morning thoughts : Lima apr18

Yesterday I cooked the first meal in the new kitchen on the roof at Escuelab. Rice with a sauce of tomato, onion, garlic and a bit of tuna. mmmm... :)

I am trying to find someone to talk me to a reggaeton club, most people won't go in that part of the city tho. The people in the lab here are so awesome and the people from Media Lab Prado are also really great. I feel as if there are kind of 2 kinds of people here. Those who look more 'european' and those who look more like the old culture here, most look like the older. It seems if you look european, maybe you can get a much better job or be a model but in the street you're a bit like a gringo and cannot really navigate the city freely or comfortably. It seems like everything is really coded, although people are generally nice, you can't step out of your predefined role or really become integrated in a community or part of the city where you are not originally from, no cultural flexibility. Its sooooo dusty. It never rains and if you look at the city from above, it just looks like a dirt shelf, nice post-apocalyptic images. In some ways I like citites like this. I feel more secure when i can see natural processes around me, whether they be development or decay. It makes me believe that what I see is more real.

I have 1gb of ram in the EEE, I could add more ram...I'll check. but to change the kernel... do I need to replace the OS? Now is not the time to do that... Edson is doing everything in Python and its coming along well. I am confident that the project is gonna be good, its going great, people are super supportive and smart, we're doing good things with it. Also the Media Lab Prado will arrange to ship the whole contained unit back to Europe for me, so I can take the time now to build something really working and won't have to re-source all the parts again. In this process of building it really fast I feel very much inspired by Andre's Goncalves' work since we're just using the materials that we find around here and are immediately at hand, such as the crank from the building's old elevator or the top of a paint can. Of course we're also taking in to consideration all the parts to make sure they make conceptual sense to the project, but a lot of serendipity is happening, the right materials are just falling into out hands so mostly we're just freely building. We'll make the frame of the structure today so we can get everything happening upright. and this morning I have an Arduino workshop. One of the workshop leaders, Frank is helping me alot. He builds tech art projects for a living and he knows freekin everything, from water systems to crazy electronics components. He's funny too, I think he could just tell me all the tech answers right away, but he tries to let me figure out things for myself. We'll do tinynoise on the 23rd including Katya and Jaime, Pierre, Rolando, Omar and some other artists from here.

This is the dome inside the hotel Bolivar, the birthpace of the Pisco Sour!