by ATR

Being late the first day of my appointment, as usual, I found the door of the workspace at Bauhaus Foundation closed. Without any chance to get in, I knocked at the door of the IBA, on the second floor of the white building at the end of Gropiusallee 38. That’s how I met Anders Simonsen, almost two years ago in Germany, when I moved to Dessau to start an intensive research period.

In the late summer East Germany looks completely different from the cold place I was expecting. It is more human-friendly and the wind as well as the colours of the leaves is quite warm. Those are qualities that, so far, you appreciate if you get used to live in north Europe.

Anyway, with Anders I developed a fast friendship based on the work pauses between the third and second floor. The Bauhaus club, at the ground floor of the white building, was the obvious place for discussing and drinking beer during the day.

It was in one of these work breaks that Anders showed me his idea to work with mass culture, consume, and decadence (or at least I interpreted it in these terms) in a new way. I remember I was really impressed of his work, although he pointed out that it wasn’t complete yet.

Then, deadlines, work excursions, and different time frames made impossible to discuss further his idea - plus the fact that he left the foundation some weeks before Christmas, when I was still in Tallinn.

That’s it.

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In the next weeks we are going to show Anders’s research, which consists in a collection of pictures shot between October and November 2008 in Dessau. We decided to leave the original title which Anders gave them. As two years ago, the research is not finished yet. Therefore I have suggested to him the opportunity to involve UF’s community to work on it. He agreed.

New topics will be created in the discussion board of the UF-Facebook. In this space you can copy/paste texts and links created by you or quotations from an available (for publishing) source. The pictures area available on GMap support for a closer look (link). The aim is to complete Anders’s research.

This will be one of the first experiments in P2P media-art research. I hope you will be proud to take part on it and, therefore, invite other friend to do so. Once the series of pictures will be entirely published, UF-Community will evaluate democratically each proposal which, together with the pictures, will be published in the first issue of UF-Mag, available online as well as in paperback.

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A short bio:

Anders Simonsen (Copenhagen) is a graduate of the Mediadesign center from the Copenhagen MIK. Right now, He is studying graphical communication at Mediehojskolen.More info at: http://dansergrafik.dk/

Ah, I forgot: Anders thanks for the bicycle!

This event is sponsored by:

PresS/Tletter

P2P foundation

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join to UF-Community on facebook to get UF-Event (link): http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=68796852575#/pages/Helsinki-Finland/Urban-Fiction/98661593798?v=wall&viewas=578461033