A conductor on the Caltrain, ying yang ear plugs and bright toy train braces, talks incessantly holding the doors and calling after each conversational conquest as they disembark. “A couple of years back I bought 250 knives for 200 bucks. They were Chinese but still! There was a sword that I hung on the wall, [...]

Peak tourist season. Airlines are straining at the seams. The cheapest flight Barcelona-Lyon is via Casablanca. Where the hell is Casablanca?… The ticket bought from the airline website indicates 50 minutes in between flights. Plenty of time for connection transfer. I arrive at Barcelona airport to be told that my baggage cannot be checked through [...]

Being an art history ignoramus I go blank when anyone mentions ‘the dutch masters’ but apparently they have beautiful skies.

Fantastic effects of slow sun descending and fast plane rising over the North Sea.

As I sit on the train every morning staring out at the rectilinear view I have been contemplating what it is exactly that I like about mess. I like randomness, the chance encounter, catching a glimpse of some particular combination thrown together in a certain light, with a graffiti scrawl in the corner, that is, [...]

Spending time in new places and different cultures always inspires a greater degree of observation and reflection about yourself and the world around you than might normally be the case. Some things are the same – for example, I always seem to end up living in the middle eastern part of town – and others [...]

One of the most enjoyable moments I had when I visited New York City recently was at the laundromat. Something about a moment of stopping. Being squashed into the the almost subterrain warmth and hum. A child moves from bench to bench uninhibited, chatting to the other washers. We all sit and wait for the [...]

I’ve been reflecting this last year about the nature of life in the ‘oil age’. About the eons of past lives that we chew up in order to fit more into our own. How energy is time, millions of years of sun lived, absorbed, converted. What a particularly contemporary experience it is to travel halfway [...]

I caught a bus-taxi from Linz to the Munich airport today. The driver and I exchanged broken fragments of English and German. It was midday when he picked me up and he told me that he had been on the road since 3am. The second passenger forgot his ticket so we had to backtrack 20 [...]

The main reason for my trip was of course, not food or toilet titilation, but to attend my second Subtle Technologies Festival in Toronto. The theme of this year’s festival was in situ: art|body|medicine. I presented a paper at the symposium called Sticky Sojourns in a Body of Metaphor: Reflections on the contemporary intersection of [...]