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2020020

A selection of the Trans-Siberian Railway -Sound Archive is now available on Freesound. There are 35 clips (1.7gb) and I think the gps data mapping of the recordings alone tells a nice story. I’ve included Helsinki as a part of the Trans-Siberian railway network… As it was intended when the Tsar had our rails build. The archive would work great as background noise for a train-story/documentary or for train themed games. I think some clips might work as chopped samples too. The indexing of the files is a bit messy but there are real gems in the mix. My favorite clips are:

I’m listening to them while writing and I can feel the sounds vibrating my phone, which makes the clips feel material, like thin peals of the trip. Miinas note that the archive is linked with geology (or the process of harvesting geological samples for profit) feels acute. I like that the samples have interference sounds and occasionally my hands can be heard touching the mic. The interference makes the surrounding medias physical, it shows the limits of the recording technology and adds to the appeal. There is a clip were the microphone passes an x-ray machine for example. The material disturbances make me think of Viktor Toikkanen when he pushed his laptop to memory overload glitch territory when live-coding.

Our In Various Stages of Ruins exhibition series continues at Alkovi. The current exhibition titled Toxicity will be build gradually through the end of the summer towards the fall. Currently there are photos from the Town of Asbest on display, my humble C-Cassette recording we made with Jesse titled Two Men Coughing in the Woods (2020) and a set of DIY orthopedic supports I made for my feet (mentioned earlier).

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20200514

Alkovi published an interview were we discuss the work I’ve been doing related to the In Various Stages of Ruins -project. The questions were send beforehand and the interview is conducted by Miina Hujala and video edited by Arttu Merimaa. Mineral waters are mentioned and views to the wild springs we found shared. The format is interesting, Miina is scrolling the screen vertically, the timeline is progressing horizontally and to read the longer parts one needs to pause the movement.

Konsthall C made an announcement for next weeks Mineral Water Sommelier Hotline performance. Build three piezo-amplifiers and seriously sourcing a sound card for the live stream.

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20200217

Participated in a field recording workshop by Alan Courtis at Solu. The event was a little bit too short but it still rewarding to participate in. Courtis offered a fast introduction to the topic and shared an interesting observation: Before the invention of studios, every recording was a field recording. We listened to some of the earliest captured sounds and worked ourselves up to recent bioacoustic releases, discussing the relationship of human made and natural sounds. Francisco López and Jana Windferen were mentioned as examples of artist whose work is hyper-real, meaning that they use technologies which allow them to capture events in the unhuman spectrum. It was noted that field recordings have become accepted as an artform in their own right following a similar trejectory as photography. It was particularly fun that Courtis mentioned a few railway related releases. Both work as great references for making something out of the Trans-Siberian sound collection.

The mazizone will prepped and I made a sign to guide bypassangers to join the network. Used my own handwriting for the texts and cut the text out of vinyl. While working it I was reminded by my mother who opposed learning page layout programs arguing that her handwriting is perfectly fine. She mustered trough the 90ties making print layouts by hand.

Notes on Craft (2020) Jem Calder. A motivating story on how to keep developing as an artists, while grinding a day job. The text ends with a warning: As we loose leisure time, art making will be (yet again) made a leisure activity of the rich.

Unable to angle my monitor away from prying administrative eyes […] I wrote in the address bar of my web browser, in spreadsheet cells, in emails I addressed to myself.

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20200214

The Mazizone local network archive I’ve been setting up for my Raspi3+ is stable and working well. I have occasional problems connecting to it and I need to “forget” the network to reset certificates. But this only happens when I’m login in and out intensively for tweaks & edits. The device reboots daily to prevent these kinds of clogs. I haven’t gotten Gammu (to produce daily status updates via sms) working but with the reboot cycle enabled I’m confident that the device will run well enough.

I build the sound archive using wordpress and it looks fresh. Using wordpress in Mazi causes issues with the network url but this is manageable (it redirects visitors to portal.mazizone.eu which is ok for me). I’m now planning to build a funky case for the device and to make an inviting sign which will guide visitors to the network and archive. While making the website I got the idea of using ornamental patterns as illustrations. I also used ornaments in the eurorack case I build for the trip. When I was designing the case I tough the Byzantine style decorations as a reference to early natural sciences (which my work on mineral waters touches). This spawned the idea to add ornamental figures to the thumbnails of the sound files in the archive.

Each sound file (53) has a unique photo assigned to it. The photos set a mood for the content and give a hint of the sound. Photos were shot during our train trip by Iona Roisin, Elina Vainio and Miina Hujala. On top of each photo is a layer of different ornamental shapes. They twirl around the thumbnail corners and interact with things and people in the images. I’ve used Kid3 to add the images to the .wav files. If I’ve understood correctly .wav’s don’t have thumbnails but Kid3 manages to embed the data anyway. The default wordpress media playlist widget can source the images from the files and display them next to the track info.

Now there are ornaments everywhere!

I like over the top ornaments which have an abundance of detail. In Russia I can spot them everywhere. They are used in architecture (Corinthian pedestals and window frames), street lamps, fonts, advertisements, jewelry and clothes. Sometimes the patterns look familiar. Shapes I’ve seen in Russia appear to fuse Byzantine style decorations with folk ornaments I worked with during my carpentry studies. I can recognize a patterns being identical to a traditional woodcarving I’ve seen in Finland. Pirtanauhat and kauluslaudat are good examples.

I guess ornaments appeal to me because they link traditional Finnish crafts with Byzantine history and even contemporary Islamic and Arabic cultures. We visited a folk culture museum in Kazan and many of the Islamic artifacts in the collection looked similar stuff I’ve seen in Finnish folk culture museums (particularly the wooden objects). Some of the clothes looked like something my mother would want to wear. Styles I link to Bedouin folk gowns that are decorated with coins, felt really similar to Russian military uniforms which are decorated with medallions.

The ornaments I’m using for the archive and the thumbnails remind me of weeds. I think they link the archive to “ruins” which Miina is interested in. I think ornaments should be read as celebration of decay. They simulate nonhuman futures by imagening how plant life will take over architecture. They feel like archaic glitch art! Sometimes ornaments in clothes look like roots or blood vessels. I think Scandinavian design aesthetic read ornaments as a vanity but if we approach them as a celebration of decay there is nothing vane in embracing them. I hate Scandinavian design because it makes me feel ashamed of my appetite for details.

Using ornaments to decorate a sound archive, which is difficult to access – Feels right and embedding weed-like ornaments inside metadata makes sense. Here is a low-resolution sample of what the archive looks like when browsed using a mobile phone.

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20200130

What an exiting day. I got a Mazizone installation running on my Raspi3+! I can now host a local access etherpad service, open a file sharing box or a wordpress installation (among other things). Here is a short explanation why these kinds of “Digital Sovereignty” projects are important. (The project also has a faint link to urban farming, as one partner for the project has been Prinzessinnengarten) Feels great and only took 10 hours of manic computer work to figure out. I’m preparing to share my Trans-Siberian Railway sound collection using a Mazizone which is specifically set up for the Alkovi space at Hämeenkatu. Here is are my notes on getting the system running for this setup.

  1. Etcher > mazizone-v3.1.1.img (or 2020XXXX_alkovi-mazizone.dmg)
  2. SD card to RPi3+, boot and wait for ssid: mazizone
  3. Setup (Set location: lat, lon 60.187174, 24.953562) and change password
  4. Expand Storage > Reboot
  5. Browser to local.mazizone.eu:4567/admin > Disable unused apps
  6. Set USB1 wifi dongle (panda06) for “Internet connection” and set “Internet Network Mode” to “online”
  7. ssh pi@10.0.0.1. Change password using raspi-config and sudo apt update > sudo apt full-upgrade and reboot
  8. Setup DS3231 clock for stability. Sudo apt-get install i2c-tools, set locale using raspi-config and configure module using ssh. Guidelines for battery setup (in short supply it 3,3v).
  9. Applications > WordPress > Set up WP (don’t mess with the URL settings in WP)
  10. Change WIFI ssid: Alkovi (no password) and reconnect
  11. Change Portal Domain “in-various-stages-of-ruins.eu”
  12. Assign WordPress as “homepage” and set bigger upload file-size via Admin > Settings > Apache max file size: 500M
  13. Don’t change WordPress url (Test if changing step 8 order would help in clean urls for wp. Edit: no effect, see: Changing domain for wordpress not possible.)
  14. Update WordPress and themes, make them pretty (one page for sound, one page for info) and upload Trans-Siberian railway sound collection.
  15. Setup cron for daily reboot cycle:  sudo nano /etc/cron.d/alkovirebootcycle > 15 2 * * * root /sbin/shutdown -r now
  16. Add > dtoverlay=pi3-act-led,gpio=19 to /boot/config.txt to allow sd-card activity to be shown on an external red-led (protected with 470Ω resistor for good measure).
  17. Make duplicate of the SD card as backup.
  18. Test everything, break everything and re-do everything.

Later: External shutdown button (python?), how can I get it to “sms report home” (will old Huawei E1550 I’ve stashed work out of the box or should I configure it somehow?). experiment with PiFmRds(?) and enjoy.