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20190316

Made my first batch of Faux San Pelligriano. 1,5l water is added with ~2g of salts and minerals (10l has 0,92g Table salt, 5,7g Epsom-salt, 4,8g Plaster of Paris, 1,5g Chalk). Digesting Plaster of Paris aka. Burned Gypsum feels weird but I’m confident because Gypsum is also used in the production of tofu. Epsom salt aka. Magnesium sulfate is a spooky material too but it is used also as a laxative and it’s health benefits are well documented. Chalk and salt feel more safe to use.

Spotted Too Many Zoos online. The baritone saxophonist is called Leo Pelligriano. I want to drink Faux San Pelligriano while playing techno as Faux Leo Pelligriano.

Build an acoustic piezo preamp using a tl071. Used the toner transfer method to etch a pcb following this design (some traces came off a bit weak). The same circuit can also be found as a vero board design. Works well, sounds very clean and even amplifies the signal enough to trigger Bastl Skis. I’ll possibly make a lm386 audio amp as it’s companion, so that I can boost the signal further. I’m also planning to run the lm386 independently so that I can use it to trigger the second Skis channel. Drum triggers in the works! I designed how the two circuits would be linked while attending the Frame Epistemic Hospitality event.

Meritocracy is a myth invented by the rich (2019) Nathan Robinson.

It’s no secret that wealthy people will do nearly anything to get their kids into good schools. But this scandal only begins to reveal the lies that sustain the American idea of meritocracy.

[…] equal opportunity would require a radical re-engineering of society from top to bottom. As long as there are large wealth inequalities, there will be colossal differences in the opportunities that children have. No matter what admissions criteria are set, wealthy children will have the advantage.

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20190314

Visited Permanent Temporariness book launch at Publics on Tuesday. Artists-architects Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti offered an introduction to the work they do at and in relation to Palestinian refugee camps. They provided a great overview of the contemporary Palestinian condition and offered some hints on their approaches to art making. In their presentation, they separated the work they engage in at camps from the art they present in museums (and biennales etc.). I got the impression that their work is rooted on a double-reading: They are using art for activism and activism for art.

Sometimes calling a their work “art” grants them the possibility to access places that are restricted from political operators and sometimes people living in camps, use their work for non-art activities like education and meetings (See Concrete Tent, 2015). It felt like they celebrated refugee camps as incubators for agile and non-normative agency. I appreciated the spin – This approach acknowledges skills which refugees manifest. Instead of approaching refugees as victims they can seen as some sort of re-organization specialists. It felt like Hilal and Petti were trying to craft an alliance between contemporary precariat workers and refugees: Both parties are pushed into motion by the same global capitalistic conditions. This part of their talk remained me of an encounter at the Finnish refugee policy protest camp in 2017.

They have an interesting archive of course descriptions on decolonizing.ps site Decolonizing Architecture: Sites of Knowledge production.

Architecture is too important to leave to the Architects. (Giancarlo De Carlo)

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20190304

Small cities in the Satakunta region serve as incubators for the “Finns Party” political organization and other racist fearmonger movements. Until recently I thought that people who vote for the “Finns Party” there, are expressing their disappointment: They feel left outside from the focus of development and are trying to express their feelings by using their votes as a protest. I used to pity people in the region and I thought that their anger was at some level understandable, tough horribly misguided. I no longer feel this way.

I now believe that the political climate of the Satakunta region is a manifestation of their desire to return to the times when the land was organized as the estates of the realm and managed by the talonpojat-class. The people who are collecting votes for the “Finns Party” are local church reverends, teachers and farmers! These classic upper-class actors are promising their voters the return of a class-society, where land-owners rule the estateless.

Racism in the Satakunta region is manifesting the deep hatred the talonpojat-class has against all outsiders and the working class. The decedents of the talonpojat-class see the demise of industrial production (which is resulting into the demise of the middle class) and the renewed interested in localized food (etc.) production as an opportunity to re-establish serfdom. The talonpojat-class still owns the land. They loathe cities, centers and the urban, because they hate people who have taken charge of their own lives. They hate freedom because it reminds them that they no longer have serfs to fuck around.

The “Finns Party” is for feudalism. #☭

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20190228

Build my first module: “Tip/Ring Thing (Breakout)”. Its a 4hp unit which divides a 3.5mm TRS socket to two separate mono sockets. I can now transmit CVs (and audio) from-and-to my softPop with the module. It’s essentially a passive two channel splitter and/or mixer. It also works with my QuNexus, which sends CV trough a TRS connection. (Building the module costed me less then 5€ but four hours of time, because I wanted the panel from wood).

I’ve now compiled all of the modules I have planned. Feeling content but I want to deepen my understanding of sounds. I need some kind of drum-sound generator (re-discovered Kastle 1.5), a looping envelope, more VCAs (I’ll possibly build them using vactrol), a second LFO (for slow movements), a second attenuverter (for the second lfo) and a spring echo. Today I used the Turing Machine as an oscillator (by clocking using softPops square wave output), I patched the same clock signal to my clock divider (which serves as a square oscillator, when clock very fast). I then routed the sound of the Turing Machine to the softPops filter and used the QuNexus to trigger the Skis envelope/VCA to control the sound (of the filtered sound and the clock-div sub-osc). I wonder.. Would psychotherapy be more affordable?

My review titled Kun kirjasto lukee meitä (When the library reads us) on the The Library’s Other Intelligences art project is available on Mustekala.info.

Listening and studying Toshimaru Nakamura NO-INPUT MIXING BOARD (2000).

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20190227

Submitted EU E OS MEUS / ME AND MINE (2018) to the NAFA (Nordic Anthropological Film Association ) festival.

Visited Millainen ilmastomenu? panel at the Parliament House, Helsinki. The event was organized by the Ilmastomenu group and the panel led by Pietari Kylmälä. Anna Kontula was the star of the event. Her arguments reminded me that questions about sustainable food production are not about our relationship with an abstract entity called nature – Sustainable food production is a series of practical decisions, trough which the rich decide who (on our limited planet) have the right to continue living.