This is Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ which began being constructed in 2004 and which graces one of the entrances to Chicago’s Millennium Park. I managed to skive off for a morning to visit this superb ‘bean’ of silver last week, while visiting the city for SCMS 2013.

This is perhaps the largest conference I’ve ever been to and while I’m not a fan of research events of this size, I have to say that the quality of some of the papers was superb. It was a shame that there were really that many informal social spaces – and that getting a coffee took about half an hour if you were in the hotel – which did make ‘networking’ and meeting new people rather difficult.

I was presenting some of my current research that looks at the remediation of public data on mobile devices and I’ll post some more information on this presentation on this site soon. We ended up with a small audience in a very big ballroom (!) but the discussion was definitely worth the 8 hour journey over and it is always nice to learn a little more about what’s going on in the field right now.

Would I go again? I don’t know – it was a funny experience – not helped by the fact that I was nursing a cold. But I think I would at least consider attending again – providing there is some cool architecture (and shopping) I can escape to when it all gets a bit too much!