Thursday June 23 I was given the opportunity to create a non-comissioned art piece at the Tate Gallery new extension Switch House.
Within Meschac Gaba (1961, Benin) “Architecture Room” installation part of the “Museum of Contemporary African Art” exhibit, the artist invitation was to build my own imaginary museum… and what better place to do that than in the recently inaugurated Switch House extension of the Tate Gallery by Herzog & de Meuron?
Today I was invited to attend InfoSecurity Europe, Europe`s largest Information Security industry event.
As always, it was interesting to have a chance to catch up with this rapidly moving field, and a great opportunity to chat with old friends.
Apart from gimmicks (VR everywhere, car racing and helicopter simulators, giant robots, etc), swag (all kinds of Star Wars and other Sci-Fi related giveaways, from toys to t-shirts) and junk food (from candy to icecream to chips, the booths did not have healthy alternatives, although the food vendors did), the most interesting part of these events is always the talks, specifically the hands-on demos.
As an international “solo-preneur” you have to be careful about how to invest your time and resources, and what metrics are really key.
My main company (Kanteron Systems) is in the Enterprise Healthcare Software world. Blog posts and books talking about apps, user adoption, and monetization mean nothing to me. Yet most companies in the Enterprise B2B space are big listed multinationals, so their metrics do not exactly apply to me either.
On my way back from the amazing Sankeien Garden, after attending (but honestly not paying much attention to) a Japanese-only BioInformatics lecture (seriously, I enjoy those things), I went for something fun and quirky: the Cup Noodles Museum.
Founded by revered Momofuku Sando-san, Instant Noodles (Cup Noodles) has a very interesting story behind its world wide wild success. I learned that Sando-san spent two years in jail for tax evasion. That he invented the instant noodles in his 60’s.
These past few days have been quite “playful”.
On the one hand, I have just discovered, right around the corner from our apartment by London Bridge, a free and public playground that has an artificial grass hockey field, half a basketball court, 3 pingpong tables and even a beach volleyball court with sand and all! So obviously, the next day I went with my son to a sports equipment store and bought a soccer ball, a pingpong set, a basketball, a volleyball and a badminton set.
On Wednesday my wife and I were invited to the MoMA member reception “The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World”, which opens officially tomorrow for the general public.
Obviously the rain did not prevent hordes of socialites to flock to MoMA and gather around one of the three open bars. But that was great because it gave us, and quite a few other “they must be on a How About We date” couples to visit some of the galleries without having to use our elbows.
