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20201225

Disabled the Auto WiFi hotspot script on my Raspi following the Script Removal guide. Using the Raspi as my studio terminal… Yeah, I build a studio over the last two weeks. It’s a small room (240 x 230 x 235). Originally a compartment of the mandatory civil defence emergency evacuation structures of our apartment building. It’s below ground level but has a cute window trough which I can see the grass. In the summer I can turn this space into a camera obscura!

I build long shelves, two tables (one for standing and the other for sitting) and a weird high work stool using a Brooks-bicycle saddle and timbre I salvaged from a nearby construction site. The tables and shelves run along the walls and are mounted straight to them (made from OBS hence channelling strong 2000-berlin vibes). I’ve used every corner of the space and even added a sitting hammock to the ceiling. I got everything ready just before I was relieved from my gig-job at Posti. Still recovering from the gig.

I haven’t used the space much yet and there is still some work to be done. I’m currently moving all my gear, tools and supplies from the closets I’ve used to stash them. Dismantled the WaterLab patch (made notes of it) and organized my modules to the two cases I’ve build. I can finally test CaliOSC with the Mutable Instruments CVpal with my Norns (running Orca). The hammock is positioned perfectly for working a keyboard/Norns and to send signals to the modular.

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20201213

I remember being angry in 2012 because it felt like our performance with Hanna and Pietari, The Heroes of Art was not getting the traction it deserved. I talked about it to Jussi who calmed me down by asking: “Why do you care about museums so much? Don’t you have more important things to attend to?”. This made me aware that if I really wanted to renew  institutions, the best response would be to work on and with, the ones which accept me as I am. I think he was urging me to invest more effort to Tehdas Ry. Jussi wasn’t calling for me to “cancel” museums, just to ignore them. This made me a healthier artist.

I was reminded of this when reading The Strongest Reactions to the Philip Guston Show’s Postponement Miss Two Key Points. Here’s What They Are—and Why They Matter (2020) by Ben Davis. He identifies two phenomenons which hinder museums capacity to respond: “Context Collapse” meaning that the “professional art discourse don’t center the ‘cultural conversation’ anymore; the trending social media conversation clearly dominates. ” which leads to the “original intention” of an exhibition to be is “easily overwritten.” The other hindrance he identifies is “Paranoid Reading” a style of “interpretation in which, no matter the object at hand, the exposure of its secret negative side would recur as the main point of interpretation.” The term is credited to Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (1997) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

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20201212

There is a mug with the old TeaK logo in the Sturenkatu 21 Posti logistics backroom. A positive trace. The work easy.

Mailmans short term memory is infrastructure. #ॐ

Customers have five digit codes which correspond to packages they are picking up. To speedup delivery I memorize them and keep the numbers in mind for the twenty steps it takes me to reach the shelfs where I collect the packages. For those twenty steps, the internals of my brains are a part of the logistics network.

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20201210

The taxpayer is the ultimate maintenance artist. #ॐ

Got a job as a temporary Christmas Maker (postal mail and package logistics worker). An epic month sliding from an artist, to a voice actor, to online event broadcaster, to art teacher, to a thesis inspector, to logistics. Skidding trough rough patches but I’m moving too fast to notice the burn.

As the pandemic pushes creatives, who have been seasoned by years commitment in busy productions, to temp-jobs where will the folk who previously worked these sites end up? The work I got is a work a first year art student didn’t get – What will they eat for Christmas? This is survivors guilt I guess.

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20201208

Participated in a creative writing class at Aalto. The session was hosted by Nat Rahaa who presented poetry as a toolkit for defamiliarizing established rationals (poetry as an anti-imperialistic practice!). We were presented extracts form works by Samuel Solomon, Linus Slug, Caroline Bergvall, Will Alexander and others. Solomons reworkings of archive materials felt interesting and I really enjoyed No (2017) by Anne Boyer. We were offered multiple approaches towards defamiliarization: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, Experimental Writing.

I’ve experienced that texts always establish borders.  I think all writing is punishment.

To start of the domain of creative writing feels like it is reserved for people who have been initiated to grammar. Writing, as a craft,  is maintained by a vigilant clergy who have been indoctrinated to grammar since kindergarten. Most likely trough the exercise were we had to color letters while staying inside their bounds.

Language cops were friends in high school but they end up as lone rangers in adulthood. Most of them end up working for the establishment. A selected few gain a right of roam over all text. For them it’s all the same: If it’s letter-like shapes, it can be read and made sense of or its nonsensicality can be classified.

They gain their position from the trust folk show them when they need help.

Language cops and grammar-clergy are needed for surviving a bureaucratic world.  Everyone should get know at least two members from this clan. It’s a passive aggressive arrangement. The grammar-clergies violence is subtle – They don’t even notice what they are doing: Pulling focus to the absence of punctuation marks, in a world we can’t stay still – Is a bitch move. Their actions echo a believe that texts, words and even letters perform and make stuff.

More effort would be put into teaching people how to read. Because reading is the performance of text. People should be taught to read wrong (I think one of the text collage exercises we did during todays Zoom session was after this). If more people would be taught how to read-wrong, it would enable folk to write like they feel, with out having to fear the grammar-clergy.

Text is a horizontal performance, which sets words in a list #ॐ

Below is a text we were tasked to write. I feel happy about it.

I will cycle in the sun, after work and play music as loud as my phone speakers allow.

I’ll see people drinking wine in the park as I pass by and think about my kids when I see some climbing a tree.