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20200707

My gig at the Malmi cemetery has ended. I got an opportunity to leave the job thanks to a Art Promotion Center covid grant. The grant enables me to complete a writing job on Performance Pedagogy, start developing the Horse & Performance course for TEAK and prepare mineral water performances for the fall (which is going to be hella busy). I got the grant for making an interesting critique of the response creative culture in Finland had on the pandemic.

I miss the work a bit, it felt honest and the crew was fun. It was exhausting to work outdoors in +30C° weather / rain and doing artsy stuff as a sidejob took its toll on family life. The pay was pretty low too, so the grant feels like winning the lottery. I’ve slept and wept for two days. Artists in Finland often complain that government artists grants are too low. Sure, they are but considering the hours and physical exhaustion of the gardening job I’d take the grant life for life.

I completed two electronics kits over the last weekends. I assembled a Dannysound Cali (California) oscillator, which is a replica of the Buchla Model 258. Wavefolding is inspiring: Instead of removing content to develop a sound, an aspect of it gets exaggerated. The unit allows wavefolding to be used to cut the volume, which works for neat lowpass filter type effects. Last weekend I assembled a Befaco Rampage, which is an “approach to an old invention: the Serge/Buchla ramp generator”. It processes sound, triggers and gates to spurt out an array of control voltages. It feels like an intelligence of sorts. I can use it as an envelope follower (Planning to process sparkling water. Edit: My preamps are not strong enough!). My current Waterlab eurorack system runs on a USB power bank.

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20200627

The Coloniality of the Algorithm (2019) Flavia Dzodan. Dzodan asks us to use the word coloniality instead of colonialism because coloniality is an active process which still affects us. They argue that post-colonialism is a bluff indented to make us believe that it is a thing of the past (I share a similar believe in post-humanism). Dzodan defines the data-collection performed by bigdata corporations as being rooted on a a colonial mentality which sees payed labor as a privilege (of the white ruling class).

I’ve been following the llllllll.co forum as a covid pastime and recently read trough the Let’s dump master-slave terms! tread (only open for registered users). In short a lot of music related technical jargon echo foul attitudes and removing problematic terms such as Slave and Master (from the MIDI documentation and implementation etc.) can be though of as a step towards more inclusive creative & technical cultures. The thread is hard and provoking to read, which I think is a good thing. A lot of folk feel offended by the idea of change.

I was unaware of the connotations these terms bring with. For me these terms have been a part of a technical vocabulary which I don’t translate to my own language. For me learning English has been challenging and as an example, I remember being penalized for not learning to use gender pronouns correctly (which our native language does not have). Now that I’ve read how these terms affect folk, participating in a campaign which seeks to change these terms or help in developing awareness of them, feels like the right thing to do.

But I would like that the process where these terms are discussed would not assume that every culture shares the same understanding of these terms or shares a similar belief on the significance of words. Changing these terms is a good starting point and the discussions which follow are good. I think the root of the problem is in a culture which assumes hierarchies and binary opposition. I fear that the language these cultures use reproduces harmful relationships regardless of the words that are used.

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20200616

Machine powered gravedigging replaced gravedigging in 1967 when the first outsourced excavator entrepreneur started working at Malmi cemetary. He explained that in the winter folk were buried in shallow graves (even 1,2 meters). Before him gravediggers could only do 1,5 graves per workday and the cemetery maintained a staff of four diggers. During peak times he dug 2000 graves a year but nowadays folk are cremated. He recalled the groundwork of a service building. They worked a wartime grave site and had to operate in difficult conditions.

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20200613

Sweet Lullaby for World Music (2003) Steven Feld. The article starts with a sharp definition of “world music” and identifies two binary trajectories (celebratory and anxious narratives) which tactically pull all music into a modern ontological understanding of what constitutes music. Then the text offers a thorough look to the notorious case of the “Pygmy Lullaby” and Felt concludes that: “Western copyright law is not comprehensive enough to equitably include indigenous cultures, creating a new kind of imperialism …”.

Celebratory narratives of world music tend to normalize and naturalize globalization, not unlike ways “modernization” narratives once naturalized other grand and sweeping currents that transformed and reconfigured intercultural histories. As with these predecessors addressing the question of what has been bought and what has been taken, celebratory narratives stress the costs to “traditions” as rather surface ones, ones that will, in the larger sweep of things, be overcome by creativity, invention and resilience.

On the anxious side we read narratives that insist on the complicity of world music in commodifying ethnicity, locating it in the “finanscapes” and “mediascapes” of global popular culture ([Arjun] Appudurai 1996) and the “noise” or “channelized violence” of music’s industrial economy ([Jacques] Attali, 1985).

The broad picture then, is that today’s world music, like globalization discourse more generally, is equally routed through the public sphere via tropes of anxiety and celebration. While sometimes quite distinct, these narrative positions on anxiety and celebration seem increasingly more intertwined, seamlessly indexing the status of world music as a tensely modern category.

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20200606

The Futures of Russian Decolonization (20??) Anna Engelhardt. A complicated text, good for reminding that there isn’t a process of decolonization – there are processes of decolonizationS. Towards the end there are notes on infrastructure as a colonial apparatus:  “Analyzing colonialism, I propose therefore to aim for its infrastructure, both of domination and resistance to it, following Indian post-colonial feminist researcher Chandra Talpade Mohanty. This infrastructure of domination might be revealed through looking into logistical networks of the empires as they, according to Deborah Cowen, map the logic of contemporary imperialism in spatial materialization. “. Engelhardt own project crimeanbridge.info explores infrastructure/colonization link further. The site is complicated but there are notes on “Railway Imperialism”.

One of the points from post-colonial theory that resonates with post-Soviet space questions the limits of the “post-Soviet” or “post-communist” itself. Arjun Appadurai, a post-colonial scholar of globalization, who is of Indian origin, outlines the West’s “endless preoccupation” with itself. [Vitaly] Chernetsky adds to Appadurai’s statement: “whether positive or negative value judgments are attached,” meaning that Western scholars tend to either praise the West or criticize it, but never speak about other geographies and contexts—so the West will always remain the center of attention. Looking at Soviet modernization and its consequences, we see a similar preoccupation.

It is much easier to be heard if you reference academic figures well-known in the West and make arguments that parallel already established lines of thought associated with Western knowledge production. Ironically, we can think of this tactic as similar to [Gayatri Chakravorty] Spivak’s strategic essentialism—temporary networks of solidarity that appeal to the seemingly universal nature of oppression.

Russian colonialism could be characterized as a settler colonialism, as it combines the features of external and internal colonization, erasing the spatial separation between metropole and colony. Russian colonialism features military colonialism—a sign of external colonialism—with “biopolitical and geopolitical management of people, land, flora and fauna within the ‘domestic’ borders of the imperial nation” of internal colonization ([Eve] Tuck and [Wayne] Yang, 2012).

A Day to Remember (2005) Liu Wei. A simple question yields powerful effects. Remembering the June Fourth Incident.