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20200928

Back in 2018 I noticed that Facebook had autogenerated a “Community Page” in my name (it had 21 likes). It showed my face which they had sourced from a Wikipedia article and they had categorized me as a “local business”. I wanted them to remove it (21 likes felt like a burn) but soon learned that there is apparently no way to contact fb directly, I then ended up chatting with an array of service bots who designated me with the complaint number 244899592919672 and after writing a few candid messages to an AI higher in the ranks of the corporate ladder the page in my name was removed.

A few months ago I noticed that it had reappeared and the old links for contacting fb were not working. I contacted the Office of the Data Protection in Finland, who advised me to send my complaint to dpo(ät)fb.com. They removed the page within a week. The reply fb gave reads:

We reviewed the content you reported. Since it violated our Community Standards on image privacy, we have removed it.

Which is weird as the image on the page is licensed CC BY 2.0.

Are They Human? (2016) Eyal Weizman links climate change to racism. Serres backs this idea too and I think also Mbembe can be read this way: Climate change is a deliberate process, the planet has been made a gas chamber.

Seen from the point of view of eighteenth century colonial history, however, climate change is an intentional project: colonial administrators did not only seek to take control of and tame the physical reality of newly discovered lands, but to engineer and change the environments, including their cyclical climate patterns. […] The term “climate change” was born not with the recent discovery of the devastating effects of global warming but in the late eighteenth century as a potentially positive consequence of the human husbandry of nature.

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Hevonen ja rakennettu ympäristö taiteellisena tutkimuksena

Hevoslinja on kääntynyt Aalto yliopistolla suoritettavaksi taiteelliseksi tutkimukseksi. Alta löytyvä teksti on kirjoitettu apurahahakemukseksi Koneen säätiölle ja samanmoista tekstiä tullaan käyttämään myös tulevissa hakemuksissa. Aikaisemmat Hevoslinja kirjoitukset suomeksi löytyvät asiasanalla Hevoslinja ja jatkossa kirjoituksia tehdään pääsääntöisesti englanniksi asiasanalla Trans-Horse. Alta löytyvä teksti pohjautuu 2018 laadittuun Hevonen ja esiintyminen suunnitelmaan. Työ on vasta aluillaan.

Hevonen ja rakennettu ympäristö

Monet ovat kääntyneet tekoälyjen ja ihmisasiantuntijayhteisöjen puoleen tuottaakseen ehdotuksia sille, miten ympäristöä olisi kehitettävä, jotta voisimme tukea ekologisesti ja taloudellisesti kestävän (tai edes vähemmän väkivaltaisen) kulttuurin muodostumista. Tutkimukseni osoittaa nämä kysymykset hevoselle. Hevonen on varteenotettava kumppani tulevaisuutta koskevassa pohdinnassa. Se on osallistunut lukuisten modernien kaupunkien rakennustyöhön ja vaikuttaa nykykulttuuriin taiteen, urheilu-esitysten sekä tekemänsä sosiaalipedagogisen työn kautta. Suomen 170 000 hevosharrastajaa, uutterasti palvelevat 75 000 hevosta tarjoavat ihmisille elävöittäviä kokemuksia (Leinonen, 2013). Ensimmäistä kertaa historiassa osa meistä voi valita elävänsä vailla eläinsuhteita – mutta mitä itsenäisempiä kuvittelemme olevamme sitä haitallisempaa toimiemme vaikutus on ympäristölle. Posthumanismi on “monialainen ja -monihaarainen teoreettinen suuntaus” (Kokkonen, 2017). Siihen liittyvät yhtäaikaisesti ihmiskehon biologisia rajoja vastustavat trans-humanistiset pyrinnöt sekä globaalin pohjoisen tuottaman humanistisen maailmankuvan kritiikki. Taideyhteyksissä posthumanistisilla lähestymistavoilla markkeerataan usein teoksia, jotka pyrkivät osoittamaan ihmiskeskeisten mallien ongelmallisuuden. Tässä tutkimuksessa esitellyllä posthumanistisella työotteella tarkoitetaan eläinten älyn tunnustamista ja yritystä soveltaa tätä älyä suunnittelutyön tukena. Tutkimus luo väyliä (harjoitteita, taidekokemuksia ja tekstejä), joiden avulla ihmisen ulkopuolisen älyn kanssa voidaan neuvotella ja hyödyntää näin saatua palautetta käytännössä.

Continue reading “Hevonen ja rakennettu ympäristö taiteellisena tutkimuksena”

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20200115

Polttava taide [Burning Art] (2020) Jenni Nurmenniemi. The text is passionate and echoes a strong commitment to the development of ecologically sustainable curatorial work. Nurmenniemi wants to engage in situated and localized practices. I like the part where she underlines that environmental matters should not be addressed as a “theme” because ecologies are about relations and connections. My presentation on Land-Art Conservation at SOLU is referred, which feels nice. Towards the end of the text she brings up a Haraway-ian idea that art could serve as a compost: It returns ideas into circulation. I believe art can help in creating containers for obsolete concepts (nation state, capitalism etc.) and help in disintegrating them into less toxic models (eu, socialism etc.).

But I think the process is challenging because, actual artworks have a weird relationship to the future. Many artistic gestures are imagined as eternal – Which is why they don’t make for good compost. I’m not talking about materials (Bronze or Wood). I’m talking about concepts, which I believe can be more harmful because they refuse to degrade. Concepts are zombies. I guess this idea is derived from a weird reading of Serres: He argues that objects are made to prevent social change. I don’t know if Serres views concepts as objects but I think bad habits, like eating meat, should be understood as such. The resources needed to maintain the habit rely on and bind to particular infrastructure (fossil fuels).

A performance artwork is defiantly an object. It is used as such and can even be commissioned as a classical monument. Gestures, like walking on the moon make for great monuments, they align perfectly with neoliberal fantasies of future service economies (More specifically to the postwork without communism -utopia). More work should be done in developing ways to digest and compost concepts and the habits they are bind to. This might be a useful expansion to the popular process of decommissioning modern authorship. Paradoxically: The best way to compost a concept might be to make it into a object, so that it can be destroyed. I’ve tried to write about this before.. Exploring how documentation of live art, situates it and makes it conceptually malleable (less modern).

Interestingly, if concepts can be objects then humans (with their skills) can be infrastructure! #ॐ Makes complete sense to me.

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20190907

Yesterday we saw a girl galloping from east, past the Vadim Sidur museum towards the center. The horse was a peasant breed and moved effortlessly along the tram tracks. The riders backpack had a flower pattern. Today we are drinking fermented horse milk in Kazan. We arrived in a open cabin night train, where the distance between our faces from the feet of other passengers was less then 10cm. Everyone in the train was at their peak performance, no disturbances at all. People timed their actions (packing and unpacking) perfectly and touched each other’s gently when passing.

We visited Sidurs museum to see Alexey Buldakov’s exhibition, which was organized as a part of the Mmoma artist placement project (they show contemporary art in old museums). Buldakovs exhibition offered a text citing Serres (parasites) and a shit-optical graffiti machine, in the form of a heated seating structure for pigeons. The shape of the structure invited pigeons to sit in such an arrangements, that their droppings would form words on the ground below. The shape we saw projected the text “peace”. The copper pipings, which positioned the birds to form the letters, were heated with water from a computer cooling system. The computer was mining for bitcoins (leaching on museum energy supply).

The exhibition offered snippets of everything we learned of his practice the day before. And extras like birds painted in watercolors and thermal imaging projections. For most of us, the shape of the pigeon seating machine would have been enough (without out the mining, heating etc. processes).

Our group discussed the maximalism of the exhibition as a feature of Russian art. In discussions we sympathized with Buldakov’s attempt to include everything into the display (he was “pulling all treads together”, Elina noted). I feel that opportunities to exhibit are rare, so I maximize the work to make. This maximalism could also be understood as an attempt to forge a narrative, which could account for the current, absurd state of affairs (The need to craft narratives was present in Vilnius too).

Maximalism could be the aesthetics of inclusivity. The museum displays here in Kazan (we visited National Museum of the Republic of Kazan) are jam-packed with stuff, ancient tools, gems etc. from every branch of social life and every historical phase of the territory. Something specific for every-specific-body. Maximalizing is a strategy for reaching out to diverse audiences.

Russians seem to manifest a strong believe in new construction materials and technology. Window frames are attached using blobs of sikaflex. Polyurethane is not cut into shape and covered with panels. The polyurethane blobs show progress: We have the new means, nails are for medieval times, our bonds are chemical.

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20190827

(The Earth Demands) The Necropolitics of Art (2019) Rick Dolphijn for Sonic Acts. He starts of with a solid summary on what Michel Serres understands as “quasi objects”. Objects are made to prevent the passage of time, to keep things from changing and to prevent revolutions. Dolphijn argues that art is something different, is not limited by any finitude (a quality it shares with philosophy). It proposes an other history and tells us that political realities can be (must be) deterritorialized. I think he’s idealistic but it’s cool.

Art refuses to be embedded in the present. […] Art is a Necropolitics. […] Trough it we can explore what other realities are possible.

Bought boots from Töysän kenkätehdas (for Russia). Due to the trip I’ll miss the Rehearsing Hospitalities events (There is a talk on the 10th of Sept. called Rehearsing Dialogues where Dolphijn will be in dialogue with Marjolijn Dijkman and Mari Keski-Korsu). I’ll also miss the Publics Today is Our Tomorrow club.