tziteras

Here is my submission to the sustainable communities bill call for suggestions. I hope that others feel motivated to publish their SCB suggestions. I think there's a huge lack of dialogue in the current process, and the more we share what we know the more we can counter this -- 0 -- Walking through Bristol in mid recession, there are many many more empty properties as businesses close, homes are repossessed and places become derelict. This reminds me of what happened during the Great Depression in the US: Thousands of properties lying empty while people are homeless or crammed in social housing, or having to endure various hardships due to living arrangements. This conundrum led to considerable social unrest both then and in the recession of the 70s. To solve this problem some turn to squatting, or artists sometimes ask administrators of empty properties for their temporary use for exhibitions, and many positive results have come from this. The arts/community group Artspace/Lifespa...

About a month ago, I went to the "Big Cafe for Transport" event that was happening just around the corner from my house at the brilliant new "Co-Exist" sustainability business centre . Coexist run as a CIC and are just about to launch with a plan to open up green community and event spaces, funded in turn by work and business spaces. I really hope that means a market in stokes croft! After I attended, I'd promised everyone I'd write up about it, and promptly left it as a nagging thing in the background as life took over. But now the official write up of the event has been published so I thought I should finish the abortive blog post I made that same night. A disclaimer : I'm allowed to make mistakes here, so if I've written anything wrong or stupid, please correct me! A big cafe costs 20 pounds to attend. It started really early on a Saturday morning (thus excluding the entire population of Stokes Croft), but it included a lunch (from Kukuva Cafe ac...

Today I did lots of healthy, useful things * , while the news around us is that we are in a recession, a very quick and serious one, and not just as a country but as a globalised western world. What this has led to is exemplified really nicely by the great Big Issue headline that came out a while back "The answer to the food crisis - Grow your own!" - and in general people are rushing to get more and more into planting and cycling and generally into more sustainable lives as they see this is probably the best time to do it - even if this is just a mini bust due to speculation. And when I read an article in the weekend paper about a poor freelance journalist wishing he had studied engineering as a backup trade - and now impoverished by the credit crunch , I was inspired to expand freecycle and other stuff like that into an online community task/project/exchange coordination system, that could fall back into wireless if there was no main internet. That's what I've been...

No time just now! Lots of commentary on fluxus today, flux sports, how to put on a fluxus event, and random natter, but later. For now, just the pics - as they are so in demand! A really nice score, performed on the Monday, when I wasn't around I think... Or was it for the piano recital? All the budding fluxus stars, awaiting our first concert, day 1 Tools of the trade Group photo, before the salad The string quartet performs while the audience throw a big ball up in the air, and chopping sounds begin... Bowls and rakes, still life And finally, our name in lights, in the corner of the big poster... Lots more of these on faecebook, slowly appearing here and there...

This weekend I went back to what I did a few months back , and went down to the Tate Modern all the way from Bristol, to play (very little) crazy music and perform in front of loads of people in London. Last time we were on Millennium Bridge, which (to explain for the non-londoner) is a very narrow bridge which gets swamped around 4pm on a Friday afternoon, by commuters going both ways. We were there lined up with loads of loud and eccentric instruments, in t-shirts and responding to a conductor, and to an orchestra by the Tate, and a boat with lots of improvising musicians (Evan Parker included, who is now coming to the Cube Cinema in June) playing samples of maritime, Thames noises - boats, seagulls, and some of the most complicated classical as well as improvised and participatory music that was a beautiful tribute to that space. This time for us performers it was a 4 day experience - 2 days rehearsal, and 2 of performance, with some of the surviving masters of the Fluxus time, sti...

I came to attend this symposium out of the blue, having seen an email late one Wednesday afternoon, saying our assistant director was too ill to go, and after a quick look at the programme, I realised it was a follow-up to an event I'd seen on video a while back where an entire conference on Second Life had been trashed by a talk which had argued it was all pretty much useless hype. So if this year's presentations were going to be in that vein, it sounded like like a fun time. This being a web 2 conference, lots of it was used, including a live chat backchannel ( http://www.eduserv.org.uk/foundation/symposium/2008/livechat powered by cover it live streaming software: http://www.coveritlive.com/ ), a ning based conference centred social networking site (which as expected didn't achieve critical mass but was a nice feature all the same), and of course lots lots more. Eduserv's Andy Powell started the day talking about these "Disruptive technologies" we know so...

Sir, Melanie Reid's article "I don't want to live in a scratchy world of hemp lingerie" made me reach straight for a pen to reply (this email is a transcription of that, you see), with many references to women's impending return to a boring dark age devoid of skiing, exotic food and sleek accessory porn, forced by "eco-purists" to go back to sewing buttons, wearing rags and to the absolute unhappiness of the world that preceded household appliances. I'm sorry for Melanie, but these are in themselves dark times, in which our senses and ability to experience emotion are dulled by the intensity of the world around us, where any exotic meal, place or piece of information is seemingly at our fingertips, or as Daisaku Ikeda, the Japanese Buddhist philosopher puts it, "This imbalance takes the form of a dulling of our natural responsiveness to life and the realities of daily living". And I believe this dulling has in many ways been brought about b...

Yesterday I went to the shops, in a desperate last push to get some new curtains, the inner liner white £1-a-metre ones that people put in a drawer when they move in somewhere, and then put back when they move out. And mine were all mouldy... Bleah! Anyway, I stopped in Waterstones for ages and bought 3 books: Clay Shirky's "Here comes everybody" , Noam Chomsky's "What we say goes" (hope I don't get in trouble for linking to a torrent, but they're interviews, and that link will give you the full original audio for them) and Rob Hopkins' Transition Handbook . All these purchases were devoted to my quest for finding a way for the re-use and investment in technology to become a strong part of the Transitionista's vision. I think we've got loads of equipment these days that we can recycle and make use of for a long time, and if we all have generators or solar panels, some of that charge can be spent on the laptop... So no matter how stupidly ...

Julian Oliver is a brilliant artist! He's also done a workshop like the one I'm doing now - Loads to look at!!

We live at such a key time, when on one hand we're waking up tragically to the effects of our use of fossil fuel and our extraordinary growth in the past few hundred years to this blip where revolutions can happen at any point, and go unnoticed, because it's given us an incredible luxury as well. As food prices increase and the skies punish us, we are more in touch with all our friends, family and community than ever before through the benefits of telecommunication. I mean the Digital Revolution, or whatever is at the base the geekiness of ham radios, and at the top the equally geeky virtual worlds which start to take a strange grip on the real world - Second Life, Facebook, Myspace, Email, Instant Messaging, Texting and all the other ways we have added to the written and oral communication we had before. In a sense, all the virtual worlds are just an elite's pinnacle at the top of the incredible communications we're capable of as a global population, aided at this time...

Yesterday I attended a very fun and immersive Second Life talk by Art Fossett, the in-game avatar, accompanied by his on-earth alter ego, Andy Powell of Eduserv. It was fun mostly because he'd organised it to take place on Eduserv island, in the conference room, and invited friends and colleagues to attend online. They kept chuckling like a misbehaving class, turning into dinosaurs, cartwheeling around, and calling him Chubster behind his back (on the projection screen, but he could spy them from his laptop so he caught them out). All very innocent fun though and it complemented his talk quite well. The presentation was organised as a series of t-shirts, which took a while to res the next topic name on the avatar's chest. Interesting for the links it turned up, although they kept mentioning something called slideshare, (which I guess I should google!) where the slides will probably turn up soon enough. There are a lot of mailing lists following Second Life activity in higher e...

Workshop is in 2 months, have found http://www.ventrilo.com/ and http://forums.facepunchstudios.com/forumdisplay.php?f=24 and above all discovered Garry's Mod, a modification of half life 2 that allows you to position characters from the game, and the many sci fi characters that forum users have created and posted online, can be used to create situations, poses and scripted movements or multiplayer acting environments. The link I gave above was for a forum where people post the videos they're making, or making calls for actors to be in their movies. But I have to remember that we aren't making movies. Maybe we're making archives, personal archives or documentation about things by encoding it in a three dimensional space. Or maybe parody star wars re-enactments? Garry's mod costs 10 dollars, so I'm tempted to use it to create characters in the workshop on the second day, although that would mean windows machines again, and some of this is so limiting because it...

Yesterday's Dumped (new eco-reality programme on British TV where people are left at a rubbish dump for 3 weeks) was wonderful! Great mix: surreal post-cataclysmic landscape, lazy people having tea, and lots of more extreme eco-talk than I've ever heard on TV - like to what extent do we really need to adapt, where do we stop in our efforts, how far will we have to go etc. The sad possibility I saw was that not only will we one day walk the mounds of rubbish in the dumps, but we'll also fight over them, as some have called them the treasure troves of the new millenium. When there is no other way to get that kind of stuff here from other countries, those will be the only places to get them... So I was spellbound until I realised I'd sat through 1 hour of TV when I usually just catch the news for a second, in that time pondering how to word my letter to TV Licensing about how TV sucks and why I don't want to pay for it anymore.

This Sutra, handed down by Ananda, the Buddha's companion, then found and translated to Chinese by Kumarijiva, is part 1 of a trilogy consisting of the Lotus Sutra, The Innumerable Meanings Sutra and the Meditation Sutra. It is studied and known among others, by Nichiren Schools of Buddhism, and it's his interpretation that I probably share most with: http://nichiren.info/OngiKuden/text/Muryogi.htm First of all, it is meant to be read by Bodhisattvas. Boddhisatvas are people who use what they learn to teach others about how to be Buddhas. When I think of Boddhisatvas, I think of people like Gandhi or Martin Luther King etc, people who fought beyond their own lives for the greater good or peace, perhaps even without knowing what the right way or right practice is. The Innumerable Meanings Sutra says these people will attain the supreme enlightenment that the Buddha attained, eventually, although the short term effect will be that everyone is a lot better off. Laws, people and so...

Here are all the areas of the Section 4 open exhibition, with comments on how they were received and where they could develop: Symbolic Jumble Sale: This was a strong piece - as it constituted the full first week of the Pierian Centre exhibition on it's own and a lot of people saw it. It is basically all the items I picked up when my friends Cristina and family were deported, on display on a table. At first I thought it hadn't gone well because a lot of people looked very upset looking at it, but it's an upsetting thing to see. A visitor reminded me of this, and said it probably really affected people. I thought success would have been if some wealthy visitor had offered to buy for example, the extension lead or the phone charger for £2000 as a work of art, so I could send it back to Bolivia, but although I think this is viable as an installation, I need to do just that, and none of the other things, or it loses focus. Just each item, with a huge price tag. The fact that th...