Now it is the third week I am living here in Berlin and it’s about five days since Lisa left and I am all alone here. And just before I asked myself whether I was homesick. And as strange it may sound, my answer is no. But why? What is it that makes me feel that way?

In my solitude I was pondering on that topic for quite a while and realized that I am quit immune to homesickness. Even when I was away from home for the first time when I was ten I remember being glad to be back again, but staying for another week with my class in upper Styria wouldn’t have done harm to me.

When I started at the University of Applied Sciences in Salzburg and got my room there on campus I wasn’t eager for my home in Graz any minute while some people in my class had had some emotional troubles to overcome if I remember correctly.

But why am I feeling so well and at home here in Berlin? Is it the apartment? Yes, perhaps because it isn’t mine. This may sound paradox but it doesn’t feel like actually “living” here, more than an extended stay to water the plants and to have an eye on everything here my landlady left for me to discover. Right now I am sitting in one of the most comfortable beds amidst some very interesting books and a large CD shelf. Both these assets tell me more about her than she could tell me in an afternoon. So am I nothing more than a watchdog to overlook this flock of books, this herd of personal belongings?

But here’s the catch: I feel at home where my computer is. And I am not talking about Desdemona, my notebook, but about my nameless computing-monster that is downloading Call of Duty - Modern Warfare in the other room¹. My computer is more than just some overpriced piece of electronics for viewing websites and watching films. In my case my computer is a big part of my life and creativity and I feel constrained and blocked when I don’t have access to my beloved Photoshop, Lightroom, Maya, Nuke, and all the others.

Sherry Turkle once wrote in her great book Life on the screen that computers allow us to outsource parts of our personality and characteristics into it, shape it and use it as mirrors for ourselves. In the highly customizable world we’re living in everything that was made or chosen on purpose by a person tells something about him or her, with every t-shirt imprint, every time our cellphone rings with a distinctive (or emphasized generic) ringtone, every time we change the wallpaper on our desktop.

And in my case there’s helluva lot of my personality in my computer. My mp3 collection in highest bitrates with high-res scanned covers and lyrics in every file, my digital photos tagged in Lightroom with keywords, GPS coordinated and developing data or my personal archives of jobs well done, terabytes mirrored on two disks, a thousand kilometers apart. Yes, this is me, in every folder icon I can see a fraction of my self, with every mouse click I transport my creative intentions into digital reality which is nothing more but the same: Electic energy transformed, submitted and captured, in my brain like in my quadcore.

So working on my computer, spending many hours a day with it, working, watching, playing, browsing means nothing more than looking into a reflection of thine own self? I’m ashamed to admit it but yes, I’m looking into a digital image of myself, and my machine-self looks back at me. For now it’s a symbiosis, and I want to keep it that way, even if it may seem like an one-sided addiction to an outsider. The machine helps me to structure my self.

1. And that’s not even illegal, because I bought the game for 55 Euros but forgot it at home and am eager to play it. Along with my newly awaken affinity for Diablo II. But that’s another story. [back]