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20211029

In the contemporary milieu, the idea of being negative is either regarded as a destructive mentality or else defeatist fatalism. But, at least in passing shades, negative emotions can hold great power. There resides in negativity the seed of critical thought and a beneficial duty to engage with one’s internal feelings.

The Art of Negativity – On Rejecting Positive Thinking (2021) Enis Yucekoralp. The text draws a link between capitalism, positivity and the “Likes” which social media devices employ. There is a determinism at play in positivity… As if things would “get to” or need to “go towards” to exist or feel good to be meaningful! I’m reminded of a previous claim that bitterness is in fact an emotional response of class awareness #ॐ. This is framed in a sentence: “Judgmental bourgeois attitudes towards revolt and protest necessarily represent hegemonic support for the status quo”. The text brings forth a useful concept: “toxic positivity”, which is deployed to against the stagnative argument that “negative emotions are inherently ‘bad'”. The author identifies trades of “cultist optimism”, which approaches critical world-views as a sin. Also loving the critique of “wellness capitalism” (Yucekoralp is citing Audre Lorde).

… the English Romantic poet John Keats formulated a concept, one which he termed ‘negative capability’. At root, it describes a propensity for living in the midst of mystery; or, more accurately, the power to accept enigmas and uncertainties with an open mind free from the imposition to hunt down order and clarity. His very use of ‘negative’ is not meant derogatively, but to represent absence in a more abstract sense – the positive potential of ‘being without’ something. In this case: knowledge or certainty.

Wellness capitalism is the symptom of a much more corrosive condition; as if more consumption were the answer to healing the wounds of capitalism. In reality, the promises of ‘mindfulness’, ‘positive mental attitude’ and ‘healthy living’ pledged by the industrial wellness complex are exposed as just one more arrow in the quiver of exploitation.

We should work to destroy ourselves nicely, not only to maintain the current but to destroy it! Authentic movement and authentic drunken slumber can possibly be equally healing. Authentic Drinking (or getting fucked up in other ways) was recently discussed with Leena and Heini.

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20211026

Visited the Helsinki Performance Art Symposium at Mad House over the weekend. A nice line-up and big audience. If aliens would have abducted the guests, organizers and artists, Finland would have lost 30% of its performance core. I witnessed presentations from the usual suspects and artists such as Maija Kivi and Heikki Mäntymaa whose work I hadn’t seen before. Kivi presented a self-soiling striptease act – I danced a long but started feeling uncomfortable towards the end. It was emotional to see Joonas Jokiranta perform, I don’t think I’ve seem them in 15 years. Tomasz Szrama presented a long, rude and fun piece, were they deployed a large chunk of the audience as counterweights and other supports for their actions. Irma Optimistis lecture was great. Exactly of what is expected from her but this time it felt more intriguing. I think I’ve grown an appetite for slowly evolving, repetitive performances with subtle visual cues and references to art history.

Their work made me think very critically of past lecture performances I’ve seen (and performed). It felt like Optimisti had internalized the theoretical aspects of the knowledge they worked with and instead of illustrating Wikipedia entries or offering a laypersons science presentation: They build an argument on how knowledge of the world is made and worked with the revelation using their body. It was an experiment, not a presentation. The work made me think of John Ó Maoilearcas writing on François Laurell. I haven’t read much of them but I think I get the point of the optics and directionality or hierarchy of knowledge: Optimisti was not looking to scientific conventions of presenting the world as something they aspired towards, they were looking at the methods of science trough art. Their presentation was of the world.

Successfully build the RYO Paths unit after receiving the Fairchild transistors. The Fairchild FJN3303R Delivery initiative is active and I’ve started launching it in incrementally.

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20211021

The Threshold (2021) Vasif Kortun. Got passed this by Elina as a good companion to our text in No-Niin. Kortun also addresses the moment when covid turned museums into content-broadcast-stations which were so desperate for audience engagement that they forgot decency. For me, this broke the threshold: Their art became a one-way affair (which made the other side was irrelevant).

Threshold […] is about the conditions of how the two parties—the institution and its audience—begin to trust each other. Not to consent, but to agree to a process of accepting each other as workable partners; not only in the institution’s programs but also in the veracity of the relationship. It is a fluid contract, not a once-and-done deal. It is also not merely about the “offer,” but how the institution acts upon the world, its demeanor, its decency, how it levels with a situation, and how it treats the user as wiser than itself. Absolute parrhesia cannot really be expected, but adopting, growing, and developing this relation into an institution’s output is a must. Otherwise, institutions are just shopping, doing good, and being timely: commoning in the Summer, queering in the Fall, and decolonizing in the Winter.

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20211020

Worked as an assistant for Simon Vincenzis FROM THE DEAD AIR ORGY: On The Nature of Things. An intensive gig. I helped in preparing the Roihupelto artist studios into a multichannel live-feed broadcast station. The daily broadcasts lasted only 20 minutes and performers were directed & their actions timed meticulous to execute partially synchronised movements and others gestures. The separate events built up slowly into a consistent mood. As a performance it felt like an ambient artwork. Not a lot of events but what ever it was it occurrent consistently and it didn’t demand an audience. It was made for algorithms and AIs too. There was partial nudity which youtube automatic sensors picked up. Imagine: Youtube has developed an algorithm which can identify penises. It was speculated that this is the most religiously motivated algorithm in existence, an algorithmic model of North-American puritanism and modesty etiquette.

Bought a la-radio (cb-radio to be specific: President Harry 2 Classic) for cheep and planning to build my own antenna for it. The model I got might be suitable for mods. The Slim Jim and J Pole calculator calculator site feels like a good resource for antennae and the cbharraste.info also offers a lot of tips (the site works better on wayback machine). My interest in radio is getting serious. Not sure what it is ultimately about. I’d like to perhaps build a digital radio relay station and I want to make sculptures which work as antennas! They would work well for tuho.org.

Received my M8 unit. Looks and feels lovely. A steep learning curve but making progress. Haven’t tested it with midi gear yet. Found a few useful resources of the M8 discord channel:

  • OctaChainer v1.3.1 Makes suitable slice files as an “Evenly spaced grid”
  • Chordmate3 by impbox. Transcribes chords to m8 FM synth hex. Short memo: Set ALGO to 0B (A+B+C+D) -> Set A, B, … MODs to 1>PIT, 2>PIT, … -> Set MOD1, MOD2, … according the heximal data Chordmate3 displays (example: D-4 00 03 0E 15)
  • m8.uvu.la for making themes.

Still expecting fairchild transistors for my PATHS. They’ve been stuck in Vantaa for two weeks. There was a clearance issue which I had to sort out. Assembled a working Aperture. Setting up a techno rig it seems (the track is pretty much based on Aperture, which supplies the kicks and the squeals). As a filter Aperture gives me the same brain tingles as MS-20. I feel the high resonances in the back of my scull.

Visited the Kurängen spring with Elina Vainio and Monika Czyżyk. We collected clay from the proximity of the spring opening and later prepared a few cups and sculptures from it. We don’t know much about the clay yet but are looking to burn in later this year. The water was clear! I visited the spring in August and removed a canvas from its base. This released mud and soil from under the canvas which contaminated the water. I visited the site later in the month and the water was still murky and undrinkable. I feared I had destroyed the water source (for human use anyway) but proceed planting a few m2 of peat, turf and moss I sourced from a swampy patch higher up in the forest valley (the entire affair reminded me of Land-Values).

I attached the patchwork quilt peat-slices using wooden anchors (tree branches), so that they could stick to the spring base (it floats) and establish roots which could contain the soil. While working on site I spotted two frogs (I drained the 200 litre spring to attach the peat). While visiting the spring early October the water appeared to be cleansed! I could see some parts of the turf in the middle of the spring had turned grey (possibly died) but as the water in the spring is clear, light can access the base and the plants can grow further. We spotted two tadpoles. The water tasted like a mild forest tea. Good and as cold as ever. The forest skin (peat, turf and moss) transfer method seems to work.

The placement of the canvas had formed caveats to the forest base and sledges to the west side of the spring opening. This side appear prone for erosion. I will continue investigating if the west ledge of the spring should be reworked. The north-east side looks equally troubling. The canvas placement has made the spring too deep, like a bathtub of sorts, from where the access water is released into a very muddy swamp opening. I think the spring base should be somehow lifted higher to prevent the water from swamp opening from keeping contact with the water in the spring.

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20211018

I witnessed Aira Samuli offer fashion tips for aspiring businesspeople. It was in the 90ties, we ate uunileipä (slices of wheat toast with minced meat, paprika and cheese) on weekends and binged on TV. Samulin prompted a businessperson to reveal their undergarment on a talk show. They lifted the leg of their pants revealing white tennis-socks which they wore with a black suit. Samulin shamed them.

This is how we grew into fashion. It was logical: Pay much, look good.

The Soviet Union had collapsed, people were hurting and the nation aimed to the west. Finns had factories and products but I guess they weren’t selling. Someone like Samulin convinced factory owners that Finns didn’t know how to market their stuff and that this was a reason for the emerging sustainability gap. There were even songs about this… Artists presented Finns as apes who fell from a tree.

Dressing properly, like some had seen businesspeople in international airports do, was a valid effort. It was a structural change of the era: A leap from production, to looking like a product. This period bootstrapped the careers of hightier media-bullies such as Jari Sarasvuo and Nalle Wahlroos.

This is how marketing gained its power and by the early 2000 marketing was everything. For consumers this change looked like Heikki Kinnunen turned into Neo from the Matrix. This figure reached its peak as the political figure of Alexander Stubb. Perhaps Kinnunen-Neo saved us from the recession. The media was saturated by colourfully printed annual reports and 3d corporate logos (and specifically adverts detailing how much rebranding had cost).

For a while the media was saturated with marketing and everything became a stylistic choice. Valio and other Nordic dairy companies ripped off Keith Haring to convince us that drinking milk was actually a style. At which stage of the production line does milk become a style? Efforts like this dislodged material relations. People seized to eat to feel good, they begun to eat to manifest their values. I think the milk-fashion-swindle is touched in Rumina (2017) Anni Puolakka.

Marketeer made farmers and cooks fashionistas and they’re still on it with superfoods.

Communication agencies came to be. Unhinged politicians escaped their responsibilities by joining lobbies and agencies which aimed to interface, to produce relations and events. Everything became a launch. Products weren’t sold, they were to produce relations.

But relations to what? To whom? We’ve reached a peak where communication agencies are revealed as the media. There aren’t any journalists left and the communication agency leaflets get published without edits. For a while marketeers mistook this as a sign that their professionalism but actually it was a symptom: There is only an echo chamber left. Only an echo chamber left.

Factory owners in Finland have spent the last 30 years attaching new meanings to old products. We’re left with Moomin, Marimekko (reincarnated as Makia), Fiskars and Kone. Each investing millions to agencies to constantly renew their relationships with their client. Billions of wasted money. Their products stink of uunileipä.

This is why we need support for art. The sustainability gap is a result of bad investments.