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20220408

The difference between performance art and live-art is class. Live-art is favoured by artists from or aspiring to middle-classes and performance art is for the poor. Performance art is customer service, job hunting, busking and haggling. Live-art is choreography, dialogue and contracts.

I’m still scorned by COVID period setbacks, the impact of restrictions and control measures. Trying to read but I can’t do much work. The peak of the pandemic toggled my sense of agency and Russia’s attack to Ukraine is continuing the same. I feel irrelevant and detached.

Still awaiting a pcb shipment for the Arradio revision.

Clap in many synths Ive listened to is not a clap it is a tap as from the dance. I think many of my favourite claps would be better defined as taps. They have a woody element and a double tap is often used for emitting a sense of space. Doing double taps is easier then double claps.

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Personal Decamerone (2022)

Originally published on No Niin magazine in April 2022 issue 10. Edited by Elham Rahmati.

I think it’s brave and curiously decadent to work with sex; I mean, working with sex in any form, as a creative theme or performing sexual acts. I’ve never felt comfortable exploring my sexuality, and I think I need to engage in this aspect of my creative life. I’m worn, strained and feel a need to revitalise myself. What I’m doing here is an attempt to come to terms with my curiosity. But I might be overdoing it. Instead of working with my issues, I’m jumping in headfirst and committing a public sex act to get over it. We all have to start somewhere, right?

When I began thinking seriously about sex, reading and writing about it, I started imagining myself as a sex worker. This helped me establish a professional distance from the topic and made my engagement with it less personal. I might have a hard time exploring my body and how it feels, but I know how to work. So, approaching sex and sexual expressions as a project made it feel less intimidating. I’m confronted with the realisation that I don’t think I know any sex workers. At least no one has confessed this to me; perhaps they fear I’d judge or misunderstand them. I don’t think I would. I’d have a harder time coming to terms with a friend admitting they were paying for sex than learning that someone was doing it for a fee. It turns out I’m a prude. I’ve fostered a belief that money taints sex, which belongs to a private domain.

What I’m exploring here as sex work also includes novelists who write about it and others who have sex without pleasing. I’m inspired by artworks and performances that deal with sex or are arousing to the extent that I’m left asking: “Did I just see a striptease act, or is there something wrong with me?”.

These are my angles on sex as work. Well, honestly, these and online porn. I haven’t paid for any of the porn I’ve consumed. I guess this makes my relationship with the performers less professional. My taste in online porn is polarised. I like over-the-top performances that feel unreal and show unrealistically fit bodies. This establishes a distance, which helps me feel less ashamed of my gaze. I guess a lot of online porn works this way. The categories sites use for organising their content give a bigger rush than the videos they link to.

60fps, amateur, babe, babysitter, behind the scenes, brown-in-pink with vertical rotation, casting, clean, double penetration, euro, exclusive, fingering, liquid on porous, pink-on-pink, public, red-grey-opaque, rotating up with veils under limbs, shaking soft with mass, squirt, toys, untitled 2#

I’m scared of sex; categories appeal to me because they help constrain it. The craft of controlling a body at will and the will to control another body is frightening. Imagining this power makes me view people as tactical flesh machines, as mechas or robots, operated by desires. I fear I would be easily exploited.

Is it vain to work on a sex project as pandemics and wars are crippling the world? Perhaps. But in all honesty, this is the best response I have come up with. I’m working as an artist, performing a public act and even getting a grant for it. It’s a COVID-19 art grant intended to help creatives pass the social distancing related to businesses and government agency shutdowns. The grant is for relieving economic stress.

Emerging as a sex-artisan

Beautiful agony, a little death. Powerful names for an orgasm. One is the name of an online sex community. Beautifulagony.com has been up and running since 2004. I’ve followed it occasionally over the years. Contributors share videos showing only a tightly framed image of their face while having an orgasm. Simple, stylish, and elegant. Confusing too, a community for sharing the faces of enjoyment, for the enjoyment of others. There is a small fee involved for the contributors, but the biggest payoff seems to be that contributors gain full access to the archive and become part of the community. It feels innocent, but the website’s forum is banal on a closer look. Performers are referred to by their submission number and discussed as flesh.

“Ms. 4161. So nice to see her again. Her orgasms are so natural and unaffected that I have to smile when I see them. I particularly loved the contributions she made with her partner.”
“I agree. The Friends’ contributions are some of the best on the site.”
“All their videos are excellent, and I hope she contributes more with or without 4160”
“In her confession video, she explains her synchronous masturbation technique.”
“I love watching clips with men, and it turns me on. Sometimes I jerk off and try to orgasm simultaneously with the man in the clip. If it works, then it is great and very relaxing.”

There are sample videos available for free, and I was drawn to them because the people in them look sincere. The way they are shot leaves a lot to the imagination. They only show a happy face moving in syncopated rhythm, unintentional utterances, and audible skin friction. In the grant application, I wrote that I would make a contribution to the site as a way to explore the changes we experience in intimacy due to COVID countermeasures.

At first, Emmi was curious. When I presented this idea, her immediate reaction was that it was fun, but then it dawned on her that the production of the work would take hold of our lives. We’ve been together for almost twenty years. Keeping work and family life separate has been challenging. When I get a project going, it engulfs our home. I use our living room and closets for storing art gear and talking about what I do nonstop. She feared that she might have to start sleeping in the living room when I would be working.

She asked, “On which dates do you need to keep the camera rig in our bedroom?” I promised I’d shoot the video in a hotel. But there wasn’t time for it that summer. I took a temporary job working as a gardener. It was a hard job, and I lost my appetite for art, sex, and life. I grew bitter and spent the free time I had sulking.

Later, during the fall, she reminded me that I should complete the project, and sometimes after sex, she would make a joke about filming the highlights. I think the sex part of the work made her feel a bit proud of me. I haven’t been shy about sharing details of this project with friends and colleagues. But they don’t ask about it either. As it stands, my solo sex performance is putting Emmi and the kids in an odd position. Weirdly, the sexual act I’m planning will be more relevant, more understood, and discussed by strangers than my friends and colleagues. Having an orgasm publicly makes me lonely.

When preparing for the shoot, I read the Beautiful Agony website submission guidelines and the release form they wanted me to fill out. There are a lot of technical demands on video quality. They recommend that I use “natural light” and have specifications for the audio quality. The demands feel vague and rigid simultaneously, like an open call for a student film festival. Suddenly, making the video starts to feel like work. They want me to submit two recordings shot in two different locations. This is so that they can select the performance that fits their brand best. They also want me to include a 15-minute “Confession” interview, a monologue in which I share a depiction of my first orgasm and notes on my sexual desires. I’m not feeling many things right now. Anxiety over precarious work conditions hardly counts as a sexual desire.

The confessions segment feels like a mandatory artist interview that an art festival might expect an artist to provide. Something organisers assume the funders of the event want to hear: A juicy display of complete submission. I think I’m not paid enough to offer one, and I doubt anyone cares about my sex life.

The confession videos are only available to members of the community. So I can’t see how other contributors are responding to the demands, but judging from the thumbnails, people look fresh and as if they have stories to share. I’m pressured to make something up. While reading the guidelines, I started to think about the easiest ways of executing the work, just like I would plan for a regular work commission. This stress, bundled with figuring out the logistics for the sex act, made the entire project feel frustrating. Doing sex as a performance is boring because, while the actual sex can be exciting, there are a lot of office tasks.

We went past the second peak of the pandemic, and I ended up working in logistics for Posti. Later, I went for a job at a food courier company and was offered a position working as a shopping centre security guard. I was saved from these by a small commission. Emmi started expecting our third child; I got vaccinated three times and scavenged a small grant for a different project. Life moved on, and masturbating for strangers felt like a vain thing. Eventually, I postponed the project for two years, and it lost its urgency for me.

Two years later, together alone

The archivists of the Beautiful Agony site forums seem very committed and ready to scrutinise the quality of my submission, from the tone of my voice to the blush on my cheeks. Will they like me? They will refer to me as a number, and if they do, I hope I get a good one. A series of odd numbers would feel like a good luck charm. The value of life, our capability for empathy, and our rationality are assessed using numbers. The numbers display statistics of the virus’ spread and the death tolls. The pandemic and the culture that statistics feed into are turning us into cyborgs. We are connected through data, and I hope for a high number of views.

Kaino told me that they had read somewhere that there hadn’t been as much poetry or artistic depictions of “the plague” as historians expected. People were busy surviving, we reasoned. I imagine a lot of “plague art” was made while the disease reigned in Europe, but after the disease had its way, the artworks lost their context and were neglected. Poetic depictions of the colours of boils don’t make much sense to people who can’t read the progress of infection from them. Masturbatory Covid-art falls into this category too. It only makes sense when nothing else does.

I hope you are feeling relaxed and relieved. I have a shoot to prepare. Thank you for this moment. I feel like I’m ready for work now. I’m not passionate about what I have to do, but I feel more equipped to handle it. I hope you are too. Bye.

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20220325

Companies partially owned by the Finnish state, most notably Fennovoima Ltd. nuclear power company established by Russian state’s nuclear company Rosatom, where grounded by the premise that business interactions would advance democratic development in Russia. The plan was that free trade would boost the emergence of a free society.

It seems they sincerely believed that investments between state corporations, would foster good will between nations. Turns out the investments the Finnish state made for establishing infrastructural ties, have been pocketed and used for amassing even more authoritarian power.

Peace and democracy do not trickle down, they are built from the ground up. Next time, we must invest in actual peace work, cultural exchange and grass root democracy initiatives.

If one or two of the hundreds of billions of euros Finland has wasted in advocating free trade, would have been used for establishing independent cultural exchange –between Russian and Finnish democracy activists, cultural workers and grass roots activist– we could imagine an easier path out of this mess.

Despite our proximity to Russia, Finland has failed in establishing institutions which could reach Russians. At this moment we would need to offer Russians a promise of an alternative and means to achieve change. I don’t think Russians will stand against their current regime due to economic sanctions. Having the right to consume is not a freedom or right worth fighting for.

The same premise is at the core of EU: Trade is presented as means for peace. Why are EU countries selling weapons and weapons systems? We need to do better. War is be made impossible because people make it impossible.

Finland wasted 600-700 million in this (now cancelled) project.

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20220315

– Well,  [David] Tudor was one of my first customers. [John] Cage and Tudor visited me at my studio in Berkeley and I remember that occasion. My studio at that time was ten feet wide and I worked out on the sidewalk. It was so crowded in there we hauled the workbench out on the sidewalk on good days and set up my oscilloscope and worked out there. Cage came by and for voltage control I had hooked up my keyboard to an FM module that I’d built, a little module that was an FM receiver and I could play stations on it because I had one of the first veractor tuned FMs. Cage, as you can imagine was, just enormously interested in the fact that I could tune each key to a station and then proceeded to play the radio. I had already met Cage while putting together some of his pieces that involved perhaps multiple radios, phonographs and so on. At that time, in fact the first instrument that he encountered that I had built was a device that gave you a pitch according to where you were along the sound beam. Add it was a guidance device for the blind. At that time I was working a lot with prosthetics for the blind and Cage played it as a musical instrument in this piece and then later on saw my voltage control tuner. He didn’t actually purchase one. I’m not sure that I was offering it for sale in fact. But David Tudor came along with him and commissioned a sound locator that was based on a very beautiful Aztec-looking design. Four circular motifs in which you played a five-channel sound system. Four speakers in the corners of the room and a fifth directly overhead. That was my way of making a equal interval polyhedron. Not taking care of the bottom but certainly the top and Cage bought that and the rather complex voltage controlled amplifier that it controlled to distribute sounds and he used in a number of pieces. I believed he used it in a early version of the Rain Forest Piece.

– Do you recall the date of that?
– I have a hard time with years to tell you the truth.

– The 60s of course?
– Oh early or mid sixties .

– What was the war doing?
– This was early 100 series stuff.  By ’69 I had abandoned the 100 series so it would be around ’66.

Extract from 1991 Buchla tape transcription from the Steina and Woody Vasulka archives.

I submitted a PCB design revision of the Arradio module to a factory. Made the design using KiCad and called the unit Radio Kid. The revision uses a different FM radio submodule, includes reverse voltage protection, the output has a 1k buffer, the board is fitted with a U.fl-smt-1(01) connector for a SMA antenna connector (optionally mounted on the panel), the circuit includes a “latch-toggle” which prevents the tda7088 locking to FM channels and it is 2hp smaller then the original. Small changes to the original design, yet milestone in for my electronics hobby.

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20220221

What is ecofeminism, and why is it necessary in the fight for climate justice? (2022) Julie Gorecki. A well spirited discussion with Inês Telles, Joana Bregolat, Andreia Galvao, Alice Vale de Gato and Sara Bourehiyi investigating the possibility of an ecosocialist system change. The discussion explores how ecofeminism could serve as a framework, for developing alliances among careworkers and other precarious labor forces. An effort to develop unity among emerging members of an ecosocialist ecofeminism working-class. Motivating and fun to listen to. Also works a nice recap to what metabolic work and ecofeminism are.

Arradio exploration is progressing steadily. The ak-modul-bus.de Steckmodul mit TDA7088 works as a drop in replacement for the obsolete Conrad/Arradio tda7088 submodule. The coils which the chip needs (78nH & 70nH or 70nH & 70nH, depending on source) are build into the pcb of the new submodule, the tuning feels more accurate and the reception is better (I can even listen to radio in my air raid shelter of a studio). The current Arradio uses 100k pots for tuning but with the new submodule all the FM channels  are present in a smaller region (perhaps a 50k resistor would suffice).

Feeling frustrated with the sonics of the FM domain. Using commercial channels for exploration is proving a challenge and most likely a reason why there aren’t that may FM modules out there. I’m using an Ampmix to supply steady voltages to the I/Os of my sequential switch Paths, which is swapping channels. The steady voltages work like a memory and the tuning is fast and accurate. There are occasional glitches (perhaps some slew is needed for ease).  I can change the channels rhythmically but the splinters of songs and droplets of radio host chatter, are so figurative that they steer the listening. The manner which channel swapping has been portrayed in popular media, is effecting the experience. I feel like a kid, playing a DJ on an old radio. Arradio feels like a performance of old school media critique, a sonic collage which opposes the commercialisation of mass media. The sonics I’ve managed to produce so far have been dogmatically locked to this reading.

The sequential switch supports audio rate switching and with it I can listen to two or more channels at once. Switching the channels sounds clean and works so fast that I can follow what’s on different channels at once (depending on the rhythm of what ever is playing). The setup works like a flanger and I’m flangering two or more audio streams together (decoding them in the brain and I guess with this setup I could assess the speed my brains can decode). I tested a low pass gate (Apature) to shape the FM audio bursts. This works when the envelope is very fast but the more abstracted the sounds are, the more irrelevant it feels to work with an actual radio. There are periodic sweet spots when different channels mix together but the majority of the experience causes frustrations. The glimpses to different audio streams spark curiosity to what’s being played but any effort to follow a lyric or tone goes unrewarded. It’s teaching irrelevant listening (which is a skill regular commercial radio teaches better).

What I I’m enjoy listening listening to to jazz reads with like my this Arradio . .