a 2024 update

The first time I’m sitting down to write something in 2024, that isn’t for work or my thesis or my emails. Nearly a third through already! As a friend recently put it: “spring is the Friday of the year - it holds all the promise of the weekend.” So here are some things I have been doing and photographing, written under sunshine on the Friday of the year (and posted under rain with the weekend feeling distant).

I was proud (really proud) to be awarded a distinction in my MSc in Digital Anthropology in February, saying goodbye to nearly 2.5 years of part-time study. The end of typing into the early hours after a full day in the office, work calls between classes in the signal vacuum of the anthropology building, losing countless weekends to my laptop. A degree alongside full-time work was so so hard, and yet somehow still so much less hard than my undergraduate degree - thank god for a fully developed frontal lobe. I’m excited to continue the research my dissertation was based on with a community data trust in the town of Brixham, a place which really captured my heart. I love talking about the work, and the avenues it’s taking me down.

And I’m also excited for other avenues of learning, as I book myself onto intensive evening Arabic classes with my new UoL alumnus discount and google community plumbing courses. Studying part-time proved a lesson in structured growth and curiosity outside of work, one that I hope to keep learning.

My job remains interesting and every day I learn something about AI and society and something about effective strategic communications and a lot of other things besides. Everyone wants to talk about data and technology policies right now, especially me, and getting to talk to the experts every day is a treat.

I’ve picked up my cameras rarely, although I loved talking about digital witchcraft before a portrait shoot with an author last month, and photographing protest actions in London. I shot minimal film on my first 2024 trip abroad cycling through Belgium last week, and a bit more in sunny Vienna after a nightmarish multiple-train journey through Germany in the small hours - nonetheless featuring a well-trodden journey from Munich into Austria over a sleep-deprived sunrise. Bavarian villages and distant mountains and spires poking at candyfloss skies.

I just got back the year’s first rolls of 35mm for development (unedited Kentmere 400 above). Two of my 2024 resolutions are to make a project zine and a photo book, and I’ve been thinking about what these might look like.

2024 reads so far, bar some already shed. Our one-in-one-out rule is not working, and our ceilings are too low for IKEA bookshelf extenders.

A good few months of art and books and things on screens - in particular the incredible The Zone of Interest at one of my favourite London independent cinemas. A huge achievement of a film, made by a brave and principled filmmaker. Also Dune and Dune 2, and the Greek film Animal at Vienna’s atmospheric Stadtkino.

I’ve seen interestingly curated exhibitions at the Barbican and the Royal Academy, and a lot of Magritte in Brussels and Klimt/Schiele et al in Vienna. Several graphic novels, and two absolutely gorgeous plays (cowbois at the Royal Court and The Picture of Dorian Grey whose press night after party was as illuminating as the show). Also several bad and mediocre plays, incoherent books, badly thrown together galleries. We are heading to Japan in the autumn, a trip I’ve been dreaming of for at least 15 years, and my list of things to read and to watch grows longer the more I ingest. Everyone seems to be in Japan at the moment. I hope they’ll share their tips.

The Ghent Altarpiece at St Bavo’s.

However my favourite cultural experience was my second pilgrimage to The Ghent Altarpiece and its central figure. A challenging day of cycling left us 8 minutes too late for the final viewing of the day, so we had to return for the first slot the following morning as the first ones in there. I’m not sure I’ve experienced collective audience suspense as intense as the mechanical panel-by-panel opening to reveal the central Mystic Lamb, which is presumably why we now have a very expensive Lam Gods Christmas tree bauble and a large array of fridge magnets. British theatremakers should take notes from this theatrical experience - perhaps also from the Augmented Reality exhibition downstairs where you can observe the durational performance of elderly German tourists lining up to be fitted for their headsets.

The cognitive dissonance of life unspooling gently alongside a livestreamed genocide remains jarring, and there’s not much more to say on that. Protests and solidarity events, of which I’d count our civil partnership in February as one.

I wrote most of this during several days in almost complete solitude, catsitting in the countryside and entrapped by train strikes. I sat quietly in the village church, pools of sunlight fading and forming at top speed as gale-force winds chased the clouds away; watched a lot of sci fi on Netflix with the cat. In recent years I think I’ve got better at enjoying my own company again; I was often lonely, but often content.

That’s the update! This picture was taken by the brilliant Sophie Williams and we will cherish it always.