Monday Mixtape – One Talk From the Archive, Every Week

In 2014, Jeremy Keith published the schedule for dConstruct and wrote a line that resonated with me.

Figuring out the flow of the day is another aspect that I really wanted to get right. It’s like making a mixtape.

I quoted him here in April 2015, in a post about how I put a schedule together and all I added below was: “That’s exactly right.”

Eleven years later Tom Arnold, who has been at nearly every beyond tellerrand since the first one in 2011, wrote his running diary of Düsseldorf 2026 and use the same metaphor: a well-made mixtape.

Well. If an idea comes back to you twice over eleven years, from two people you like, maybe it is trying to tell you something. ;)

So: Monday Mixtape

Every Monday I will pull one talk out of the archive and post it. One track. The speaker, the year, the idea and a link to watch the whole thing. That is all it is.

There are 370 talks from 29 events. Fifteen years of them. Most of them are by people who are now friends and a lot of them are better now than they were when they were new. Nobody goes back through an archive on their own, right? I mean, do you? See! So I will do it for you, one Monday at a time.

And the mixtape thing is not only a nice phrase. When I build a schedule I think about flow – the heavier talks in the morning, someone after lunch who can wake the room up again, something entertaining in the evening slot and a closing talk that people carry home with them. Then I leave it on the table overnight and look at it again the next morning to see whether my stomach still agrees. This is the same job, just spread over weeks and weeks instead of two days.

Track one is on Monday, 14 September: Paula Scher, Berlin 2017.

Follow along at #btconfMixtape. And if there is a talk you want to hear again, tell me – I am taking requests ;)

Stay curious!