Image: Still from Alea City One, by Matt Schell 2018
Something that I remember observing about my parents as a kid was how little time they spent with their friends, as compared to how much time I spent with mine. Now as a parent, I understand. Being an adult with kids is pretty challenging in terms of time. I find I spend a lot more time not seeing my friends than seeing them, and making new friends is much harder due to time constraints. I also find myself more cut off from my professional communities, excepting the work context. Almost all the new people I meet and get to know nowadays are work colleagues. I’m not particularly happy about this turn of events and have been thinking about what the possibilities are for change. I’m a single parent so time away from the kids always requires careful management and resources. I’m also an introvert so getting out and mingling is not a fully natural thing for me to do under the best circumstances.
Every morning after I meditate I sit and write three pages long-hand in my journal, a practice called ‘Morning Pages’ which I got from Julia Cameron’s book “The Artist’s Way”. In these pages lately the theme of some kind of space keeps popping up. A store, or a gallery or a cafe or a co-working space or a school. I think this comes from my desire to be around more people in an interesting context, with shared interests. There is no real sensible way that I can currently think about to make this a reality in my current life but it keeps bobbing to the surface during my freeform writing sessions. I would love to start or be part of some kind of public space that revolves around art and technology, in which diverse groups of people can come together, meet and interact. I realize that I miss a lot my time at Dubspot, the electronic music school in Manhattan (now defunct) that I used to teach at. There was a wonderful community there of musicians, DJs and students from around the world and I met many wonderful people there. Teaching there was a great balancer of my otherwise introverted tendencies, tying me into a lively community with a sense of purpose. My work has some of that but not to the same degree and it’s much less heterogeneous, and also less artistic. So this ‘space’ idea has been bubbling to the surface.
I’ll lay out the fantasy here for fun. The fantasy is a reasonably large, well lit space with two rooms. One is a public space with a cafe, some long tables for people to sit and talk and work. There’s good coffee and simple cold food and snacks. The walls hold screens which are used to display a rotating collection of interesting screen based art. Generative works, moving images, real time art and so on. Speakers quietly play interesting music. The cafe doubles as a store and sells a small collection of books, tools, toys and art works. The second room is a room in which classes, lectures and workshops can be held. The curriculum is varied and focuses on the intersections of art and technology. Classes are taught in a ‘flipped classroom’ methodology with lectures delivered online via video and then class time spent in a hands on workshop, solving problems, answering questions, collaborating and applying what was learned in the lectures with the support of an instructor and fellow students. The physical location would stick roots out of the physical world down into the internet and connect to the digital world in interesting ways, but the primary focus would be on the place itself. I think in our current exploration of the discovery of the possibilities of the internet, internet communities and global communication we are maybe missing some opportunities for things which blend the two, but privilege the physical. It’s something I’d be interested to explore at some point if I ever got any (at this point imaginary) time and money to put into it.
