Sunday. 

In the evening I decided to use the sound-gun to do the homework for a Friday course, where we have to intervene in a public space. Me and Maria went to a restaurant with our guns, ordered a coffee, chatted peacefully and then at some point turned the sound on... Five people left immediately, asking us if we both were ok. Another couple asked us afterwards, when our next performance would take place. All in all it felt unbelievably uncomfortable, because every one in the restaurant stared at us. No wonder, it was so loud, that they couldn't carry on with their conversations... But apart from that, nobody said anything, not even the staff. 

See where the university takes me... doing embarrassing things every week... 

Late in the evening of the same day I reconstructed the whole circuit once again from the scratch, but this time it worked, yey! In the morning I did the design. So, here it goes:  

Have a lovely day! I am off to the next workshop, this one is on pure data. Nick will have deepest sympathy for me, I'm sure.



P.S.: Here is a bit of embarrassement from the last week's homework:

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It's been a long while

Now I'll show you our home.

No, I'd rather start with the famous Brick Lane market. We finally managed to get there last Sunday. It used to be pretty alternative (like Camden market a long time ago) but has already turned into something fancy. Everybody was very styled and the place was not cheap at all. But the good thing was we could still walk around and admire brilliant street art.

Look at the pink dragon on the right.

A street artist who is famous for carving his pictures into the walls

It's huge!!!

People enjoying their meal in the street.

Now to our sweet studio flat. It's quite spacious... for London! And apart from having a burglary on the third day, we feel pretty safe. Sounds strange, I know. The really Munich-ish thing about our way of life is that we actually spent more nights in here WITH than WITHOUT guests so far.

Our funny table with funny chairs, which turned out to be very 

convenient in terms of space saving.

Our first borsh )

Our first guests. They kindly left us their brand new 

air mattress for the next guest-generations

Our flat from the lamp's point of view

Online grocery shopping Home delivery to come! 

No more shopping with a huge suitcase

And this is the cute Canada water area. The most quiet and peaceful place in the central East London I've seen so far (No, don't think of the burglary, just keep ignoring it.)

Meet Anna, my Greek fellow student who speaks Russian 

and lives and nearby. Should I call her "pub neighbour"?

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A London-ish week-end

Enough of glossy life, this time I want to show you the shabby side of London. And a lot more. This is our walk on a lovely day two weeks ago:

Well, this park is not particularly shabby, but wait for it...

Ahaaa, here we go, a railway bridge.

What a naughty, naughty boy!!!

 Next we did a tiny bit of the "Secret London" tour, a cool book Ilya got on his birthday.

This is an old market hall, as far as I can remember.

Isn't it cool?! The first public drinking fountain... with chained cups!

Replace it or die.

And we finally got there! Occupy Wallstreet! Worth having a look at.

Don't know why St. Pauls complains, they have PLENTY of space!

Hey look, they're writing about us

This was our alternative just for the case we wouldn't find any flat in London. Good, ey? 

They even sold coffee and tea in one tent. A place for hippies and students.

A weird guy performing a sort of Irish dance, 

but I don't remember what the whole thing had to do with Israel....

 And after this long walk we went to a Brazilian rodizio, which was still planned as a part of Ilya's birthday. (For those who don't know: it's an all-you-can eat with a buffet, which was not that interesting, and with guys bringing you all sorts of delicious grilled meat... and they won't stop unless you turn your card to the NO side. And even this won't stop some of them.)  We had enough meat for the rest of our lives! At least that's what I thought for the next two days...

@темы: Exploring London

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Favourite painters

I always have time for things I am not supposed to do. Like this one. Although I started thinking of this post a long time ago.

Here are painters, who are very special to me. Most of them I love deeply.
And yes, there are almost no contemporary painters among them. That's because in my opinion arts is gone in a very installative direction. So recently I became much more interested in illustrators and photographers. To me, they seem to be more honest in a way, less conceptual.

Ok, here we go. I am sure I have forgotten somebody. So please tell me!

Chagall, Renoir, Vermeer, Banksy, Lora Zombie, El Greco, Gauguin, Ernst, Klee, Turner, Hundertwasser, Vrubel', Frida Kahlo, Modigliani

What about your favourite painters?