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20160913

I’ve been sick with flue for a week. 

Felt better yesterday, worked together with Viivi Koljonen on a Grey Cube Gallery artist documentation we made in Italian during the spring. We made a raw cut together and now she’s working on the translations. On my way home I started feeling sick again on went to the supermarket to buy a treat. In my weak state I suddenly bought a a 16kg kettlebell. The kettlebell is a big surprise. It’s an incredible concentration of metal and cultural practices (My favorite move with it is The Turkish Get-Up). 

I guess I’ll have to make an artwork out of it/with it. 2007 during my time in the Academy of Arts in Tallinn I felt guilty about buying coffee in take away cups daily. My friend Daniel Kupferberg urged me to “make art from the expendable cups so that the feeling would yield something productive”. This approach will serve well with the kettlebell. 

Later surfed online and bought a Honu Cage v.2 camera cage (used for 86€). I can now replace my shaky and worn out Dörr stabilizer grip thingy.. It’s intended for shooting low-angle skateboarding glides and under the load my current system (Gh3/lens, Tascam dr-40, Røde VideoMic Pro, cheep wireless AudioTechnica units and a YongNuo YN-160 led lamp/battery) it wobbles in the wind. The Honu Cage v.2 will stabilize my kit and serve as a hub for a shoulder rig I plan to build.

Today I met with Arttu Merimaa, Miina Hujala and Mikko Kuorinki to plan our upcoming course “The Cruel Radiance of What Is” for Art School Maa. The educational collaboration had a shaky start last spring but this meeting restored my believe on the project.

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20160908

Youtube lecture of Herbie Hancock presenting the Fairlight CMI. Midway the video (7:45min) he says that new instruments are tools when they allow users to choose if they are used for good or bad. This is a really interesting way to describe what a tool is: It is something we can effect to world with, which does not limit how (and by whom) it is used! He compares the Fairlight CMI to an axe which can be used to build a house or slaughter a neighbor. The power of samples in a sentence.

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20160907

Saw a young woman who was carrying heavy duty bolt cutters buying a diy pregnancy test kit.

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20160906

My views on “public art” and “art is public spaces” have changed drastically. I now feel that “art in public spaces” is primarily about exporting preexisting institutional frameworks to new sites and colonizing foreign cultures. The elements of the non-institutional environments will always surrender to art: The less culture there is at a site, the more easy it is to colonize it using artworks. A singular art object can fold the unprotected wilderness into itself and take control of its surroundings (A cross on top of a mountain etc). When art is made for the insides the institutions, it is met with more resistance and its structure is opened for negotiations. It is more easy to evaluate and compare artworks inside institutions. They may be more democratic spaces then I have previously thought! Institutions are dependent on gatekeepers who maintain status quo and reject works which they deem unfit. The act of rejecting something is actually articulating and making the inner values of the institution open for public debate. The wilderness cannot reject art. I should start to offer my artworks to established institutions. That would be the only way to benchmark their values.