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If you’re reading this, you probably know that I gave a presentation on Friday to the Art Directors Club of Germany here in Berlin. I had written my comments into a long post that also included these more general thoughts on culture and the metaverse, but realized there was too much for any sane person to make it through to the end, so I’ve split them up into two. First, the cultural metaverse of Berlin. Coming soon: Some idle thoughts on next-gen virtual worlds.

The day-long conference I spoke at actually turned out to be quite interesting, featuring not only creative professionals from branding, marketing and advertising, but architects and event planners as well, including Ric Birch, who has been organizing the opening ceremonies of the Olympic Games since around 1984. I’ll go over some of what was said below, but first, to explain the pic: The event was held at a very nice new arts center here known as RadialSystem V, where in the evening I had the chance to attend a performance of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons in which the chamber orchestra of about 14 pieces had also been choreographed as dancers. One non-musician dancer was also on stage, doing things like sprinkling solo violinist Midori Seiler with snowflakes and autumn foliage when he wasn’t running around in his tighty whities. The musicians mostly walked or sometimes ran around the stage, and though I’m usually not a fan of avant-garde treatments like this, the effect was actually quite captivating, and worked exceedingly well, and a lot of the choreography of the solo dancer was very Beckett-like. The whole thing was conceived by the formidable Sasha Waltz. The space at RadialSystem is very impressive to begin with, being a modern structure built into the remains of an old warehouse or factory building that sits right along the former Berlin Wall on the edge of a canal. The audience loved show, giving the performers something like six or seven curtain calls.

RadialSystem is run by two very interesting guys, Jochen Sandig and Folkert Uhde, who were also part of the presentations. What Jochen and Folkert are doing with RadialSystem is very cool, in that they’re trying to incorporate new ways of presenting art and performance, such as we saw in the Four Seasons piece. They spoke against a clip of a performance in which the players wandered freely through the same set of rooms as the audience. So of course we got to have a great conversation about whether there might be some metaversal features that would be interesting to incorporate into a future event. They brought a healthy skepticism to the table, but at the same time were very interested in exploring the idea further. This, I think, is great: it’s important to include the cultural establishment as we push the metaverse forward. In fact, it was good to get to spend a day talking with people about physical things like the nature of space and how space, and the spaces that buildings create, affects who we are and how we interact with other people. This was an idea explored in a quite brilliant presentation by the German architect Gunter Henn. I also got to have a nice chat with Ric Birch about some rarely discussed corners of musical history — early experiments in changing the traditional positioning of musicians in symphony orchestras — that I had learned about in my days studying composition at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and which Ric was aware of from his work staging huge events like the Olympics.

Ric also gave a great presentation about some of the thinking behind the opening ceremonies, and noted that they can be seen as a certain kind of snapshot of a time and place. This is definitely apparently if you look at some of the stills and video from the 1984 games, including the gaudy scaffolding that marked one of the entrances or exhibits, seen at left. All this led me to think yet more about what our tools do to shape who we are, which has been on my mind a bit lately, but this was part of what I’d been talking about that morning anyway.

On the tourism tip: I hit the Brandenburg Gate, the Reichstag, some impressively architected government buildings of the kind I wish we had more of in the States (there’s some in Albany) and the very striking new Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, before haring off for some meetings at a tech-hip, laptop-filled cafe (the Sankt Oberholz) and then wandered down Unter den Linden back to the hotel. You can check out some photos on Flickr — but sorry, Meg, the batteries in my camera ran out just as I got to the memorial. Gonna go back and get some more shots tomorrow.