40 things
A list I started before I turned 40 on November 26: 40 things that have made me who I am that I did before turning 40
1. Becoming fluent in German
2. Becoming fluent in other languages (French, Dutch, Italian), though I don’t maintain them
3. Living many places that weren’t home, not at first, on three continents
4. Listening to independent music
5. Doing radio
6. Writing about music
7. Becoming someone who can go running
8. Falling in love with communication technologies of all kinds
9. Identifying with terriers
10. Falling in love
11. Falling in love in a foreign language
12. Learning to play classical guitar and flute, even if I don’t really play now
13. Doing theater as a kid
14. Doing things where I’m not the best in the room
15. Teaching
16. Going back to school
17. Writing
18. Playing in a youth symphony and hearing what music sounds like when it floats in the air before setting onto the audience
19. Going to weddings, showers, reunions and funerals, even when they’re far
20. Singing at the top of my lungs in public
21. Going to Burning Man, and then not
22. Going to South by Southwest for 14 years, with # 15 coming up.
23. Living in San Francisco
24. Studying things I’m not good at
25. Studying things I couldn’t learn on my own
26. Studying things I am good at
27. Being mentored
28. Mentoring
29. Having friends much younger, much older and about the same age as me
30. Using online community, the web, social media for 20 years this year
31. Dancing, often not well
32. Studying architecture
33. Teaching design
34. Handing in my undergraduate thesis
35. Meeting you (my friends)
36. Walking around Barcelona with a digital camera in 2000, to teach myself how to see small details
37. My family
38. Books and reading
39. Always noticing the quality of light
40. Flirting
Report from Umeå
Above: a beautiful and violent sunrise at 8:15 am (the picture was taken from my bed!). No snow yet, which is rare, but the light is really something—that is, until the sun sets at 2:30 in the afternoon.
For the last three weeks, I’ve been a visiting researcher at the HUMLab digital humanities lab at Umeå University in Sweden. The community here is wonderful: a great group of postdocs, researchers and happy geeks of different stripes, all exploring technology and digital strategies in their work. How does an anthropologist model a site and its spatial relations? How do we create ideas of futures in literature, text and image? How does religious practice play out in the digital world? It’s been a fascinating set of discussions and scholars to meet and I’ve liked how it’s stretching my brain. I’ve given three lectures since I arrived: in the QUMU lecture series on qualitative methods, in a cognitive psychology class, and my first weekend, as a part of the Umeå Institute of Design Fall Summit (which I wrote about earlier). It’s been great to connect with students at the design school, too: I’ve spent a lot of time with Adam Henriksson, Lorenzo Davoli and look forward to our future exchanges. I feel sad to be leaving so soon.
Um, and I turned 40. 40, it turns out, is awesome. They don’t tell you this when you’re 30 and I think it’s because if we all knew that it was awesome, we’d adjust our ages upward.
My final week here will be even busier, as we host the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. I’m giving a short talk on pneumatic tubes, moderating a virtual and live discussion with Anthony Townsend, Haiyan Zhang and Liz Goodman participating from afar, and hosting a workshop called Future Things with HUMLab postdoc Mike Frangos. I’m really looking forward to seeing friends like Bruce Sterling, Jasmina Tesonovic, Anne Galloway (double yay: I miss Anne a lot) and Kathleen Fitzpatrick, and seeing their reaction to Umeå in the winter. In addition, I’m doing lots of writing writing writing, wrapping up two chapters of the dissertation and finessing another, preparing for job talks in the US, and putting together ideas for classes I’d like to teach.
Hard to imagine that in one week, I’ll return to the States, soak in LA’s sunlight as we hit end-of-term reviews at Art Center for our Graduate Media Design students, a visit to San Francisco, and visits to Madison and then Minneapolis for the family. In 2012? I think I’m staying put.
My last note of my 30s
Left, age 29. Right, age 39.
Today, I am 39. Tomorrow, I will be 40.
A decade ago, I was miserable. I had just met people who would become dear friends (Louisa, Tom) in Chicago and who I still adore, but didn’t know them well yet. I’d been laid off twice in a year. My boyfriend and I had an acrimonious breakup. I’d just bought a condo and it was beautiful but I couldn’t unpack. By July 2002, I gave up and moved back to San Francisco. I thought I’d return to the dotcom and web world of my 20s and my old friends.
But that’s where everything began to change. Three days after arriving in SF, Judy Wert and Nathan Shedroff started recruiting me for a professorship at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy, and right after I turned 31, I found out I got the job.
In my 30s, I…
spent most of my 30s in and around design and architecture schools. I was a professor at Ivrea, a master’s student at Yale and a PhD student at Princeton. Ten years ago, I never would have imagined that I would have gone back to school, let alone at an Ivy League institution. I probably wouldn’t have imagined that I’d be a design professor. I really probably wouldn’t have imagined I’d become an architectural historian or an historian of cybernetics and artificial intelligence.
started teaching. I love teaching and even more than that, I love advising students on their projects.
lived in Chicago, Italy, San Francisco, New Haven, Princeton and Los Angeles. I have lived for a month or more in Copenhagen, Bangalore, Berlin, Montreal and now, Umeå, Sweden.
loved a lot.
met wonderful people, stayed in touch with old friends, found my way back to people who mattered dearly, and yet still miss people I’ve lost so much.
ended up in places I never would have guessed.
Tomorrow, I will be 40. I…
don’t own a home, I’m not married, I don’t have children, I don’t have a dog. Thinking that all of those things will change in the next few years.
have friends as young as 20 and as old as their 70s. I love navigating the things we have in common across our ages. I’m friends with people I loved more than I can possibly explain. I’m friends with generous people and new people and people I do projects with and people who visit and people who invite me to wonderful places and people I admire. Lots of people I admire.
will finish a dissertation and then I’ll become a professor, if things go the way I hope they will.
still love music and am better clued in thanks to my hipper friends.
don’t plan to go skydiving because I prefer the view from the plane and scuba diving to the thought of hurtling through the air.
don’t have a bucket list and don’t know that I want one. Life’s good enough, the way it’s unfolding.
I’ll report back from 40 but in the meantime: thank you, 30s, for being so weird and surprising. Nothing went the way I would have expected when I was 29, but it’s so much better than what I could have imagined. I’m thankful, I’m amused, I’m happy.
Sweden!
Hello again, Girlwonder! This missive reaches you from Sweden, where I’m on my way to Umeå. I’ll be spending a month here doing a fellowship with the HUMLab at the University of Umeå. Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking at the Umeå Institute of Design fall conference organized by Matt Cottam, along with Russell Davies, Dave Vondle and Matt Ward, and next month at the Critically Making the Internet of Things conference. It’s a delight to be back, to come a little bit earlier in the winter this time around… I came last year to Umeå to speak at the Media Places conference, which kicked off a friendship with Patrik Svensson, the head of the lab, and fomented the idea of delving into some digital humanities research here. Also, my family background is largely Scandinavian, with the Swedish branch of the family originating not far from Umeå: where no one will ever mistake me for Italian, everybody looks like me in Sweden.
There’s lots to catch you up on, much of which I’ll write about in the next few weeks. I spent the summer in San Francisco, writing my dissertation from a desk kindly provided by Adaptive Path, with a few intermittent weeks in Princeton for dissertation boot camp and summer barbecuing. We had a reunion for the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea in Italy in September, which I followed with a visit to Milan and London. The school year is rolling again at Art Center College of Design, and I’m teaching writing and advising thesis year students in the Graduate Media Design Program. And I turn 40 in 15 days, a milestone birthday that portends to be the start of an amazing decade. I will be in Sweden, maybe at the Treehotel, maybe in Berlin. And amidst the writing and movement, I’m applying for academic jobs.
A little op-ed in Domus
My friend Fred Scharmen and I wrote a piece for Domus titled “Architecture Needs to Interact,” about better crossovers between architecture and interaction design — or for that matter, all of the design disciplines. It gave us a chance to reflect upon some of what he learned as an master’s in architecture student at Yale, and what I was exposed to as a professor at the Interaction Design Institute Ivrea.
Give our op-ed a read and let us know what you think.
Updated: here’s a copy of the piece. But if you possibly can, you really should buy a copy of Cabinet. They’re a non-profit journal dedicated to art, culture and science run by great people.
I couldn’t be more excited about this: this is my article, “Interfaces to the Subterranean,” in the latest issue of Cabinet! I’m delighted to have finally published an article about the Poste Pneumatique — and at that, in one of my very favorite publications. Please do pick up a copy: Cabinet is wonderful. It’s the Infrastructure issue.
A week ago tomorrow, I arrived in San Francisco, where I’m spending a month. I’m catsitting and writing the first of a few dissertation chapters about Nicholas Negroponte. Tonight, libations and introductions with the Overlap conference folks: tomorrow, we are off to Santa Cruz for the conference. I’m looking forward to conversations and connections and stories with the people there. It’ll be great to attend.
Otherwise, SF is its usual blur of friends new and old. I’m appreciating the conversations and connections, the small worldedness of it all, the wall of fog about to envelope the Mission, the cats that meow at me in the mornings, the tapping of my fingers on the keyboard.
Nicholas Negroponte’s books The Architecture Machine and Soft Architecture Machines are long out of print and often quite expensive. Following the links above will provide you with digital versions of the books.
A quick note that I’m presenting today at UC-San Diego at Designing Geopolitics. I’m giving a talk called “Intelligence in Search of A Body” on Nicholas Negroponte and the Architecture Machine Group as a part of the session titled, “Data as World, World-Image, World-Making,” with along with two people I admire greatly: Lev Manovich and Kelly Gates. Thank you, Benjamin Bratton, for having me.
I’m on at 4 p.m. or so and it’s streaming live. Afterwards, there’s a discussion, also streaming live.
All-Nite Grocery! Walt Mink!
Walt Mink was a terrific band from St. Paul in the early 90s. They were named after a psychology professor at Macalester did a great cover of Pink Moon, they did a great couple albums, they were great live…
Thanks to Willfully Obscure, I heard something I’ve not heard since 1992, hanging out with my then boyfriend Andrew, a bike mechanic: their demo tape! Best of all — All-Nite Grocery, their song about going shopping at Rainbow Foods in the middle of the night. “10 Second Head Start!” Listen to it here. Walt Mink – All Nite Grocery
And if you’re really a Walt Mink fan, visit Willfully Obscure and download the album there (and note that Candice, their beautiful and awesome bassist actually posted in the comments!
My last two Saturdays involved reciting poetry out loud in some unusual ways. The first episode: a manifesto, a bubble and a monster.
Two weeks ago, I participated in the Emerging Territories of Movement event at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. I was one of 15 people asked to deliver a manifesto—my group was “Urbanizing Technologies”—to a crowd of about 150 people inside a big, inflated bubble (provided by Raumlabor, one of my favorite architecture/urbanism groups). The day was magical: an exploding day of spring green and sunshine, of listening and arguing and drawing and talking.
I stood on a chair and took the mic in my hand–and realized that I was shaking with adrenaline. I shouted my manifesto, then followed it up with my favorite e.e. cummings poem, one that I’ve (largely) memorized, and that age 18 as a student in Düsseldorf, Germany, I stood on a chair and shouted it to my fellow high school students.
Photo by Enrique Ramirez
The manifesto, with the attendant images:
1. Technology always perpetuates the flow of capital: it is inevitable
2. Circulation equals communication
3. Technologies and transactions always microsize in tandem
4. As they seep into us, they colonize us from the inside out
5. We must hyperbolize and hypermobilize
6. To fight it, we must get small like the tiny technologies
7. We must atomize into a million dusty fragments
Then onward to e.e. cummings. In the middle of it, I noted, “I’m shaking.” I was.
pity this busy monster,manunkind, not. Progress is a comfortable disease: your victum(death and life safely beyond) plays with the bigness of his littleness -electrons deify one razorblade into a mountainrange;lenses extend unwish through curving wherewhen until unwish returns on its unself. A world of made is not a world of born-pity poor flesh and trees,poor stars and stones,but never this fine specimen of hypermagical ultraomnipotence. We doctors know a hopeless case if-listen:there's a hell of a good universe next door;let's go
