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20200325

Schools are closed and kids are taught trough the web. Domestic spaces are used for remote classes and parents are made into web-technicians (I use 4-5hours a day to help in school work). Turns out our society is operated by google and microsoft. All kids have been assigned email addresses and are expected to use the ms-office365 suite and different google services. This is a really sad and shameful turnout. There are open source alternatives to all of the services the kids need and nothing to stop schools from using them. ms and google stuff is just as complicated to use. Corporations are using this situation to unashamedly establish their services as the infrastructure of all social and work related interactions.

Also turns out schools are absolutely obsessed with quantifiable results. This situation is teaching kids to perform school as a series of questionnaires and online presence which does not involve interaction. They are essentially learning to fake working. Schools in Finland should back down on their desire to “keep the kids in schools” during these times. Schools, with big class sizes and mass curriculum’s don’t really work for online learning. Learning online happens best when a student is given the liberty to decide how they pace their work and allowed to set their own goals. The schools current strategy of maintaining daily presence trough online services (ms/google) is hindering learning possibilities. Technically savvy families get the “faking working” experience with virtual punched cards and online meetings which are organized for the sake of having meetings, while other families are dropped out.

How can I help in this situation? I’ve written feedback to the schools and the Ministry of Education and Culture about the situation and asked them to give families more liberties in pacing school work. I don’t think my critique of the situation has any impact. Unfortunately it seems that our modern, corporation reliant, mass-society is combating these challenges by evolving to an even more modern and more controlled organization. This is a really bad strategy: Mass culture has no future, evolving into a surveillance society (which focuses on quantifiable performances) should not be an option. I don’t think my critique will be heard because citizens are using mostly social medias as a platform for organizing and voicing their concerns. It really feels one has to be a member of a corporation (though fb/twitter) to be a part of society! Why is our society allowing this to happen?

Pietari made a strong critique of the tone of a recent Kone foundation grant procedure. I agree with him: This crisis should not be made into a creative project and this crisis does not bring about an opportunity for change. Change happens after a crisis, when people feel secure enough to voice their fears and desires. Crisis only teaches people how to survive a crisis (or how to suffer) but it does not change people. Change requires resources, time and research. Rushing it causes people to retreat to established models. Which is why a call to use a crisis as an force to drive personal development feels like a hostile act. Why isn’t anyone offering their support for arts unconditionally? This would be a really good time for such a gesture.

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20200323

Performing the Fringe exhibition at Konsthall C was rewarding to setup. Most of the artists in our group came to Stockholm, where we were warmly welcomed by Erik Annerborn & staff. On site we had the pleasure to work with Kaisa Sööt who had designed the exhibition architecture. She had build wavy-benches based on a park seating design spotted in Hökarängen. A localized furniture architecture development effort (reminded me of NCD-C swingers club designs).

I arrived a day before my performance to extract samples from stone architecture using kitchenware from Ikea. A meat-hammer served as a mallet and a regular table knife as a chisel. I pulverized the rocks using a Ikea stone mortar & pestle. The powder was gray and dissolved (seemingly) well into the water (0,3 mg per liter). Polukord noted that granite ore contains metals which caused some concerns (I wonder if it’s possible to separate metals from ore using a magnet?).

My portable CO2 regulator worked well and produced ~5,5 bars of pressure inside standard 1,5 liter plastic bottles, which I used for water-to-gas agitation and serving. The gas was from a local shop which stocks consumer grade 475g CO2 tanks (CGA320 treads). Interestingly the plastic bottles stretched when I added pressure and when shaked the plastics retraction would add to the pressure, causing the content to retreat back towards the regulator. In my first rehearsals this counter pressure caused the valves to come loose.

The next day I performed for a private family which lives in the district. The family connection was facilitated by Annerborn, who introduced me to them in person before the show. I executed my performance in the family’s kitchen. I had some trouble with my sound system, the shape of the space caused a feedback loop, which was hard to resolve. I attempted to do the talk bits in Swedish (my Swedish language skills are fringy, which works well with the project theme) but turned to English midway and the kids lost interest soon after. My statuesque warm-up dance moves were constantly commented by kids, which made pacing difficult. The performance was a delightful mess.

The family was very concentrated on the presentation. I had some minor problems maintaining cohesion, the event challenged the artistic integrity of the piece in a good way. A beneficial learning opportunity and I think the family enjoyed the chamber performance too. We chatted a bit after the performance and they showed their backyard. I was donated a piece of rock from their garden and prompted to make mineral water from it.

The coronavirus didn’t change the performance much. At the time there was no social distancing etiquette guidelines in place in Stockholm (a week an a half ago). We did maintain a little more distance then normally and I executed extra caution in the water preparation. If the family would have wanted I could have made the performance outdoors, in which case it would have been a typical lecture-performance.

Our exhibition opening was cancelled, even so there were some 10 visitors at the space for the opening. This was just enough for setting the mood and actually made the social situation more dense than normal openings. The fewer people there are the more focus they demand. Performances for big audiences are more relaxed because the crowd behavior is more easy to react to than individual gazes. I prepared different waters for the guests and people were exited to drink them (particularly the gravestone water). When walking back to the hotel we shared a pleasant chat with Alexey.

Katarina Frifarare had a parallel opening in the Konsthall C Centrifug space. The Centrifug can be booked for exhibitions by anyone and the dates of the show are set randomly. We should have something like this in Helsinki too, in the Taidehalli space? Frifarare’ exhibition was a leftist analysis of women’s textile work and made a good match with our exhibition.

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20200320

All Finnish art funding organizations should combine their funds to provide a support package for artists (just learned there is a plan in motion). I think they should support artists with a tax-free fee which would cover living costs for three months, after which we could reevaluate the situation. I think this could be given unconditionally to artists who have received support from the foundations or the state with the last three years. I also think that art organizations should temporarily lower their grants to support a larger mass of artists.

Art funding by the state has been stuck in a model which values quantity over quality. I think this situation offers a great opportunity to focus on content.  The amount of visitors or the volume artworks an event hosts is not important anymore – This should make everyone happy! I believe that art spaces / organizations that show willingness to emphasis on content should be supported during this transitional period. Their efforts will provide a solid basis for “changing gears” of the art field.

Experiments with social distancing etiquette:

  • I just arrived from Stockholm.
  • I’m planning to come over for a few beers.
  • If you are concerned with my arrival, please PM me and I’ll invent a discrete excuse for not comming.
  • You can PM me during our meeting, I’ll makeup an excuse on the fly and leave.

Kissing is yet again a sign of a lovers dedication and victory over death.

I have full confidence in our government: If they would have seen a quarantine as a better option then social distancing, they would have called for it.

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20200316

This virus is more about coping with the terror of a corporation controlled mediascape and the totalitarism of nation states then health. There is no post-truth, only noise paranoid businessmen utter trough the voice of precariat journalists, there is no quarantine only a performance amplifying bourgeois monocultural family values. The message this noise amplifies is their fear that Okboomer virus is a call to action. They fear people will see their fear for what it is and feel alive for the first time. #☭

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20200308

Labour of the Artist, Feminist Practices and Troubles with the Infrastructure (2019) Bojana Kunst (via Academy of Fine Arts in Prague). Citing Isabell Lorey, Kunst argues that people are governed by precarity and that a constant state of self-organizing is drawing resources from our potential to organize collectively. In other words: Precarity hinders possibilities to imagine political continuity. She argues that precarity is structured or enforced by the infrastructure of our cities and states that the activities of urban feminist artists and collectives in the 70ties were a response to a collapse of welfare infrastructure (in her view infrastructure becomes visible only when it is in crisis). Kunst builds a case that many leftist artistic movements which desire to repair infrastructure end-up reproducing its problems. It’s not beneficial to cling on to good feelings which responding to symptoms of infrastructural collapse offer. More effort should be put in problematizing conditions cause its hindrance. Unfortunately struggle for a future has been replaced by a struggle of maintaining life in contemporary cities. The film she refers to in the beginning is Subjektitude (1967) Helke Sander. Here is a powerful extract (or short film?) of hers: Nr 1 Aus Berichten der Wach und Patrouillendienste (1985).

Visited Makamik squat but came too late for the support gigs. Felt like a warm community and I hope to visit it again. The last set had a lot of modular synth gear on stage. Feels weird to see modular synths at a squat: There is a mismatch between the affordability of the gear and the accessibility of the site. But modular synths in a squat make complete sense on a conceptually! Also I think gaining skills in diy electronics could easily be scaled to skills in working with the house electricity systems.

The state of economics can be measured from the temperature of elderly world leaders. #☭