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20190410

Is Art a Currency? (2019) Hito Steyerl. Save a click: Its worse then a currency, it is a vessel for political ideologies that are aiming to suppress cultural movements that advocate egalitarianism.

[…] as an alternative currency, art seems to fulfill what ether and bitcoin have hitherto only promised. Rather than money issued by a nation and administrated by central banks, art is a networked, decentralized, widespread system of value.

Art is encryption as such, regardless of the existence of a message with a multitude of conflicting and often useless keys. Its reputational economy is randomly quantified, ranked by bullshit algorithms that convert artists and academics into ranked positions, but it also includes more traditionally clannish social hierarchies.

Intellectual perspectives, expanded canons, nontraditional histories will be axed—anything that requires an investment of time and effort instead of conspicuous money. Public support swapped for Instagram metrics. Art fully floated on some kind of Arsedaq. More fairs, longer yachts for more violent assholes, oil paintings of booty blondes, abstract stock-chart calligraphy. Yummy organic superfoods. Accelerationist designer breeding. Personalized one-on-one performances for tax evaders. Male masters, more male masters, and repeat. Art will take its place next to big-game hunting, armed paragliding, and adventure slumming.

Posted on

20180418

We are publishing Oodi modular video teasers in preparation of our Kontula Electronic presentation on Saturday. The first is out on Viktors youtube site and another will be hopefully published on Kontula Electronic FB-site. (I posted the video on /r/synthesizers too, people have responded to it well) My 0-coast & Arturia Beat Step Pro studies are progressing steadily. Updated the devices and build a batch using both sequencers. I’m having trouble configuring the different midi modes (arpeggiators, latching, legato etc.) on the 0-coast and Beat Step Pro is very complicated too. Fun but complicated. I haven’t hooked them up with my Drumbrute yet… But I tested the lfos of my Kastl on the 0-coast.

Wrote a proposal for a techno-gig-talk at the Exhibiting Sounds of Changes seminar in Tampere (in June). My proposal for a Sound of Work: Blacksmith presentation was accepted into the program, which is nice! But I feel cheated. They made their call with an obscure text: “Participation is without a fee; however travel, accommodation and daily living are at your expense.“. I had read “[…] at our expense” – Thinking that they would have covered travel expenses and offered a lunch for people presenting at the seminar.

I’m down for throwing a gig for the love of art, research, labor issues and sounds but paying for the travel is too much to ask. Their project is founded by the Creative Europe programme and the event is organized by Werstas the Finnish Labor Museum. I send them a message asking for a confirmation on how the expenses are handled and got a reply: Speakers are expected to pay for their own participation. No food, no promises of coffee… Nothing.

Their project is about archiving and presenting sounds of work. I offered them a worker making sounds (referring to labor struggles through techno and critical views to samplers and their relationship to appropriation). The Finnish Labor Museum as a culture factory (as defined by Steyerl) producers workers as dead echoes of the past. #☭

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20180401

Youtube is my #1 source for marxist propaganda entertainment: What’s Wrong with Capitalism (Part 2) by ContraPoints.

My busker name is to be Thuomas EnBusker.

Tiny Tramp live at Void Bordeaux is a solid live gig documentation. He’s using cassette decks, spring reverbs and lo-fi microphones to build evolving dark ambient. There is singing and distortion too. I particularly enjoy (the digital?) artifacts which combine into random cheerful melodies.

Christianity the faith of a Zombie.

Re-reading Is a Museum a Factory? (2009) by Hito Steyerl. The idea that museum guests are laborers, working to make sense of exhibitions is appealing.

Today, cinematic politics are post-representational. They do not educate the crowd, but produce it. They articulate the crowd in space and in time. They submerge it in partial invisibility and then orchestrate their dispersion, movement, and reconfiguration. They organize the crowd without preaching to it. They replace the gaze of the bourgeois sovereign spectator of the white cube with the incomplete, obscured, fractured, and overwhelmed vision of the spectator-as-laborer.

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20160929

Finished my article “New Material Intercource” regarding contemporary sex-toys and their impact on the environment and our sexual expression. It’s currently being edited by Tuomas Laitinen and it’ll likely come out before Christmas in the Esitys-magazines Masturbation-edition. I draw nifty pictures to accompany the text. The illustrations are available on Openclipart: New Material Intercourse – Clipart collection and they are licensed for unlimited commercial use! The text echoes the “handicraft-ethical / future archeological” thinking we’ve developed over the years through various Ore.e Refineries activities. One slogan we’ve deployed with Jesse was: “The future is decided with hands” and the “New Material Intercource” text takes this statement literally.

Watched and appreciated “November” (2004) by Hito Steyerl. The movie convinced me that narratives are a thing of the past. At time artist were trained to produce counter-narratives in an effort to voice out opinions of the oppressed. I’ve now come to understand that the problem is with narrativity itself. Every narrative ground events in to mythological continuum.

Every story, tells the story that there is a founding myth. #ॐ

Met with Päivi Raivio and I agreed to join her “Rescue Museum” events in November. I’ll possibly be working to salvage personal digital heritages of unknown Facebook users.

Met with Pilvi Porkola and went through my participation in her upcoming show for New Performance Turku. I’ll be using a kettlebell and making techno on stage with her.