I participated in the inaugural workshop

Utopography: Imaging, representing and critiquing imagined worlds organised by the Arts and Science Fiction research group, the Department of Things to Come 

At the Baltic 39, 31-39 High Bridge, Newcastle, NE1 1EW,

1pm-6pm 19 September, 9am-5pm 20 September 2013

Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveller recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had, and will never have.

Italo Calvino

I've been visiting the Shabako Stone, at the British Museum, for as long as I have been living in London, its a source of wonder.

In the twenty-fifth Dynasty, sometime around c700 BC, an Egyptian mythological text was incised for eternity in a basalt stela.  The text contains an account of the creation of the world by Ptah, God of Memphis and patron deity of craftsmen.....

.....For the very great one is Ptah, who gave [life] to all the gods and their kas through this heart and through this tongue, in which Horus had taken shape as Ptah, in which Thoth had taken shape as Ptah. Thus heart and tongue rule over all the limbs in accordance with the teaching that Ptah is in every body and every mouth of all gods, all men, all cattle, all creeping things, whatever lives,.....

Lost and centuries later refoud, the stela was repurposed as the base of a mill. A square hole was cut, the 'eye', to locate the mill shaft, and shallow radiating furrows to produce the flour from the milled grain as the top stone turned. Decades of grinding grain slowly obliterated most of the text.

A selection of films  from the Enthusiasts archive I co-founded is being exhibited as part of Ostalgia at the New Museum in New York,  from 17th July - 25th September 2011

Ostalgia  takes its title from the German word ostalgie, a term that emerged in the 1990s to describe a sense of longing and nostalgia for the era before the collapse of the Communist Bloc. Twenty years ago—after the fall of the Berlin Wall—from the Baltic republics to the Balkans, from Central Europe to Central Asia, entire regions and nations were reconfigured, their constitutions rewritten, their borders redrawn. Ostalgia exhibits art produced in and about some of these countries, many of which did not formally exist two decades ago. Mixing private confessions and collective traumas, the exhibition traces a psychological landscape in which individuals and entire societies negotiated new relationships to history, geography, and ideology.

Hello, and welcome.

Welcome to the inaugural Moderna Museet v3.0 heritage publication.

As part of our centenary celebrations we have been reviewing many of the public domain resources that Moderna co-produced in the preceding hundred years. And, the huge challenge for all of us involved was to attend to the lines of force, the transactions that generated, and continue to generate the nexus Moderna Museet; and not be dazzled by the subjects, objects or buildings they produced.

To trace the history of Moderna Museet, is to trace the history of a creative institution that in 2’12 decisively forked the 19th Century museum trajectory. We diverted from a model which had to constantly expand; commission signature buildings, consume scarce resources, evolve huge administrative hierarchies – exhibition, education, support, management and so on - to a sustainable trajectory where Moderna instituted, in the ancient sense of the word - of founding and supporting, on instituting creative practice.