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20230823

My mothers petrifying religious practices.

Their beliefs built on a fusion of christian superstition, severe guilt or shame and a very specific know-how in psychology. The science bits of their beliefs were picked up from their father who did their PhD in the sixties on an analysis of parapsychological testing processes. The research revealed biases in seemingly neural test forms. For example how the layouts of questionnaires impact the data that they provide. Their research revealed biases in language: Red, hammer, apple.

Mother could cite Carl Jung to ground their intuitive decisions, use Freud to explain the fool proof logic of their whimsies and decorated the walls of our home with Buddhistic, Christian, Jewish and African ritual objects which they inherited or picked up from “Indian Bazaar”, a shop selling mass produced colonial goods form around the world. These curiosities were popular in the early nineties and succeeded in making our home appear bohemian.

Once when I caught a fly in my mouth while cycling, I asked them why a bug did not protect itself. They explained that the bug had mistaken my mouth for a birds mouth and flew in as an expression of its death drive which is inherent in all living beings. Mother talked with crows in the nearby forest, and translated the advice they gave. They had me talk kindly to hedgehogs and not jump on boulders as they were the knuckles of giants. Some of these approaches I’ve passed on.

Mother made bad life decisions, was unemployed and became severely depressed. We were poor and in the nineties recession we sold a lot of the inherited silverware and antiquities. They were on the phone endlessly arguing with distant relatives and waiting for calls from the bank, the unemployment or social welfare offices. Then they begun placing garlic bulbs next to windows and small Buddha statues on top of phone sockets.

I got angry, tore a garlic bulb from my window frame and tossed it out the fifth floor window. They got mad, explained the purpose of the vegetable but went silent soon after. Then they stationed by the phone waiting and continued chain smoking. In the night a staggering fear rose in me. I couldn’t stop thinking about going out to retrieve the garlic. But I feared that if I had moved the slightest the monsters my mother was shielding us with herbs would catch me. I didn’t sleep and kept still.

Around that time I learned that the bed I had been sleeping in for years was the same my grandfather had died in. I tried talking to them, asking for permission and advice. I felt comfort but began sleeping on the floor on a camping mattress just in case. Soon after I went for my conscript service on a remote island and took to study out of Helsinki. My brother left home for school soon after. Mother was alone and found work as a cleaner for SOL which preoccupied them. On the rare occasion we met they had only work gossip to share. They couldn’t stop talking about work gossip.

I don’t participate in any religious stuff and I don’t believe in god.

I can identify various lutheran traits in my praxis but I’m not sure if the values I express are christian or if they are the cultural particularities which lutheranism has appropriated in becoming local. I value the honesty of labour, commitment and duty. I enjoy it when a colleague emphasizes they are a “white Christian artist”. They do this to underline the mechanisms which dislodge non-white, non-christian artist experiences from the norm. But I indulge in the dynamic of their gesture from a distance. I don’t think my experience counts as being christian.

I know the stories but not the rites. Recently I suggested to barter with a priest to trade holy-water with them. I didn’t know that holy-water is not for consumption and that it cannot traded. In my teens this kind of ignorance was interpreted as rebellious.

I don’t know what I believe in but I’m expecting proper lutherian work ethic in horoscope and witchcraft affairs. I haven’t met many committed to magics and most ask about horoscopes for bohemian appeal. I guess people are scared about magic, so they tip their toes in star signs to assume rudimentary control of the domain. People develop bare minimum magic-know-how, so that magic won’t end up running their lives. At least that’s how I do it… Occasionally catching myself with a charm for good luck.

My first ritual service.

There is a city playground close to where we live called “India”. The district close by is called Arabia. It was inhabited by sailors and missionaries who named the streets according to the remote lands they had visited: Kongo-street, Damascus-street and Rome-street. Like other city playgrounds in Helsinki, in the summer India offers free daily lunches for children. The tradition is said to have started in 1942.

The food serving starts right after the schools close for the summer and takes place every weekday at noon. In 2021 over 5000 kids ate at playgrounds each day. When we were growing up in Malminkartano during the recession we ate daily at the Piianpuisto playground. I remember queuing for ages and that the meat and potato chunks went for the first in line. When I turned 15 and was no longer eligible for it, I stole the bread mother had rationed for my brother in revenge. Playground lunches hold significance to me.

At India Park food service starts with personnel, often a young trainee walking around ringing a brass bell. Children and families form a big circle around two huge soup containers at an opening next to the forest. There can be over a hundred kids. Everyone joining the circle is expected to sing. The songs are nursery rhymes and 20 year old children’s songs, that are selected based on the weather and sometimes according to what is being served. When there is stew we sing “… the crow brews the porridge…”

The playground staff member in charge stands in the middle, sings loud to set an example and leads simple choreographic movements. The choreographies include clapping hands in rhythm, simple hand gestures and jumping during the chorus parts. After the dance, a kid from the circle is selected to spin a fortune wheel, which lays horizontally at the centre. The wheel, a green square with a white dial, eventually points to the direction where the cue for the food starts.

This summer the fortune wheel had broken. Someone had stepped on it and after observing many iterations of different cardboard attachments being used for the missing arrow, I approached the staff and asked to repair it. Judging from the materials the wheel had been made in the 80ties. The base was a thin sheet of hardboard, with sides made from birch. The birch joints were complex locking rabbet joints. A lathed stud holds the arrow a tad offcenter middle of the square.

It had been repaired many times over the years and a lump of epoxy surrounded the arrow mount. I proceeded by making a new arrow from plywood, then added a strong new plywood base (from a fifties cabin I salvaged for a sound element) under the hardboard and reinforced all the joints with nails and glue. I made a bearing for the arrow and used brass screws in the assembly.

The fortune wheel has an important task: In the past food might have run out, so the device ensures everyone has a fair chance for nourishment. We handed it to the park staff with Helka, who was really proud for having painted the arrow with spray paint. As a reward they wanted to spin the wheel but I didn’t know how to ask for a favour from the staff.

The first time the new fortune wheel was spun, it pointed to a kid left of us and we ended up being the very last on the cue that day. The wheel showed us it is honest in performing its duties.

This is how I performed a belief with out knowing what it is.

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20230608

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 (except for an adventurous ant) 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-to-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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20230505

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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20230424

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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20230125

Visited Oodi Maija-sali for the SOLA Post-Festival Club. Came late, left early but enjoyed a cinematic performance by Minerva Juolahti. They stood in front of the audience in a dark room with their back leaning against a huge black stage curtain and held a mirror which redirected a projector light beam towards the audience. An odd drone was heard and the mirror trembled a bit as they held it. The reflection which they reprojected onto the floor in front of them shivered like a tongue trying to keep still. The projector showed a slow film of intersecting squares, which corresponded with the shape and size of the mirror. One of these beams remained in place, constantly directed at the mirror. The black curtain folds bent the moving white rectangles, allowing gradients to form on the curtain velvet, which made them appear as floating metal sheets.

This scene lasted for quite a while. The floating metal sheets passed the screen and only the beam directed at the mirror was left. Juolahti then turned the mirror and directed its beam to a disco ball which re-reprojected the projection so that the entire room and everyone in the space was touched by miniscule square rays of light. The projection square then began moving upwards disappearing outside of the screen. As it rose Juolahti followed its movement with the mirror they held and as it went over their reach, they lowered the mirror and suddenly a hairly drone whipped across the room. The sound was revealed emanating from the mirror sheet. The shivers of the reprojections had been produced by a solid transducer attached to its back, which revealed the drone and the reflection being of the same.

I would have loved to listen to the gig with a light to sound device. Ilpo Numminen played the Oodi-modular and presented it as an “instrument” which was a delight. The gig explored feedback loops and krell-like patches. Looking forwards to visiting SOLA on Friday too for gigs by Tomutonttu and Tina Mariane Krogh Madsen. (The gigs where last May)