Volcano (the Icelandic volcano) puts us in the strange situation of being on “enforced holiday.” It is almost like an unplanned holiday, but it isn’t.
The unfinished work that won’t go away, the muddled time difference that brings me text messages at 2 a.m. here, people calling me at midnight, people emailing urgent requests at 6 p.m. there, forgetting it is 11 p.m. for me, can all be considered details, side effects, friendly fire, whatever.
Checking airport and airline websites several times a day—even those that have nothing to do with your trip—gives the stay a more peculiar flavor, but I still wouldn’t say these are its most important aspects.
What really distinguishes an enforced holiday from an unplanned one is the buzz.
And the buzz is in the shopkeeper who barely speaks English and no longer gives that traditional emphatic reply, “Oh, Brazil!!!” Instead, he already addresses you with suspended uncertainty: And do you know when you’ll be going home…? (more ellipses)
It is in the students and colleagues at PUC asking me: “Theoretically,” when are you coming back?
It is among us: the Volcano Artist Residency Program gang, founded today and represented by Eduardo Kac (Chicago), Bronac Ferran (London), Isaac Mao (Shanghai), Chris Bregler (New York), Charlye Archibeque and Nicoll (Los Angeles), Pamela Z (San Francisco), Alain Thibault (Montreal) and me, Giselle Beiguelman (São Paulo).
We are undoubtedly in a privileged position. After days of intense work on the Ars Electronica jury, we have the chance to enjoy the unsettling city of Linz, Austria, sheltered by the affectionate, efficient and material support of that temple of digital culture, the Ars Electronica Center, on the placid banks of the Danube.
Linz is unsettling for many reasons. Not only because Hitler grew up here, nor just because its steelworks—now Europe’s most modern, voestalpine—belonged to Hermann Göring, the second-ranking man in the Nazi hierarchy, from 1938 to 1945. But because it uses all that power to project itself as a city of the future. Cultural institutions such as the OK Center for Contemporary Art and the Lentos Art Museum Linz, and especially the Ars Electronica Center, play a fundamental role in this.
It falls to these institutions, largely publicly funded, to commit to redirecting the city’s vocation. I will write more about that (and the relationship between steel, glass, an inferiority complex toward the past of Vienna and Salzburg, and my visit to the steelworks).
But today is Volcano Artist Residency Program day.
Volcano Artist Residency Program
It gives a measure of our state of mind. We laugh a lot, gossip far too much, have fifty thousand ideas a second and, above all, realize how relevant cultural differences still are. Today I tried to persuade Pamela not to work tomorrow and to go to Vienna with us, using the old rule: “Don’t do today what you can do tomorrow.” After all, these aren’t normal conditions, blah blah blah. I think that was a bit much. But she considered it…
The biggest culture shock, of course, is the unpronounceable volcano. We talk about globalization, discuss the future, think about network culture, and suddenly we not only enter the nature–technology short circuit, but notice the world’s center of gravity shifting, moving to Iceland.
And this forces us to consider that we were not even aware this place existed, that a planetary wave could emerge from it and impose its rules absolutely and without concessions. The comments that followed my first post about volcanic immobility underline and complicate what I am saying.
In this situation, an unplanned holiday becomes an enforced one.
And it is best to relax and enjoy this Volcano Artist Residency Program moment in volcation mode.