🌝🌦️🫧 Mud and rainy days, and teas and unexpected rice; sitting by the tap for shelter. Awkwardly in the way of the coffee urn, where the coffee phoenix quietly murmurs. What if web art events had no coffee? What if you stand on a spiky horse chestnut? What if everyones tent floats away? Why are the trees not uniformly tall? Where is the river, although I do not swim? What nasty insect bit my ankle last night? If I forgot about you, and me, and everything else; would I be alone or would we have found the world we were looking for, or were we looking for one at all?
All of those are questions that crossed my mind between 11am and 12pm, the usual hours of being around, if you don’t have tape over your watch. Most mornings I was late and Doriane would catch me finding breakfast and slyly invite me to some workshop about to begin. Drawing algorithms, or gathering colours, or sitting on the floor of the always cold barn where someone broke a glass in the future, but not yet so its fine.
Playing adobe company privacy polices on Lindens harps and running from the rain, while, from the other room gaggles of noise mingle. At some other time a puppet show occurs, and talking about dreams, before walking to the tower at sunset. Only to find no one there, and listening to the insects and the darkness, and watching as people approach and standing on the bridge and talking about werewolves while the moon hovers and tarmac is warm under my feet.
Where lunches seem to gather like days, and dinners float past, and Harry the cat climbs into my tent, bending the walls like A Nightmare on Elm Street. Sohyeon skypes Martin on the way to the shop in the overly hot sunshine as the cargo bikes pass, and I’m missing what I don’t understand and understating what I don't miss.
There are no valleys, everything is flat as far as the eye can see in fields of perfect order. There are moments by bonfires where the faces change like the clockwork orbits of the sun and names are burned, and logs are wobbly chairs and cheese toasties and everyone in the circle is speaking agriculturally.
Nothing’s old and nothings young, and love floats past like the daylight and rests indiscriminately on the voices outside, and worlds are born by puddles and pans, and promise that things could be different because for a moment they are; and they will return and we will leave, and people will remember their borders, and summers will pass; but there’s tape over time still, and dye and wax on my t-shirt, while the world looks grey outside and my bag's shoulder strap is broken; Heerko and his car, and we connect the dots in the train station and I try not to cry as I walk to the exit, and the airport and the mechanical pizza dispenser; carrying secrets and jokes and hopes and mud on my toes. 🌒
Iv struggled to put into words what the H&D summer camp was; when in truth I have no right to describe it to you. It was never mine to describe, it was a collective piece of pop art owned by all participants. Its value was not in the specific activities or objects that made up day-to-day life there, but in the otherworld that was created between those activities and objects. For a moment, about fifty talented artists in the field of web and new media, gathered in a field near Eindhoven for ten days, and for that moment, it really did feel like we shifted the centre of gravity of our little world.
Who’s to say the CrowdStrike global crash that took place during those days was not somehow manifested by our presence? Who’s to say that the trajectory of our niche of art and technology was not permanently shifted? For me, I found walls which I hadn't even noticed building within myself were eroded; looking back, the version of me that arrived on day one seems like a stranger now. Not because I changed, but because I was allowed to forget the model I had built of myself.
On the second last night I had a dream about my childhood house as a marble palace sitting on the edge of darkness, terrorised and guarded by a giant pelican and the forgetfulness of global economic forces. I suspect I was the house and I was the pelican, but I also suspect the summer camp was too.
For a time the world became a dream, and likewise dreaming could become the world. Where “cunty little handbags” made of collected human hair, the rat shrine and protein bars, dance about in foe bloodstain tie-dye. You could be a pirate even though the sea was nowhere near, and I find Im caught somewhere between whimsy and the edgy smoker gang banished to the car park.
How do you go home when the dream becomes your home, when the realest things are bendy spoons whittled with a pocketknife? Where terminals make magic circles, and sitting in circle you “What If” the web into becoming something else. I’m by the yurt in a crown daisies, in days gone by, while others gossip and laugh on either side, the sun is low and dinner is almost ready. The breeze is cool, and Im cutting out objects for you to build your own camp with; it wont be the same, but in flaws are the depths of life, and time is only what you make of it.
