Posted on

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.

Posted on

20210130

Artists have started to mark cancelled events into their CVs. Covid removed the affect from social interaction and turned coexistence into a performance. Our senses are crippled by quantifiable data and we cling to different statics on the disease for feedback. The value of social life, our capability for empathy and rationality is publicly scrutinized by statistics on the spread. We all look like sinners. The pandemic and the capitalism which statistics feed to are turning us into cyborgs. We are in relation through data.

Bought a beat-down Volca Beats for 40€. A lot of issues and missing components due to a misfortune snare mod/other stuff (pads torn, dabs of solder everywhere and tips of potentiometers burned by careless iron handling). Has a good punk vibe thou! Spotted the system79 Korg Volca Beats Snare Analysis site with an accurate (but not full) schematic and after a full day of studying the board managed to restore pitch&decay control by placing a 100nF to C91. Made the 100nF c78 modification too and might go for “Snappy” noise mod next. I’ll have to source SMD components to replace the trough hole parts I used for testing values. Sourced a 1k SMD resistor from an Alesis Micron board I horded from a dumpster in NYC.

Posted on

20210127

Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors and Other Articulations of the Real (2015) Bernhard Siegert proposes that “culture is a humanoid-technoid hybrid” and advances media theory as posthumanistic practice. The chapter on Door Logic works great for drafting an understanding how build environments author behavior. After defining doors as ideological apparatuses, which construct a distinction between the inside and outside, Siegert branches out to read logic gates (in computing) and religious processes which carve out a distinction between profane and sacred, as belonging to the same genre of binary categorization.

Adorno places gesture and mechanism, human and nonhuman actors into a relation in which both sides are invested with agency and in which the nonhuman actor has the power to decenter and disable the very being of the human subject.

Doors and door sills are not only formal attributes of Western architecture, they are also architectural media that function as cultural techniques because they operate the primordial difference of architecture—that between inside and outside.

The text feels wild because it presents doors both as metaphors and physical barriers. The materialistic reading of metaphors Siegert offers feels comfortable. For example: “[…] the closed door is both closed and the sign of this closedness” is particularly true in relation to horses, who respect fences and gates even thou they can pass them at will.

The Greek nomos, usually translated as ‘law’, is connected to the concrete operation of land division. […] it separates a circumscribed space from an outside, thus creating a difference on the basis of which political, social, and religious orders can be established. […] law is constituted in the first place by an opening that grants access to the law. A door is a place where the difference that constitutes the law has to negate itself in order to become effective.

The last part feels like an utter abstraction but I think this “negation of law” is something we can witness in computer game speed-runs: Players outsmart game intelligence’s by idling between rooms (staying right at the threshold of a door frame) to confuse the game AI’s which are programmed to confront the player when they enter or leave a space.

As long as doors functioned as operators of difference between inside and outside, they also helped to create, in line with the public-private distinction, an asymmetry of knowledge.

Thinking about this makes it easy to read reindeer herd separation acts as a process where the animals are coded. The reindeer as a species, with all its species specific trades had been authored.

Their (and our) genes are a receipts of transactions. #ॐ

Posted on

20210125

Eco-National Discourse and the Case of the Finnhorse (2014) Nora Schuurman & Jopi Nyman. The article points to a striking position Suomen Hippos ry (The Finnish Trotting and Breeding Association) made “[…] SWOT analysis of the Finnhorse as a brand […] sees the potential rise of nationalism as an opportunity: ‘If national phenomena will become a trend, the Finnhorse may also become a trend’ (Suomen Hippos 2008a.)”. I think the article can be read as an expose of the nationalistic agenda rooted in the Suomen Hippos ry organization. A discourse of Raceless-Horse Culture is due.

It has also been suggested that although equestrian culture enables flexible gender identities, it reproduces the traditional agrarian model of a hard working woman. Strong, even ‘masculine’ bodies are seen as physical capital among women who ride, as opposed to the urban feminine ideal.

The dominant version of Finnish self‐understanding, while outmoded yet guiding contemporary interpretations, as [Ari] Jääskeläinen points out, sees the nation as consisting of ‘soldiers, pioneers, and agrarians’ and was produced originally for the needs of the Swedish Empire in the eighteenth century.

This discourse of nationalism carries over to the contemporary documents, which place the Finnhorse explicitly in the context of nation, defining its Finnishness as one of the central characteristics in its internationalising brand (Suomen Hippos). In the general descriptions of the breed in these documents, the Finnhorse is defined as ‘genuine’, ‘unique’, ‘native’, ‘the national horse’, and ‘Finland’s only native breed’ (Suomen Hippos).

The relationship between the Finnhorse and the Finn of the text is also gendered: while the traditional stereotype of the Finnish male is that of a silent man who expresses his emotions by doing rather than by speaking, the relationship with the Finnhorse provides an otherwise sanctioned outlet for expressing emotions and care.

The article also offers an analysis of contemporary nationalistically geared horse themed schlagers (to which the Trans-Horse playlist offers great contrast). The publication is a part of the Companion Animals and the Affective Turn: Reconstructing the Human-Horse Relationship in Modern Culture – CONIMAL. 2011 – 2015 project.

I’ve been building sm-artwatches for a while by attaching pretty items to wristwatch straps. One watch has a wooded (gilded) frame with a fragment of a print by Outi Heiskanen, one has a fossil (which I also used as mineral supplement in performances), one has a coin from 1865 (10 Penniä) and one has spokes which I can attach fruits to (it’s measuring decay-time). This artistic interest has slowly evolved to an developing intrest in real watches and I now own three Casio wristwatches (One is fake, which is cool too). I bought the newest one on tori.fi for 2 euros, because I want to modify its inner workings: Casio W-800H mod.

I’m also curios of the illustrations found in the IED TRIGGER RECOGNITION GUIDE document (U.S. military or Department of Defense). The “Casio Watch Timer with Opto-Isolator” might be interesting to study as a circuit. I’d like to use the circuit to schedule electric shocks to myself.

A list of Ethical Open Source Licenses collected by the Ethical Source Movement (here is a list of the source criteria for software). Could work for other design too. I think emphasis on ecology should be added too. Perhaps something in lines of Permacomputing (2020) as defined by Ville-Matias “Viznut” Heikkilä.

[…] computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users’ intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity. Instead of making it possible to scale down the resource requirements of the material world, they have instead become a major part of the problem. Instead of making the world more comprehensible, they rather add to its incomprehensibility. And they often even manage to become slower despite becoming faster.

Computer systems should also make their own inner workings as observable as possible. If the computer produces visual output, it would use a fraction of its resources to visualize its own intro- and extrospection. A computer that communicates with radio waves, for example, would visualize its own view of the surrounding radio landscape.

Posted on

20210123

Morality is an application of sustainable law and governance practices. No stress on infra. #ॐ

A lady at a coffee shop asked me and Jussi to hangout with their puppy while we had tea so that dog would get familiarized with men. She was brave to ask and the dog was nice too. A nice exchange, we got to pet a dog in exange for manifesting a gender publicly.