Category Archives: Travel

What Are You? – Society’s categories and labels

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I am currently attending a residency in Vermont Studio Center, Vermont USA. The residency invites up to 75 writers and artists to participate in their own studio practice for a predetermined amount of time in the company of other creative practitioners. During the first week, we, the aforementioned practitioners, have engaged in introductory conversations around the dinner tables etc, spouting the usual introductory dinner-table questions, e.g. “What’s your name?”, Where are you from?” etc. One recurring question has caused me an abundance of consternation time and again. That question is “What are you?”

The residency in Vermont accepts proposals for projects in writing, painting or sculpture as broad overall fields. Thus the expected answer to this question is “writer”, “painter” or “sculptor”. My general answer to the question is “artist”. This is a bit of a dodge, and isn’t entirely true, but it serves a purpose. It doesn’t satisfy most interrogators though, as it fails to conform to the predetermined categorisation of “writer”, “painter” or “sculptor”, and I have met with some objection to this vague retort. The outright correct answer to “What are you?” would probably be simply “human”.

It should be pointed out that the spoken emphasis on the question at Vermont Studio Center is on the “you”, i.e. “What are you?” This emphasis infers a certain understanding that the “you” in question falls under a predetermined category (painter, sculptor, writer). The actual question that is being asked is “What category do you fall under in order to attend this residency programme?”, but it is abbreviated for swiftness of delivery in a conversation. The question becomes something completely different if the emphasis is placed in the “are”. It then becomes “What are you?”. This question seems somewhat derisive, inferring that you are perhaps not human at all, but some malformed hybrid concoction of an entity that requires definition.

The reason this question gives me such reserve is in its delivery. A straight answer is expected, but a straight answer can’t be honestly given. It’s like the question that is more common in Ireland, “What do you do?”, which might be most accurately answered by saying “eat, sleep and breathe”. The desired answer here would normally be your occupation, or your regular past-time, or the area that you have achieved a qualification in. However, this can’t be an accurate answer for any individual, as most people fill their time in a variety of ways. If someone spends every waking hour of every day making carboard boxes, then I would accept “I am a cardboard box maker” as an answer, but even then that person would still sleep, eat, drink and breathe or they would fail to exist.

Applying labels is often dismissive, as can be seen when right-wing commentators describe figures like Barack Obama as a “communist” or “socialist”. The word is used due to Obama’s leftist stance on certain issues, and is selected as a negative term to categorise Obama with a political system that is seen as negative within America. In this case the label is used as a form of derisive stereotyping based on capitalist views of what socialism is based on the last 100 years of international history.

“Who are you?” might be a more accurate question than “What are you?”, but it has just as vague a line of definition. Who you are speaks more about a person’s cultural, ethnic or historical background, as well as the things that the person does to help define their personality. This is a small obsession that I have noticed since arriving in America. Regularly you will ask a person about themselves and they will tell you about both themselves and half their family tree.

I recently asked a lady where she was from and she answered “Brooklyn, but my grandmother was from Scotland and my grandfather was from Guatemala.” I hadn’t asked about her paternal lineage, but it seemed pertinent to her to share that information nonetheless. Who you are is more about the present than the past, but the mixed cultural heritage of America leads Americans to regularly digress into long lines of lineage without thinking about it.

“Who are you?”

“I’m a half-Spanish half Papua New Guinean lady who sails a tow-boat off the coast of South Africa three times a week after enduring fifteen hour flights from Saipan on which I re-read the same edition of The Pickwick Papers every time, and in my free time I build microscopic paper airplanes using a sledgehammer because I love a challenge.”

It’s protracted, but it gets the point across.

The idea of categorisation made me think about the recent viral meme obsession, seen below, where various occupations were converted into quirky memes and people used these to label themselves in their area of practice. Hyperallergic, the online art zine, interviewed the artist who originally created this meme, Garnet Hertz, where he spoke about mixed histories and how things are portrayed. The idea of portrayal and the point of view of an observer who responds to “you” being a “writer”, “painter”, “sculptor”, “editor”, “gambler”, “flaneur” or whatever else suggests that any field has a stereotypical categorisation, whether this be true or not.

This meme was one of my favourites. Thanks to hyperlallergic.com for the image, click for link.

However, the categorisation is always in the eye of the person who directs the question, as illustrated in these memes. Three separate people may see “painter” as either a) a person who paint the walls of a house, b) a person who paints photo-realist landscape paintings or c) a person who paints abstract forms. And there are thousands of other variants in the broader field of painting, before each individual practice can be disected. Nothing is revealed in the answer “painter”, except to the stereotype of the person who received the answer, who will then happily categorise it away in whatever bracket they have predetermined for “painter”. The same is true for any one-word answer to the question “What are you?” (in whatever form it is asked).

One of my paintings from a series of anonymous portraits that attempt to remove context from the subject. For more information on the project click the link.

The fact is that what “you” are can’t really be defined in a single word answer. The question is asking for a categorisation, but people do not categorise. I remember a piece where Damon Albarn berated an interviewer for naming his super-group “The Good, The Bad and the Queen”. The interviewer was referring to the project that he conducted with a super-group of musicians which culminated in the an album of this title, but the group itself was never named or labelled in any way. Albarn sticks rigidly to this opinion on labels or categorisation, seeing it as a dumbing down of human interaction into a scientific sectioning and sub-sectioning of individuals in society, rather than treating each individual on his or her own merits.

I often see people introduce themselves online in forums or comments sections where they state “I am a biological scientist, therefore…” or “I am a graphic designer, thus…” in order to lend more weight to a comment that they are making. I guess level of expertise is pertinent in this situation, but the level will probably come across in the answer without the categorisation to begin with. And besides, it is easy to claim anything in anonymous online forums. I am actually a professor in online sociological behaviour, so I should know.

So try to answer in one go: What are you?

All images in this post are my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Sent to Iceland: The idea of rural in contemporary society

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Apologies to readers for the 2-week hiatus – I have been mid-adventure and things have been too hectic to write. This piece and the next few will follow up on this. Posts will be back to regularity from this week.

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the protagonist Bernard Marx finds himself on a holiday visiting a rural reservation. The visit is an insightful event showing a strange community that live outside of the “social norm” of this urban-centred world. This journey marks a decisive moment in the novel, where Bernard’s story is turned on its head by the people that he encounters and the adventure that he has with the “savages” in the wilderness.

This separation of urban and rural in Brave New World was part of Huxley’s tongue-in-cheek mockery of the society that he believed he was watching develop. The greatest  threat brandished to citizens in Huxley’s dystopia is being forced to move to Iceland – a desolate and unpopulated island. This relocation was the deepest fear for Bernard, who was pleasantly settled in the urban landscape of central London.

A dichotomy between urban and rural environments can always have been said to exist, with the bohemian bourgeoisie living surrounded by the infrastructure and metropolitan grandeur of cities and large towns, while smaller villages and country houses have a more sombre, classical cliche attached.

Certainly, like any stereotype, there is some level on which these assessments are true. Highly developed urban areas are centres of development and technological advancement. Due to the centralisation of funding and higher populations, urban areas are privy to more contemporary art, performances, innovation and ideas. The result is that in an urban environment there is often more susceptibility to change, whereas in rural environments this is not an issue that is so often dealt with.

The urban/rural divide in thinking can be seen in its influence on political decisions in the US. In a piece by Bill Bishop on statesman.com, the writer quotes statistics stating that “By 2000, however, the average Democratic county had three times as many voters as the average Republican county”. This showed that heavily populated urban areas had a higher Democratic vote, showing a leaning towards more left-wing policies in these areas. With the Republican party representing a more conservative wing of the two-tier system, the statistics point to the stereotype of conservative attitudes in rural areas, at least in the US.

The English Independent posted an online article in 2007 documenting a rise in poverty and racist attacks in rural areas in Britain. The economic wealth in rural areas has begun to decline from a traditional abundance due to the vast increase in population in urban areas. In 2008 the UN published a report stating that cities hosted over 50% of the world’s population for the first time in global history. The increase in population has positively affected the economics of urban life, in turn having a detrimental effect on rural areas. However, the mental health of rural dwellers shows lower levels of social stress than those in urban areas, as shown in a 2010 study by Dutch researchers.

The above theories may show signs that the rural/urban divide is broadening, but with the relentless development of internet technologies rural people may be becoming more centralised than in the past without ever entering into the urban sprawl. The availability of social networking, mobile telephone coverage and other information through advanced communication techniques has increased accessibility and created new opportunities for rural people. An indepth study on the effects of the internet on rural communities was conducted by Namsu Park in a dissertation available from University of Texas online (click here) and included studies that showed the positive effects of internet media on rural dwellers.

Through the internet the field of work has also broadened for rural people. As a graphic designer much of my work is contracted in urban areas but conducted from my own rural home. The instantanaeity of the internet allows for better communication with clients, eliminating the necessity for face-to-face meetings.

This blog and others like it are an opportunity for the sharing of information from any area with little influence from whether the writing was made in an urban or rural context. The internet is making the world smaller, but the rural/urban divide seems to still have weight in certain areas.

 

Having lived in a small town in a sparse region of Iceland I have to admit that Aldous Huxley’s model of rural seclusion in the north Atlantic island is not necessarily a torturous thing. Although the isolation of living in a rural environment can seem to stifle creativity at times, there are certainly advantages to the separation and freedoms that are offered in non-urban settings, including the aforementioned loss of social pressure.

Where the border exists between urban and rural when the internet is involved is still being determined.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Pre-occupied with Post-Occupy: Protesting in Ireland

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Occupy Dame street removal. Image courtesy of Drowskaerf, click for link.

Last Thursday (March 8, 2012) Occupy Dame Street, Dublin, was removed at 3.30 a.m. by the Guarda Síochána in an operation involving more than 100 people so that the plaza that they had occupied outside the central bank could be cleared for St. Patrick’s Day festivities. The de-occupation mimicked the late-night move made by police on Wall Street last November, but was met with far less public outcry despite the overkill of 100+ police removing approximately 15 protestors.

I am far from the most avid Occupy supporter, although I do regularly speak out in defence of the movement. But one of the things that shocked me most was the immediate online response to the end of Ireland’s central Occupy movement. Broadsheet.ie, a fairly liberal outputter of general national trivia and other silliness, was inundated with negative comments after their announcement of the end of Occupy Dame Street. The (assumed predominantly young) online audience were vocally critical of the Occupy movement in Dublin. The youth are the expected proponents of social change, especially when they have been (arguably) hardest hit by the economic downturn

Although I do not doubt that there is an online presence of politically motivated commenters on blogs etc., I did not believe that this backlash could have been orchestrated so acutely by the flaccid governmental bodies that called for the de-occupation with the dubious motive of retaining the country’s international image on our day of national heavy drinking. The Fine Gael government in power failed to prevent two teenagers from hacking their website this year, and the Twittergate scandal of the recent presidential election highlighted the limited knowledge of online media in Irish political debate. Although setting up fake accounts to comment on political stories is significantly easier than taking down an entire website, it does make me skeptical that the current government could navigate online media precisely enough to make this emphatic an assault on a popular news site. So I began to debate with my peers in the offline world to see why the youth of the nation appeared to detest Occupy Dame Street so vehemently.

Occupy Dame Street in November 2011

In conversations over the last few days I’ve noticed that the attitude toward Occupy Dame Street online was similar to that offline, if less outspokenly critical. The main concern was that the Dublin movement was not connected with the problems being faced by Irish people at present. It did not directly approach current issues, but stood as a symbol against them. I visited the former site of ODS last weekend, and saw a continued protest amid heavy Guarda presence, but the movement continued to resonate an anti-establishment stance rather than a view toward positive social change.

Principally, Occupy Dame Street was not Occupy Wall Street – the latter embraced positivity in social reform by encouraging interaction in a less money-driven community. The Dame Street equivalent was seen as having a negative, anti-establishment stance that is perhaps counter-productive to the overall idea of protesting against late capitalism. There is a resonating opposition in Irish youth to grand nationalistic movement – we can still (just about) remember the troubles in Northern Ireland, and ODS’s negativity certainly had a whiff of the militaristic, even if that went against their mantra.

Graph courtesy of irelandafternama.wordpress.com, click for link.

Another major failing of Occupy Dame Street could be attributed to its Dublin location. Since the economic crash in 2008, Dublin has been heavily marred by empty properties, falling property values and a marked increase in unemployment. However, the rest of the country suffered a near tripling of unemployment between 2006 and 2009, compared to Dublin’s increase of just over double, and the non-urban regions of the country have also suffered from the lack of infrastructure put in place due to delayed development during the boom years. Protest movements have been taking place outside of the capital, as documented recently by the Irish Times, but they are on a more localised community level.

The amount of intelligent debate both online and offline about this subject has since matched the blunt negative comments like “serves the smelly hippies right”, etc. Many have begun to respond to ODS’s collapse as a positive move. People who previously felt that they need to protest but were nervous about being bulked with a negative movement have begun to put new ideas in place, in the form of art and music events, social gatherings and just general debate and discussion.

Occupy Dame Street in November 2011

On Wall Street and in the highly successful Spanish Occupy movements the message was always directed at positivity. Although these movements are also faltering, they have garnered far more popular support than the Irish equivalent. These foreign movements exhibited far less of the social ambiguity, secrecy and coterie nature that Occupy Dame Street seemed to harbour.

On the whole, Occupy Dame Street’s major downfall seemed to be that it did not appear to represent the 99%. It only appeared to represent its own 1% (as a friend cleverly said to me – now we can form our 98% movement and carry on). The Irish protest movement exists, and takes on a variety of forms, but perhaps Occupy is not necessarily built for the Irish model.

Whether the Irish protest in its current post-occupy format it will be impacting remains to be seen. Risking the communist reference, perhaps this movement is more Menshevik than Bolshevik. It might not be a bad thing, but it does make it a less instantly recognisable one.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Budapest in a nutshell, on a shoestring (January 2011)

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Picture courtesy of Amy

The towns of Buda and Pest were amalgamated into one city in 1873. The monumental castle of Buda became the focal point for the new city; it sits enormous on the west bank of the Danube. It is the latest in a long line of castles to be raised and razed in this spot, the current castle is a Frankenstein’s monster consisting of parts of the 18th Century upgrade and reconstructed areas of the medieval castle amongst others after the castle was heavily damaged in World War II.

The amalgamation of histories and styles is a reflection of the central European hodge-podge that is the capital of Hungary. Landlocked in the centre of Europe, Budapest’s history has seen war after war; from Celts to Romans to Huns to Christianity, the Ottoman Empire and the Austro-Hungarian empire, occupation and conquest saw the landscape of Budapest change and mar through past generations. And what remains today is a damn fine spot for a holiday.

Landing late in the evening, myself and my lovely girlfriend Amy embarked upon a 5-day adventure in this striking city. We came to do a gung-ho tourist trail, promising ourselves an active long weekend of trips to the famous castle and the renowned health spas alongside some less well-traveled tourist routes.

We touched down in hostel HQ after the relatively short journey from airport to city. Our abode of choice for this trip was the Caterina Hostel, which, it is worth mentioning, was pretty much the lap of luxury of the hostel world. The building is beautiful, with high decorative ceilings juxtaposed against a modern interior that works perfectly (to my bemusement). The private bedroom was extremely reasonable on price, and the on-site fridge etc. came in extremely handy for the adventurer of limited pocket.

On to the city!

Picture courtesy of Amy

The trams in Budapest are great. They are Eastern European in every sense; snarling old mechanised things that make you feel like you are really taking a journey. Most of the city is easily navigable by foot however, and this is how we made most of our way.

To get a brief point out of the way quickly: the famous health spas are underwhelming if you aren’t into that sort of thing (I have learned that I am not). The buildings are lovely, but to me naturally warm water is just like unnaturally warm water, and besides the nice fresh smell they are really just glorified swimming pools.

With that gruff moaning taken care of, there is a wealth to do in the city besides the spas. We managed to stick to the tourist routes, but allowed time for meanderings and deviations along the way.

The old town of Buda surrounding the castle made good on some of these meanderings – on side-streets we caught sight of lines of old Trabants and Ladas that are still chugging away in the more remote regions of the city. We also stumbled across some great cafes in this region.

Picture courtesy of Amy - my Tiltshift edit

The castle itself is part of the Budapest UNESCO World Heritage site, which incorporates a variety of the historical riches in the city. It is spectacular for an evening wander and offers the best views of the city from its spot perched on high above the west bank of the Danube. The surrounding walls are great to explore, and the old cable car that brings you up the hill to the castle is worth the journey even if it is extortionate by Budapest prices.

There is a labyrinth that runs underneath the castle and is advertised as a tourist attraction, but beware! Although a bit of fun to explore on the late-night torch-light excursion, the cavernous tunnels are a little conceited, with unneccesary sound effects and somewhat tacky art pieces along the way; and the labyrinth culminates in a bizarre and inexplicable pseudo-exhibition placing the viewer in the future, with fossils of laptops and mobile phones on display. It is hard to describe but in my humble opinion it’s not really worth a visit even for the kitsch factor.

When night falls, Pest is the party side of the Danube. Here you can find the trail of ruin pubs that we sampled on our visit. These are terrific – the buildings are derelict and decorated sporadically with graffitti and recycled art. The ruin pubs form the centre of a lively Budapest nightlife. The Hungarians are good drinkers too, and behave more or less like the Irish when smashed (high spirits, don’t stop drinking til you hit the floor). The similarity could be due to the Celtic influence. Or the history of occupation.

On the art and culture side, the textile museum is great for a visit, with a comprehensive history of Hungarian clothes on display. We were also lucky to land during a terrific art exhibition at the Ludwig Museum showing a collection of Taiwanese art. The show was typical of group shows, in that there was a wide variety and something for everyone to love. And, of course, something for everyone to hate. But the exhibition and the museum impressed no end. Budapest’s art scene is decidedly contemporary, but offers a rich variety from grungier young art to high art museums and historical exhibitions.

Outside the Ludwig museum stands Heroes Square, a large monument commemorating the leaders of Hungary through the centuries. Completed in 1900 (and part of the enormous area of Budapest that comprises a World Heritage site), the square comprises  a semi-circle (never mind…) of statues, each one showing one of fifteen admired Hungarian historical figures. This is worth a visit and a long ponder over the variety in the excellently crafted sculptures.

The tourist hot-spot Margaret Island proved a high point on this trip on our last day. Bathed in fog we set forth on a long walk around the tranquil space, encountering joggers and tourists and freezing in the cold January air. Until this point the winter cold hadn’t hit – the days had been sunny throughout and temperatures were mild, but in the fog Budapest got extremely chilly. We passed an open nature reserve that held a selection of domesticated animals and wandered by the Danube catching sight of broken piers and the barely-visible far bank of the river, until the cold was too much to bear and we packed it in.

I haven’t exactly told this story chronologically – I decided to meander in and out and give a taster of all that was on offer, which is really how this flying visit went for myself and my adventuring companion.

But I wanted to save the best for last. Although the historical beauty, contemporary culture and boisterous nightlife were magnificent, the arguable highlight of the holiday was Pál-völgyi Cave, which we visited during a guided caving expedition north of the city. It is easy to find information on the caving trips in the hostels of the city. Take a couple of buses to the outskirts of Budapest (around an hour of traveling) and you’re there.

We were guided by Laszlo (excuse the probable misspelling), a magnanimous caver and all-round enjoyable chap. Provided with jump-suits and making up half of a group of four eager tourists, we descended into the winding, squeezing tubes of the cave. We took a route affectionately known as the “toilet seat”, which brought us on a 3-hour loop underground through some of the most fascinating tunnels I have ever seen. This was my first ever experience of caving, and I could not recommend it higher. Crawling, pulling, climbing, scraping and getting stuck were all part of the fun. Not for the claustrophobic or anyone who is afraid to get dirty, but this adventure is really worth having, if not in Budapest then somewhere. For me these underground tunnels were a terrific introduction to caving, and the tour was exemplary in every regard.

A choice of riches described, and this doesn’t come close to the full Budapest experience. The markets, although disappointing, are worth a visit. Traditional Hungarian-style garbs are on offer, along with games and trinkets, but the space is very tourist-orientated and extremely expensive. The walks along the banks of the Danube are a treat at all times, and it was fun to follow the tram-lines around the city. There is incredible architecture everywhere you look, and grand statues are nearly more common than people. Although still a very poor city, the people are extremely friendly. The high street shops are popular and much the same as they are anywhere else – better avoided in my opinion but people do travel to Budapest to shop.

It is also worth mentioning, I left Ireland with €300 cash, ate and drank liberally, went on numerous adventures and came home with money to spare. There is value to be had for anyone who wants a holiday but feels like it might be out of reach. Avoid the city-centre restaurants and dodge extortionate tourist fares and spending a few days in Budapest will not break the bank.

And that is Budapest in a nutshell. 5 days of extremely proactive tourist-ing later and we caught the next flight back to Ireland. On a whole, the city is extraordinary, and although we didn’t see everything, the essence of Budapest can certainly be experienced in a shotgun visit.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated. I don’t mind reproductions, but please credit them to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Future Shock! – How popular culture views the future

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The future is coming, or so they say. And as it approaches us head-on, we can do little to avoid collision with its impending certainty. I for one am looking forward to the invention of hoverboards in 2015, but am still nervous every time I turn on my computer of the day when robots rule the earth.

There are various artistic visions of how the future will pan out. In films and books we have been shown everything from sleek space-age technological dreams to dark, zombie-infested post-apocalyptic worlds, from grim cyberpunk metropolises to harmonic ages of enlightenment. We have seen visions of utopias and dystopias but through our myopia can only glimpse the world of tomorrow.

The uncertainty of the future leads to the endearing notion that it can be shaped in whatever way we choose. Creative individuals show us their perspectives, observing what they see around them and dictating a potential future from what they experience.

In the early 20th century, a glutton of creators began to examine the reshaping of society at the end of the second millennium. Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World paints a picture of a future showing a society monitored and controlled by the addiction to drugs and the genetic engineering of human beings. Huxley was critical of the growing apathy and hedonism in American society (particularly in California) and wrote this book as a satire on how the world could be if this behaviour became mainstream. Fritz Lang’s celebrated masterpiece Metropolis deals with a jarred future where the gap between wealthy and poor in a supermodern city is virtually un-bridgeable. The concept was in response to poor working conditions faced by the lower classes at this time. In 1984, George Orwell observed the oppressive nationalist uprisings in 1940s Europe. He studied the dictatorships of Stalin and Franco, and watched how propaganda was used in World War II as a political tool to rally masses of individuals into a system of belief under the autocratic rule in a totalitarian state.

The autocracy of Orwell’s future, the ovine subservience of Huxley’s and the gap in wealth and power in Metropolis are all visions embedded in current affairs from when the works were created. They are preoccupied with history and political movements, and show possible ultimate directions that society can take if totalitarian-style political systems are accepted by the masses and implemented. It is interesting to take these three works and see how sections of them were near accurate predictions. Certainly Fritz Lang’s perception of the growing gap between rich and poor is poignant to those protesting in Occupy movements throughout the world. And of course Orwell is often cited when we see video cameras on street corners or hear bleating monotonous pop music on the radio.

Later 20th century models saw the dystopia taken tongue-in-cheek. The dank and dreary future worlds of Terry Gilliam’s Brazil and 12 Monkeys play with the director’s frustrations at an overabundance of social order and red-tape. In both films the protagonists find themselves bound by rules and a level of order that is so meticulously ordained it is uninhabitable to the rebellious human spirit.

Another alternative to the future model developed in the second half of the 20th century. The end of civilisation altogether began to be toyed with by creative practitioners. George A. Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (1978) harked back to biblical stories of the apocalypse – the end of the human race. “When hell is full, the dead shall walk the earth,” utters a preacher at the beginning of the film, as the undead begin to rise and slaughter the human race. Like earlier futuristic writing, Romero’s is a social observation, looking at the decay of society into an anarchic mess. The idea of zombies and the spread of the end of society took a turn in the 21st Century after we witnessed the spread of HIV and other blood-transmitted pathogens. Rather than the dead reanimating, the zombie genre now often deals with a pandemic that spreads to end society, a-la 28 Days Later (2002).

Comparatively, another apocalyptic end comes in the form of war or nuclear fallout. This model deals with the disasterous end of human civilisation at our own hands. David Brin’s The Postman hints at war as the end of civilisation, but blames the survivors for their own downfall. Video game series Fallout creates a post-nuclear apocalyptic vision as society attempts to rebuild in the ashes.

Interestingly, Fallout, although a recent game, plays on the 1950s-style “Modern Future” theme harking back to Disneyland’s Tommorrow-land area and attractions such as the Monsanto House of the Future. In the duck-and-cover fear-mongering of the Cold War era, the nuclear dystopia emerged. The use of this mixed past/future style in Fallout borrows from the era when the idea first grew roots, but places the story in the future. This is similar to the Steampunk genre, which gives historical fiction (usually Victorian) access to modern or futuristic apparatuses like electricity or automatons. Blade Runner, Ridley Scott’s film adaptation of Phillip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, is also interesting as it embraces the film noir style to ground the movie in the past while juxtaposing the style with imagery of the future. Like Fallout or Steampunk, this blends two eras together to create a future that relates to the past directly.

Not all future depictions are bleak. The 2009 film Moon by Duncan Jones depicts a world where energy is abundant, powered by moon stations. Although the film centers on the discontentment of the protagonist as a lonely employee providing this energy, it hints at the peaceful unity of a utopian world of wealth and abundance.

In Science Fiction the future is often portrayed as life in outer space, with technological advancement leading to a wealth of human comforts. This can range from the semi-dystopic visions in Wall-E to the more fantasised premonitions outlined in Star Trek or Star Wars. But even these stories continue to deal with contemporary themes. Wall-E is concerned with the environmental destruction of the earth and the complacency of society. Star Trek features a comprehensive assortment of alien creatures that mimic the social structures of current societies.

Each future compiled by our cultural masterminds is in essence an amalgamation of their present, their teachings from history and their predictions of the possible future outcomes. As the weight of the Occupy movement is hammered home, more analysis of the disparity in division of wealth may lead to cultural investigators returning to the theme of disparity of wealth as in Metropolis or H.G Wells’ The Time Machine. Or perhaps the relentless advancement of Apple innovations (we can only presume Steve Jobs left a notebook behind) and Google’s cornering of the online stratosphere could lead to Blade Runner or The Matrix style technological dystopias being produced. The strongest and most recent sample of futuristic creativity I have come across is the fantastic interactive online page, Collapsus, which deals with the current energy crisis.

The future that is shown to us by popular culture will always be constrained by the limitations of imagination. We can only predict possible outcomes that seem plausible based on what we currently understand of the present. Erratic events like the spread of HIV or the detonation of the first atomic bombs will always alter future predictions to take in these new variables

Still, as a society we are the creators of the future. Cultural formats can give us a glimpse of an idea, but it is people who will make the future. Whether we follow these cultural messages by donning a Guy Fawkes mask on Wall Street or turning off a light in a room you are not using, or we simply exist with one eye on our own future lives, the future is in the hands of those in the present.

As for the writers and creators, it is impossible to predict what futures they will come up with next.

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated, please credit any reproductions to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Sixteen Years for Fifteen Seconds: How long should you view a work of art?

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Look at the painting...

In 2010 James Elkins, Art Critic and Historian of the School of the Art Institute, Chicago, wrote a piece entitled How Long Does it Take To Look at a Painting? for The Huffington Post. In this piece the author describes an encounter with an elderly lady who he estimates, over decades of visits to the Art Institute of Chicago, spent at least 3,000 hours looking at Rembrandt’s painting Young Woman at an Open Half-Door (below).

Rembrandt - Young Woman at an Open Half-Door (1645)

Last year the online version of the tabloid The Daily Mail published a biting piece about the brief moments that viewers spend viewing contemporary art, leading with the jaundiced headline We all know what we like, and it’s not modern art!

The basic premise of the Daily Mail’s piece was to prove via observation that viewers spend an average of as little as 5 seconds looking at works by important contemporary artists such as Rachel Whiteread or Tracy Emin in the TATE Modern. Their conclusion was that viewers do not like looking at modern art.

Far be it from me to accuse The Daily Mail of canny journalism, but unfortunately there was an important point raised by the rag in this study. The point is not that viewers do not like looking at contemporary art, but that they do not spend much time looking at art.

The issue can be expanded into all visual art. The Guardian (phew!) quote a viewing time of the Mona Lisa of just around 15 seconds; just enough time to take a snapshot of La Gioconada. This meant that a work of art that took Leonardo Da Vinci sixteen years to complete merits less than a second of viewing per year of making. This brisk viewing time of art was further emphasised in an observational study, Spending Time On Art by Jason K. Smith and Lisa F. Smith (University of Otago, New Zealand), where the authors observed a 17 second median viewing time of art in the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art.

Snapping the Mona Lisa - Image from The Guardian Online

I personally can confess to barreling through the crowds at The Louvre as an eager teenager looking to snap the Mona Lisa and virtually bypassing one of the world’s greatest collections of art on my way there. What I saw at the end was anticlimactic in my young eyes, having spent so many years looking at so many reproductions of this historically significant but seemingly unremarkable work of art. What I missed while glazing the corridors of one of the world’s great art institutions was monumental.

Why I rushed to see the Mona Lisa, and why the painting was so disappointing, I equate primarily to both education and understanding of art. I was raised to see the Mona Lisa as a driving force of all modern art, but I had little understanding of what the significance of the painting actually was – I was more starstruck with the idea of the Mona Lisa than with the actual work of art.

This expectation could be the same expectation that led to Rachel Whiteread’s sculpture at the TATE Modern being glossed over in The Daily Mail’s observation. Whiteread has enjoyed critical acclaim (and some lambasting) since her controversial sculpture House shot her to fame in 1993. This public installation led Whiteread to become the first ever female winner of the Turner Prize, and her method for making art has remained relatively constant since.

Rachel Whiteread - House (1993) - Image courtesy of damonart.com

The artist casts objects (including in her repertoire a Victorian house as mentioned above, library bookshelves and a controversial holocaust monument), then creates “negative sculptures” of these objects to show a sealed-off and finalised view of something which once had human engagement. The resulting works of art give a fascinating view of objects in a way that they are not normally seen, like turning real-life inside out and presenting a caulked perspective that can be eerie and unwelcoming. The weight of concept behind Whiteread’s methods is enormous, but the actual finished product can look somewhat empty to the uninformed viewer without closer inspection.

Whether Whiteread’s work will inspire a frenzy of happy snappers in a prodigious art institution in 500 years time is something we will never know. We do know, however that 5 or 15 seconds is a remarkably small amount of time to view a work of art of any description. I personally have spent sixteen seconds watching a baby panda sneeze on YouTube. But I cannot claim to have spent more than fifteen seconds looking at the Mona Lisa.

In 1970 author Alvin Toffler wrote a sociological study, Future Shock. In this book, Toffler analyses the effects of a “speeding up” of society to the point where transience will become second nature. Since its publication, much of Toffler’s percipient visions have become social mainstays. Contemporary western society can be said to exist in a period where transience rules supreme; ephemeral is the name of the game, and from a young age we are now spoon-fed instant access to a world of information through modern media and technology that leave little time for appreciation and analysis.

Although this has led to some wonderful developments, the problem with this is that art takes time and understanding to read properly. In the Huffington Post article referenced at the start of this piece James Elkins observed that if he had a full-time job of looking at art then he would have spent over two working weeks to learn to see one Mondrian painting. Art takes time and education to understand fully, and time is the key factor. We are all able to see the artistic product in front of us, but it is only through taking time looking that we can truly see the art.

Through education we can learn the rest.

The picture that you saw at the beginning of this post shows a scene of art fans viewing Manet’s famous and extremely influential le déjeuner sur l’herbe (The Luncheon on the Grass). Manet’s painting is often cited as the first modern painting, completed in 1863 and currently exhibited at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

If you have not already spotted it, the image that you see above is a watercolour painting of the Manet painting being exhibited. It is called Untitled (Manet), by Canadian artist Tim Gardner [image courtesy of 303 gallery]. Garder’s method is to take photographs and make photo-realist paintings of scenes. His concept, as cited in modern painting bible Vitamin P, is partly a criticism of modern painting, designed to show that photography has made painting somewhat obsolete. His use of the supposed “first” modern painting in a gallery as the subject of this painting underlines the theme of modern painting as central in his work.

Le d’éjeuner sur l’herbe took two years to complete. The viewers in Gardner’s painting will be looking at it as long as Untitled (Manet) exists.

The moral of this story: The more you look, the more you see.

To define “Time” in ten words or less

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We can all define time. We all understand what it is and how it works, right? The challenge: to define time in ten words or less.

The Oxford English Dictionary summarise time pretty well:

time

Pronunciation: /tʌɪm/ noun 1 [mass noun] the indefinite continued progress of existence and events in the past, present, and future regarded as a whole

 

That’s exactly what I would have said.

The concept is straightforward for anyone who has existed in it. “The indefinite continued progress of existence”, as soon as you get past trying to understand “indefinite”. The continued progress of existence is something we have all related to and seen. But “indefinite” like “infinite” is a concept that we can’t see or experience, as nothing that exists within our own individual line of vision is not definite. Except for time.

OK, but the “past, present and future” are straightforward to understand as long as you live in a world where time exists. Our memories and the memories of others that are recounted to us through historical account are the “past”. So “past” is simple. As long as you don’t think back further than history records, to the Big Bang, when time as we understand it began. But having a finite point in the past means that time is not indefinite, at least in one direction. Still, there is nothing to say that time did not exist previous to the Big Bang, but there are still questions unanswered.

The present exists though. We are all sure of that. You are reading this post in the present. Or, rather, the word you are reading as you are reading it is being read in the present. Because the parts that you have already read have fallen into the past, and the part that you will read if you are polite enough to sustain the rest of this post is the future. So the present exists between the past and the future. For a moment, as in the idea of “now”. but “now” has already passed by the time that you realise it is “now”. And apparently we experience everything 80 milliseconds after it has happened due to the delay in signals getting to our brains, so what you are actually experiencing is slightly in the past, and what is happening now has not happened for you yet…

OK, we’ll jump to the future. No problem. The things that will happen. The future certainly exists. We know that time will continue on to an indefinite point. Unless it stops. Which we would never know about, because it would happen in the future. Or, rather, it would happen in the present, at a moment, but that moment exists in the future.

This is getting polluted. Let’s try another definition; one of something more rational than language. How about science:

“Absolute, true, and mathematical time, in and of itself and of its own nature, without reference to anything external, flows uniformly and by another name is called duration. Relative, apparent, and common time is any sensible and external measure (precise or imprecise) of duration by means of motion; such a measure – for example, an hour, a day, a month, a year – is commonly used instead of true time.”

Sir Isaac Newton, Philosophae Naturalis Principia Mathematica

Newton had an understanding of absolution, and time to Newton was something which existed in an almost physical way. Newton divided time into two separate forms – one of absolution, i.e. “Absolute Time”, the second of relativity, relating to the individual, i.e. “Relative Time”

Absolute Time is something that exists without human perception. This moves perpetually through the universe. It exists and always will exist. It travels and passes, and everything that has happened has happened, and everything that is going to happen is going to happen. To Newton Absolute Time could not be perceived, but it could be inferred through mathematics. For example, the movement of moons around planets show the passing of time, because their movement suggests something calculable has changed and the change in position could not exist without time. So Absolute Time is the constant existence of movement of anything in the universe, but it is imperceptible. Got that?

Relative Time, in contrast, is time that the individual can experience. We know that time has passed by our own perception of things that have happened, and by experiencing the very short-lived present. But relative time is unique to the individual who experiences it. A good metaphor recounted on BBC’s superb radio show In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg. In an episode entitled The Physics of Time speaker and theoretical physicist Jim Al-Khalili suggests that for two football fans at a match cheering on a their winning and losing side respectively, time moves much faster for the losing fan who is hoping for a goal, where time moves slowly for the winning fan who is nervous about conceding one.

So Absolute Time just exists, and we have to believe it despite never experiencing it. And relative time certainly exists but it is different for each one of us. And this was accepted until Einstein threw a spanner in the works in the 1920s and denied that Absolute Time was a unique entity from space, showing that space and time existed and reacted together.

And space and time combined brings me to philosophy for definition number 3:

“Time is not an empirical concept that is somehow drawn from experience. For simultaneity or succession would not themselves come into perception if the representation of time did not ground them a priori. Only under its presuppositions can one represent that several things exist at one and the same time or at different times.”

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason

Now we’re getting somewhere. Aren’t we?

OK, Time is not an empirical concept, i.e. time is not relative, or concerned with individual observation. Rather, time is a theoretical thing which exists absolutely. For Kant nothing could exist if time didn’t exist, so we are back to something closer to Newton’s Absolute Time, which we remember Einstein equated to be relational to space. To Kant time is a priori, which in philosophy is a type of dual-knowledge or argument, concerned with space. Kant like Einstein saw time as fully relational to space, and argued that both are elements that we use to structure our experience.

That is to say our own individual experience.

Which is relative depending on whether your team is winning or losing.

And which changes depending on your views of history. And which can be distorted by your predictions of the future. Which is something that has not existed yet, while the present exists and the past once existed but only for a moment and that fleeting moment burned out as soon as the present subsided and a new future was entered into, and became the present, to soon become the past.

Right?

And at this point I have only delved into more populist theories of time. We’ve still got simultaneity and presentism, endurantism and perdurantism, chronology and spacetime, history and eternity and Antiphon the Sophist to cover. I’ll leave that for another post.

We’ll stick with the straightforward definitions we have at hand. Define the three concepts above in ten or fewer words. No problem. Let’s take a little from all three and create a definition:

“Time: A priori of progress of existence without reference to anything.”

Oxford English Dictionary, Sir Isaac Newton and Immanuel Kant

Sound about right? Here’s a treat for taking the time to read this:

All photography is my own and subject to copyright unless stated, please credit any reproductions to this blog or contact (contactmoonunderwater@gmail.com) for more information.

Red Phone-boxes: Ireland North and South

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On a very recent trip to the north of Ireland from my home south of the border, I was asked by a friend and fellow traveller if I had encountered any culture shock after crossing into Northern Ireland. She had never visited up north before, being from further south in the country. The thought had never struck me.

When I was growing up Northern Ireland was the place that scandalised the headlines constantly with news of the bombings and beatings and various atrocities of the ongoing war in that area, and also where my parents would go to shop cheap. As a young child the troubles were an ambiguous thing at the very least, and the mention of towns I knew quite well like Omagh and Enniskillen were just mentions of places where awful things happened, but they never seemed that bad. The money was Pound Sterling, not the good old Irish Punt, the post-boxes and phone-boxes were red, not green.

My memories are mixed. In primary school the lads used to ask if you support Celtic or Rangers – innocent as it seems it was a big question, and get it wrong and you could be in for harassment. The toilet walls sometimes had “Up The Ra” written on them, which I presumed was where the waste went. We read Seamus Heaney poems in class and thought about what the police were doing at his house. A friend moved to the north when I was around 11. And that was more or less the last I ever heard from him.

But apart from that I didn’t think too much about it.

Borders are remarkable things. Even on a community level, rivalries can kick up over the ownership of land, as Bull McCabe and William Dee thought us. Last year Dublin hosted the inaugural Dublin Contemporary, which featured an array of artworks that dealt with borders as a central theme, the most humerous being Javier Téllez’ One Flew Over The Void (see below) in which a human cannonball is shot over the border separating Mexico and the United States. The most striking was a dark piece by Chen Chieh-Jen about border controls between mainland China and Taiwan named Empires Borders I. In the former swarms of border police monitor the unusual and jovial daring attempt to enter the States, and in the latter stories of oppression and intimidation from border control police are recounted by victims. The idea of cultural difference between these distant nation states seems massive in comparison to red phone-boxes, but certainly in past times border controls were intense in the north, and firing a cannon into either country could have sparked a political storm.

So it is interesting to think about the idea of a cultural difference between Northern Ireland and the Republic in terms of the invisible border that separates both states. Historically, there are of course differences in terms of the settlement of protestants in particular during the Cromwellian and pre-Cromwellian days with the large settlement of English and Scotch protestants in the north of the country. Today there are certainly more towns that you can pass through with Union Jacks on display (the total being approximately zero in the south), and there are times when you can sense that the southern accent is unwelcome, but Ireland is one island – we deal with the same weather, we have similar geography, and we are sea-locked so as nations we have little choice but to communicate.

On the roads you can notice some differences – the speed signs show miles per hour, not kilometres like in the Republic. The road markings are different too, and at times, especially in Derry and Belfast, the infrastructure is noticeably different – like different architects were employed to do the same things that were done in Limerick and Cork but went about it in an unorthodox manner from a southerner’s eyes. The footpaths and railings seem slightly off kilter with the south, and the phone-boxes…

Having grown up and seen the troubles end and a relatively stable peace fall over the north, I have come to visit it more often. The differences that I used to notice have become fewer and fewer, to the point where I would barely notice that I was across the border were it not for the subtle aesthetic differences or the accent.

The interesting thing about a border is that it is an invisible line – there is no great red stroke across the land like there is on maps. The border is an ambivalent player in the game of cultural animosity – it is a cartographer’s line that notices nothing about the people who pass in and out of a place. It is the people that notice the difference, and in the case of the difference between the north and south of Ireland, the most noticeable difference is in the history, not in the contemporary. More and more emphasis is placed on attempting to build bridges with the nations connected by land. The Good Friday agreement has pushed history further into the past, and peace is generally welcome on both sides of the border. The orange order are looking to set up bases in the Republic, and the Irish language is being spoken at cultural events in Northern Ireland. The high-street stores and international events are similar in both states, and the European autonomy is the same.

All except the red phone-boxes, but they will soon all disappear.

From Aalborg to Skagastrond (Saturday, May 8th – Tuesday, May 10th)

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This is part 3 of 3 from the blog post Driving From Ireland to Iceland. If you follow this link the original post will explin these entries further.

Saturday, May 7th 2011 – International Waters

Saturday started understandably groggy. After breakfast and a fond farewell or three I hit the road and got agonisingly lost again in Aalborg, seething at the inefficiency of the traffic system and worrying more than a little about missing check-in for the ferry to Iceland at Hirtshals port, over an hour from the Danish City. I eventually broke free from the web of the city and was on my way with time to spare.

The port was as disorganised a place as I have ever visited. There seemed to be no concrete system for checking in, and cars and campers were parked flecked and scattered across the four lanes of entry as we waited for the ferry arrivals to slowly pass us by. When they eventually did, I drove on to the second biggest ship I had ever seen (this time with what seemed a completely bursting-to-the-brim full contingent of passengers, although on board it seemed like they could take more) and got a jolt of giddiness as the engines roared and we set sail. The next time my feet touch land I will be in the ambiguous state of the Faroe Islands, and the next stop after that will be in the unambiguous certainty that I am for the first time in my life no longer resident in the European Union. This ship (the Norona, a Faroese ferry that is a central force in the Faroe Islands’ tourist industry) is taking me far, far away.

Sunday, May 8th 2011 – Sea Legs

Met an amiable German named Martin, who, it turns out, is also a couchsurfer, and is moving to Reykjavik to do some web work for a new company. We talked about systems and getting around such things, and figured out a couple of harmless scams to make the journey a little more comfortable!

Sailed past the Shetlands too as fog began to descend. Two shipping boats surrounded by flocks of pestering seagulls that looked like TV static in the distance braved the high waves and low visibility.

Monday, May 9th 2011 – Meeting Vikings

Monday brings us to the Faroe Islands. The fog is thick and heavy as we land at 5 a.m. I had declined the option to bring my car onto shore here when in Hirsthals, and wonder (after a conversation with Martin, who had done the opposite) whether I had done the right thing. I choose to brave Tórshavn on foot, and soon enough realise this was a good idea.

There are no customs checks, passport checks or really checks of any kind entering or leaving this Danish principality, despite the fact that it is a nation unto itself (sort-of technically) and is not an E.U. state (to all extents and purposes). Really, it just seems like the folk here couldn’t care less about customs etc., it’s all very easy-going from the off.

The first sight encountered is a beautifully classical red-and-white striped lighthouse at the port. Climbing its hill I discover that the area is a former viking fort, and was a military station for the Danes during the 17th-19th Centuries. In World War II the British took control of the Faroes after Denmark had been occupied by Germany, and used this same hill as a garrison fort. The old Danish cannons and more recent British guns are still situated here, rusty and forlorn on the hilltop.

I walked along the shoreline taking in the tumultuous waves as they pounded the rocky shore, and I decided to follow a path off the main road and up along this shoreline, past an abandoned quarry. The fog was incredibly dense and there was unfortunately little visibility. Before long I was no longer in the Faroese capital Torshavn (which is little bigger than my hometown Sligo) and am walking in full countryside. Before long again I end up back in Torshavn.

The people here really resembled vikings in every Asterix-comic way. But all were very friendly, greeting me even at the early hour that I was out for a stroll with a smile and an unfamiliar hello. And there seemed to be children everywhere as the hours rolled on. I presumed that either the Faroese are very fertile or everyone on the islands goes to school in little Tórshavn (I learn later that the latter assumption is correct – as the furthest town in only an hour away, most children travel to Torshavn for their education). I circled the city a few times aimlessly – it is extremely hilly and there are a lot of side-streets so I found myself lost and found regularly. Eventually I stumbled across the national football stadium and pop in to see if Brian Kerr is in. He’s not.

A short walk from the stadium I discovered the national gallery. An exhibition by Faroese artist Edward Fuglø was advertised, and it looked pretty interesting so I decide to visit, but unfortunately it has a later opening time than 8.30 a.m. and I had to return later.

In the meantime I sauntered around a wonderful park next to the gallery, which has a centre-piece of an enormous sculpture dedicated to second world war victims, featuring a figure on top staring out into the south. On the subject of sculptures, the city is full of bronze-cast figurative works that almost all seem to be made by one artist (I later discover that this artist is Hans Pauli Olsen, and is quite famous in the Faroes).

Back to the museum then! I sat outside waiting for the opening reading Man’s Search For Meaning until early arrival school tours clear out of the building and it is (almost) time for it to officially open. Greeted by the invigilator, who has good English and suggested I go for the student rate, I was given a brief description of Fuglø and the museum before I entered. The museum houses a collection of art from the Faroes from the last 100 years, curated (I was told with an air of pride) by Mikael Wivel, the famous Danish curator and writer. The Fuglø exhibition is their current temporary show.

Fuglø is a contemporary Faroese artist. He works in painting, photography and mixed media installation. He is very well known in the Faroe Islands. And he is very, very good. The show, entitled Merry-Go-Round was about Faroese identity, politics between the Faroes and Denmark, birds, eggs, and art. It’s really very strong work, in particular the semi-surrealistic painting pieces which are as bizarre as they are brilliant. The level of professionalism catches me completely by surprise, which might seem a little philistinical, but I had not expected such a small country to produce such powerful, professional and high-budget work. I had just presumed the funding wouldn’t be there for the 50,000-odd Faroese inhabitants, but apparently it is there in buckets! Fuglø has also managed to sell a couple of the pieces, which I imagine went for several thousand euro, if not tens of thousands each (judging by prices on other works). I felt completely ashamed of Ireland at this point.

My shame worsened as I see that Fuglø was not a one-off. The rest of the Faroese artists in the permanent collection showed an acute knowledge of contemporary art and a high level of professionalism and investment in visual culture. The tradition of visual art in the Faroes is relatively recent, but it has been taken on with fervour. The quality of work would challenge any national museum that I’ve been to, although there is understandably less of it, in particular the paintings of Ingalvur Av Reyni and Thomas Arge, the former a recently deceased expressionist painter whose shown work was from the 90s, the latter’s work was 1970s work and also really expressionist and vivid. I began to wonder whether Ireland will ever search out any form of cultural identity, or will continue to hide it while we pine for international recognition through economic prosperity (it’s a pipe dream lads, and the alarm clock’s ringing).

Back to the ferry in a hurry then.

Throughout the city the tradition of grass-roofed houses can still be seen on many old buildings, including the port-side governmental houses that I happened upon by chance after getting lost on the way back to the boat. My tourist info came as I met a friendly port engineer who walked me back, accompanying the stroll with some back-story to the area. The government buildings were apparently situated there since the landing of the vikings in the 10th Century, I learn through unconfident but strong English. There are also 500 boats in the harbour, the grass roofs have had a resurgence in modern buildings and the Faroese intend to stabilise a rock-face near the port with steel beams (I kept the engineer talking as we walk).

On board again and we set sail at 3 p.m.

Tuesday, May 10th 2011 – Sublime

Here at last we hit land at Seydisfjordur. My cabin-mate from my last night on-board, a German called Ro (again, a member of the Couchsurfing community), requested a lift as far as Akureyri, the second largest town in the country, and, as it was on my way to Skagastrond, I happily obliged. As he has no strict schedule, all was gravy with regards adventuring when we hit land.

Initial impressions of the country couldn’t have been much grander. Ice-capped mountains surround the small port town of Seydisfjordur. We journey a short distance through valleys until we come upon another small village, Egilsstatdir, where I stopped for diesel and some breakfast

Myself and Ro hit the road once we had fuelled car and people adequately, and aim for Akureyri. There is one ring road that runs around the entire island so we’re either going straight for the town or directly away from it. Map and compass told us that we were on the right path.

There was heavy fog when we departed. The road leads up and up until we are driving on top of a constant mountain of around 600 metres (surrounded on all sides by higher peaks still). There is still some of Spring’s ice on the verges, which are terrifyingly steep. Best to keep on the road here – any veering into the ditch would mean certain write-off. The fog cleared eventually, and cloudy but sunny weather stayed with us for most of the rest of the day.

At this juncture I would like to just point out the extreme culture shock faced when beginning this journey. I was down a 2-lane motorway in the middle of the day where I pass a car once maybe every five minutes (more seldom again at parts). People don’t bother to stop at junctions at all – there is no need. The population is so scattered we barely saw a living soul for long stretches. I had expected a sparsely populated country as promised, but did not realise that it would hit me this hard upon arrival.

There is an abundance of waterfalls on either side on the drive from Seydisfjordur, but very little in the way of civilization. On the lower levels we passed some minute towns, on the higher terrain there is nothing at all – not even the semi-common fields of grazing Icelandic horses with their drooping manes and heavy fur subsist at these heights. We stopped briefly at a small car-park (these are dotted about all over the place on this road, strategically located next to particularly scenic views) and admire a pthalo grey, hilly landscape. The rock we encountered here seems to suck the daylight away, and as this deep grey was the only colour for miles, and with no traffic on the road, it felt as if we are taking a break on a dead planet. All the waterfalls make me think of Dettifoss, the largest ‘fall in Europe according to tourist guidebooks, and I suggest a detour slightly off our route to Ro, who was more than happy to journey out and see the waterfall.

We took a side-road that gradually dissipates into nothing but dirt towards the waterfall. I drove in the middle of the road here to avoid wrecking my suspension. There was not another soul for miles around. Construction vehicles sat by the road as we travel, but they looked like they had been inoperative for some time. It is possible that this road was one of the casualties of the recession here. We got out at a toilet that stands like an island surrounded by run-off water next to a car-park (by car-park I mean a flattened mound of loose gravel where one other car is parked). There are two enormous waterfalls here – Selfoss is the first, and this runs further downstream into Dettifoss.

After a relatively brief hike, we came to Selfoss. There were a few other hikers out for a stroll on this sunny day, but most were on the far side of the river where there is another more popular tourist trail. The canyon is about 40 metres wide at least. This waterfall is astounding. Water runs from all sides down in streams in a semi-circle into the fast-flowing river below. I adventure up as far as I can to the top of the fall, skipping over the fast-flowing water onto dry rock patches to get a few shots and have a look straight down. I eventually dragged my hesitant traveling companion along for a view. Although we were at the top of the fall, the impact spray from the bottom jumps so high we can almost feel it. We are both astounded by this – little were we to know what was coming next.

Dettifoss is remarkable. For someone who has never seen a really enormous waterfall, I had no idea what to expect. In this case, the spray came so high and in such quantity it soaked us both to the skin as if we are in the middle of a heavy downpour. The banks that we walk along have patches of ice marbled with grey gravel or dirt that looked like something from another planet. The waterfall itself is indescribable. All I can say is it is enormous, powerful, loud, and very very wet. It is around 60 metres tall and gushes water in a long line that bridges the gap between the side that we were standing on and the far side of the canyon. From over a hundred metres downstream, high up on the hilly canyon sides, we were still showered with the ‘fall’s impromptu rain.

Eventually we decided that it was time to return to the car and get back on the way. Honestly, I felt as if I could continue hiking forever here, but we had to move on at some point. Time is ticking away and night will fall eventually, and I need to reach Skagastrond and rendezvous with the residency co-ordinator at some reasonable hour.

On the walk back Ro told me about his business in Dresden – a bakery employing over ten people, which I have to say I am very impressed with as I imagine he is not yet thirty. He has a lust for travel, however, but he feels safe leaving the shop in the hands of the others he has in his employ to take three weeks and venture around the Faroe Islands and Iceland.

We made our way back along the dusty trail and back onto the “1” road, promising no more stops until we reach our destination.

Less than half an hour later we stopped when we saw an enormous plume of while cloud emerging from the horizon to the right of the road, and on the left a field of fumaroles erupting the same white smoke on a smaller scale. This was Námafjall Hverir, in the Krafla valley. I parked and we got out to have a look.

The newer earth-stacks are built up like anthills, and hiss steam out at a colossal speed and with a piercing wheeze. There are a great number of them here, situated on the slopes of a mountain-peak (we are still 600 metres up at this point) that is made up of a strange bright orange clay, discoloured with an emerald-green mould and white residue that sprouts near the geysers. The older ones have collapsed in and form grey murky pools of angry, bubbling goo that heats to over eighty degrees. The smell in the air here was like sweetened sulphur, overpowering at times. Standing at the belching and gurgling, odious pools I tried to imagine what foul creatures the vikings might have first thought lived beneath the grey slime at these geysers.

We hit the road again after an explore. No more stops now.

Two minutes later we passed the hill that these geysers were on, and come across one monstrous “daddy” geyser on the far side. We stop for a look.

There are strange space-age domes built near the base of the billowing crevice. These are part of the geothermal power system that keeps Iceland electrified. There are natural baths here too. This is Myvatn, a popular tourist spot. Rain started to fall a little here, and lasted for a short while. At the foot of the geyser there was a small pool of near-luminous cyan-green water, that, Ro told me (he has seen geysers before in New Zealand) is the colour of water run-off from geysers such as these.

Onwards then, past thousands more waterfalls, looking into the distance at tall mountain peaks, all snow and ice-capped, black and white in the distance with thick, fluffy white clouds for contrast. This time there really is no more stopping, and a couple of hours later we reached Akureyri (a 4-hour drive has taken 7 hours at this point, including detours).

Ro departed at a guest-house in Akureyri and I move on alone. It is another hour and a half’s drive to Skagastrond, but I am geared up and giddy at this point so even thick fog coupled with stuck-behind-a-lorry-itis does not affect my mood. Eventually I find the turn and I contact Ólafía, the residency co-ordinator to let her know I will be arriving soon.

The town, directly translated meaning “peninsula strand”, sits at the foot of a monumental mountain that I will climb before the end of my stay here. There is a wall of mountains on one side almost separating Skagastrond from the rest of Iceland. On the other side is the sea, blue-black in the overcast evening. The buildings are all brightly coloured and noticeably spaced very far apart. So much so, in fact, that this town of just over 500 people seems much larger than it should.

And so ends my adventure from Sligo, North-west Ireland, to Skagastrond, North-west Iceland. 3 ferries, 18 hours of driving, 5 seas, 8 countries later and I had arrived at my home for 3 months. More Icelandic adventures to follow…

From Utrecht to Aalborg (Thursday, May 6th – Saturday, May 8th)

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This is part 2 of 3 from the blog post Driving From Ireland to Iceland. If you follow this link the original post will explin these entries further.

Thursday, May 5th 2011 – Up Utrecht!

Morning arrived unexpectedly, and I awoke at the crack of dawn to go city-adventuring. Utrecht had seemed pretty cool from the stroll the night before, with an abnormal amount of bicycles and fashionable people so I figured I would stay until after lunch and see what the city had to offer.

When checking in the previous night, the receptionist had recommended the clock museum so I decided I would visit that at some point. A very groovy poster led me to believe that there was a good exhibition to be found at Kunstliefde if I could find it. And besides that I was feeling much better after the rest and decided a city adventure would be ideal!

So off I went, firstly heading straight back to the car to put a ticket on. Parked out the front of the main train station I figured it would be obligatory and necessary to appease the local authorities. A ticket for one hour was €4.95. I decided to pass up on this opportunity and take my chances with the clampers.

Following the chiming of the twinkling bells of the “Dom” (the impressive cathedral dedicated to St. Cathrijne) I arrived at the city centre. The cathedral tower plays chiming tunes all day long, which echo for quite a distance and are kind of sickly-lovely but not altogether distracting once you get used to them. From here I followed signs and a map and found the Aboriginal Art museum down by a pleasant sunny morning riverside, reaching the door just as they opened for the day.

A little on the expensive side to enter, the museum was definitely worth it. Showing works by members of CoBrA and Roar, there was an abundance of amazing stuff on display, both aboriginal work and imitations of these styles. The techniques and colours were wonderfully impressive and made me immediately want to reach Iceland and pick up a brush.

My next stop was Kunstliefde. I reached there at around 10 a.m. I rang the buzzer and upset an upstairs-artist and the receptionist there. She told me they opened at 1. I apologised and left.

Neglecting thoughts of a premature exit from the city, I decided to wander some more. I stumbled across the clock museum and snuck in the back entrance to watch the tour for free and take some sneaky photos. They had an inordinate amount of 18th and 19th Century hurdy-gurdies, cuckoo clocks, musical children’s toys, obtusely decorated automatic organs and other garishly tacky classical kitch that was all fairly wonderful in its own right.

I went for another street wander and came across a little shop called Kunsthandel Meijer that had very nice art on display in the window. The unassuming corner-stall looked like a boutique with simple white-framed windows and a rugged exterior that looked slightly worn and forlorn. Inside it was a two-roomed pokey affair, but the art on display was really nice and I was happy to look around. The owner eyed me warily as I entered but he was preoccupied with a phone-call (the first of many that he took while I was there).

Gazing around the room I couldn’t help but feel quite shocked at the high level of quality in the artworks. “Utrecht impresses again,” I said to myself, still reeling from the Aboriginal Art show. Finishing his call, the owner came and joined me, figuring out quickly that we needed to speak in English, and spoke to me about the works. “That’s a David Hockney,” he said unassumingly, “that one us Keith Haring, Wiessemann, another Wiessemann, Gundar Gundarsson, and there’s an Andy Warhol print.” I thought he was joking at first.

It turned out that this man, the image of non-chalance, was a keen collector of sixties pop art. He loved the stuff so much that every topic of conversation we got engrossed in eventually turned back to Pop Art. This was clearly his specialist subject, but he ended up being so full of knowledge that he was willing to share (including showing me a list of Icelandic artists that he recommended on his Mac, thrusting books at me, and raving about the work of one or another artist, some of whom I had never heard of) that I couldn’t get away from the engrossing conversation. Only when he stopped to take another phonecall did our conversation break. This was when I nearly fell in love with Utrecht.

Afterwards it had just passed one o’clock, and I returned to Kunstliefde. The head of the gallery, a really talkative artist with an obsession with Anselm Kiefer caught me looking at 3D paintings without 3D glasses and immediately assisted. Once we engaged in conversation he told me I should have just come in earlier and not bothered walking away.

Here was another fascinating character from Utrecht, who, bizarrely, seemed more interested in my own residency in Iceland than I was in this incredible open 2-storey gallery that he was clearly one of the heads of operations at. His name was Dirk. We talked passionately about a range of topics, but he could scarcely contain his excitement when he told me he would be meeting Kiefer that coming Friday after being wrought with jealousy at his girlfriend’s one-person media pass to the artist’s unveiling of an installation in Amsterdam, coupled with a talk from the German himself. After a coincidental meeting with one of the gallery administrators at a wild party that Dirk arrived at through a series of incidents that he recounted to me in detail, he was extended his own personal invitation, to his utter joy and delight.

Aside from the anecdotes, waffle and miscellaneous chat, Dirk also took the time to explain the show on the walls of this avant-garde hothouse. The gallery itself was a duplex unit, with tall ceilings and an industrial air, which was accented by concrete juttings at the joints in walls and iron railings on the staircase and upper bannister. Along the walls were exorbitantly priced but extraordinary works of art. Dirk explained that the gallery is run by a group of Utrecht artists who have been in existence for over 200 years and once included Willem de Kooning. This group, although regularly exhibiting works in Kunstliefde themselves, extended an invitation to workers in the media industry who have an interest in art / who practice art themselves to submit works for an open call. The stuff produced was nothing short of sublime, and the show was outstanding in every sense. An eclectic yet knitted display of mainly two-dimensional work, I was again impressed and inspired upon seeing the display. This was when I fell in love with Utrecht.

Funny city, about the size and population of Cork, and just as bustling and active, and like Cork I have taken an instant shine to the place. Maybe this is my ideal size of city… Also on that note, pretty much an identical population in Utecht (or Cork) to the entire population of Iceland.

Onwards then, and back to my car, where, I was assured by the head of Kunsthandel Meijer that I would have a ticket, as they check regularly. I didn’t.

On the open road again, and heading for a 4-hour drive to Bremen. Over the border and through the woods, passing many a chain of pylons, spotting so many huge windmills in both countries that I began to wonder if Ireland had missed an E.U. memo somewhere. Again I noticed the abundance of lorries perpetually conveying concealed loads across the continent. As I drove past them with the music off I noticed that each lorry engine emits a unique drawling, wailing howl that builds as you speed toward the front, then vanishes entirely just as you pass.

A word to the wise: Do not dare slow down on the German motorways. As far as I can gather there is a lane for cars and a lane for lorries and whatever ridiculous car-shuddering speed the cars are driving at, that is your speed and you stick to it. There are speed limit signs but apparently they’re ostentatious distractions that must be ignored. Either that or the 120 was miles/hour – I’m not sure.

Reaching Bremen I went directly to the central train station and hijacked somebody’s internet to search for a good hostel. I didn’t find any and was so immediately put off by the city so I headed on down the road toward Hamburg.

I had decided to stop and sleep in the front seat at Hamburg but when I got there it was around 9 p.m. Discounting a couple of stops for food and leg-stretching, I had been on the road for five hours. That said, I was in the mood for continuing so I pressed on toward Flensburg near the Danish border until my eyelids started to get heavy and I pulled over in a truck-stop.

Getting out and stretching my legs, my persistent cough persisted as I went to get a cup of coffee. Just after I arrived a van with black tinted windows and “Zoll” written on the side near the back wheel pulled up across from me and four heavy-set men got out inconspicuously with a couple of alsatians. I couldn’t remember what Zoll was but I was sure they were police of some kind, and the regular insecure paranoia of police presence came over me in waves telling me that they were staring at me. I felt very exposed and alone at that point. I left and got a coffee.

When I came back they were still staring, and the dogs were over near my car.

Nothing else came of it, and they drove off, seemingly satisfied.

I crawled into my sleeping bag in the front seat and read a few pages of Catch 22. A minute later I was blinded by headlights in front of me as an unmarked Mercedes pulled up and two men jumped out in hi-vis vests with “Zoll” on them. I rolled down the window nervously.

“Customs,” said the bubble-nosed, cheery ginger man at my window. Although he appeared quite comical with his round face and pin-hole glasses, and a constant ironic grimace, he also exuded confidence and authority and I figured he could probably break all my fingers just by looking at them. I did what every self-respecting Irishman would do in that situation. In my best culchie accent I barked out, “How’s it going?”

This seemed to catch him off-guard (he had clearly never done Garda Síochána 101) and he guffawed a small giggle before reassuming his authoritative and comical countenance. He asked the regular questions as his partner, a more naive, sparrow-like gentleman, poked and prodded and swabbed diligently. The lead-man made no secret they were looking for drugs. I assisted in every way as the flighty one probed all nooks and crannies, checking for hidden panels. I continued to make small-talk with the authoritative one which seemed to make him very uncomfortable. The drug test came up clean and they left without a fuss a few minutes later. I was genuinely surprised that this was the first hassle I had had on this trip (driving a van from Ireland to Iceland seems like something that would arouse a little suspicion from time to time) but this was all I had.

Friday, May 6th 2011 – Aalborg’s Welfare State

On I went the following morning, not stopping now until my journey reached its end. Denmark became more hilly, less built-up, more agriculturally based and more green than the last two countries, and for a while, watching the dairy farms roll by my window, I felt like I was driving at home. Except that I was on the wrong side of the road. And it was a real road. And there were still constant sightings of the towering windmills everywhere I looked.

Crossing an awe-inspiring suspension bridge near Vejle, I saw the most wonderful panorama Denmark was to offer, looking down on a beautiful fishing town surrounded by woodlands. I’m not sure what the town was, and I am sure that I should have been paying closer attention to the road, but the sight was majestic. Boats trawled through illuminated green-blue water in what was either a lake or the Scandinavian Sea, and different coloured rooftops reflected up brightly and invitingly but I couldn’t stop.

I ploughed on to Aalborg as quickly as I could, not in the mood for any more stops or driving. I had a place to sleep tonight thanks to Couchsurfing and I was looking forward to meeting my hosts who had suggested beers for the evening. I liked them already.

The Danish seem to like terracotta red a lot. A hell of a lot of the country’s buildings are terracotta red, including the walls and roofs, but there you go. Maybe it was the vibrant yellows, blues and greens that the Dutch used on their own homes and towns that formed a contrast in my mind, I’m not sure. But it did seem excessive.

Aalborg is a quaint city with a great big bridge and a very confusing road system. Getting around here was the first trouble that I had on the roads since leaving Ireland. The city had a convoluted traffic system that moved in circles and I kept getting lost. There were a lot of banks on all the main and side-streets. In my tiredness and frustration I strayed onto the wrong side a couple of times but thankfully nothing came of it besides a few belligerent Danish faces behind windscreen glass.

I stopped in a cobble-stoned market area and went for a stroll, taking in the nice market stalls but not buying a bloody thing (people always said that Denmark was expensive but my God they didn’t say how expensive!). There were banks all around, five in the main square itself. I was encapsulated by a little model train shop that had Deutche Bahn models for around €500 that brought back great memories to me. The models were incredibly intricate and really very beautiful and I decided there and then that when I retire I will endeavour to become one of those strange people with a model train fascination.

Visited a couple of small galleries and met another couple of artists here but was less impressed in terms of quality, and they weren’t too forthcoming with chat either so I left these behind. I went on up to the train station at Liebholz, near where I would be staying. I went to take a few photos of what I later learned was an old cement factory. There were quite a few banks here too. Denmark has a lot of banks.

Finally I met my Couchsurfing* host, Hans, who took me down the freeway toward his home, scolding me later for not having my lights on at one point, which is highly illegal in Denmark. I also learned that it is highly illegal to carry a blade of any kind (even a stanley knife unless you are on official duty and it is in a toolbox) and possession will leave you in jail for seven days. I am glad that I was never searched in Denmark as I had both a sharp kitchen knife for picnicking and a stanley knife in the car, neither of which I was too willing to give up.

*If you are unfamiliar with Couchsurfing, hit that link NOW and get familiar

I learned a great deal from Hans and his lovely girlfriend Melie as I got drunk with them later. Unlike many Europeans, the Danes thankfully know how to drink. We cleaned off a bottle of wine, a series of German beers (smuggled) and then some nice scotch before slurred, messy bed-time. I learned that Denmark has a fully functioning welfare state. It was really refreshing to hear residents of a country compliment having to pay high taxes in exchange for good roads and schools and fully functional public healthcare. Despite the current right-wing government, the welfare state was as embedded as the pathetic Irish business model, and as a result little could change under a right-wing group. Taxes can’t be suddenly halved once they are so high. It was bliss to hear these people talk about the system in such high regard. And it is true. All of a sudden I understood and sympathised with the high prices – the roads worked. The water was clean. The hospitals were, I was told, efficient. People, including Melie the politics major, were paid (!) to go to college. Every single citizen!

Much music and photography was discussed (Hans is a photographer and was full of useful tips). Balloo the black labrador was insatiably friendly and completely unaware of his own strength, which became more of a problem the less my balance subsisted. Eventually and inevitably the night ended and I spent a sorry drunken while desperately pumping an air mattress up with a pump that whistled piercingly every time I pushed on it. The quieter I tried to be (so as to not wake the couple sleeping next door) the louder it wheezed until I gave up and slept on a half-pumped bed.

Stage 3: From Aalborg to Skagastrond (Saturday, May 8th – Tuesday, May 10th)