News/posts

Report from Kompass - day 2

25 August 2014

Friday was the main day of Kompass, which I felt was a modest event, organised around an afternoon un-conference format. Unfortunately, the turnout was much lower than I had hoped - we had ten people who remained from Thursday night, and only one ethnic Estonian. This isn't necessarily an impediment to productivity - a smaller group means a more intimate experience and can often be better...

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Report from Kompass - day 1

22 August 2014

Last night was the opening night of Kompass, a small unconference-based event organised by myself and Kaspars Lielgalvis (Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga). Kompass is designed to unite Estonian and Latvian culture organisers, artists, urbanists, and activists into a networking and brainstorming event, built around the topic of 'public space'. The Kompass project has been an ongoing series...

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August 2013 at Ptarmigan

31 July 2013

In August we're pleased to host Done Kino, the first Kino Kabaret event in Estonia. At Done Kino, participants will create collaborative film/video projects built from previously shot, unfinished material which they will bring. The workshop is set up as a 99-hour event, in three 33-hour sessions, with a public screening after each session. There's still a bit of space left on the...

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That was the week that was, the other week, that is

29 October 2012

I'm still dazed from all of the awesomeness last week, beginning out of the La-Bas 'Concept of Performance' biennale in Helsinki, which ran from 25-29 April. I already posted about the DIS/Orientations workshop I co-led on Sunday, which was really the beginning of an unforgettable week - amazing people, brilliant performances, and a real feeling like we were trying some new ideas...

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Fight the cold : Ptarmigan and related activities, February 2012

04 February 2012

It's really, really cold here right now. Here being Tallinn, Estonia, where as I write it's currently -22 C (-7.6 F) and it "feels like" -33 C (-27.4 F) with the wind chill. I'm sitting here in Slothrop's trying to stay alive, for the feeble electric heating can't keep up with the brutality of an Estonian winter. Thank you, medieval architecture!

But that's...

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Slothrop's, Tallinn, Estonia

20 January 2012

If you're in Tallinn, please stop by Slothrop's on Müürivahe 19.  You'll find a large selection of secondhand books in English - literature, history, art, politics, essays, criticism -- the works.  Slothrop's is open Tuesday through Saturday from 12 to 18, Eastern European Time.  Soon we'll hopefully have a (carefully-curated) selection of...

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Serious Introspection
with John W. Fail was a live show in Helsinki, Finland from 2015-2016. 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. We tried our best to entertain. 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. The show is indefinitely on hiatus as Justin moved away and other projects took over. 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. But wait, there's more! We will come to your event and offer our services for hosting, hyping and media specialisation (live tweeting) for a variable fee. 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 are still available, in theory to be booked for parties, wedding, bar mitzvahs and other events. 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 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). 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. So yeah, that's it, pretty much. We're trying to keep this page simple, if for no other reason than our cup runneth over with websites already. We will announce future events and SI-related matters here so feel free to check back any time.