This has been a busy week and I've not had time or energy to write any new posts until this morning. My first month here has been lived out to the full and the honeymoon with Wellington is over. People have been drifting back from the Summer holidays and I've managed to have a few meetings with officials in organisations and have made a start with my research of the cultural industry situation here.
On Sunday I spent a few hours in Te Papa museum talking with Jussi Luukkonen and family, as well as one of our MA students from the Media Lab, Mikko, who is here for student exchange in the same department as myself. Mikko was once a student of Jussi in the Lahti school some years ago. Small world syndrome strikes again!
It was nice to speak Finnish after so long, although with that group the language switched constantly between English, Finnish and Japanese and combinations of the three. Jussi was once leader of one of Finland's pioneering new media companies, To the Point and moved to New Zealand some years ago and is based in Palmerston North, about 90 minutes drive North from Wellington, working in an e-learning company. Palmerston North has a certain reputation here as one of New Zealand's most boring towns...This was no doubt reinforced with the comments in 2006 by English comedian John Cleese, who was of the opinion that anyone feeling suicidal, but without the nerve to end it all, should make a trip there.
My colleague Roy, who was the person responsible for helping me to get my position here, also reappeared from holidays this week and we managed to get out for coffee and a good chat. Roy was interested in my first impressions of the school and the city. He, an architect and designer, describes the feeling of Wellington as 'the Wild West'. I'm beginning to understand that too. It's easy to be blinded at first by the official views, the harbour and the business district rising against the steep hills that surround us here but, the 'street view', is quite another story. In fact you can experience it in Google Earth using street view, which I've found invaluable for planning my visits around the city. Here's three examples of the wild west which are literally outside the entrance to our faculty building.
So there you have it, within spitting distance from the entrance of the school of architecture and design, a locksmith, a strip club and a bordello!! There are so many more fine examples, especially in the suburb of Newtown, where I've already had to take the arse rocket on four occassions for repair etc. I'm starting to think that the wild west point of view might have good potential for my street photography here, in terms of both the environment and also the people. Let's see how that develops over the next few months.
Roy is originally from Hornchurch is Essex and, that too, is part of the small world syndrome as it's only a stones throw from the old Essex market town of Romford, in East London, where most of my family ancestors had their roots. The market was founded by royal charter in 1247. Roy can even remember the treat of being taken to Romford market to see the livestock trading there. The cattle market closed in 1958 but it's quite likely that Roy has watched my great uncle, uncle Reg, at work there. He was the last working auctioneer in Romford market and, somewhere in a shoe box in UK, we have a clipping from the newspaper with a photo of him auctioning the last animals there in the history of that trading in Romford which spanned over 700 years. I reckon uncle Reg would have got on well here in the wild west of New Zealand with his skills in the value of livestock. Outside the cities this is still a very strong agricultural nation and lots of people still live off the land in farms and on smallholdings of all shapes and sizes. In that respect there are a lot of similarities with Finland. I passed by the New Zealand t-shirt store the other day and couldn't help noticing the one with the slogan that read, 'New Zealand, where men are men, and sheep are nervous'.
Against the deep rooted pioneering attitude and agricultural forces of the New Zealand nation I am trying to investigate the most modern aspects of design and creative culture. You might notice that there is a certain contrast here and obvious possibilities for running into discrepancies and being labelled elitist or, generally, off-target in my pursuits. But I've taken the attitude that this country, like Finland, surely has that diversity of culture and practice that allows the modern and the traditional to live side by side and, hopefully, also the modern possibilities can be seen to aid and improve the quality of life for those in the remote parts of the land, as it surely does in Finland. I cannot speculate too much yet, but, nevertheless it is clear that there are some huge structural challenges here that really need to be solved. The Internet infrastructure is totally inadequate and there is an almost total lack of competition in the market for provision of Internet services. My, typical, ADSL connection here at home can only upload at maximum speed of about 130 kb/sec and the maximum download is just above 1 Mb/sec. But, in practice, that is not the extent of the problem. One feature of the service is that total cuts in IP service occur regularly, at anything between every 2 minutes and every 30 minutes. Typically my connection goes down once every 10 minutes here at home. There are only a few critical things that you might want to do over such a connection. The chances of screwing up a web-based transaction, like buying flights or similar, are quite probable. Once into the secure transaction mode it's a race against the clock to complete everything before the connection goes down and you have to start the whole thing again from the beginning.
Everyone I've spoken to about this has just agreed and raised their hands, 'so what can you do?' Unfortunately this problem isn't going to be fixed with the typical ingenuity, of which the Kiwis are famous, and often related to the use of No. 8 wire. What's needed here is an active policy to improve the infrastructure at all levels; the international fibre connections have to be opened and multiplied (well, now there's only one), fibre backbone for consumer traffic has to be planned and deployed and the thinking that, things will work out via future innovations in the use of the existing copper-based networks, has to be buried. Maybe the new government will, get real, with this challenge. At least a lot of people here I've spoken to hope so.
The vehicle above is a Hillman Minx, somewhat identical to the one our family used to own in the 1960s, prior to the purchase of the Hillman Imp which I mentioned in an earlier post. The picture doesn't really have anything to do with this post but, somehow or other, serves as an icon of the attitude that some New Zealanders seem to have towards 'the good old days' and some of the relics of those, that they've managed to maintain through their will and ingenuity, despite the constant, growing and ever-eroding waves of mass consumerism that have been battering western society since the 1950s. In terms of modern road transport the Hillman Minx is totally analogue, of course, with a minimum of electronics and, like most vehicles of its day, an ecological disaster in terms of fuel consumption and use of materials. Food for thought in this wild west environment.
Tomorrow I am driving the arse rocket up to New Plymouth on the West coast, which is a drive of at least 5 hours. I shall have to leave pretty early in order to make the first session of the SCANZ symposium in time, at 10.00. It will be fun to meet some friends and colleagues of many years from Europe and USA in a New Zealand, Media Art setting. I've booked myself a place at a camp site up there, not far from the town centre and the venue. It'll be the first chance to try out my new tent. I just hope it's not too windy up there when I have to put it up (alone) for the first time. The symposium lasts all weekend and then, on Monday, I've planned to drive via Stratford and the Forgotten World Highway, up to the micro-nation of Whangamomona, a place we visited and really enjoyed during our holiday here last year with Tarja and Tessa. I'll stay over there Monday night and hopefully get some photography done and maybe a story for later publication in a newspaper.
But I have a challenge today, another one brought about by the small world syndrome and this could delay my leaving tomorrow. I am meeting up with Tim Evill for 'a beer' here in Wellington. Tim and I were in the same class in Brentwood school in September 1968, in class 2M (M for Morsley, our first teacher). Strange, there was no '1' classes there at Brentwood!? We have not met since around 1973. Anyway, according to the strict, military-like methods at Brentwood (the military methods were easily explained as most of our masters were ex-Oxford & Cambridge, ex-army officers employed there after their efforts in World War II) we were obliged to spend our first year seated in rows, in alphabetical order. As far as I remember, the order went, 'Ablett, Baker, Bartlett, Brown, Dean, Davey, Donnovan, Evill....and so on, finishing with Mr Zac, or was it Zak? Anyway, within that eccentric, scholarly, all male, madness of Brentwood - a place whose whackey environment was an influence on some world names like the writer, Douglas Adams, comedian and TV personality Griff Rhys Jones and the recent British foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw - Tim and I were only a few 200 year old, oak desks apart and members of the same school house and group of friends. Tim's father was also one of the masters there, teaching physics. Tim had spent his childhood in Africa and his stories were very exciting for us poor lads who had no experience of 'being abroad'. For me being out of Essex was 'abroad'. Tim left school early, if I remember correctly to join the merchant navy and captain ships. I could be wrong. I don't yet know how it has all happened, but Tim ended up as one of the real 'Ad Men', in Singapore and Hong Kong at least, and now, through the wonder of FaceBook, we will meet in Wellington. He is apparently living in Nelson, the sunshine capital of New Zealand. in northern South Island.
But the challenge is nevertheless (for me) to meet, have 'a beer', discuss the content of the last 35 years in our prospective lives, remain reasonably sober, say farewell for the time being, get home unscathed despite the mobs present in town for the NZI Rugby Sevens, sleep, wake at 04.30, drink coffee and then drive to New Plymouth in the wretched (although thankfully repaired) arse rocket to arrive by 10.00 am. Does this sound feasible I wonder...? No doubt my next post will reveal all ;-)
(Hillman Minx photo with iPhone, others with Nikon E71, a much superior camera and GPS device IMHO).
On Sunday I spent a few hours in Te Papa museum talking with Jussi Luukkonen and family, as well as one of our MA students from the Media Lab, Mikko, who is here for student exchange in the same department as myself. Mikko was once a student of Jussi in the Lahti school some years ago. Small world syndrome strikes again!
It was nice to speak Finnish after so long, although with that group the language switched constantly between English, Finnish and Japanese and combinations of the three. Jussi was once leader of one of Finland's pioneering new media companies, To the Point and moved to New Zealand some years ago and is based in Palmerston North, about 90 minutes drive North from Wellington, working in an e-learning company. Palmerston North has a certain reputation here as one of New Zealand's most boring towns...This was no doubt reinforced with the comments in 2006 by English comedian John Cleese, who was of the opinion that anyone feeling suicidal, but without the nerve to end it all, should make a trip there.
My colleague Roy, who was the person responsible for helping me to get my position here, also reappeared from holidays this week and we managed to get out for coffee and a good chat. Roy was interested in my first impressions of the school and the city. He, an architect and designer, describes the feeling of Wellington as 'the Wild West'. I'm beginning to understand that too. It's easy to be blinded at first by the official views, the harbour and the business district rising against the steep hills that surround us here but, the 'street view', is quite another story. In fact you can experience it in Google Earth using street view, which I've found invaluable for planning my visits around the city. Here's three examples of the wild west which are literally outside the entrance to our faculty building.
So there you have it, within spitting distance from the entrance of the school of architecture and design, a locksmith, a strip club and a bordello!! There are so many more fine examples, especially in the suburb of Newtown, where I've already had to take the arse rocket on four occassions for repair etc. I'm starting to think that the wild west point of view might have good potential for my street photography here, in terms of both the environment and also the people. Let's see how that develops over the next few months.
Roy is originally from Hornchurch is Essex and, that too, is part of the small world syndrome as it's only a stones throw from the old Essex market town of Romford, in East London, where most of my family ancestors had their roots. The market was founded by royal charter in 1247. Roy can even remember the treat of being taken to Romford market to see the livestock trading there. The cattle market closed in 1958 but it's quite likely that Roy has watched my great uncle, uncle Reg, at work there. He was the last working auctioneer in Romford market and, somewhere in a shoe box in UK, we have a clipping from the newspaper with a photo of him auctioning the last animals there in the history of that trading in Romford which spanned over 700 years. I reckon uncle Reg would have got on well here in the wild west of New Zealand with his skills in the value of livestock. Outside the cities this is still a very strong agricultural nation and lots of people still live off the land in farms and on smallholdings of all shapes and sizes. In that respect there are a lot of similarities with Finland. I passed by the New Zealand t-shirt store the other day and couldn't help noticing the one with the slogan that read, 'New Zealand, where men are men, and sheep are nervous'.
Against the deep rooted pioneering attitude and agricultural forces of the New Zealand nation I am trying to investigate the most modern aspects of design and creative culture. You might notice that there is a certain contrast here and obvious possibilities for running into discrepancies and being labelled elitist or, generally, off-target in my pursuits. But I've taken the attitude that this country, like Finland, surely has that diversity of culture and practice that allows the modern and the traditional to live side by side and, hopefully, also the modern possibilities can be seen to aid and improve the quality of life for those in the remote parts of the land, as it surely does in Finland. I cannot speculate too much yet, but, nevertheless it is clear that there are some huge structural challenges here that really need to be solved. The Internet infrastructure is totally inadequate and there is an almost total lack of competition in the market for provision of Internet services. My, typical, ADSL connection here at home can only upload at maximum speed of about 130 kb/sec and the maximum download is just above 1 Mb/sec. But, in practice, that is not the extent of the problem. One feature of the service is that total cuts in IP service occur regularly, at anything between every 2 minutes and every 30 minutes. Typically my connection goes down once every 10 minutes here at home. There are only a few critical things that you might want to do over such a connection. The chances of screwing up a web-based transaction, like buying flights or similar, are quite probable. Once into the secure transaction mode it's a race against the clock to complete everything before the connection goes down and you have to start the whole thing again from the beginning.
Everyone I've spoken to about this has just agreed and raised their hands, 'so what can you do?' Unfortunately this problem isn't going to be fixed with the typical ingenuity, of which the Kiwis are famous, and often related to the use of No. 8 wire. What's needed here is an active policy to improve the infrastructure at all levels; the international fibre connections have to be opened and multiplied (well, now there's only one), fibre backbone for consumer traffic has to be planned and deployed and the thinking that, things will work out via future innovations in the use of the existing copper-based networks, has to be buried. Maybe the new government will, get real, with this challenge. At least a lot of people here I've spoken to hope so.
The vehicle above is a Hillman Minx, somewhat identical to the one our family used to own in the 1960s, prior to the purchase of the Hillman Imp which I mentioned in an earlier post. The picture doesn't really have anything to do with this post but, somehow or other, serves as an icon of the attitude that some New Zealanders seem to have towards 'the good old days' and some of the relics of those, that they've managed to maintain through their will and ingenuity, despite the constant, growing and ever-eroding waves of mass consumerism that have been battering western society since the 1950s. In terms of modern road transport the Hillman Minx is totally analogue, of course, with a minimum of electronics and, like most vehicles of its day, an ecological disaster in terms of fuel consumption and use of materials. Food for thought in this wild west environment.
Tomorrow I am driving the arse rocket up to New Plymouth on the West coast, which is a drive of at least 5 hours. I shall have to leave pretty early in order to make the first session of the SCANZ symposium in time, at 10.00. It will be fun to meet some friends and colleagues of many years from Europe and USA in a New Zealand, Media Art setting. I've booked myself a place at a camp site up there, not far from the town centre and the venue. It'll be the first chance to try out my new tent. I just hope it's not too windy up there when I have to put it up (alone) for the first time. The symposium lasts all weekend and then, on Monday, I've planned to drive via Stratford and the Forgotten World Highway, up to the micro-nation of Whangamomona, a place we visited and really enjoyed during our holiday here last year with Tarja and Tessa. I'll stay over there Monday night and hopefully get some photography done and maybe a story for later publication in a newspaper.
But I have a challenge today, another one brought about by the small world syndrome and this could delay my leaving tomorrow. I am meeting up with Tim Evill for 'a beer' here in Wellington. Tim and I were in the same class in Brentwood school in September 1968, in class 2M (M for Morsley, our first teacher). Strange, there was no '1' classes there at Brentwood!? We have not met since around 1973. Anyway, according to the strict, military-like methods at Brentwood (the military methods were easily explained as most of our masters were ex-Oxford & Cambridge, ex-army officers employed there after their efforts in World War II) we were obliged to spend our first year seated in rows, in alphabetical order. As far as I remember, the order went, 'Ablett, Baker, Bartlett, Brown, Dean, Davey, Donnovan, Evill....and so on, finishing with Mr Zac, or was it Zak? Anyway, within that eccentric, scholarly, all male, madness of Brentwood - a place whose whackey environment was an influence on some world names like the writer, Douglas Adams, comedian and TV personality Griff Rhys Jones and the recent British foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons, Jack Straw - Tim and I were only a few 200 year old, oak desks apart and members of the same school house and group of friends. Tim's father was also one of the masters there, teaching physics. Tim had spent his childhood in Africa and his stories were very exciting for us poor lads who had no experience of 'being abroad'. For me being out of Essex was 'abroad'. Tim left school early, if I remember correctly to join the merchant navy and captain ships. I could be wrong. I don't yet know how it has all happened, but Tim ended up as one of the real 'Ad Men', in Singapore and Hong Kong at least, and now, through the wonder of FaceBook, we will meet in Wellington. He is apparently living in Nelson, the sunshine capital of New Zealand. in northern South Island.
But the challenge is nevertheless (for me) to meet, have 'a beer', discuss the content of the last 35 years in our prospective lives, remain reasonably sober, say farewell for the time being, get home unscathed despite the mobs present in town for the NZI Rugby Sevens, sleep, wake at 04.30, drink coffee and then drive to New Plymouth in the wretched (although thankfully repaired) arse rocket to arrive by 10.00 am. Does this sound feasible I wonder...? No doubt my next post will reveal all ;-)
(Hillman Minx photo with iPhone, others with Nikon E71, a much superior camera and GPS device IMHO).
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