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20170124

Autochthonic Fantasy (2016) Arttu Merimaa.

Kirjastoessee (2016) Pilvi Porkola.

Preparing for “Performance and Media” course which I’ll host next month in Kankaanpää Art School. Feeling stressed.. It’s taking a lot of time to sort out practicalities and the time would be better spend making fun art stuff (like preparing the SOW: Blacksmith ed.1).

I’ve planned that we’ll… Make six intensive workouts at the Kankaanpää gym (working with kettlebells), make 3d renderings of meditation stools (later construct them) and work with sketchup to design imaginary objects (later meditating on them). It’s a fun program to conjure but stressful to organize. At the same time I’m mentoring a group of five graduating students with their thesis related artworks. So far I’ve written 12 pages of emails and spend 63 hours on mentoring tasks and travels to Kpää (I’m using a nifty work scheduling application to measure the exact working time). I don’t think they are reading my emails and on my visit there last week I learned that half of the group hasn’t started working yet.

It takes six hours to travel to Kankaanpää by bus. It would be more practical to organize my course for an academy in Berlin etc. The travel time would be more reasonable. Still.. I enjoy the idea that somewhere there is a polytechnic university which offers free art education for people who live in the middle of nowhere. Globally it doesn’t make any sense to have an art university in Helsinki either. I should make a travel video about Kpää and show it friends visiting Helsinki. The site puts contemporary art into perspective. On a map the city is at the same level as Greenland.. It’s among the most northern universities of applied sciences offering education on performance art. I guess Tromsø is the most northern – But Norway doesn’t count because they have oil money, which makes space and time are manageable.

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20170123

Youtube lecture by Karen Barad: Troubling Time/s, Undoing the Future. Quoting Niels Bohr: “Concepts are specific material arrangements”. Hence, there is no difference between an object and the apparatus and the world consists of phenomenon.

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20170120

​Slavoj Žižek defending his stance against political correctness in Zero Squared #95: Žižek And The Double Blackmail podcast. He argues (in short) that political correctness comes to play only after public moral and decency has been corrupted. Political correctness tries to enforce decency through rigid dogma and etiquette, but it’s doomed to fail because decency is not a matter of form, it’s a mode of existence. 

He also shares interesting notes on academic power, arguing that it is: 

  1. The power to employ. 
  2. To fund research. 
  3. To make publication. 

And that academicians do not have this power!

He also outlines a new memesis for the political left: “Liberal fascists” i.e right wing politicians who execute social transfers which benifit the working class. He claims that the possibility for “liberal fasism” arise from the lefts lack of motivation to adapt to new political realities. Hes mapping a route to leftist populism.

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20170119

Humans are not alienated, we are in our element because we are the element. #ॐ We don’t eat meat because we are unaware or the pain animals feel when they are slaughtered, we eat because we are aware of their pain. Our societies are unjust because we like them this way. By making the world unfair we get to excuse ourself from the real work ahead, the process of changing ourselves.

Catching up on Marx: Marxism by David L. Prychitko. A weird source but a nifty text.

I want to rehearse the skill of talking while listening. I want to have conversations in which both parties talk, listen and understand each other at the same time.