Yesterday was my last of five Tuesdays this summer I’ve spent printing in Druckwerkstatt, the magical printing workshop in Kreuzberg 15 minutes walk from our apartment in Berlin. While it’s sometimes been a logistical challenge to carve out time from work and family to spend 8 hours in the letterpress shop, it was worth the effort: I was able to learn to print using an entirely different press (an old Grafix proof press), with an entirely different collection of type, mostly wood, from anything I’d experienced before, and with an excellent colour palette of inks.

Druckwerkstatt is an amazing facility and its collection of type is the largest I’ve ever seen. Alas, as the bent of the facility is art rather than trade, most of the metal type goes unused, sitting lonely in its drawers. On my first week there the studio manager, Frank, advised against trying to print with smaller sizes of metal type on the proof press because it would be difficult to manage them on the press; and, true enough, without composing sticks or any of the usual “type management” appliances a letterpress shop would have, it was. And so I focused my efforts on wood type.

But yesterday, with Frank safely on vacation and therefor unable to protest, and the metal type crying out to me, I decided that I had to awaken it at least once. And so I set up a “thank you” card for my 40 subscribers, intended both as an actual thank you for their support and encouragement, and also as a card they could then turn around and use as an actual card for someone else.

For the front of the card, the “Thank You,” I choose Gill Sans; it’s a classic face, and although it’s one I have in smaller sizes at home, I welcomed the change to use the 48 point font I found:

For the “credit” on the back of the card I went with Volta (“fett,” which is “bold”) and Thannhaeuser.

Volta is a German-designed typeface from1957 designed by Konrad F. Bauer; it’s pleasantly substantial, and I’m particularly fond of its lowercase “i”. As I could only find Volta in lower case, I set the “printed in berlin” in all lowercase.

Thannhaeuser is a self-titled face from the East German designer Herbert Thannhaeuser, director of the state-owned VEB Typoart foundry. It’s a peculiar face that seems both old and modern to my eye; it’s got a lovely lowercase “e” and “x”, a fantastic uppercase “G” and numerals that aren’t of the style I generally like, but that seem to work here.

Here’s the final result, off in the mail today, with thanks, to destinations around the world:

One of the things I love about Berlin is its cinema scene. While there are multiplexes galore, there are also still many small independent cinemas and smaller chains keeping smaller cinemas in business. And then there are the open-air cinemas – Freiluftkino – which, truth be told, are one of my reasons for wanting to be here in the summer.

In our neighbourhood in Kreuzberg there are half a dozen cinemas within easy walking distance; of these, Babylon Kreuzberg and Moviemento play some films in English – “OMU” or “OV” in the listings, though you’ve gotta be careful because a French film “in the original version” probably means French with German subtitles. There’s also the Freiluftkino Kreuzberg (site of my first open air cinema experience, back in 2007; as it happens, located immediately behind the letterpress workshop I’ve been printing at, so very handy) and the Freiluftkino Hasenheide, a slightly longer walk, but worth it for its location and setup inside a massive city park.

As I’ve been trying to get a feel for what big city life is like, I’ve felt an obligation to attend as many movies as possible during our weeks here (based on the possibly-made-up assumption that this is what big city people do). Some of these I’ve seen with Oliver, some with Oliver and Catherine, and many by myself after they’ve gone to bed.

Our only misstep, if you can call it that, was when we went slightly further afield to Freiluftkino Insel to see Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: I’d neglected to notice that it was the dubbed-into-German version, but as we’d already made the trip we decided to stay, and if you leave out that Catherine had the uneasy experience of having a rat run between her legs (the cinema is in an abandoned rail yard that’s been reconceived as an “adult playground”), it was actually rather fun (it turns out that you don’t really need the dialogue for Scott Pilgrim vs. The World to understand it).

For the record, here are the films I’ve seen:

• Win Win
• The Wizard of Oz
• Beginners
• Barney’s Version
• Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
• Mary & Max
• Four Lions
• I’m Still Here

Additionally, Catherine and Oliver have seen The Zookeeper and Monte Carlo at the big Cinestar multiplex at Potsdamer Platz, which seems to play English-language movies almost exclusively, is very posh, but, alas, requires venturing into the antiseptic environs of Potsdamer Platz, Berlin’s “new downtown” full of glass and steel skyscrapers.

I’ve seen the trailers for more than a few German films that, I imagine, will never make it to Canada; most of them appear to be some variation on the theme “modern-day hippie arrives in rural German town and brings the villagers to life with his unusual outlook on life.”  Indeed I just looked up the plot description for one of these – Sommer in Orange – and it’s described as a “culture clash comedy about the clash of wild life in a Bavarian village and commune Bhagwan community,” so I think I got it right.

Gotta get me some more of this kinda action back at home…

I may be many things – someone called me a “pluralist” a couple of weeks ago – but a party person I am not. A combination of social awkwardness, claustrophobia, lack of experience and plain old ignorance of what one is supposed to do at a party mean that the prospect of writhing after-dark Berlin was about as inviting to me as a field trip to prison.

But this trip, for me, is about filling more pages into the atlas of possibilities, and so when Eric kindly put me on the guest list for last night’s SoundCloud–EyeEm Summer Party it felt wrong not to attend on several levels. Slightly more levels, in the end, than it felt right not to attend.

So I plucked up my courage and headed out into the heady atmosphere of Berlin nightlife and found my way to Picknick where, sure enough, I was on the guest list. What I found inside was, indeed, several thousand miles outside of the boundaries of my comfort zone, but I persevered and hung in for 90 minutes of beer drinking, people watching, music listening and what I might call sociological research (you might call it “hanging out on the fringes of the crowd trying hard not to look like a dork”). Here’s what it all felt and sounded like:

Around about dusk on Friday at Chaos Communication Camp, Oliver and I were starting to flag. It had been raining, we’d just finished dinner, and we were feeling a little at loose ends. Suddenly, as if from nowhere, a gaggle of quadcopter pilots emerged, set their crafts of the ground around the festooned airplane we were looking around, and started to fly. It was, in an entirely geeky way, a magical moment, and it gave us the second wind we needed to stay at camp into its transformation as a ethereal playground of sound and light.

I was pretty sure, once I learned that Chaos Communication Camp 2011 was going to coincide with our time in Berlin, that I’d find a way to make my way there. And when my friend Jonas from Malmö announced he was flying down to go, I had my chance. Which is how [[Oliver]] and Jonas and I ended up on the journey to Finowfurt first thing yesterday morning.

It’s hard, maybe impossible, to put into words what the camp is like. Take thousands of hackers, relocate to an airfield 40km outside of Berlin for 5 days, and see what happens: that’s what it boils down to. The organizers provide the space, power, bandwidth, and all the necessities of life (showers, garbage removal, access to food and water); the participants make the camp.

We weren’t full-fledged attendees, as we weren’t camping out, but we got a good chance to experience everything from homemade Polish vodka to a laser-cutter demonstration to a soldering lesson, to an extended session with a DJ learning how to use Ableton Live to make edits. We arrived at camp at 11:00 a.m., left at 11:00 p.m. It rained a little in the middle, but we were happily hidden away in a tent. We ate extremely well – everything from lard and bacon on bread to mango lassies and watermelon shakes to one of the best burgers I’ve ever had.

Lots to digest from the 12 hours we spent there, and perhaps more to report later, but in the meantime, here’s the day in photos (see all the photos I shot here).

Retro Gaming Tent: Oliver Learns Pac-Man

Oliver’s First Hack: Super-fork

A Robot Encountered on the Way to Lunch

Two Hours in a Dome Tent with DJ Billy Idle

The Rain Clears

Watching a Talk from the Outside

Revivified Airplane

Light Sculpture

Neon + Fighter Jet

Hanger at Night

Oliver the in the Steam of the Rocket

You’ve all probably been asking yourself “what does this ‘hot desking’ that Peter keeps casually referring to actually look like?” Well this morning I came into Betahaus first thing in the morning and was the first one here, which allowed me to take some photos without unwittingly taking photos of unsuspecting coworkers:

Here’s one of the third-floor workspaces, the one where I’ve ended up working most often, mostly out of habit and because it has desks at a good height for me:

And here’s what my “hot desk” setup looks like. I leave my full-size keyboard, mouse and other cables inside a locker here at Betahaus when I leave for the day and cart my laptop home and back every day.

Note the green dot in the corner of the desk: this means that it’s eligible for use by itinerant “flex” users like me (as opposed to those with a more permanent “leave your stuff on your desk when you leave” arrangement). Every desk comes with power, very fast and reliable wifi, a desk lamp, and a somewhat-ergonomic chair.

All this for €149 – about $200 – for the month. Here’s the building looks like from the outside:

I’d always assumed that I wasn’t cut out for working in a room full of other people and their various mobile phone rings, conversations about “breaking the personal care supplies market wide open” and comings and goings, but it turns out that, perhaps because most of the conversational part is happening in non-English languages, it’s a comfortable sort of white noise. I’m not sure I’ll be able to back to the relative quiet and peace of Reinvented HQ, and may have to hire German-speaking extras to come in and simulate Betahaus-like conditions for me.

Today was seasons day in the letterpress shop: Frühling, Sommer, Herbst, and Winter (generously contributed translations by Catherine, via Google Translate over the phone). One of the nice things about using a “defective” press – the Grafix proof press I’m using here in Berlin is only partially working and I need to manually roll the ink onto the type – is that printing multiple colours at the same time is easy. Or at least easier.

I printed 40 copies of a 20 cm by 40 cm sheet in four colours – green, red, orange and blue – and once the ink is dry tomorrow I’ll return and slice them up into 20 cm by 10 cm cards, which will fit nicely inside the 210 mm by 110 mm translucent envelopes I just picked up across the street at Modulor. I should have everything in the mail to my global network of subscribers by mid-afternoon Wednesday.

When you imagine a typical Sunday in Berlin, what comes to mind more than spending the day by the lake at an abandoned tuberculosis sanatorium at a festival of urban art?

That was our Sunday, today: artbase2011.

Not quite sure what we were getting ourselves into, we headed off early, catching the 9:30 a.m. subway, then a regional train, and then a bus, and then a 2 km walk. By 11:00 a.m. we were in the woods of Grabowsee, north-east of Berlin about 15 minutes from Oranienburg. Built as a sanatorium in the 1930s, later used as a military hospital, in recent years Grabowsee has been in a “deep slumber” (so says the event’s website); as we walked across the Grabowsee bridge and through the woods we got a good sense of what a sanatorium in slumber looks like:

Ten minutes into the woods along a well-groomed cycle path we came to a booth staffed by a pleasant but imposingly muscled man. We paid our €10 each (Oliver was free), got a wrist band, and proceeded on to the next level, 5 minutes further along the path, where we were quizzed, half-heartedly, about whether we were bringing alcohol in with us (it seemed that the likelihood, in the gate-man’s eyes, of a suburban couple smuggling in beer was not great; there was no bag searching).

And then we were there.

It wasn’t immediately clear where “there” was.

We emerged into a clearing populated by several large open warehouses, a couple of sleepy-looking food stalls, a giant foil-covered Trojan horse and with the pulsing beat of a techno DJ set up in the opening of one of the warehouses. I’m sure, to the Berlin urban techno hipsters that were chilling all around we must have looked like we’d taken a wrong turn looking for the golf course (we all think we are 200% hipper-looking than we actually are, which places me somewhere in the “Richard Nixon” level of presenting myself in an environment like this).

That said, everyone was very nice and it wasn’t long before we had cake and a sit and began to figure out where we were.

And where we were was in the middle of a spontaneous nexus of spray-painted masterpieces covering the ancient infrastructure that the forest was doing its best to take back.

Building after building after building received the same treatment, and there was hardly a door or window or beam uncovered. The work ran the gamut from banal to intriguing to mind-bogglingly profound. If nothing else it made the notion of experiencing art in a traditional white gallery box seem absurdly narrow-minded.

All of this was, of course, in the midst of the slumbering sanatorium, which, as we walked through the forest, we found new parts of around every corner:

Down toward the lake was a large group of tents – the festival started Saturday at noon and you could, if you liked, come and camp out on Saturday and Sunday nights – and then, by a crumbling church, a sort of café cum workshop cum studio cum crashpad in yet another building, filled with paintings and people making new art, and people asleep on moldy sofas. By this point feeling like a fish out of water seemed beside the point, so we just wandered around drinking it all in.

It was all deeply, deeply weird, but also deeply, deeply interesting. I can’t say as though I grasp completely the lifestyle that supports spending summer weekends by the lake making artworks on abandoned buildings, but I’m certainly happy that there is such a lifestyle.

The bus back to the city left every 2 hours, so we started to head back toward the road around 2:00 p.m., passing through another couple of buildings on the way out, and running across a different slice of the art:

By 5:00 p.m. we were sitting inside Maria Bonita in urban Berlin eating tacos and, I think, not quite sure what had just happened. But we were all glad we went, and, at least for me, what I think of when people talk about “art” has expanded to include a kind of environment and a kind of artist I didn’t know existed before.

Today’s project at Druckwerkstatt here in Berlin was a full Moon calendar – Vollmond Kalender – for 2012, an attempt to bring together my Old Farmer’s Almanac self with my printing self.

Last night, in preparation, I started with the Almanac.com Full Moon Dates page, then translated the month names into German (when in German, print as the Germans do, I reason).

When I arrived in the studio this morning my first task was to search through the drawers of wooden sans serif type to assemble each month and its corresponding date, a significant challenge given that many of the fonts are incomplete (and that I wasn’t willing to go the “mix and match typefaces” route, at least not within words). This took about 45 minutes.

Next, I had to find a way to jigsaw puzzle all of these months into a rectangular shape suitable for printing; this took about two hours, give or take, and I went through several iterations and several tweaks of the final version.

Here’s the layout I started with:

And here’s what I finished up with:

The biggest changes were the switch form a sans serif “mond” (Moon) to a serif “Voldmond 2012” in metal spread over two lines and the introduction of spaces between month names and day numbers (I thought munging them together would be cool; it was just confusing).

Over lunch I purchased some large sheets of grey paper and green paper at the Grün Papetrie up the street, cut these into 25 cm by 29 cm pieces on the giant paper cutter in the book bindery, and then experimented with printing in different colours. Here are some of what resulted:

That last one – white on grey – is my favourite, as the mottled white ink (I didn’t get complete coverage) resulted in letters printed with a distinctly Moon-like look:

Now all I gotta do is figure out how I’m going to mail these to subscribers without going broke; I’m thinking that, because there are a few cities – Charlottetown, Montreal, Malmö – that have more than one subscriber, I might gang these city’s prints together and mail them in a big envelope; the recipients can then all get together, have a beer, and get to know each other.