Temporary/Biathlon presentation in Riga 27.7.2016

posted: 26 July, 2016

My main project this year has been working with my colleague Agnieszka Pokrywka on the creation of a new toolkit for enabling participatory, trans-disciplinary culture environments. The toolkit, called Biathlon, will be tested out in a physical project space called Temporary, which we will open in Helsinki in September. Agnieszka and I have been supported throughout the year by the Kone Foundation to develop this concept.

Tomorrow (Wednesday, 27 July),  we will be presenting our plan in Riga at an event called Black Hole Compass, organised by my dear friend Kaspars Lielgalvis. Agnieszka and I will give a little introduction to our concept (which will attempt to make participation across different events cumulative, via a credit-based system which is stored on the Ethereum blockchain). We'll also ask the audience about what they are looking for from culture, and how their own goals are realised or not in their current environments.

Latvia-based readers of johnw.fail, please come and say hi!

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Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. We tried our best to entertain. Each week, John along with hype man Justin Tyler Tate, interviewed people about their creative process and tried to deliver a direct, communicative experience about art and performance. The show took place at Mad House Helsinki's Ihana Baari, and was free to attend. No one is really sure why John hosted a talk show, but a lot of strange things have happened in the universe and this is ultimately pretty insignificant. You know, we did eight shows in the first season and it was pretty time-consuming, but we were excited to come back for eight more in 2016. It's all archived here. We've made videos available from all episodes of the show here for you to watch. We also will occasionally post audio podcasts when we get the time to go more in-depth with people, outside of the public show. The videos aren't always perfect and the audio even less so, but we hope you still enjoy them. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. But wait, there's more! We are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. The for-profit arm of Serious Introspection is called SI Services and we're up for anything, really! Now that we all live in different places, it's probably going to be quite an ordeal just to have three white guys host your kid's birthday party. But please believe me when I say that we would really, really love to do this. We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. If you'd like to find out more about Serious Introspection, you can start by watching these episodes and seeing if it's your cup of tea. We have made the show available as a podcast where people get Podcasts, generally iTunes or Stitcher. Try the Overcast app, it's really nice. We have a Facebook page which we use to post info about the upcoming shows and videos as they are released. The hashtag #SeriousIntrospection contains the running stream of live tweets from our media specialist Ernest Truely (and anyone else who might contribute). So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already.