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20190123

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.

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20180419

Reached out to Persian Parade NYC and asked if they know of a Zoorkhaneh in the city.

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20170314

Edits on the SOW: Blacksmith sample pack are progressing steadily and I’ll have all of the samples chopped by the end of the week. After this I’ll continue with mastering. EQ fixes are almost done but the dynamics of some loud machines and hammers pose a challenge. After the fixes I’ll export the samples and continue organizing them into folders and adding​ metadata. If everything goes as planned we can publish the pack by the end of the month. I plan to make a intro video for the collection at Jesses smithy.

Did some benchmarking and found a few companies and private artists offering blacksmith sounds and other industrial noises for sound designers and musicians. Some of these links have been collected by Paul Virostek who runs the Creative Field Recordings blog.

  • Freesound offers 134 sound tagged “blacksmith” for Free!
  • Bluezone Corporation offers the “Metal Impact Sound Effects” pack for 14,95€
  • Eiravein works offers the “Ilmarinen” Blacksmith sample pack for 16€
  • Echocollectivefx’s offers the “Lockdown” sample pack for 40€
  • Hart FX offers a massive “Hart of Steel” collection for 99€

Minttu also recommend a Finnish ​musician who is working with junkyard sounds called Pentti Dassum. He works under the title Umpio and he’s currently engaged in a sounds of craft and labor project related to textiles.

I regret we didn’t use more professional mics for our recordings. The tonality of our samples is suitable for projects that are flirting with lo-fi field recording aesthetics. If we’d invested in more advanced mics we could could have reached out to the professional foley artist community too. Our efforts will provide a great addition to the Freesound community.

Assisted Ilkka Wahala (a graduate from the Kankaanpää Art School) with his real/simulation shooting documentation. He had organized a shooting range, an instructor and guns from Osuva a range located in the center of Helsinki. He shot with a Scorpion Assault Rifle and a pistol. I got to shoot too but only with a training gun. It was fun and the staff was very welcoming. Relatively cheap too.

Meeting Kristian at the gym in preparation of the Kontula Electronic gig.

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20170302

Thanks to aesthetic relativism it’s considered pointless to make formal evaluations of artworks. This is great! As a result artists are considered more important than artworks (unfortunately art institutions prefer their artists dead).

Contemporary artworks are cynical puns, which an artist is employed to present for audiences. Audiences are invited to enjoy the style the pun is presented. This condition serves craftspeople who maintain myths about the integrity of artistic work (and performance artists).

People who are serious about arts compare contemporary presentation to presentations the artist made in the past. This is why it’s important to make a lot of artworks.

When there is an exciting body of work it is easy to imagine how new pieces fit to the collection. It’s more convenient to discuss (and appreciate) artworks made by artists with long careers. Careers and collections are less risky to manage then living artists.

Interestingly many of my artist peers are working out extensively. Fitness is the new black (See article on Vogue for hints). Is fitness.art an effort to bypass cynicism which aesthetic relativism enforces upon artistic practice?

Bodybuilding and fitness appear as efforts to assume control of the cultural dynamics aesthetic relativism has shoved us into. Fit bodies are absolute and their presentation serves as evidence of labor: Fit bodies can stand to oppose capital by becoming capital in themselves! Hints for this thought are found in an article by Jon Stratton (mentioned earlier).

I’m recovering from a teaching gig at the Kankaanpää Art School, where I conducted intensive Kettlebell exercises for the students. I think the primary reason for fitness as a part of the art education was to build bodies which can resist. See “Media & Performance” study journal for details.

I believe this is also why working class communities emphasised sports back in the day. As the automation of labor and ideologies of optimization and efficiency rejects our human bodies – The value of a body is the style it is presented in.