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I’m 2 3/3 into The Remembrance of Earth’s Past trilogy (2008-2010) by Liu Cixin. I should have discovered this artwork earlier. It offers insight to many of the ideological challenges posthumanism faces as a political movement: Nature is beyond cruel, shadowed only by the ignorance of the universe… So, how can we built momentum to organize? I imagine the story (particularly the first book) is to a degree reimagining changes which European expansionism inflicted on the world. It could be read to imagine what went on in people’s drug numbed minds during the Opium Wars, when the destiny of China changed and people needed to break their minds to survive anew. Cixin is weirdly approaching this stress optimistically, celebrating bureaucracy and hierarchical governance (a sense of more-than-human-duty) as safe havens from the anxiety which individuals feel in troubled times. Perhaps the series is a reader for Confucius.

This defeatism is the horror in the story, it portrays individuals the weak links of collectives, or populations rather. The book portrays that for life, only populations matter and this perspective brings about challenges to human rationality. The manner humans have adapted and continue to adapt to change is non-rational, our survival is a non-rational process governed by a lifeforce beyond our grasp. This is why we can’t die. The best we can do is to document the passing of this cruel lifeforce in order to gain an understanding of its direction. This understanding is helpful only for preparing for the next horrors that await us. Kristiina Koskentolas Our Bodies Have Turned to Gold (2018) is a good reference for approaching this deathless death.

The people in the story are bone dry, caricatures of film-noir characters and there are hardly any women (and the few portrayed as saints or demons). There aren’t any animals either and the few plants which the story depicts are used for a thin backdrop landscape. Despite issues with character development, it suggests bold ideas on social order such as the weaponization of empathy, exhibited in scenes where people plot and execute ecogenocides. Communication takes place through gazes and decisions are affirmed in feedback loops. Perhaps all communication has this character.

The story also suggests that all cosmological questions may be resolved through philosophical enquiry. Having binged on acollierastro’s videos on string theory and dark matter, this rings true. The “sophon-barrier”, a talisman blocking scientific development on earth, featured in the first two books is real: We can only perceive what our nature affords us, so investigating the mind is the only route to discovery. This extends Timothy Morton’s ideas regarding algorithms (in Humankind, 2017) to flesh. Morton’s depicts that algorithms are locked to the past because their code replicates the ideology of the era they were written. The lifeforce is the only route for change yet if we surrender to it (which we must), humans become something else, which is gruesome and ugly. Surviving is a disgusting process as discussed earlier.

Edit: The third book didn’t provide more of “cosmic sociology” but it had entertaining horror & space opera bits. The idea that stories transmit technological information was of interest and syncs well with ideas on rhythm as technology which I was introduced in Assembling a Black Counter Culture (2022). In the third book earth is flattened in a multidimensional attack which converts the solar system into 2D. This got me thinking that representational political activity (for example artists producing illustrations of past political movements) possibly removes a dimension (perhaps intuition) from our understanding of day political activity.

Assembled a Delay No More and set it in a case with a Benjolin, a Twin Peak filter, a speaker and the FM radio I’ve been working on. It’s difficult to grasp as a system. The delay itself is a challenge.

Resigned from the army reserve and I’m set to undergo five days of Civil Service training in August. I resigned as a protest, because Finland’s NATO process was not discussed and organized democratically. Defending the authoritarian society Finland is emerging as, as a corporal was a saddening idea. Feels weirdly sad to resign.

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A Day of Artificial Spring Water Tasting in a Museum preparations for Lappeenranta Art Museum The Surface Holds Depths -exhibition progressing steadily.

Sinne gallery Regel 62 exhibition with Moa Cederberg, Mikko Kuorinki and Nomadic Kiln Group (Monika Czyżyk, Elina Vainio & Eero Yli-Vakkuri) is building up high expectations for next week. The title of our piece is epic 💨 Planetary Consciousness Massage Behind the Ears of the Thousand Winds and Statues of Fire 🌋. We’ll start preparing the work at the gallery on Monday.

As You May Sen­se -exhibition at the Uniarts Helsinki’s Research Pavilion is set to open 12th of June. We are preparing an monumentally vain bore-well with the Institute for Coping With Destruction. Drilling is set start next week. Enjoying In­gest­ing Bod­ies of Wa­ter (2022) Saara Hannula, which is written for the same Research Pavilion framework (a quote below). Reminds me of a fashion district window exhibition by Jesse and Emmi, where they made a dress out of plastic trash to illustrate a eco-mental cycle where antidepressants, pass trough bodies to the sea escalating environmental degradation, which causes more depression.

Through [waters] involvement in intimate encounters and bodily events such as drinking, washing, and peeing, the water incorporates new ingredients: hormones, chemicals, microplastics, microbes, and bacteria. Some of the active pharmaceutical ingredients and other contaminants are filtered out in Viikinmäki, which is the main wastewater treatment plant in the Helsinki region, but many of them remain in the water even after it is “purified” […] Especially hormones, endocrine disruptors, and antidepressants are known to have major effects on the development and behavior of organisms, even in low doses: as such, they play a key role in the evolution and extinction of aquatic life.

Later during the summer a gig at Mitäsmitäsmitä and a reseach-like piece in two phases for Institute of Urban Culture‘s new spaces at the Gdańsk Wasserkunst building with Tea. Fun stuff but a lot of it.

Returning to blogging feels good. Updated an old text on Finnish statue removals (should make it into an article too) and hoping to complete some prolonged writing commissions later in the month.

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Information overload (2023) Claire Bishop criticises the aestheticization of research in the context of contemporary art. The article establishes a trajectory for how the artists research we are witnessing today has been defined and portrays its present impasse. I like how youtube searches and wikipedia browsing become defined as “search” and “research” is constituted as something which changes our understanding and perception. I agree with their critique but also question if artistic research displays, which the article dissects, have ever been produced to be made sense of to begin with.

When studying for my first artist degree at the TAMK polytechnic in Tampere, we were taught to fake research. Our teachers knew that we would be outmatched in resources, so they provided us skills in making appearances. Site-specific art was taught primarily as a search of site related historical nick-nacks, which were then casually referenced to establish a historical backdrop for contemporary actions. In Bishops terms it was done to make the art appear “serious”. In practice this was done, to convince funders (city officials) that art has a place in society. This is still a necessary strategy.

Because I approached research as a rhetoric technique for establishing a sense of certainty, it took me years to begin believing that artists honestly engage in it. I still believe that in the Finnish academic context research is deployed for appearances. But I know that these appearances matter for our economy. Growth in Finland depends on portraying Finns as designers not labourers, so that we can imagine a place in global markets. I’m very pleased to how Bishop ends the article.

The richest possibilities for research-based installation emerge when preexisting information is not simply cut and pasted, aggregated, and dropped in a vitrine but metabolized by an idiosyncratic thinker who feels their way through the world. Such artists show that interpretative syntheses need not be incompatible with a decentered subject and that an unforgettable story-image can also be a subversive counterhistory, packing all the more punch because imaginatively and artfully delivered.

Bishops article is contrasted by Pamela Paul’s A Paper That Says Science Should Be Impartial Was Rejected by Major Journals. You Can’t Make This Up (2023), which is cry for hard sciences to return with hard facts. Similarly When Does Artistic Research Become Fake News? Forensic Architecture Keeps Dodging The Question (2023) Emily Watlington works to re-establish an ethos of objectivity in research.

Both efforts miss the point about post-truth… Which is that there is no truth. This results into a lack of meaning in some but Clair Bishop offers validating comfort for both in one sentence: “The self becomes a glue that enables the debris of the past to stick together, at least temporarily.”

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I’m not an advocate of genius artistry nor a spokesperson for the artist trade. Having worked in different roles with them, as an assistant, an art writer and a producer, I’ve grown allergic to much of what constitutes an artist. Last minute changes to exhibition layouts as power grabs, pettifogging material or textual decisions for asserting authorship in collaborative processes, claiming commons as a resource and whimsical scheduling & budgeting irritate me.

But through having been active in the Kiasma_strike campaign I’ve been introduced to an aspect of artist-rational, which yields unparalleled power: Collective desire. On the rare occasion when artists exercise will collectively they outmatch any state of affair. For example, I now understand artistry and capital as the only domains which can meet as equals at an intersection of power, will and curiosity. Having consulted many of the over 220 artists on strike in different roles, I’ve witnessed them joining forces out of sheer curiosity and a multifaceted desire to push boundaries.

In the strike artists have gone all in for their beliefs and this gesture granted them similar type of power, creative movability and reach which capital has. In practice the collective power of artists outmatches capital power, because it originates from nothing. It is an expression of will and cannot be traded, inherited and interestingly it cannot be relied upon. Nonreliability makes it a fiersom asset for negotiations. It does what it wants, it resists efforts to be led because it can choose not to exist on a whim. Artistry is inherently disloyal to the established and bites the hand which feeds it, because it remains curious to what happens if it does. It truly tests the reality which contains it.

Being involved with the strike has refreshed my belief in the transformative power of art. Demanding something ridiculous yields real life results. Most of what we should demand from ourselves and the world is ridiculous.

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Send out six Fairchilds to Germany. I seem to have misplaced a transistor and the units are running out much faster then expected. The ones I’ve sent were planned to be used to built a Paths. Which reminded me that I originally got my Benjolin PCBs as a gift for three transistors. So, I tested a Paths and Benjolin combination (which is the Fairchild initiative sound as of now) by clocking Paths with the PWM output, splitting the same signal to  I/0 1 (set to two steps), via 0/I 1 & & O/I 2 to a pair of VCA CV inputs, which were fed the A & B SQR outputs from the Benjolin. This yielded a massive stereo spread. I also send both TRI & SQR outs to Paths with one or two outputs straight to the system out put but the Paths channel swapping produced a audible pops which effected the sound considerably. Sounded fun.