So…. when I first came to Europe, around 1998 or so, I came for a conference in Amsterdam, and then found myself walking across the Macedonian – Greek border trying to get away from a potential war zone. It’s a long story, but once over the border I took a taxi to Thessaloniki, then a train to Athens. I got the first hotel I could find, booked a room, went to the roof and drank as many cocktails as my remaining DeutscheMark could buy while watching the sunset over the Acropolis…
It was quite a night for me. I was definitely relieved to be safe, although looking back I don’t think there was anything to worry about. But also, I was super happy and it was quite a surreal experience as I loved studying ancient Greece when I was at college. I knew everything about the Greek gods and myths, and there I was looking at the Acropolis. I spent the next day a little hungover crawling all over it, checking the Parthenon out, trying to work out which was the temple of Athena Nike etc…
Now… many years later, when I come to see the Athens Coko team, I walk to work passing the Acropolis. Is kinda amazing. And then every now and then I take the time to check things out. Like today… my route took me past the Temple of Zeus… so I took the time to have a wander around….
Whoot! That building in the background is the Parthenon 🙂
Also, today I arrived at the Athens office and a radio I had ordered had turned up. It is the same model as the one I had when I lived in Latvia as a radio artist. It’s from the 1960s and was the first mass-produced transistor radio in Russia. They used to be made in Riga where I spent a lot of time.
So happy to have this…it kinda was the inspiration for one of the artworks I did a long time ago… http://wifio.net/
Lotte Meijer did the beautiful design and we made a big two-dimensional cut out installation. You could actually tune the cardboard radio into the local wifi networks and listen to local net traffic read out using a sniffer and text-to-speech synthesis.
Anyways… cool days…here’s a video that the title of this post sorta comes from… Hey Seuss by NZ band the 3Ds…one of my favs from the ole days… awesome…
