tagged: iceland

i’ve always liked looking out of the windows of trains as the landscape scrolls past sideways. no different in a mini-bus, but now there’s a video camera in all of our pockets, with the perfect form factor to simply press flat against the window and capture that sideways scrolling effect.

i’ve got hours of such footage from india, but the one day trip of iceland was more manageable, and so there’s actually an edit. here’s the trip, in less than two minutes.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

lava cave, clearly showing signs of recent caving-in. with so much surrounding tectonic activity, we don’t go so far in.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

it was a day of rainbows; late summer sun punctured by the spray of waterfalls or the heavens simply opening up.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

i had this dream of mountain biking in iceland. i thought what better way to use the one day i had than that; a real engagement with the landscape. but iceland is not cheap, and the options i found were prohibitively expensive.

but, there is one tour operator that has some biking as part of a ‘best you can do in a day from reykjavík’ tour. there’s a dc-3 abandoned on one of the black sand beaches, a good kilometre walk from the road. tröllaferðir decided this would be more fun using fat bikes (and, no doubt, quicker on a jam-packed day). so much fun. the attraction of the dc-3 quickly paled in comparison in roaming the undulating landscape alone. totally made the day for me.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

have you ever wondered what a flash flood on a glacier would be like? neither had i. the guide decides it’s time to get the hell off; water should be sluicing down the sink holes, not spurting up and out.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

…uh oh, here comes the rain.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

find where a glacier comes sliding and scraping out of the mountains down the coastal plain, put on crampons, grab an ice-pick and hike. pretty grand, and as a lover of black and white the ashen detailing made it all the better.

but oh-look! while the valley outlet is still in sunshine, the glacier isn’t any more…

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

i waded barefoot into the river to get a straight-on shot of the waterfall, partly for the derring-do and partly to get all the other the tourists out of shot. but overall i like this first shot best, popped off just walking from the car park: you get a sense of scale from the band of people in their brightly coloured jackets.

diary | 05 sep 2017 | tagged: adventures · iceland

the ring certainly didn’t used to have that colourful finish! a side-effect of the hot tub and its sulphurous water.

diary | 03 sep 2017 | tagged: iceland

had a lot of fun with my talk ‘visualising performer–audience dynamics’ at ISPS 2017. with a title like that, some play with the ‘spoken paper’ format had to be had.

pleasingly, people were coming up to me to say how much they enjoyed it for the rest of the conference. huzzah!

i recorded it, and have stitched it together with the slides. the video is here, on the project page.

diary | 01 sep 2017 | tagged: comedy lab · performer–audience dynamics · phd · qmat · research · iceland · talk

geometry isn’t harpa’s only trick. this dark, ashen concrete is amazing. and very icelandic.

diary | 31 aug 2017 | tagged: iceland

to reykjavík for ISPS 2017, the international symposium on performance science. it’s being held in harpa, which is a building i can’t get enough of.

diary | 30 aug 2017 | tagged: photo · iceland