July 31 São Paulo speakers photo

I’m back in São Paulo myself, briefly. Here’s the speakers’ photo from the July 31 conference here. (All the Portuguese speakers went on July 30 instead.)

With me are, from left: Winifred Nöth, Sybille Krämer, and (at far right) Joachim Paech. The reason for so many German speakers (Siegfried Zielinski joined us from Rio onwards) is that Erick’s original idea was to have this be a huge conference on German media theory. The concept evolved a bit from there, but many of the same ideal speakers were invited.

celebrating a good run in Brazil

We’re at a restaurant with wifi on the seaside in Fortaleza (though it’s a fish restaurant where I am able to eat nothing on the menu myself).

I do still have another talk in Curitiba two days from now, but this is the end of the “Secret Life of Objects” conferences, all four of them, for which the energetic Erick Felinto has been preparing for the past two years.

There are a certain number of places where you feel like you’re in the center of the universe… Paris, Manhattan, sometimes Los Angeles… Where else? My feeling is that Brazil is another of those places. Brazil has in some ways come to occupy the psychic center point of global vitality and promise, so that when you’re here, you feel like nothing more interesting is happening anywhere else. That was reflected in a column on the internet last year that described Brazilian as “the world’s coolest nationality.”

Is there any other place outside Europe and its American appendages, where you feel like you’re in the center point of what is happening in the world right now?

Yes– I feel that way whenever I’m in India. Hard to explain it, but on every trip to India (and I wish it were four times per year) I have a similar feeling, if for different reasons.