In the last couple of days kevin has been posting an amazing seriesofimages of mid 70’s lego sets, which evoke lots of memories for me (and show how ridiculously non-standard lego has become of the last 3.5 decades).

Yesterday kevin has published an ode to the magic of lego and the first set his father gave him in 1975:

[…] Then there were others. Not too many, but others, enough to get the gag. The gag was that it wasn’t a puzzle to solve, after all. The gag was that the puzzle was more interesting unsolved, growing in complexity over time. It’s so fucking corny to write about Legos that I can barely commit to posting this. But these things are true, that I still don’t know what a Payloader does, that even blindfolded I could still construct this vehicle with these pieces, and that discovering that anything can become anything else was a lesson that would be reinterpreted six years later, when a TRS-80 arrived at public school in the Bronx. Most everything in the interim was tv, play, or schoolwork. […]

Nothing to add here. except maybe that i have fond memories of chewing on those rubber tires and still remember how they tasted…

For some reason i never managed to write about manifesta7 after having visited 3 of the 4 locations on the opening weekend back in mid july. not sure what to say of the overall exhibition but it included a number of really interesting and beautiful artworks. my favorite among them was Tantalum Memorial – Residue, by Graham Harwood together with Richard Wright and Matsuko Yokokoji. Is a memorial/intstallation to the Congolese people who have died as a result of the coltan wars. Regine over at we make money not art has posted a short description of the installation:

This installation is constructed out of an old electro-mechanical 1938 Strowger telephone exchange, discovered amongst the remains of the Alumix factory. Seen from afar it looked like it does belong to the ex-factory. An old telephone switch forgotten for decades. The switches are reanimated by tracking the phone calls from Telephone Trottoire – a social telephony network designed by the artists in collaboration with the Congolese radio program Nostalgie Ya Mboka in London. The TT network calls Congolese listeners, plays them a phone message and invites them to record a comment and pass it on to a friend by entering their phone number. This builds on the traditional Congolese practice of “radio trottoire” or “pavement radio”, the passing around of news and gossip on street corners in order to avoid state censorship.

More pictures on my flickr page.

The same location (the ex-Alumix factory in Bolzano) also hosted the first ever installation by my good friend Lawrence Liang: Pandoras Index consists of a filing cabinet filled with index cards referring to various aspects of the debates around, cultural production, intellectual property and piracy. Having known Lawrence for years some of the drawers appeared to me as elaborate attempts to replicate parts of reasoning (or parts of his brain) in a series of index cards. probably only makes sense if you know Lawrence or if you are really familiar with the topics he addresses, but i liked it quite a lot (again, more pictures are available on my flickr page):