With my bag around my shoulders I head towards the Swiss Cultural Institute in the Marais, the former Jewish quarter of Paris. I am one hour late for a video performance of fashion duo Radic/Morger. As I arrive I am just in time for a second run of the performance which takes place in a small theatrical room with a screen and a motorbike on stage. Performance artist Djana Covich appears on stage dressed in Radic/Morger clothes. She also wears a motorbike helmet which is coated in fabric and has a long tail in the back. As she takes place on the black motorcycle a video starts.

The video is a ride through Paris with that same motorbike filmed by visual artist Stephan Lugbauer. Djana rides the bike on stage in front of that video projection. After a while the bike goes through a tunnel and Djana lies back on the seat to do one of her sleep performances. Then there are scenes of a motorbike performance where audiences which queue up for big fashion shows get „hijacked“. Djana performs in front of the people on that black motorcycle giving really gas.

A horde of beavers have launched their attack on Vienna. They started out by killing a little forest on Danube Island. They felled mostly the big trees and spared only the little ones.

Once nearly extinct, now a protected species, the beavers are thirsty for revenge. Their hunger is unsatiable. Chop, chop, chop! the people hear them working during night. They must be building a big dam somewhere to flood Vienna! Nobody has discovered it yet. The Danube in the meantime has risen to an alarming degree.

The remains of the famous palace on the corner of Karl-Liebknecht- Strasse. Almost demolished, now reduced to a skeleton, the palace appears in 2 parts which look like boxes with an empty space in between. Only the outermost parts on the left and the right side are left.

I go up Montjuic, a mountain in Barcelona which is a place of excursion for Barcelonians and tourists alike. There is a big parc, the Museum of Catalonian Art, two stadiums and – a lot of cats. I notice that the cats mostly come in couples and that they are all grey and have black stripes. I observe several times that one of a couple limps. One back leg is stiff or cut off. I have to think of a social system among street cats, where one cat helps the other. Makes me ponder about a cat help system or even a cat welfare state…

I go to Barcelona to visit my friend Moritz. I am invited to stay at his new appartment at the Barceloneta which has a direct view of the sea. Every morning the sun wakes us up.
On the fourth day I am on my way to the MACBA (Museum of Contemporary Art) and go through Raval. I get to a little square with many people, which seems stange at first sight.
There are young women who stand around alone or who are approached by men.
I pass a Japanese guy who talks to a prostitute. He keeps his head on the side, looks down on the floor and keeps fumbling around in his pocket. It must be the weight of bad consciousness.
As I continue further a Russion prostitute in red high heels stops me. She tries to take my hand, which I refuse.

Fucking? I suck you?
No, thank you.
Are you gay?
No.
Yes, you’re gay!

It’s not the first time that I hear of a woman who calls a guy gay, who does not want to have sex with her. Only, that it never happened to me before…

Ende dieser Woche bin ich wild entschlossen, der ewigen Finsternis und dem undurchdringlichen Grau in Wien zu entfliehen und fahre mit einem Freund zum Semmering.

In Wr. Neustadt wird es allmählich heller, in Gloggnitz erkennt man ein Himmelsphänomen, dass sich am Semmering endgültig offenbart. Zuerst sind wir nicht in der Lage das Phänomen zu benennen. Wir haben nur eine undeutliche Erinnerung, was dies sein könnte.
Langsam entringt sich uns das Wort SONNE!!!!

Seit gut 2,5 Monaten ist das Wetter in Wien beschissen, seit drei Wochen hat man hier nicht mehr Sonne gesehen. Kommt die Sonne mal kurz raus, wird sie auch schon wieder von Wolken oder Nebel verschluckt. Es ist zum sich Grämen und ganz und gar fürchterlich! Ich beschliesse Maßnahmen zu treffen…

On 1 January 2008 for the first time in three weeks there is sunshine over Vienna! That comes like a miracle after a period of about two months during which the sky showed only different shades of grey. In 2007 the weather turned shitty already mid-october to stay like that until the end of the year. Now it’s almost unbelievable that the sunbeams really make it through the fog.

I rush out of my apt to go to the Vienna forest. As soon as I get out on the street I see clouds moving into the city from the west. Slowly – but with pleasure, it seems – the clouds devour the sun again. I am quite frustrated.

My mood gets better as soon as I get to a snowy area in the forest. At least the snow works well against the grey.

On 18 December 2007 me and my friend Paul Horn shoot our new project on film which will be both a video installation and a film in the end. From a height of around 7 meters we let furniture fall down on the floor so that everything breaks apart beautifully. We shoot with two 16mm highspeed film cameras from two different angles in order to get slow motion in the end. Eventually the work will be a 2 channel video projection projected on two walls.

The Viennese electronic Krautrock outfit VILLALOG play a concert at FLUC (Vienna). It’s the release party of their second album „ZWEI“ which has just been put out on „Angelika Köhlermann“, a record label run by Electro musician Gerhard Potuznik (GD Luxxe).
Villalog consist of Marc Muncke (electronics, synths) and Michi Duscher (guitar). Bernhard Fleischmann appears on drums and Japanese musician Teppei Ozawa as singer. Villalog play a mesmerizing mantric sound which derives from 70ies Krautrock. B. Fleischmann hits the drums hard, Teppei Ozawa sings and shouts great. The music goes partly in loops, it’s live version comes quite hard and from time to time reaches the peak of ecstacy…… We happy……

I go to a party of Austrian artists Konstantin Luser and Christian Eisenberger which takes place in their Viennese studio. Christian has built an installation of cardboard pipes which covers an entire room. The pipes are held together with adhesive tape. There is another room with a dj and a buffet, a small kitchen and a yard. I guess around 100 people are there.

Around 2 in the morning I see a couple standing in the corridor of the house waiting for sth. From their appearance I can see that nothing good is on their minds. They are completely alien to the party. I guess they are waiting for the police which they have called – and I am right. Usually people who report a party to the police never show up, they always hide in their appartments, the lights probably turned off. But this couple is clearly different.

The police are out in the yard closing one room of the party . The couple is with them and I see the man getting aggressive. He gets close to both artists and the police, screaming. „These people are not artists, they are pigs! They piss in the stairway! Don’t you see that they make fools out of you (policemen)?“ One of the policemen tries to calm down the angry neighbour.

The music has to be turned low first and then off alltogether. The police are around for a while. Soon afterwards they leave. Somebody turns on the music again and people start to get into the room of the installation and start to jump against it. The cardboard pipes break one after the other. Christian, the artist, likes that and jumps against the installation, too. He encourages other people to do the same.

The music gets louder and people get back on the dancefloor. Christian and some other guy start to wrap adhesive tape around people. Groups of dancers get taped together as the guys circle around them.
It’s extremely funny to watch the dancers stumble on the dancefloor tied together in groups.