Calling Sydney

Ich bin zurück! =)

OK, 8 more days left and I’m still living more or less at uni to finish everything before my last weekend in Sydney.

One of the projects finished yesterday and was exhibited at an exhibition at the School of IT, which is just a 5 minutes walk from the Faculty of Architecture. The picture above shows the final test run that I did the night before around 3am in the morning. Of course it didn’t work, meaning I didn’t really get to sleep that night, trying to fix it. I finished the whole thing like 5 minutes before the official start of the exhibition. Is that good or bad timing?

More information about the exhibition should be online somewhere soon. Meanwhile, you can see a short video from the exhibition here:

I also just had my final presentation at the weekly research seminar, but have still more work to do: there’s another interactive screen installation I’m setting up, which is not finished yet and should be running by Friday. Going back to work now…

Sorry to everyone for the silence, both on this weblog and in terms of e-mails. I’m basically living at uni now to finish my projects. My final presentation is next Wednesday and I still have heaps to do until then.

I’m also blogging here now, as a guest author:
http://www.mediaarchitecture.org/

It’s about work-related stuff and my contributions will probably be quite limited due to the amount of time I’m already spending on other things.

Is this for real? (Just encountered that on my Mac OS dashboard.) And I recently realised that May here would be like November in Vienna. Luckily the weather isn’t like that. (At least for now)

… looks different to the world map as we use it in Europe. Which makes sense, but looks a bit strange at first sight. Mainly because Europe is all by the sudden not the center of the world =)

Last week I visited the architecture labs for the first time. They’re located in the same building where I currently work, just one level up. It’s the place where architecture students build their models. Apparently the cleaning stuff gave up vacuuming the place and now it’s only being cleaned at the end of every semester, leaving tangible traces of studying activities over time.

I am a tidy person, usually. But somehow - I don’t know why - my work desk always ends up in chaos.

Not much happening here currently, except that it was raining a whole lot - almost two weeks - followed by a sunny and warm weekend (beach, finally again!) and again followed by cold temperature with sunshine.

Whoever told me before my departure it wouldn’t be could in Sydney, was apparently wrong. Or, well, it’s not as cold as in Europe (especially northern parts of Europe), but it probably just feels as cold since the houses are not isolated.

Happy first of May to everybody! Enjoy the day off. It’s not a holiday in Australia, so I had to go to work today. Whatever, I’m increasingly realizing that there’s not much time left until my return and I still have so many things to finish here. So no time for holidays anyway.

However, I did get to see some local bands recently (balance is important!), and if you’re interested, here are the better ones (and all from very different genres too).

Cloud Control
Folk, prepared in a very indie-fashion-like style
http://www.myspace.com/cloudcontrol

Yves Klein Blue
Brag magazine described them as a mix of Libertines and The Strokes
http://www.myspace.com/yveskleinbluemusic

Cassette Kids
“summoning the likes of Bjork, The Klaxons and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs into a mixtape akin to a well dressed Berlin Wall coming down in a New York Basement”
http://www.myspace.com/cassettekids

Grafton Primary
“Drawing on a wealth of musical knowledge from classical to new romance, synth-wave and electro, Grafton Primary craft tunes that are designed to score well on the test of time.”
http://www.myspace.com/graftonprimary

Since the incident with the deadly flower stuck to the outside of an envelope, I must be on Australian quarantine office’s blacklist: every parcel that I receive from overseas is decorated with a sticker saying “Opened by Australia Post for Inspection by Quarantine”…