The End is Nigh

There usually comes a point in any holiday when you check your emails and are reminded of something – a deadline, a work meeting, a dentist appointment – that you’d completely forgotten about. I don’t know about you, but when this happens it always throws me somewhat; I stop enjoying the present and start looking to the future.

Now, officially mid-way through the last week of the Summer Academy, I’m starting to think of the texts that I have to hand in when I get back to Berlin and the drinks I’m planning on Saturday night with my friends. I’m looking forward to being back in my flat where – unlike my student house in Salzburg – people don’t sing opera constantly in the hallways (#Festspieleproblems) and where my mattress doesn’t make me feel like I’m sleeping on a yoga mat.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m also sad to be leaving Salzburg and – it goes without saying – the Summer Academy. There’s a weird melancholy now when I look outside my bedroom window and see the mountains and think to myself: you won’t be there next week. I feel like I’ve been taking scenery for granted while I’ve been here. There’s still so much I want to do! I didn’t go to a lake, or a rooftop bar. I haven’t eaten nearly enough knödel for my liking and there are still classes to be visited at the Summer Academy, performances to watch and exhibitions to be seen.

And I’m still learning new things daily. On Tuesday, I joined Sabine B. Vogel and her class as they were schooled in search engine optimisation (SEO) – otherwise known as all the ways in which google’s algorithms rule our lives. Sabine is a lecturer at Vienna University of Applied Arts and a freelance art critic. I was impressed to learn from her bio that she’s been running independent weblogs since 1996, which was well ahead of the curve. She’s been posting art content – news, interviews, reviews – on her blog sabinebvogel.at since 2012 and is now running a course at the Summer Academy to give advice to young art bloggers. The course will mainly focus on writing – later in the afternoon they visited the Anna Boghiguian exhibiton and you can already see a review of the exhibition by Antoinette Blume here – but yesterday was a short introduction to the more technical expects of blogging: how to use keywords, headlines and links to increase your sites readability to Google. It’s not sexy – but it’s all important information for increasing traffic to your site and getting your words out into the world.

– CS