This past Sunday at IGLOO Gallery was pretty festive. Nathan Langler from the PNCA Grad program came over and taught us how to brew beer, we got to help a band make music and we made delicious food.

We brewed a dark winter beer with sour notes and chocolate and caramel and I got to learn all about mash-tons, car-boys, and other cleverly named devices.

Nathan Langler, the brewmaster (left) and Damien Gilley, gallery curator (right) talking about how to bre beer while we are waiting for the water to boil to make the Wort.

The grain mixture for our beer!

It should be ready to drink around January 7th- just about a month away from Sunday. This is my second time brewing beer with Nathan and he is a fantastic teacher, very thorough and devoted to his craft. Nathan’s artistic practice is all about brewing beer and the social constructs around brewing and drinking beer.

Nathan stirs the grain into the hot water in the Mash-ton to make the Wort.

Nathan takes out some of the grain to make a filter at the bottom of a bucket. We will then pour all of the water and grain (Wort-making goodness) into the bucket and drain out all of the liquid back into the Mash-ton. Then it will be the Wort! The whole gallery smelled sweet and sour like malt and sugar. Very nice for a chilly, rainy Sunday. Oh and of course we drank beer the whole time we were making the beer.
Just cause.

Tristan, Anselm’s son is pointing at the liquid draining out of the bucket. It was very hot and I was freaking out that he would stick his fingers into it and get burned and also possibly ruin the beer!
This part of the process, from water-boiling to grain-adding to wort-draining took the longest time. Maybe like 3 hours. We ate a lot of rice and beans and talked and worked on the IGLOO website while we waited.

Once all the grain was separated from the Wort we dumped the grain and went back and put the Wort back on to boil and added these hops that smelled really, really good.

Then Nathan cooled down the whole mixture in the bathroom utility sink (which is huge) with this cool copper tube that had cold water running through the inside of it and then poured hot water out into the sink so that the whole thing cooled down to a specific temperature really fast.

He then poured the contents of the mixture through a strainer to get out the hops and it went into the carboy. The only thing left to do was to add the yeast!

We went through the whole process and now the beer is bubbling away in my kitchen. It sounds like a tap dripping slowly and it’s nice to know that something is growing and fermenting happily in the gallery.

If you want to see the full set of photos from our beer-making adventures go here!

THEN! The band Bones Made of Lazers (Sean Carney and Posie Currin) performed for us and we were able to participate and add to the music; as a group we all got together and clapped to create the rhythmic back-beat for the song. Carney and Currin’s Bones Made of Lazers is an open-source collaborative project involving downloading and reusing stock tracks and backbeats, layering them with keyboards, violin, base and guitar and then reposting the music online for further glitching/reworking and remaking. Sean Carney says he will get me a link to the tunes by this weekend so I will post it up for folks to grab.

And Kelvin Pittman played Sax while they set up for their show

While the music was playing we made a pizza that looked like a laptop computer which I seem to not have photos of but was quite delicious.

Greg from http://ecoroofseverywhere.com came over and we spent about an hour talking through his site – as a prelude to migrating it away from flash into ordinary html with javascript.  We ran into a horrible problem with the networking support under Windows – somehow his bios turned off the networking and we could not get the card to show up. @reidab spent about an hour on this and I spent a good 30 minutes on this as well.This marred our ability to complete the first rev of his site – he’ll return hopefully with something less sad-sauce.

As a long time Windows user, and finally making the switch to MacOSX – I know well how much the Windows OS is problematic – and in so many ways.  Windows is not built by people who care – the tool chains and solutions they offer are bad enough that it becomes increasingly difficult to actually make forward progress.  I personally reached a point where I was losing a day every day in dealing with performance and networking issues and it was a big motivator for my leap over to MacOSX.  I had shied away from the Ubuntu and FreeBSD solutions for my desktop for a variety of reasons, mostly that I figured that Windows would be “good enough”.  Now that I am on a *BSD system I realize what a mistake that was.  Metaphorically using Windows is like living in the suburbs – don’t surround yourself with people or practices that are mediocre because only mediocrity will result from it.  Perhaps we are not good at finding excellence, but we can avoid what we know is bad.

In any case then I personally took a peek at the problem with http://graffiti.org . This was brought to us as a real urgency and a real need.  The entire site is static, and hand-built.  But in need up systemic upgrades and improvements. What I’ve done is build a scraper using hpricot from why the lucky stiff which walks each page of the site – turning into a document tree and then pruning and injecting new layout details – to generate a new site.  Fun.  This worked well and I think we have a first rev of the site redesign done.

Matthew Stadler dropped by as well,

We took shovels to the compost that the neighbor needed moved – and we talked about place.  There are resonances between us.  Matthew is extremely interested in how people perceive spaces, how we can reclaim urban space.  He hosts the http://thebackroompdx.com/thebackroom_future.php event which brings artists and designers together to talk about space – usually involving copious amounts of food.  Not quite sure how he knows so many people in fact.  Amber Case – our cyber anthropologist in residence – also has a similar fascination witih place recently; she’s asking the lazy web for a way to have geo-local rss feeds so that as you walk around the city you are subscribing to different feeds that reflect that part of the city.  I too am interested in place, and would like to find a way to build technology to solve this puzzle, and also bring in folks like Matthew to bring critical analysis to it.

Finally at 9 or so Paige Saez and Amber Case both showed back up in town after being at MIT.  Bram and I fetched them from the aeropuerto. We had to talk them down from their hyper-kinetic mental mode ( after a few days at an intense conference they were definitely at top speed ) – and we just hacked late into the night – played music and ate food.  I put on a movie in the corner ( Totoro ) and a good time was had by all.

We’ve all been doing a skillshare on Sundays for many weeks now.  It has somewhat replaced our initial focus in the year of Tuesday and Friday nights – the approach we used to build http://imagewiki.org .  While not as work focused it is more diverse. Paige has a large community of artists, anarchists and creatives who’ve been bringing their diversity to our events.  What seems to be the most fun for us hearing about problems and issues from people and then helping them solve their problems.  The crowds are diverse, and we swarm over issues, talk about them, eat food, and generally have a pretty good time.  Sometimes we do this at my house ( 4804 North Borthwick ) and sometimes at either Paige’s Gallery or Ben’s Gallery ( IGLOO and ON Gallery respectively ).

Remember to checkout cyborgcamp coming up btw!  It is looking to be full of that special Portlandia people hacking magic – a good place to get futurized!