I’ve just come back from a 10 day extravaganza in Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia.

It all started with the lovely people from Pixelache invited me to do a keynote for their digital culture festival. We built a hexayurt sauna, of course! I was kindly hosted by the Helsinki Fablab folks.

Then I went to Tallinn, Estonia to do a talk for Ptarmigan on Infrastructure-centric politics. I also did a very, very funny (drunken) podcast, Slothrop’s Screaming Sky, a Tallinn bookstore’s podcast series. You can hear me and the guys here and here. It’s pretty demented. I love their habit of listening to the podcast and putting up a list of all the items mentioned as hyperlink references. That’s excellent practice. Hy and Binx do beautiful work.

The Helicam aerial cinematography folks let me fly their drone simulator and try to fly a trainer drone, and stood me in front of a RED cinema camera which just goes to show that I look incredibly lifelike in 5K format! They actually fly REDs off an octocopter. It’s insane.

Then I came back to Helsinki, visited with the Kuori Hexayurt Gallery folks, hung out a bit with Occupy, and came home.

Here are my pictures from the trip.

Here’s the talk I did in Helsinki on why the Government can’t get organized, but the People can.

Slides and .ogg video download

Here’s the talk I did in Tallinn on infrastructure-centric politics and a new economic geography for the 21st century.

Slides and .ogg video download

You’ll probably want to download the videos for those talks rather than watching them in-browser. The talks are about an hour long. I’ve tried to upload them to blip but its not playing ball tonight.

So that was my vacation. It was insane, I loved every minute of it, and I hope you get to meet some of these fabulous people. I’m amazed by the culture that’s brewing in Tallinn, and Helsinki is, without any shadow of a doubt, a summer paradise.

PS: I’ve identified folks by project rather than by person because, well, they’re kinda private up north.