Finally back in London after some shared leftover days in Linz.  With Giselle Beiguelman and Rachel a US animator who worked on Alice we went on a derive to Vienna looking initially for Wittgenstein's House after a fine lunch at Cafe Central with Eduardo Kac. Instead we found the Colombian embassy or at least its mysterious entrance, and like us a little out of time. On the way back on the train to Linz, we sat beside an amused stranger who listened with me as Giselle, Eduardo and Rachel recited Hebrew phrases they all remembered from childhood and lit up the dark compartment with iPhone applications changing from blue to green to orange combined with chill out electronic sounds that registered like ghosts in the thin post-Volcanic air. 

Having speculated earlier this month on the constraints and limits of the nomadic media lifestyle (see below) it befits me to now have to linger a little longer than I had expected in Linz. I was part of the jury process for this year's Hybrid Arts award and it has involved much intensive head-scratching, debate and argument which has left me tired, exhausted yet happy to have been part of such a rich process. There's been a Brasilian connection almost inevitably - with Eduardo Kac as a fellow Hybrid jury member and Giselle Beiglemann here also to take part in the Interactive Media category.  Added to this, Koert van Mensvoort, who took part in last year's Paralelo event in Sao Paulo and wowed all with his Next Nature presentations was also part of our jury which made for considerable diversity of perspectives and hence, hopefully, also some unexpected decisions which will be announced later this year in preparation for the Festival. Ars has also some big news - it is moving venue along the river. The first press conference is tomorrow and so the straggling jury members will also be there to see the space.  It's fun to linger on somewhere like this - to lunch along the Danube at the Lentos Museum in unusual sunlight and lie on the grass outside the Brucknerhaus and feel you have worked yourself to the bone. A London based friend told me today he had lunch with seven people from China who came to London from Berlin via Oslo by taxi which makes me wonder about travelling on water.

I've just been to Covilha, a town 300 kms north east of Lisbon famous for its wool production and occasional snow. Known as the Manchester of Portugal it has a history of textile production and sits at 500-800 m altitude surrounded by the highest mountain range in the country (and an accompanying national park). Sadly I hadn't time to explore beyond the campus where Rudolfo Quintas and his team of students created a new festival there last week -  http://www.gear-up.info - /which combined talks and workshops about media research and production models with all night performances of sound/electronica held in a local club venue, featuring presentations from academics, design companies, researchers, policymakers, hack lab organisers, artists, producers etc. The Secretary of State for Science and Technology turned up on the first day to launch the event and showed an impressive grasp of the challenges of art/science collaborations befitting his PhD status (apparently most of the government in Portugal have doctorates). Computer science professors from Porto, Lisbon, Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburgh and the University of Austin, Texas, joined the Director of STEIM Amsterdam and other researchers in in talks about the history of computing and its relationship to performance particularly sound and electronic media.  A great panel about creative labs showed off some of the new self-organising hack labs just getting going in various towns and cities around the country in the past two years. Portuguese science and innovation policy now also includes creating close partnerships with US universities with joint doctorate posts and development of research institutes iincluding a CMU centre on Madeira which offers experimental Masters courses combining design with psychology, computer science with fine art and various other interdisciplinary conjunctions. The panel I took part in looked at how practice based research is supported in the US, UK and elsewhere in Europe. An essay I have recently written on the value of the arts to higher education in London was usefully drawn on. (see www.lcace.org.uk/.../towards-ecologies-of-learning-enhancing-relations-between-arts-and-academia.html) A common theme among many of the presentations was the emergence of multitouch systems and Portugal's leading role in development of these, for exhibition, heritage, fashion, display etc. As a twenty four hour party place though Covilha can well rival Manchester and especially in the sunlight we were experiencing last week one couldn't not see the glittering river running alongside the campus, and the cafe built beside it just below an enormous and crumbling textile factory no doubt awaiting some future regeneration. I was a bit dumbstruck to find myself sleeping in an area of town they call the Pelourihno (or whipping post)  I had somehow thought the only Pelo was the throbbing heart of Salvador de Bahia. I did know that Covilha had been named a Royal Textiles centre back in the 18th century shortly before the Emperor of Portugal set sail for Rio with the country's national library and other significant cultural goods, in 1809, on his flight from the Napoleonic advances which came in through the northern mountains.  Generally I felt a bit of that strange deficit you get sometimes on journeys through nomadic media circuitries - of not having time enough to go deep enough, or far enough, to know enough, about the sources or locations we pass through or the waterfalls

we don't get

to

fully

yet

visit.