Snapshots from space and narrativity

Ylva and I spent a moment yesterday to visualize memory snapshots from K3.
Here are some of the things we thought of. Feel free to add detail to these sometimes very sketchy memories:

- Maureen Thomas transforming the Narrativity Studio into a jungle of potted plants (1999)

- The interior architect visiting the premises every 6 months or so to make sure nobody violated the design guidelines by introducing soft furniture, patterned textiles, non-scandinavian colours etc.

- counter strategy: "creative allocation", i.e. making a tour of the building late in the evening and drag all soft furniture found (sofas, armchairs) into the studios. Building secret cosy corners invisible from the outside where the peepholes in the doors do not reach.

- The functionalist army: a large collection of Arne Jacobsen "syveren" chairs in black lining up in the café. Since they were such a popular object of theft, they now have anti-theft stickers of the type also used for digital equipment and technology. A hint that they contain some digital technology after all, some active agent that works on environments and minds...

- Video ethnography in the space studio. Large tables with many toy-like objects, playing cards and the like, surrounded by people that through posture and voice signal the serious of the situation in spite of the playing cards. Two persons (or more) with videocams circulating around the table to capture all words, movements of cards or toys, facial expressions.

- Post-it notes in large numbers

- John Wentworth in a yellow costume with feathers. Mika with high-heel shoes and a long scarf artistically swaying around his body. More generally: the narrativity studio as a breeding ground for impersonating the new kind of narratives rather than only writing or programming them.

- September 11. Internet goes down when all want information of the terrorist attacks. We realise that the Digital Bauhaus has no television connection - we are isolated without any information channel. Until somebody finds one old transistor radio in the electronics lab. All gather around in double rows to listen to the news. My version of this memory snapshot is like some old photo from World War II with people gathering around the radio, eager for any information.

- The physical of the virtual in the digital bauhaus. No room for storage. No conceptual or physical space for junk. Piles of junk growing under the stairs to the mezzanines, in spite of all signs, interdictions and restrictions from Peter Winther and the fire authorities.

- Strategies to subdivide large open spaces into small personal spaces. "billy design games" with bookshelves used as walls.

- food habits. The computer nerd/media lab style: pizza and coke served on the keyboard. The Narrativity Style (women AND men) all sorts of ethno, vegetarian, vegan, cross-cuisine food. Maureen preferring red aliments over other. The space studio (men) generally eating meat-brown-sauce-potato lunches at the little Bavaria restaurant.

- The narrativity workshop that somehow ended into the runecast project: Mika Tuomola glueing researchers together with gaffa tape. Maureen initiating schaman voyages and Runic Yoga in the corner studio. Lots of space: there was always another room to appropriate and fill in with new creative ideas.

- Discussing names for the studios - until now an unsolved project! Gropius and Itten were names proposed. Does somebody remember names for computer servers, by the way?

- the very different excentricities of the Narrativity studio and the space studio. Narrativity studio as a collection of colorful theatrical persons kept toghether as helium-filled baloons by Michael Thomsen, who tried to counterbalance the artistic flair with a sound commercial perspective. Space studio very much attuned to the excentric style of Thomas Binder: rustique, very skeptical towards the elitist dangers of aesteticism, with a firm belief in mapping out and verbalizing large fields of knowledge with equally large surfaces of post-it-notes.

- Said Ylva: the only place to exist is on the threshold between the narrativity and the space studio.

- Social computing experiments as part of the environment: plastic dolls symbolizing researchers in the creative environments studio, the "studio sandboxes" where relations within the space and narrativity studios were represented by piling sugarcubes and small plastic objects in the sand. Myu overall feeling about them now: they did not work. We had too much confidence in artifacts conveying meaning by themselves. Or too little patience, or too many opportunities to attend to.

- Grief: Micke Wallin who somehow captured the whole idea of the narrativity studio as a student, and did a lot to make it manifest later as a member of the narrativity studio. He used his knowhow as a filmmaker and stage technician to create corny and hilarious workshops where Narrativity excentricity was confronted with municipal politicians and local industrials in Hässleholm ...