I am back in Puerto Rico paying a short visit to my mom and taking care of some errands like her taxes and so on before returning back to the US. I often get the question “what is PR like?” “Is it like the US?” Of course there are some obvious differences related to language, culture, environment, and politics. For example, Spanish is talk of the town; you can run around, barely clothed, in January to frolic in some pretty soothing ocean waters; and and unlike the US, a large percentage of the population actually takes politics very seriously, which means 81% of the voting population hits the voting booths, there is a mainstream culture of protest, and people party vigorously during voting season (and this makes politics personal, domestic, familial, leisurely, and thus, it gets woven into the fabric of everyday life ).

But while there are those and many other obvious differences, I am more interested (at least today) in the more subtle ones, the “fixings” and “toppings” related to things like commodities, street dogs, the law, and government services. These are more or less supposed to be standardized and thus the same between the mainland and this small Caribbean island but in fact, there are minute disjoints here and there that can be at times frustrating and, in more rare instances, amusing.

So let’s start with the amusing ones. We have US Post Offices here that look, smell, and operate as they do in the US: with lackluster aesthetics and more or less disgruntled employees. So yesterday when I walked into the local PO to buy some stamps, I was sort of floored to see that one of the tellers was also moonlighting, in plain view, running a business on the side, selling purses and other handbags that were nicely displayed on the wall. Now I can’t imagine this was legal, at all. But who knows?, perhaps there is some obscure US PO clause that, with the right paperwork and initiative, allows employee to operate a small consumer-oriented business at the same time that they process money orders, sell stamps, and accept packages. After a day of horrid horrid errand running, the handbags for sale at the post office washed away my scowling frown and I only wished I had my camera. Perhaps allowing such entrepreneurship is what the PO needs to keep employee morale high and can also be used to secure another source of revenue (they can get a commission for every article sold).

When it comes to dogs, there are wayyyyy more street dogs in PR than in the states and frankly, I find the mutts, known in local lingo as “Satos” are the most appreciative mutts I have met. If you want to get a solidly down-to-earth-and-street-smart sato, by all means, come here and get one. We now have one, “Isabella” (a.k.a. Gordita/Chubster) and she is a gem who I would like to steal in my suitcase but I am afraid my life as an academic would come to a screeching halt if I did, for she is as demanding as they get. All she wants is to be pet and hugged and to make this happen, she rams her small head into your hands. If she fails, she switches into “kiss-you-to-death-mode.” Kiss-you-to-death-mode is kicked into turbo-gear after you shower and, especially, after you put any lotion on. At this point, if she is near you, Gordita proceeds to attack you as if you turned into some human sized T-Bone Steak and licks every last ounce of any lotion off . I usually feel like I need to take another shower after this Gordita-fest, so I try to bypass her after shower time. But aside from such quirks she is as good as they get.

Now for the most part the commodity goods in PR are exactly the same as in the US. But there used to be this 6 year period when Sara Lee sold chocolate pound cake in Puerto Rico that I absolutely LOVED and this was cake simply not to be found in the United States. This is something I could never understand because well, it was fantastic tasting stuff, and it seemed like a pretty standard commodity good that should not be limited to a 100 mile long and 35 mile wide island. When I came here I used to buy like 6-7 of them, freeze them, and take em back to the US. But then one year, poof, they vanished. I always imagined that there was some Vice President of Sara Lee Puerto Rico who also was very fond of this chocolate pound cake and decided to authorize local manufacturing despite a strict cancellation order from the headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio. And then it took like like 6 years for them to catch on that in fact he disobeyed such corporate orders.

Business and other such relationships are more informal here, which can produce for pleasant and unpleasant experiences, sometimes together. For example in the last few days, my/my mom’s lawyer was unwilling to give me a firm time or date for appointment. And since I needed to discuss a really obscure set of legal documents and deeds that may have required a visit to an equally obscure government agency, I pushed and pushed to get something out of her. Finally she agreed to meet with me but only during her morning manicure session. After a 15 minute conversation while her nails were being painted blood red, it was clear I was not the only client in such a predicament, as another one showed… It was pretty amusing.

I did find out I had to visit this obscure government agency “CRIM” related to property taxes and it took me 8 conversations to get directions there. No one could explain it because they did not know the street names and it is not only an obscure agency but is truly also tucked away in a seriously obscure location. One person basically said “look take a taxi” otherwise you will never get there. But finally one person knew of two streets it was near which was enough for me and I fearlessly proceeded to what I thought was going to be a pit of despair and a total time sink but that turned out to be the quickest of the day’s errands. I found out that I in fact did not own a gabillion dollars and that a change of address would take only minutes.

After I left, I was in a sate of total glee. After departing from CRIM, I could care less that Citibank had lost $4000 in deposited checks days earlier, that my mom’s SS tax information did not come in time, that I could not find the location of the accountant because their office had moved due to a fire in their office , and was ready and pumped to fight the Medicare prescription plan for enrolling my mom on the phone when in fact she has alzheimers (and they were told of this..) and can’t really make these decisions, but as I was partaking of my moment of glee, I promptly hit a shard of glass, and my tire exploded. Oh well, at least I was a block away from Western Auto and could contine uninterrupted with my endless day of errands….

It is strange to think that one decision can so dramatically change the course of one’s history, one’s life.

For me, when I was 17, I decided to live on this ship , the R/V Heraclitus, and I think the more important of decision, in terms of impact on my life, was not that I went but that I left after a year.

At the time, it was extraordinarily hard to leave. Life was good and rich, 80 feet and all. Within the constraint of having to show up every morning for work at 8 am, of rarely being able to “leave” the boat, of having only 10 people to interact with consistently, of being pretty darn poor, of living in tiny quarters, there was an expansive cloak of freedom. Part of it was, as my friend put it, “freedom from choice.” Part of it was that life on the sea, with a small group of people, is really so interesting enough that it grabs not only one’s attention, but one’s soul and for a very long time. Part of it was the vastness of the ocean, for it is a liquid land ripe for constant exploration.

I left because if I did not, then years later, I would have to foot the entire bill for college and that was just too large of a bill and school was too important to me. So one sunny day, I walked off the red deck in Belize and since have not really sailed much (if at all??) in my life. I made a promise that one day I would live on a boat again, perhaps even do an ethnography of sea people by living and traveling on a sailing boat, as that I think, has yet to be done. Who knows if that will ever be but today, when I was visiting the R/V Heraclitus site, which I do from time to time, to see where the lovely barge is at, and to catch a glimpse of my former life, I was surprised to see they have a short video of the ship and wow, watching it was, of course, a serious trip down memory lane.

It has been almost 14 years since I left and I have not seen such images since. Many of the objects are the same (the chairs on the deck, the huge silver bin containers in the meeting room, the imposing helm) and there were even some folks I still knew… It was truly wonderful to see the rough black cement, the deep wood of the library, the built environment that somehow, floats a top a vast territory, carrying a motely crew to physical places at the same time that such travels are always an internal movement, the self, transforming, minutely but surely.

Where you or it goes is never down a straight path, but more circular, more mysterious. Heraclitus, of course, says it best:

The world, an entity out of everything, was created by neither Gods or men, but was, is and will be eternally living fire, regularly becoming ignited and regularly becoming extinguished.

Flying across the country during a nearly nation-wide cloudless day is nothing but striking. The first coast, for me being the east coast, is packed with human presence, nestled in green and this past weekend, was drenched in water. Then much of the country in the middle is sparse and the dramatic landscapes—the jutting Rockies covered in white, the hollow but topographically reddish-brownish Grand Canyon—makes them selves heard, and loudly. By the time you reach the other coast (if you fly into Los Angeles, like I did at least), human signs are in full swing again, notably in the form of concrete. Flying into LAX has its own peculiarities. If one did not know that wafting brown translucent film was pollution, one might think it was some natural and pleasant outgrowth of the brown hills that edge the city.

I left CA 2.5 years ago and went for my first visit this past weekend. I went to give a talk at the BioArt and Public Sphere Conference at UC Irvine. First I stopped in LA for a weekend of family fun since I had not seen my brother and his children in way too many years.

In the last year I have been on a self-imposed conference hiatus. Being they entail signigicant prep work, travel, and once there a lot of attention, they can act as a string of interruptions that last year I could not afford as I had to finish my dissertation. But now, I am back on the conference circuit, in part to present finished work and in part to present emergent, embryonic work in need of some serious shaping up.

So I felt particularly lucky to be invited to speak on my new project on psychiatric survivors as it really forced me, in the last weeks, to jump in to a whole set of new materials. The project went from a formless entity, residing primarily in the deep and inaccessible (even to me) recesses of my brain, into a formed substance that will hopefully, over time, become something more substantial.

The conference was one organized around one my favorite formats: an intimate one day affair and I would say incredibly unique in its inter-disciplinary nature. Ok, so most conferences fancy themselves interdisciplinary and, to some degree, they are: in attendance are sociologists, anthropologists, historians, crit lit folks and so on but we tend to reside in more or less the same galaxy, located perhaps on different planets. At this conference, being there were artists, engineers, biologists, activists, and the social sciency types, interdisciplinary functioned more along the lines of inter-galactic. It is not always an easy conversation to have because the distances between galaxies are much longer than between planets, but, lets face it: inter-galactice travel is a blast.

If you are interested in any of the talks, I think that the organizers are soon going to put up an archive of photos, video, and audio.

There were too many fascinating and important topics raised to discuss but here are some of the projects/talks that I found particularly interesting because I perhaps knew nothing about them until this weekend. First, if you don’t know about SymbioticA, well then learn a little about them as this project/lab/concept is probably one of the only fixed places with significant resources (as in a lab) where the intersection between bio-science and art is being created and sustained. Before this conference, there was another week long event BioTech Art Workshop Conducted by Symbiotica

One of the conference goals was to examone how to create a more participatory sphere between experts and non-experts in science via the avenue of art. Claire Pentecost, an artist based out of Chicago, raised this question pointedly. She explored the structural similarities between science and art in relation to the public (they are somewhat esoteric, inaccessible, etc) to problematize the idea that art is easily equipped to act a bridge that gets us toward greater accessibility. In other words, it is not just science that is esoteric, often, so is art. Along with raising that very difficult question that should be asked if such a bridge can ever be crossed, she also presented with the most vivaciousness and flair, which is I so appreciate since we sit for a full day of listening.

Sujatha Byravan also talked about The Council for Responsible Genetics, which has done some amazing work in its 20 + year existence. I was very happy to find out about their work and think that as bio-genetics and similar fields have a routine but perhaps unseen impact on our lives, their work becomes even more important.

Finally, Rachel Mayeri, a video artist and professor at Harvey Mudd, showed her video Stories from the Genome. Here is an excerpt from her website about it:

Part cloning experiment, part documentary, Stories from the Genome follows an unnamed CEO-geneticist whose company sequenced the Human Genome in 2003 – a genome that secretly was his own. Not satisfied with this feat, the scientist self-replicates, producing a colony of clone-scientists to save himself from Alzheimer’s. The animated video switches between misadventures in cloning, and a history of equally improbable theories of human development.

Stories from the Genome is based on the true life story of Craig Venter, who was the CEO of Celera Genomics in a race with an international consortium of scientists to decode the human genome. He did in fact use his own genetic material for the Human Genome Project, completed in 2001, despite much fanfare about the “diversity” of human populations it would represent. The video is intended to comment upon the dangers of short-sighted, self-interest in contemporary biotechnology and its appropriation for profit of human genetic information.

The video was stunning, in part because it was, peraps in some respects, an answer to the question that Claire raised. This video was not so esoteric, but incredibly accessible, however, not because it was simple or simplified the issue. It was accessible because it was a fun and funny interestinng story that could captivate, and thus take you along a short ride to explore the complicated issues and implications of genetic technologies. Combining weirdness, wonder, and humor, with a great dose of special effects, this video is well worth watching if you can get your hands on a copy.

Even if you tried, it is difficult to spend much time alone at a hacker conference/festival (or any such similar event). The whole point is to immerse yourself fully in the string of events and happenings, and more so, with others—friends who you finally see after much too long time apart and with those friends who have just recently entered you life.

So when you finally leave, as I just have, things feel strangely silent, even on a train brimming with conversation.

My trip began with a flight to Amsterdam and an immediate train ride to Eindohoven where I met up with two of my steadfast IRC buddies, one of them who now lives in the South of .nl, the other who has been traveling through Europe for over a month.

After an urgently-needed night of sleep and a trip to the market and store (where I made the very wise choice of buying a waterproof rain jacket given the torrential rain that became part of the environmental woodwork ), we ignored the dark clouds, and made our way via train to Boxtel, the town adjacent to the festival grounds where the volunteer-run What the Hack crew had built, over the course of week, an infrastructure of tents, programs, radio station, party areas, bathrooms, hot showers, av equipment, and naturally, a sturdy and fast net connection, so that on top of this basic infrastructure, human presence could bring the campground to life. Already palpable was the excited buzz among the 200 + folks there with pitched tents, enjoying the beer, and relative calm that was soon to end. The CCC folks had erected a dispersed but fantastic altar of lights, the glow and twinkle of the blue, red, and white, a condensed display of the energy building up.

I was quite relieved that Mako had been guaranteed a speakers tent, which was less tent and more semi-permanent bungalow with wooden floor, beds, table, chairs, and thick white canvas forming a protective layer against the storms that came to visit, quite dramatically and perhaps too frequently, over the course of the event. I had lugged a tent with me only to discover missing poles, which in the end was a blessing. I would have been soaked staying if I had relied on it.

The first night there time started to accelerate. Arriving at 4 pm, the next thing I knew, it was 4 am and I was finally getting to bed, physically cold but emotionally glowing.

After one day of relative dryness, Wed morning greeted the day with a slow steady rain that was an ideal excuse to stay in bed, late, and get some needed sleep after a long night. As every hour passed, the trickle of folks arriving increased and soon there was a torrent of bodies. Tents accompanied by a healthy dose of electronics equipment were erected in what seemed to be like no time. There were some elaborate structures like semi-transparent buckie balls, rainbow tents, rugged army tent-barracks, right along the standard 2-4 person tents.

I spent most of Wed doing the final preparations for my talk. I had decided, a bit last minute, to enlarge the scope of my talk to include a summary of a report that included one of my contributions. I guess I have been so used to the paltry 20 minute academic conference talk that when I realized that I had 50 minutes, I knew that I could cover a few more topics. I spent most of the day re-reading the report, taking some notes, and finally making my aesthetically boring slides that consist of black text on a white background. I spent a good 5 hours in the cafeteria area, mostly by myself except when a few friends came to visit, a small volunteer effort putting WTF stickers on condoms, and finally taking a break when my good friend Niels finally showed up. With slides under my belt, and at 2:30 am, it was ostensibly tent time. The problem is that when there are more than 2 people sleeping in very close proximity to each other, there is a very good chance that getting to sleep will not be priority number one. And indeed, the main topic of conversation that night, happened to be a little odd, though it generated over 2 hours of intense, perhaps too descriptive, conversation: the merits and visceral consequences of various toilet designs (I will leave it at that).

Thursday, the first official day of the WTH, opened with a morning keynote with Hack-Tics/HFH Rop and 2600′s Goldstein, who used the hour to reflect on cons-past as well as the current political state of US/EU.

Soon after, or really right after their talk was mine. There were a handful more folks than expected (being the first talk after an hour long keynote and during lunch time) and of course my computer did not work with the A/V equipment (thankfully Mako was around to lend me his computer). I started off feeling more nervous than I should because I usually settle into my comfort zone. If you are interested in the topic, instead of seeing me talk, I recommend the report…

The best thing about WTH talks is that all they are taped within within 1.5 days are put online. There was an amazing media, audio group, Rehash who were taping the event and being really smart about how to proceed one’s the tapes arrived at their headquarters: encode immediately and put online…. (TBC)

What the Hack Photos