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20210224

If I were an unpublishable text I would feel as irrelevant as I feel thinking myself as a god.

I once took part in a communion at a church next to the rail-tracks. The priest, who was one of the first female priests in Helsinki offered us white cookies and wine. I thought it went well, felt serious and fancy. Everyone was silent. As we were walking back to school, Eeva looked me at awe and asked where I got the courage to act as I did. I didn’t understand what she was speaking about but took it as a compliment. It turned out I wasn’t supposed to pick the cookies from the priest plate myself nor to pour my own wine. I was supposed to wait for the offering. My ignorance was interpreted as arrogance and lovingly believed to be a critique. There was some unspoken shame in not knowing how to behave. I believe I was helping myself so that the priest would not feel embarrassed serving me.

Later on in life, this moment gave me some strength in believing I was closer to a pagan than a christian. And yes, I know most christians cherish this believe.

Right now, learning writing feels like praying. A supervisor, peaking amongst a grid of faces, has tasked me to recite prayers for a rational I don’t believe in. The rational I’m tasked to summon is wrapped in a veil of feels. It always is. I’ve performed these rites many times. Bowing, nodding silently, pounding the keys. I’m a good servant, I consider myself clergy even. Obedience should feel comfortable. Thinking optimistically, the irritation I feel is a result of me being confronted with the hollowness of the tone I use. But I’m bored calling for a sense or logic to appear in my own noise. Today inventing stuff makes me feel lonely.

Tomorrow I only want to read the english of non-native speakers. The rest of the lot are cheats. The clergy is not needed now. They need folk at the stables, shovelling wet hey. Why am I so provoked by this all now? Its guilt. Must be. I should be earning money but my hands are tied.

I’m dying to tell you that I have been tasked to write about my mothers dog. It stays with us when she is in treatments. To pray for the beast, can you imagine!

I hate the dog sometimes. I like that the kids like it. It looks at me lovingly and when it pleases me, I look at it that way too. I shout at it to be silent and yank its leach when it goes the wrong way. I have hurt it too. It’s my mothers dog, so it barks at strangers and I don’t know what to do with it. If it were mine it would know better: Wait for them to get close, then bite.

We’ve developed clever routines. When it’s dark enough I open the front door and it rushes to a forest for it’s business. It stays there longer then I want to and goes so deep into the bush that I don’t see it. The only reason I don’t shout after it, is because the site is public and I want to appear cool. Neighbours in the block see us at times. They know I let the a dog out without a leach. “Introducing Berlin dog culture to Käpylä” I say jokingly. Ashamed of being caught but sincere as well.

Sometimes, when it gets darker still I take it for a long walk around the district without a leech. I wouldn’t dear taking an animal I love so close to busy streets uncontrolled. The hate I feel for it offers it liberties I don’t see other dogs having.

There aren’t many things I can confess hating. But hating an animal is accepted because it is a token of a relationship. The dog takes in my hate and uses it to venture deeper into the woods. Eventually it will leave me and I’ll feel free.

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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.