2018115: Manhattan | Graz

An arts atelier may not be the best indicator of technological inclination, but I couldn't help but notice the technology that people were using. iPhone 4, which was eight years old, PCs instead of Macs, or old Macs, instead of new Macs, cabled headphones and websites that look old enough to vote. So when Iris wanted to have a conference about my project and I proposed a Bluejeans® conference or Skype® because I needed to be editing for George, her aversion to connect to VoIP just reiterated my observation: Austrias aren't at the cutting edge of consumer technology. Ultimately she acquiesced and allowed me to be her first bluejeans meeting host. The art of existing two places at once is made possible by voice over Internet protocol.

Within this question of tech is at least a highly sophisticated manner of restraining the members of an affluent country from consuming techno-trash at the rate of New Yorkers, including myself, and generating techno-waste. At most a question of what exactly does “affluent country” mean. The trend of higher standards of living being synonymous with rates of consumption/waste production seems to not be true in the case of Graz (I noticed a similar de-teched presence outside of Schaumbad). The most obvious answer is that higher taxes have curbed a rate of consumption by lowering expendable incomes. This is social welfare society in which desires are suspended by a prescribed way of living that offer social and urban infrastructure instead. If this is the case, then the Murkraftwerk is even more dubious, using tax money for a prescription that is not only reprehensible to the paying citizens, but aimed to cheapen electrical consumption, which is already a decade behind consumer levels.

But it's not as simple as the Grazers just keeping up with the Joneses. Graz has a parallel technosphere. In some ways its boldly local. For example, everyone has a @mur.at email address, which was described to me as a company that supported the arts but was today an actual business. Later I learned that it was founded by a group of net artists during the 1990s who now rely on annual donations in order to offer this exclusive (isolated?) service.

In another aspect, the tech world hadn't fully reached Graz. Google maps failed to give accurate directions in Graz, outside of walking and biking routes. Qando was an alternative maps app that encompassed the extensive public transportation system, but it was wonky. Uber didn't operate in Graz. One had to call 878 taxi to get picked up. Lime, Bird and Tier scooters, which were extensive in Vienna were absent in Graz. There was no Apple store in Graz.

20181116: Hellweg | European Livingroom

Zihua and I set off at 9 in the morning to pick up supplies. The top of my list was an AC cable to replace the adapter. We first stopped at Hellweg, a domestic hardware store. While there were electronics, I didn't find the cable. I had stopped in several computer stores around the city, including Hartlauer, and home supply stores, like XXX Lutz and Möbelix, and even Libro. No success. All had some amount of techno-trash but none offered the low-level trash I needed. In fact, the tech they had was too sophisticated. We gave up and went to Boesners for art supplies.

In preparation for the Triple V Trip – Vienna, Venice & Vanesa – I picked up a second T Mobile data card for her. What I didn't know was that the network response and speed was functional only in Austria, not Italy, nor Germany, nor Spain. This is very strange since even the US TMobile card has some concurrence in Europe, albeit slower.

In the evening I went to a performance of European Working Title, which was 99% in German and I understood about 0.5% of the dialogue. The visual scenario included an artist who was be creating an artwork using string wrapped around a bookcase and other junk while a woman was soliciting something to/from him. Adjacent was woman dressed as a rabbit sitting at a writing desk. In the middle of the floor was a big blue plastic tarp that was later used for three of the characters to change costume. Two actors drank gallons of water. A man climbed a set of stairs and exposed his anus to both side of the audience, and later that same man interjected with the performance and started to engage the crowd, including asking me if I understood any of the performance. I denied knowing anything, which was 99% true, and he demanded that the entire play be translated into English for me. He then led me around the stage, which had been mostly demolished by performers prior to this segment and said I could do literally anything I wanted to do. It’s amazing how few desires one has when the mind is preoccupied with misdirection.

Later Iris told me that the crying during the performance pertained to someone learning about what happened in a television show and being deeply disturbed by what she had learned. It sounded interesting. Allegedly later performances adjusted to the audience’s reaction and walkouts and toned down some of the aggressiveness and intimidation on behalf of the Slovak, whose anus most spectators could likely identify in a police lineup. That is unfortunate because I saw this as a dramatic, PG-13 version of a Viennese Actionist performance and thought they should have gone in the other direction – even more extreme. I don't think the Actionists even reached the level of necrophilia, network hacking or national debt lending. What I mean to say is that there is room to grow.