Hiding in the crowd - Venice Bienalle: Architectural Spaces - www.veneziaubc.com

Unfurling by van Brandenburg at Museo Diocesano, Venice

İstanbul’dan kalanlar

SALT Beyoğlu’nda ‘Yazlık: şehirlinin kolonisi’

What will you MAKE?

Rome Maker Faire; transforming electronics—its all personal!

 I was with makers today in Rome at the opening ceremony in Rome maker Faire. It is our second year for entering into this space. And boy—what a year its been! We shipped two versions of Galileo board for Makers; we shipped Edison for promakers.

The most gratifying is to hang out with these incredibly creative techy people imagining wonderful things using technology. We demo’ed a motorcycle we prototyped with BMW which is smart, and you get all the information about the bike via a talking helmet! Our engineers did that in a matter of two weeks using an Edison chip… 7 billion people, 7 billion ideas to revolutionize how we think and how we make!!!!

I cant wait to wear that helmet on my headJ

‘By the way—I am an actor!’

The story of my week; how I managed to clear customs in Rome with Michael Madsen as his spouse and shared Gezi protest memories.

Arrived in Fumicino airport in Rome, the new terminal, majesticly large, but yet exactly three passport control officers. I am prepared for this everytime I come here, so quietly attended the very well organized que. Until when around 300 Russian speaking people swarmed around me, bypassed the entire que and lined up in a mass hysterical manner in front the by now invisible control points. I tried to hang in there for some ten minutes till I thought I was about to faint from lack of oxygen, smell of sweat and children bumping to my laptop bag. Then I decided to skip the whole thing and go back to find a chair alone and started stressing about how to make it the press meetings and rehearsal for my speech I need to deliver at the opening of Maker Faire tomorrow.

A very tall man came and sat close to me. We were the only two people who refused to stand up in the line or even take the chance, and as I was huffing and puffing and making frantic phone calls, he was doing the same. After a while we started chatting on solutions. We tried various options, appropriate and inappropriate which all proved to be not working. By this time stranger was looking all very familiar, he was wearing very peculiar snakeskin boots, many rings and certainly was fresh out of Los Angeles Melrose Avenue. I gathered he is some sort of actor that I have seen in my previous life but just could not gather who it was.

I was chatting with half of the Alitalia officers by then at the airport anyway to find a way out. We plotted on how we get assistance.. If he just could not walk… I said they wont buy it. He said ‘I am an actor’. He said just tell them you are my wife and I will say my knee popped out. I asked him his name, he said Michael Madsen. Then it all came to me… He was the man in my favourite ever movie Reservoir Dogs. He was the guy at Kill Bill. So there I went for some half hour, running around, convinced Alitalia that my husband who was coming from LA via London popped his knee out and could not walk and we needed assistance badly; and by the way he was a very famous American actor who came in for George Clooney wedding (not sure where that came from).