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20201106

Returning from Anti festival. Our performances (four two hour long spring tours, one featuring local spring water advocate Sirpa Vuori) and the Water Bar during the event gala were well received. Our collaboration with Tea was smooth and were kindly supported by Thomas Berra. I particularly enjoyed the energy we channeled during the 6h Water Bar session. I completely lost myself to the work and we moved around our bar-table in unison – Staying concentrated on our individual tasks: Preparing cocktails from water which bar customers prompted from us. I think we served over 20 liters of drinks (half of which was from the Poukama spring).

Here is a recipe for Moon Mist which was one of the most coveted drink (Discarded Gravestone with Salt did well too). Moon Mists is the taste of the moon crust as it is presented on Geology of the Moon article. We used 2g of substance per 1l water (Carbonated with 65 bars of pressure to illustrate a spacecrafts entry on Earth). The mount feel was sandy.

  • Quartz stone powder (as a supply for silica) 50%
  • Soda-can tab shavings (Aluminum) 24%
  • Limestone (Chalk) 15%
  • Steel tool flakes (Iron) 7%
  • Hit of Magnesium oxide 7%
  • Touch of Titanium white paint (Titanium) 1%
  • Hint of Sodium oxide 1%

We also served: Tap from Genova (Multia spring seasoned with a big chunk of copper), Poukama Spring (raw unfiltered wild water), Faux S. Pellegrino (recipe here), Finlandia Hall Carrara (marble powder from Finlandia hall with Faux S. P.), Wäinö Aaltonen Travertine (travertine from Wäinö Aaltonen museum wall with Faux S. P.), Berlin Wall Carbonated (Ppowdered Berlin Wall with Faux S. P. and salt), Ammonoidea in Limestone (fossil powder with with Faux S. P. and chalk), Sokos Hotel Puijonsarvi Tap, Private Home on the Rocks, Distilled ’n Chilled and Discarded Gravestone with Salt

Also participated in a TAIKE seminar on Performance as Public Art (my contribution is available as a recording ) and before your shows I gave a short interview for Yle. (Edit:  I was told that spring-water restoration was discussed in Savon Sanomat in 17.11.20 and 22.11.20) A busy production and an intensive week. Currently working for Aalto university with Tina Madsen. We are teaching a course called Art, Environment, Education and has little over ten participants. Feels nice to teach. We will be experimenting with Deep Listening next week (as defined by Pauline Oliveros).

Mark Fisher: Capitalist Realism (2019) Philosophy Guy. An easygoing video for staying on track with communist fantasy.

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20201020

Listened to James Bridle New Ways Of Seeing (2019) which “reimagines John Berger’s Ways of Seeing”. Felt like an throwback to the past glory days of media-art. Some interesting new stuff too, like terra0 the cybernetic forest (by Paul Seidler, Paul Kolling & Max Hampshire). Their modular, open-source framework is available on Github. The project is affiliated with Moneylab, which is fun as I just helped to stream an event related to it at Oodi. Bridle’s presentation is stuck on gaze. He repeats numerously (and in numerous ways) that seeing is knowing: That by gaining a view to the inner-working of a system, we could overcome its effect on us. I don’t share this optimism. Knowing is not power: Power is power, and the power to employ is the Power.

I’ve visited the Kurängen spring (60.288403,25.214754) area twice after the first visit. We found a wooden-frame which has been build to protect the spring opening (mentioned here). I cleaned the foundation of the spring by removing plant life from the bottom and leaves from the top. Found gray clay in the bottom soil. Could it be used for pottery? While cleaning, the clay tainted the spring-pond, which revealed the exact location where water is gushing out. An incredible site. It’s mentioned on the Helsinki city database of natural resources.

Preparing the Encountering Taste performance with Tea Andreoletti. Preparations are fun and have progressed steadily. Interviewed Sirpa Vuori a Kuopio resident who was witnessed the decay of city springs from 1988 onwards. Spotted her from an interview on Savon Sanomat (Kuopion kaupunki mylläsi lähteensä, 03.03.2014). During our interview I got a detailed witness account of the destruction of the Linnanpelto spring and a thorough mapping of past spring usage by city residents. A small detail:  Her neighbor had a sealed document granting her the right to use the Linnanpelto spring as a supply. The neighbor had received this document when resettling to Kuopio from the north (as a refugee). Suvi from Anti festival got her hands on a great document Lähteet Kuopiossa (2011) Teppo Tossavainen which offer a technical view to the springs. She visited many of the sites mentioned in the survey and it appears that the Poukama Spring is the only one left.

Digging Filament 1 (2007) Sachiko M and planning to modify my Arturia Keystep following Toms Jensens Janko Project 00 guide (also on Thingiverse). Sourced parts for a diy Norns build (the PCB is from Pusherman) but I don’t have time to commit to the build.

Got a temporary teaching gig at Aalto and bought Cobra Biker Hook Jac-Dingo boots from a Finnish manufacture Boot Factory run by Pekka Lahti.

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20200831

Visited the Kurängen spring area (~60.2885,25.2120) and collected a few liters of water. We couldn’t locate a wooden edge-structure mentioned in the Helsingin … julkaisuja 17/2013 survey (pg.8) but there were a lot of clean ponds and some build structures in the area we explored. A knee high π shaped marker stood still in a dry pond. It had been assembled using Torx screws which dates the structure to later then ~2010 . A big pond close by offered the cleanest water we could find. It was odorless and had a yellowish hue. In a taste test (compared to Faux S.Pellegrino & tap water) the Kurängen water had a mellow tone which is possibly due to iron in the soil (alkaline?). Comparing the color of tap water with a glass of Kurängen is like comparing a 5000k lamp to 2700k lamp. Tap water looks sterile. I’m hoping to use the Kurängen water in upcoming mineral water performances in Helsinki (Mad House & Kiasma esitys_nyt). The https://kartta.hel.fi/ city map service service shows multiple “water holes” and “basins” in the region. The service uses ┴ symbol for water holes (Ascii code 193). There are two interesting sites to explore further 60.286063, 25.206394  and the other is deeper in the forest 60.287891, 25.204271 (I think this is the area we visited).

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20200826

Pasila district bicycle-routes are under development thanks to a spree of tweets by bicycle activists. In the aftermath of the station rebuild (a process which I don’t understand) a “penalty-lap” glitch in the bicycle route design came to light. It is a silly glitch, a monument to the top-down ethos of Helsinki planning. Cyclist who could previously speed along a straight and safe line following the train tracks were forced to take two hard turns on a hilltop below the station. A campaign started immediately after the route was reopened and heated complaints on the #penaltylap #sakkokierros were send directly to Helsinki City officials. Officials responded flamboyantly by announcing the development of a temporary cycling bridge which would restore the old straight lane.

This is the first time I’ve seen tweets develop infrastructure and it feels that the process was guided by the voter-market-logic. The bridge is a monument for social media influencer culture: The Influencer Bridge. As the penalty-lap situation is solved, the speed of the cyclists will now interface with the pace of pedestrians who are departing the Pasila station towards east, students of the Haaga-Helia school and visitors of the Helsinki fair center. The direct lane will benefit riders who are passing Pasila outside of rush hours.

Maybe a more sustainable option would have been to redesign the route leading to the Saparonpolku track underneath path (the tunnel facing the Haaga-Helia) so that cyclist approaching it from the north could reach it easily and pass the Pasila station underneath it (skipping the Ratapihantie hill altogether).

Build six AllFlesh Landscape clones using Neutrik jacks and 1mm fiberglass PCBs. Ultra durable and lovable! Using them to trigger samples from the Disting Mk4 and for touch control over filter parameters. Trying to workout the kinks of my Water Lab for NPTurku. I’ve wired up a side-chain style compressor to adjust the A-119 preamp output. The system has a weird volume drop issue which I’m struggling to solve. The performance planning is progressing steadily. I wish I had two more weeks to reorientate from a recent teaching gig and the workload from before. A speedy development phase is bad for building confidence on intuition as a creative resource.

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20200803

The world is a tea: The taste of water is the taste of the world. #ॐ

Digging Onyx Ashanti’s 2019 presentation for Eyeo festival. He wants to turn computerizing into a spatial and temporal activity. As an interface he focuses on hands, because “they do stuff before asking the brain”. He echoes a believe that humans can be programmed trough the hand-interface: The tools we use shape the way we think. I believe there is truth to this. I feel rejuvenated after working with crafts projects or construction. I think writing is a development of our desire to do thinking with our hands. Ashanti’s interest on hands has a solid connection to Tetsuo Kogawa/mini-FM transmitter stuff (mentioned earlier) as both artists are using gesture-based wireless systems.

LOW←TECH MAGAZINE is operated from a solar powered server. Access to the site is depended on weather! The design of site is perfect: Brutal and bandwidth efficient. The premise of the design is the same as with our Ore.e Ref. website (notes on the design here) but the LOW←TECH implementation of image dithering and coding optimization is way more advanced. Their design premise: “Default typeface / No logo” is elegant and they also offer “print-on-demand copies of the blog.”

The Internet is not an autonomous being. Its growing energy use is the consequence of actual decisions made by software developers, web designers, marketing departments, publishers and internet users. With a lightweight, off-the-grid solar-powered website, we want to show that other decisions can be made.

Installed an alternative firmware (Beta3) by Ralim to my ts80p soldering iron. Sending bug/testing notes to the [Long] TS80P Thread development channel. Soldering iron with an alternative firmware and a development community feels like the pinnacle of modernity.

Visited the Makamik squat for the Makamik-fest. The artist lineup was great and there were gigs and performances for three consecutive days. I heard a few gigs on Saturday and visited Salla Valle’s performance on Sunday. Valle worked outdoors and focused on smoke. She hid in the grass and send smoke signals by vaping, then she attempted to store smoke in jars (critique on live-art archivism?) and played a ringtone/mating call mixtape.

We had our final Achille Mbembe reading group session last week. The process was well organized and I enjoyed meeting new people. As a side quest, we met with the Helsinki based group, at the Malmi cemetery for a necro-touristic tour. I escorted folk to the pear-tree garden, a concrete-fence-stage and a relocated mass grave. The visit ended at the discarded gravestone disposal facility, where we saw old gravestones which had been grinded into rubble. Some fragments of letters and numbers could still be identified. The rubble pile felt like a monument and a very fitting summary for the Mbembe reading group sessions: Rubble mesh of identity signs which is used for construction and the underpayment of roads.