Eero Yli-Vakkuri
Succefully build a RYO Ampmix, a Ginko Synthese LFOv2 and a Befaco Output V3. I’ll utilize the Kankaanpää Art School circular saw next week to build a 104hp case.
Found my Herbs of Wall street infusion vodka. The vodka has a faint greenish hue. I’ll taste it this weekend.
SOW Blacksmith ed.1 spotted in the wild as a part of a Novation Circuit Sample Set! Some new entries in the Freesound.org comment page on the collection too. Feels really good to see the pack in use!
Ordered parts for a second Lorre-Mill uTone building session (more on that later – Planning to attach the unit to a 42hp blank eurorack panel). Also got parts for a PMFoundations Clock Divider (Eurorack PCB set). I now have an elementary set of modulation tools in the works. I’ll start compiling the units next month. The uTone will likely be build at Oodi. Odered parts from Digi-Key on Friday and they are already in Helsinki!
Saw dance works at Zodiak. Mira Kautto: Station to Station to Station was a faux-one-person-techno-party, framed as a reminiscence of the traces that past performances had left in the dancers body. Laura Jantunen: Talvi was a monotonous, repetitive and pattern orientated piece. It placed human bodies and abstract electronic patterns on the same plane. I liked the experience of looking at human movement as a pattern but disliked the academic/neutral-tone of the work. For me the performance felt like a display of the concepts of repetition and patterns, rather then an exploration of them. Kaino liked work a lot and their text on the piece is a good read THE CIRCUIT I NEED: TALVI, A CHOREOGRAPHY BY LAURA JANTUNEN (2019) Kaino Wennerstrand.
Also saw Their Limbs Their Lungs Their Legs at TeaK. I enjoyed the views and read the piece as a post-humanism for kids sort of show. The outer forms of the dancer bodies where changed with various disguises. Some parts were very humorous but it didn’t offer new insight to dance.
Busy two weeks. Applied funding from: AVEK (Didn’t get 3000€ funding), SKR – Uudenmaan maakuntarahasto (Didn’t get funding), Taike (Didn’t get 6 month grant) and send proposals for HAM gallery (Didn’t get a show) and Place Publique (Got positive feedback but no residency).
Also preparing a teaching gig for Kankaanpää Art School. This time we’ll be reading (Communism for Kids by Bini Adamczak, 2014), writing, moving (I’m still on Kettlebells) and voting.
Up next… Updates to my portfolio and electronics (I have a nifty set of eurorack kits in the works). I build a DIY liquid carbonation system and I can now manufacture sparkling water and sodas (currently I have a batch of Ginger-beer in the works). During the weekend I converted white wine to sparkling wine! I plan to manufacture sparkling mineral waters from regional fountains (which can be found using the brilliant loydalahde.com service) and to clone famous mineral waters (such as San Pelligriano) following guides found on the khymos.org blogpost from 2012.
A 10l batch of San Pelligriano clone would require:
Kenen ajalla elät? [On Who’s Time?] (2019) Kaino Wennerstrand. Part 1 of 5. A thoughtful text which investigates the lived experience of people who have to sacrifice their time and to constantly change their pace, to accommodate the falsified idea that contemporary capitalism makes everything available.
Perinnön vaalimista täystuhon äärellä [Protecting Cultural Legacies in the Face of Annihilation] (2018) Anna Jensen. A bright text questioning the motives of cultural preservation. I agree with Jensen but I have to argue that not all narratives need dismantling (previous post) and putting things in the museum (or defining them as UNESCO World Heritage things) is a good strategy for positioning the things to the past, offering them for the gaze of the public (for critical re-evaluation) and nullifying their mythological force (which is the case of the Swastika symbol is a good thing).
The gilets jaunes: Giving colour to suffering (2019) Benoit Bohy-Bunel. The text starts as a rant which is difficult to follow. I only read the chapter 4 titled “Brief remarks on the ‘yellow vests’ movement”, which offers a reading to the reported right-wing elements of the movement: Some parts of the moment are racist, because the nation-state subjectivity (the crisis of which Gilets Jaunes manifests) is rooted on racism.
[…] The racist, homophobic acts present in certain demonstrations, the nationalist, populist, sexist, ableist, anti-migrant and anti-social-assistance speeches, which have met with some success in certain parts of this movement, reflect the crisis of this subject-form and the rise of crisis ideologies.
There are many testimonies of suffering or social anger in this movement. These testimonies directly question the existence of the State and capitalism, with all that they imply (racism, patriarchy, ecological destruction, ableism, ageism). But the translation of this suffering, which is made against the backdrop of the crisis of the subject-form and the diffusion of populist ideologies of crisis, is not systematically emancipatory. What would be properly subversive would be to grasp, collectively and individually, the root of this lived suffering, and the radicality that it designates, so as to counteract the reactive and identity responses to the suffering. Such a capacity is not the privilege of ideologues, even “critical” ones, who would have to “educate” the “people”. Such a capacity eventually develops in the praxis of struggle, which can induce new encounters, new awareness, and new forms of life.
I’ve fixed all of the socks! There are now 27 socks on my wall (some pairs), which I’ve successfully darned. Some socks (the woolen ones) took me over two hours to complete. I restored them using thick visible stitching’s, so that people will have with a good story to remember. Some of the stitches look like ornaments. I suspect it’ll take me one day to document the socks in my studio and a day to wash them in the East River and to photograph them next to the Manhattan skyline (or at a monument of the senders liking) as promised. Feeling good. While fixing the last pairs I was listening to Why We Bleep Podcast 004: Transistor Sounds Labs (2018) mylar melodies. In the podcast Nina Richards and Zoe Blade give a nice introduction to their design process and talk about sexism of the electronic/computer cultures.
Visited Lau Nau: Wild/Captive at Blank Forms last weekend. Modular synth beats from multiple directions, blended with field recordings from the woods and organ-toned melodies. Many of the nature-sound-trips I’ve heard in the city (Bánh Mì Verlag/Control gigs) have been based on field recording too. They have underlined the differences of technological and natural soundscapes, moving from nature-like-sound towards machine-like-sounds (the narrative contrasts them and makes technological sounds feel disrupting). In Naukkarises’ piece the organ-toned melodies (from an accordion?) blended into nature sounds seamlessly. It was a tad romantic, but welcome. It felt hopeful.
Visited Storm King Art Center last Monday with the ISCP-crew. There were also people from other residents such as Eye Beam at the trip but unfortunately we didn’t have time to mingle (it was so cold outside). The endless display of gigantic rusty metal sculptures was depressing but there were some pretty vistas, fresh air and decent artworks on display too.
Mary Mattingly’s Along the Lines of Displacement: A Tropical Food Forest (2018) is a series of tropical trees planted to the cold New York terrain. The palm trees were intentionally displaced, as an absurd and uplifting response to global warming. They are destined to die during the winter, which makes the piece into a memento mori plant-life arrangement. Being non-native to New York I didn’t understand that the trees were unsuited to the climate (palm trees in New York pass my radar).
There was a really nice video Wolf Nation (2018) by Alan Michelson on display inside the exhibition center. Michelson had found a remarkable stretch of footage from a disregarded wildlife film, which showed a pack of wolves observing their territory on top of a small hill for 10 minutes. They choreographed different kinds of collective arrangements, reacting to other inhabitants of the site and moved in an out the frame periodically. The wildlife film was found footage and Michelson had connected it with a soundtrack. The work referred to the New York Lenape people (Wolf Tribe).
Visited Remy Jungerman’s Based In exhibition at robert henry contemporary on Friday. I had no prior knowledge of his work and decoding its visual language took a while. Luckily Jungerman gave visitors short introduction to the works. As I understood the pieces were tools for identifying blind-spots that modern art and modernistic thinking has in relation to spirituality and otherness. The sculptures in the gallery felt like miniature models of modern cities or container ships. Each had a few iron-nails hammered into it. At first I thought that this was reference to the absence of materiality (in modern design) but the nails were possibly referring to religious practices in which nails are hammered into figurative sculptures as a sacrifice.
Participated in a Lorre-Mill uTone build workshop at Control yesterday. The uTone “uses CMOS logic, a resistor ladder, and a few other simple pieces to create audio forms. The scale inherent in this instrument is the undertone series, giving divisions of the main clock frequency”. Here is more about the design. We build our uTone units in four hours, hooked them together for a jam and chatted briefly about the topography of the circuit. I learned how to read resistor values from color codes a little better. Unfortunately the workshop was too short, we didn’t learn more about Will Schorre’s views on design and sounds (here is an interesting post on his website on prototyping). I would have also liked to learn more what the uTone is capable of. It has two inputs. I’m in the process of adding an 3,5mm TS Jack -> Banana Jack port/adapter to the device to integrate it with other gear.
We drafted a proposal with Ilari to have a publication on land- and environmental art conservation (Working title: Notes on Land and Environmental Art Conservation – Critical Approaches to Denes, Holt and Smithson) co-published by the Finnish Cultural Institute in New Yorks and the Fine Art Academy of Helsinki.
Synths and eurorack modules we proposed through the Oodi-modular initiative are currently being acquired by the library staff! We are on our way to a people’s-public-modular of Helsinki.