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20210222

I’m the key and the lock. I can barely breath as the walls are caving in and I must act fast to open myself. I’m told I’m only one who can find a path but I’m only allowed to move my fingers and have to squint my eyes so that nobody sees what I’m really looking at. I’m looking for a way out, so you know.

But I’m kept firmly behind horizontal bars of organised letters and confronted only by people who know more than I do about what I’m doing. Allowing oneself to be taught, calls for a strong trust to someone who you don’t know. Teaching is about teaching others to trust an unknown.

The bars in front of me tell me that nothing makes sense makes sense. The aim is that people write their own story out of it and discover themselves. Noise is here for us to situate ourselves as ourselves, so that we don’t confuse ourselves to be a choir. But the more situated I become, the more I only hear me.

I keep oriented by remembering that the first thing ever written was a job application. It didn’t include a CV because there hadn’t been any careers yet. I don’t know what the job was. Possibly a middle-management task, like counting stuff. More people were hired as the company expanded, which is how literature was born.

It took a while but eventually literature became very sophisticated and today most of us write receipts. I write receipts because I don’t understand what people are saying. I write it down to figure it out. It’s material, sums and tokens.

Today I got triggered by a tw. It made me feel white, male and privileged. The warning was about what white men in power do. I’m such but something else too. I must be something else then a receipt of my genes.

Later on, a person in a group I work for invited us to confront the patriarchal structures of language. They of course are not talking to me but I feel responsible somehow. So, I intentionally speak less than others only to not come off as dominant. But I fear my silence is speaking too much. Where can we go from here?

Honestly, I don’t really work in the group but my presence is needed for work to exist.

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20210220

Continuing with kettlebells. Working to develop grip and core strength which will prepare me for the physical ordeals of p3rm46r4ff171. Sourced a Lomatex outdoor outfit (Kaamanen Folk-suit desing). The company has an interesting history. A workout for making public artwork is based on a Turkish Get-Up routine (I think the move is an adaptation of routines performed with Persian sangs). Get-Ups are complemented with a rotating set which includes:

  • One Hand Swings
  • Standing Side Presses
  • Forearm Flips
  • Bottoms Up Cleans
  • Snatches (eventually with Bottoms Up)

Digging Robocop Remake – Scene 27 (2014) Fatal Farm. Dick shooting cyborgs to the rescue! Makes an odd fit with the new Can’t Get You Out of My Head (2021) Adam Curtis series. I like the way Curtis links the phases of the Chinese Cultural Revolution with the waves of restlessness which emerged in Europe and USA at the same time. I also enjoy the criticism of managerialism and the consequent interpretation of computers as engines of managerialism. All algorithms, no matter their purpose or whether we understand their workings, are mere servants to managerial ideologies. No matter what, computers obey a logic and this will always make them servants to causal worldviews.

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20210218

Conservatives are concerned that handwriting its getting worse, when in actuality we are witnessing it being liberated from the shackles of past institutions. Handwriting is revealed as asemic blur, an expression of interior tremors and the body. Eventually we will witness handwriting detaching itself from words  all together. The more we write with computers the more liberated our handwriting is becoming. #ॐ My mother participated in a computer course in the nineties but she refused to learn graphical design with the machines: “What’s the point? My handwriting is good!”, she argued.

The upcoming Performing the Fringe – Vaeltelua laitamilla [Wandering in the Outskirts] exhibition is announced at the Pori Art Museum pages. Preparations for the show are progressing steadily.

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20210208

Modulisme Session 034 a playlist by Modular Music Station. Which is a “internet radio & web portal dedicated to electronic music made with modular synthesis, test equipment & experimental instruments”. The 034 session focuses on Serge instruments and introduces a comprehensive palette of sounds the system can produce. My favorites on the playlist include Bevis att Napoleon aldrig existerat by Överklassen, Serge Time by Miguel Frasconi and To Bring Out The Shame by Francisco Meirino. Thomas Ankersmit is featured too.

I think Lowercase/Onkyokei/extreme minimal ambient composition as it is being defined on the llllllll thread is the best form of cultural input for these times. It’s like listening to nothing, which is something I need at a time when everything is a performance: When all relationships are confined to the attention we perform trough screens. Times are rough for peppy radio hosts and music producers. It is being revealed that observing high energy performances demand energy (which I don’t have, busy surviving) and that space is a luxury (sounds which give space are a gift). Being-Sound – From Wandelweiser to Onkyô (2018) Jason Brogan is a good source for learning about the aesthetic.

[…] given the notion of affect as posited by Deleuze and Guattari, sound-itself may be understood as being always already real. Thus, sonic actualization — contrary to its common meaning — entails the contextual, qualitative exteriorization of sonic interiority. Performance, then, may be understood as the site-specific fulfillment of the process of actualization.

A complicated sentence. I read is as a way to approach all sounds as already existing and the performance of a composition as tapping into a sound or tone. This is a nice and comforting approach, a process of becoming with sound. It feels similar to tasting (a spring water): The taste is there already and is actuated by the performance!

I don’t like wearing headphones unless I have to (last years weekly online teaching gigs were headphone-heavy) and I often listen to music from the crappy speaker of my mobilephone. I think this suits lowercase/onkyokei/extreme-minimal stuff well. The distortions and space ambients make the music even thinner. The sounds are seeping from the minuscule holes of the device and counterbalanced by remote machine sounds, plumbing, the radiator and the fan of my computer. I get energy from looking for the sounds in the noise. My curiosity is sparked: Am I really hearing this? Did an artist conceive this?

Once, while on a run I didn’t notice a track had ended and I took the wind howling on the edge of my headphone as music. A perfect example of a sound becoming. Or was it a hyperchaotical listening experience (a defined by Quentin Meillassoux)? “hyperchaos […] suggests that […] randomness remains as only one particular mode of presentation among others”. All work (which is not work to maintain the flesh or gray infrastructure) is performed in screens and earcups. Majority of the performances seek to resolve events. I think art which sparks curiosity is needed for energy.

Seven Points for a Computer Critical Computer Art by Sarah Groff Hennigh-Palermo. A simple list to keep in mind. She also operates in the LiveCode.NYC which is developing artistic live coding tools.

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20210205

We are preparing a public artwork to Ruosniemen Kukkulakallio, Pori. It’s an Ore.e Ref. effort, an extension of an initiative we call p3rm46r4ff171 which was set in motion early 2020. This phase will be executed in the framework of the second iteration of the Performing the Fringe -exhibitions and hosted by the Porin Art Museum. The museum will also be responsible for commissioning the work. This is the second permanent public artwork we’ve made. What we are planning merges p3rm46r4ff171 with my previous efforts on mineral waters. The site is an abandoned granite quarry which was established in the 20ties. Rocks from the site have been used to build the Pori bridge. A newspaper article details that WWII Germany troops, who prepared an expansion to the Pori airport forced Soviet war prisoners to work at the mine. The area has an interesting history. There is Bronze Age site called Ruosniemi metsäsarat right next to the quarry and well preserved hiidenkiuas tomb constructions called Ruosniemi 1 located close by. A pond, named Ankkalampi  (Duck Pond) has formed to the quarry pit and serves as a popular swimming site. A pair of local entrepreneurs have established an accommodation service next to the pond which they call FinnDome. Guests of the service are hosted in plastic geodesic domes and there is a sauna too. Bronze Age and Buckminster Fuller (here is a nice interview on his philosophy) merged with mineral waters and a initiative tiled p3rm46r4ff171.

The Ruosniemi quarry is featured on the photo archive of the Geological Survey of Finland. The images are by Ilkka Laitakari who passed on in 1996, which dates the graffiti on the walls of the quarry to the 90ties! Some text read -93 and I’m imagining that as many of the texts are painted using the same color and same width of strokes, they could be traces of a youth event organized in 1993. Jussi Matilainen told me that just behind hill is (or was, he hadn’t visited the site in a while) a skiing resort (one lift) which earned the area the title Ruosnimen Alpit (the Alpines of Ruosniemi). Found  downhill mountain biking videos titled with this site name (mentioned this to Polukord!). I spotted a swastika symbol on site which led me to investigate its role in Finnish folklore. Suomalaisista taikamerkeistä: kansatieteellinen tutkielma [Finnish magical signs: A folklorist study] (1937) Sulo Haltsonen provides detailed investigation of different magical symbols used in the region and concludes that the symbol is not common in Finnish magical practices. The article underlines that organizations in the 30ties have attempted to framed as a locally significant sign, which is how it became the emblem of the Finnish air force but judging from evidence it is not very common or frequently used.

I will be looking for minerals and waters from the quarry area. A recent discussion in relation to the Protection Spells -curatorial project  by Native Art Department International (for MOCA Toronto/Shift Key) led me to explore water as a relation to a locality. Processes were we explore spring waters nurtures appreciation of locality and the nature of specific sites. By drinking the spring water we become aware of the taste of a locale and become with a site. This is problematic, as in Finland we don’t really know who we will become when drinking spring water here. Everyone in Europe is afraid that if we root identities on locality we risk becoming violently territorial. Weirdly this portrays bottled waters like evian or sanpellegrino as deterritorialization potions. We must drink the spring waters from a far to keep our nationalistic tendencies at bay. On the other hand I will be manufacturing artificial mineral waters. If we can become with a site trough the taste of a spring water, then we should also be able to imagine a completely new site from the taste of an artificial water. By tasting, we can imagine assemblies yet to come. The water I’ll produce form the Kukkulakallio will be an attempt to document the obscure p3rm46r4ff171 project as a taste. Making a mineral water is getting pretty complicated.