It seems no-one in this stony city keeps their WLANs open. Where's the local Petteri Järvinen¹ who has scared everyone off about the dangers & dragons of the Internet? Okay, there's at least one house in the Rykestrasse, where a couple of tenants are sharing one connection (and its costs too). It's the one that still has the bullet holes from 1945 on it. But they're hippies over there, some smoke grass and all that. They are not even the hippiest community I know. The ones who call themselves anarcho-communists even had the MAC address² filtering on their base station. Nobody knew the router password, except one guy who didn't live there anymore.

Disaster from a distance

So I've been in a bit of a news penumbra, but imaginably in Finland there's been only one subject to talk about: Jokela school shooting. Everybody's shocked and our thoughts are with the afflicted. I don't know anyone involved, but I grew up in a neighbouring settlement³ in 1978-1981. The top attraction was Aleksi Kivi's death cabin⁴.

I've been thinking that the Jokela shooting might well be a Black Swan in front of our eyes. Black Swan is a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Basically it is an unexpected eventuality with three characteristics: it is rare and unpredictable, carries a massive impact, and we tend to find it very explainable in hindsight.

Obviously nobody (at least anyone with the power to stop it from happening) expected the tragedy to take place. Similarly, we've been very good at being not surprised at all in retrospective (lots of guns, lots of mental problems in the country). As to the impact, it has been terrible to victims' friends and families, but on the scale of a society, the effects are still unclear. In the worst case the reactionary forces prevail and we get more surveillance and control. In an acceptable scenario, we get better mental health care. In the best case the attitudes of an entire society change for better. Now, that will be a matter of time.

Trip to Karosta

I shared the trip to Berlin via Karosta with mkk. Of all the possible itineraries we chose to travel slow to Latvia, but to skip Poland and fly over it.

The departure was on 30th October and those days it can get quite stormy. Luckily Linda Line hadn't cancelled their first departure to Talliin at 8:00. The later ones were. M/S Jaanika is a robust hydrofoil, but even she needs to stay at port when the wind speed exceeds 15 m/s. Forecast for the day was 16 m/s. Had they cancelled it, we would have missed the bus to Riga. No redunancy in plans.

This time I developed a new technique to tackle sea sickenss. I had earlier read that professional orienteerers, when they examine the map, construct a mental 3D model of the terrain out of it. They work top-down. I attempted to do the same bottom-up: I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the water terrain. Just to get into the rhythm with the jerks and bumps – inducting the terrain based on the sensory flow and then anticipating the movement. I think it worked well, but might as well have been placebo.

Bus trip from Tallinn to Riga was uneventful. Looking out from the window, I recalled one of Tuglas Society's podcasts and a quote from Lennart Meri: "If you are a traveller, not a tourist—pass by the knights' castle and instead—take a beautiful picture of a field, that has been cultivated for 2000 years. It is a greater history, because there live both the past and the future."

For a hasty stopover lunch we opted in for the lowest common denominator - Hesburger! Then we tried to find a souvenir from Stockmann department store, but I beeped at the gates (not at the door but at the escalators, somehow). So I had dig through all the underwear for that unzapped RFID chip. Finally found the unexpected contraband, it was my paperback copy of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, bought used from St. George's. I'm a traveller after all.

Next, it turned out that the bus to Liepāja was "overbooked" and as we didn't figure out the elbow tactics in time, there were no seats left. It all felt like a memory of scarcity: if you don't rush, you'll be left without.

From the oxygen deprived interior of the bus I remembered, how dark a country Latvia is. Not many lights lit up in the countyside after the sunset. Two days later the locals mentioned another kind of darkness; smiles can be few and far between too.

Twelve hours after boarding the ship in Helsinki we arrived in Karosta district of Liepaja city.

This time there weren't any other guests around, residence artists⁵ nor visitors. So, the Admirals' House was literally stone cold when we arrived, but on the other hand, we got some undivided attention from Calle and Kristine, the people who established K@2 centre in 2000. There seemed to be much in the air. A new media art progamme with the Liepaja Academy was about to start. Visiting architects had remixed one of the roofless buildings and renovations had proceeded in others. Plenty of playground in and outdoors.

The bridge connecting Karosta to Liepaja proper was still half gone. A tanker rammed into it a year ago and took down one half of the pivoting structure. They sent a repair bill to Georgia, but most likely EU has to intervene.

Kristine had two adorable and sociable dogs Pūce and Ūpis⁶. Due to the increased police response times brought upon by the bridge's demise, they come quite handy as well.

Technomadic Berlin

It is nothing short of fantastic to know on arrival that Jodi had returned to Berlin and that John was in town as well. That sort of lineup can only mean two things: art and dinners.

Art seemed to be mostly about blowing stuff up.

NGBK hosted the exhibition Achtung Sprengarbeiten! where my attention was grabbed by Ruth Toma's and Rudolf Herz's "Das Haus der Kunst abtragen" – a Super8/U-matic video experiment from 1980 about a plot to detonate Munich's Haus der Kunst⁷. With a stretch of imagination the piece could also be a bastardly Chris Marker (La Jetee) and Peter Greenaway (The Falls) collaboration.

At Hamburger Bahnhof no-one fared better than mad-hatter Roman Signer whose art comes about in a MacGyverian fashion by engineering various kinetic devices, warheads and mortars and the artist himself setting them off from a close range. This could be shared thanks to artist's wife having videotaped it from a bearable distance. Never grow old!

Fragmented dinners instead of one big one, so it's until February then.

Jodi, mkk and I made it to a lunch at Spätzle Express. They serve nudels Swabian style. If I ever manage to get fit for triathlon, this is where I'll come for t-24h tank up. Later, John joined in an we had a chat at Villa Orange (one of my favourites) before proceeding to see theremin diva Dorit Chrysler in a previously unnoticed hideaway behind Prater Biergarten.

The other night we managed to catch up with mi_ga⁸ as well and Fernanda, who brought the latest buzz from Web 2.0 Expo to the roundtable.

Yeah, what else... three punctures in two days. Cyclists beware. Going to go collect the yellow Jopo on Thursday. Need to see if there's a way to vulcanise that rupture in the rear tyre. All back to normal then.

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