Posted on

20221029

The Evening of Artificial Spring Water Tasting at the Finnish-British Society r.y. turned out great. Tuukka Asplund was a welcoming host and the audience of the event open to encountering taste.  People shared their drinking water related memories and tasting histories. We explored in-house waters which were collected from two different tap of the building. To my surprise people experienced the kitchen tap to be more refreshing then the toilet tap water. As I learned from Tea during a previous performance, the toilet tap usually supplies fresher water then the kitchen tap. This is due to the frequent flushing, which constantly clean the pipes. Moving water is fresh – We gotta keep moving. The evening folded into a comfortable seminar, a chamber presentation of sorts. I ended up detailing my activities at the Kurängen Spring (I had brought with two of the carbonization / mineral extraction tool displays built  last month) and opening the waterworks relationship to land-art conservation, which is a topic I’ve not yet explored publicly.

Joined Outi’s blessing ceremony today. The priest conducting the blessing asked us to foster “good speech” as an opposition to “hate speech”. The ceremony was held in a church, from where we were led to restaurant Kosmos by the Bad Ass Brass Band. It felt great to dance in their trail. It was raining and we formed a bicycle bock of the parade with other wheeled friends. A fitting rite to commemorate Outi’ life and legacy. I will keep the mourning flag at the Ore.e Ref. site for a week still.

Posted on

20221003

Money isn’t power but the lack of it is a symptom for the lack of it. Having worked as an assistant for many artists, I know that wethey often make drastic decisions at the very last minute. In my role as an assistant preparing exhibitions, I grew accustomed to this and would expect Outi Heiskanen to alter exhibition designs right as the museum doors opened. I served as a shield and muscle. As the museum directors met guests at the gate, we swapped the placement of art in the halls. We did this more then once.

I assumed they did this to feel alive: Being relieved of stress feels great and creatives are addicted to it. Perhaps we are afraid that art does not feel like anything and fill this void with adrenalin. A drastic last minute change is also an artists power-grab. Because our societal impact is low, we take the power which is left for us to grab. Exactly when others are most dependent on us: At the very last minute, at the opening while people are attempting to make sense of what they see.

I  think that the emerging-passing generalistshamanist, soft religious and cult aesthetic trend which artists (myself included) are inspired by, is an effort to reclaim power. Artist are becoming fantasy shamans or diy-alchemists, not necessarily to submit themselves to an another domain of reasoning but to re-establish the artist mythos of past (which never existed): We are trying to become vessels for spiritual affairs because articulated forms of power elude us.

This is not a bad thing but it is symptomatic and possibly works against our efforts to self-organize. Cult’s seldom have more then one leader. Also such aesthetics remain very sensitive to appropriation.

Posted on

20210317

p3rm46r4ff171 carvings have been executed successfully. Together with Jesse, we managed to produce a little above 45 tags to the Kannistonkallio quarry. Most graffiti we worked on was at ground level, some were reached by climbing and others from the top of the hill. Sizes varied, most text and images being below a meter in heigh and spanning one to three meters. We used mostly chisels and a few outlines were made with an angle grinder. Some stylistic experiments with steel rods were made too. We are currently preparing to print an image of the graffiti for the Performing the Fringe exhibition. There is also a plan to publish some teasers on the Pori Art Museum instagram. Here is a low resolution video showing highlights. Music is by tyops.

Ruosniemi hills are located 7km north-east from the Pori centre. There are a few Bronze Age constructions in the area such as the Ruosniemi metsasarat burial mounts. A corner of the hills called Kannistonkallio (38m high) was established as a quarry in the 1920ties. Granite from the site was used for the construction of the Pori bridge (completed in 1926). During the Continuation War German troops operating in Finland forced Soviet war prisoners to work the mine and to produce material for an expansion of the Pori Airport. After the war the quarry was used by the city for producing gravel and an entrepreneur manufactured pavement at the site. Local kids stole dynamite from the quarry storages and practised ski jumping on the hills.

Some time in the 80ties the pit which the mining operations produced filled with water and became a popular swimming site. The pond is known as “Ankkalampi” (Duckpond) and it is believed that the water seeps from a groundwater source. Crabs and fish have been planted to the pond. The quarry is mentioned in the Geological Survey of Finland database and photographs of the Ruosniemen sepelilouhos are dated to before 1996. Some texts in the current graffiti date the writings to 1987. Illustrations and texts are spread along the over 100m long hill edge. In 2018 a pair entrepreneurs established a outdoor centre called FinnDome to the site. FinnDome houses guest in dome-shelters close to the pond.

The selection of graffiti we engraved was based on intuition and we worked independently to cover the vast area. Initially I was inspired to engrave texts which were made to hard to reach locations. Engraving text to hard to reach spots was a way of connecting with the original authors. In some cases I didn’t engrave texts because the spot had required tremendous courage to reach. I wanted to leave them undisturbed. The majority of the texts we wrote are names and nicknames like ana, anzu, eero, erno, hanna, lepis, limppu, miia, niina, riikka, tero and so on. There was a considerable amount of love confessions and some like emmi <3 samppa got engraved. Others were left untouched because fading-love can be a beautiful process.

Looking at photos from the site most of the graffiti we engraved were written in plain handwriting and a significant portion are names of girls. We were also motivated in engraving asemic utters like pippui, oky-mus-porkka and odd illustrations. Some might have initially been parts of longer texts which had eroded over time. Some focus was also given to proto-global graffiti signs such as zeni, zlim and hamp. These sound like something kids born in the eighties might imagine rappers saying (I threw a tag which read zikke around -93, it was written so that it could be read as zakke and derived from my old name Sakke). The letter Z is exotic for the Finnish language.

We also engraved brand names such as hilux, bimmer (and possibly JAPA). In this context, it felt like the authors had written them as prays of sorts. Or perhaps social pressure had forced the authors to produce brand names instead of opinions. The shape of the quarry formed an opening with two distinct stages. The setting invited a dramatic reading of the original texts. It felt like the original authors had channeled deep feels. There were some crude markings and signs which showed that the authors had been working with their haterade, fears and desires. To reach some spots the authors have performed life-threatening climbs.

I think the audience we made this work for does not resite in our time. The audience we worked for occupies a beautiful ruin, where everything we currently posses has been assembled into piles. This landscape affords them novel tools which surface periodically from the ground. The tools are yielded for unimaginable purposes. I think this audience is what we have been working for when we’ve framed various Ore.e Ref. activities as an “archaeology of the future”. We investigate today as a remain and imagine our stuff from the perspective of an other intelligence. This speculative intelligence is not of our own invention. They are folk of the Pensastuulikansa (Bushwindpeople) as defined by Outi Heiskanen and they don’t live in a particular time. They merge occasionally in the form of good humour (with no joke).

Outi was a kid during the second world war and witnessed how scarcity turned her mother into a craftsperson. Outi’s mother could, for example manufacture soap from anything. Making “soap from anything” is the most innovative practice I can dream of. I think with Jesse, we imagine that the audience we are reaching out to, are folk who have developed mindsets, which afford them skills to use the tools and materials they discover from their surroundings, beyond the semiotic functions these items are currently assigned. A possibility for semiotic reconfigurations has been discussed before during the Performing the Fringe excursions and the process is presented as a core strategy of the Crusaders’ School of Pure Humour Without Joke.

Playing with semantic changes was typical of the Crusader School, as was the unclear delineation of events that grew out of one person’s spontaneous idea and was then developed and variegated by the entire community. In their openness – in terms of both authorship and chronological delimitation – they are happenings in the purest sense of the word, although this term is rarely applied to the Crusaders’ activities.

In our case, the folk of the Pensastuulikansa will be able to read the engravings and make sense or assign meaning to them.

The quarry can be found at Liitostie 92, Pori. 61.50567, 21.87771.

Posted on

20210225

They, a recovering survivalist with limited means, were halted at the border control and tasked to polish their gems for an inspection. Being smart about it they had already disposed, or digested rather the stolen ones before entry and yielded only proper fossils on their wrists. There might have been some crumbs left from the stolen ones but not enough to reveal whose they were. Fake skin bubbles in metal crusts flew past at astonishing speeds and the border officer would have had to shout into the noise to be heard. Not that it mattered, they knew the questions and how to answer, or deliver rather and begun the recitation.

– “All stones are of the same age”. They started.
– “All stones are of the same age, to you” the officer replied in a shallow exhale.
– “Back way back when, when folk still dusted cow brain peels with silver and children sat in silence watching light pass them. A promise was made that a figure would appear which would lead us to a glorious death. I’m a bearer of the peels and the glues.” They handed in their documents and took a step back.
– “I’m a bearer of the peels and the glues, to you” the inspector murmured and performed the stamps.

Both were pleased that the ceremony went easy and so they continued to the queue, waited for their tools and then headed to the antibiotic hills. The work was hard, as expected and drilling took its toll. They proceeded mining through rubble and junk, passing layers of old newspapers but were wise enough not to waste time reading any. Remembering what Outi Heiskanen had told them, that text is not supposed to be read. It is meant to line the edges of the pit, so that it does not cave in.

A gem, which at night returned to them by means of interior circulation, reminded them of a happy summer night. After a glass of wine Heiskanen had asked out loud “Tell me, how do you build a house?”. They remembered replying something, knowing it was irrelevant as Heiskanen knew the only answer: “You start digging… In a day or two a man comes by and they will tell you that you are not doing it right. Then quickly, challenge them and hand them your tools. Go to lunch and wait for the house to be completed. Like this, have a look“.

They had studied the material but doubted that they were building a house now. If they were, the shape of the construction was such that nothing imaginable could survive in it. Unfortunately for them, they were working too close to the shape to see that it was inverted. If they had taken a step back, they would have observed that their efforts were producing a quarry which would eventually serve as a casting mold of the Pori bridge. But they were too concentrated on finding tiny antibiotic particles. The medicine was contained in the droppings of privileged pets of the past. Beasts which had been medicated by high tier professionals of glory days. If the blue rim, surrounding a pile were to be scraped off successfully and digested, it could heal them.

They spend their days working and nights waiting to work. Genuine starlight blessed them trough the ceiling wrinkles of the bubble dome shelter. Having spend two cold days in the pit they spotted the hardend remains of a past miner and a shameless exploration of their dried out dun led to an astonishing discovery. To everyone’s surprise they had breached into a sediment where antibiotics could also be found in the droppings of pet owners! And so they began to scrape around the remains, expecting a glimmering blue rim to appear. They were not discouraged by the sulphuric fumes. Amongst their kin, outlining corpses with furious labor efforts was the highest sign of respect. This kept them working diligently and to top it all, if they had understood Heiskanen correctly, their life would get better soon.

They is Ore.e Refineries (est. 2007) and they offer mineral water made from quarry graffiti (2021). This text is available as a vector-graphic.

Posted on

20210125

Eco-National Discourse and the Case of the Finnhorse (2014) Nora Schuurman & Jopi Nyman. The article points to a striking position Suomen Hippos ry (The Finnish Trotting and Breeding Association) made “[…] SWOT analysis of the Finnhorse as a brand […] sees the potential rise of nationalism as an opportunity: ‘If national phenomena will become a trend, the Finnhorse may also become a trend’ (Suomen Hippos 2008a.)”. I think the article can be read as an expose of the nationalistic agenda rooted in the Suomen Hippos ry organization. A discourse of Raceless-Horse Culture is due.

It has also been suggested that although equestrian culture enables flexible gender identities, it reproduces the traditional agrarian model of a hard working woman. Strong, even ‘masculine’ bodies are seen as physical capital among women who ride, as opposed to the urban feminine ideal.

The dominant version of Finnish self‐understanding, while outmoded yet guiding contemporary interpretations, as [Ari] Jääskeläinen points out, sees the nation as consisting of ‘soldiers, pioneers, and agrarians’ and was produced originally for the needs of the Swedish Empire in the eighteenth century.

This discourse of nationalism carries over to the contemporary documents, which place the Finnhorse explicitly in the context of nation, defining its Finnishness as one of the central characteristics in its internationalising brand (Suomen Hippos). In the general descriptions of the breed in these documents, the Finnhorse is defined as ‘genuine’, ‘unique’, ‘native’, ‘the national horse’, and ‘Finland’s only native breed’ (Suomen Hippos).

The relationship between the Finnhorse and the Finn of the text is also gendered: while the traditional stereotype of the Finnish male is that of a silent man who expresses his emotions by doing rather than by speaking, the relationship with the Finnhorse provides an otherwise sanctioned outlet for expressing emotions and care.

The article also offers an analysis of contemporary nationalistically geared horse themed schlagers (to which the Trans-Horse playlist offers great contrast). The publication is a part of the Companion Animals and the Affective Turn: Reconstructing the Human-Horse Relationship in Modern Culture – CONIMAL. 2011 – 2015 project.

I’ve been building sm-artwatches for a while by attaching pretty items to wristwatch straps. One watch has a wooded (gilded) frame with a fragment of a print by Outi Heiskanen, one has a fossil (which I also used as mineral supplement in performances), one has a coin from 1865 (10 Penniä) and one has spokes which I can attach fruits to (it’s measuring decay-time). This artistic interest has slowly evolved to an developing intrest in real watches and I now own three Casio wristwatches (One is fake, which is cool too). I bought the newest one on tori.fi for 2 euros, because I want to modify its inner workings: Casio W-800H mod.

I’m also curios of the illustrations found in the IED TRIGGER RECOGNITION GUIDE document (U.S. military or Department of Defense). The “Casio Watch Timer with Opto-Isolator” might be interesting to study as a circuit. I’d like to use the circuit to schedule electric shocks to myself.

A list of Ethical Open Source Licenses collected by the Ethical Source Movement (here is a list of the source criteria for software). Could work for other design too. I think emphasis on ecology should be added too. Perhaps something in lines of Permacomputing (2020) as defined by Ville-Matias “Viznut” Heikkilä.

[…] computers have been failing their utopian expectations. Instead of amplifying the users’ intelligence, they rather amplify their stupidity. Instead of making it possible to scale down the resource requirements of the material world, they have instead become a major part of the problem. Instead of making the world more comprehensible, they rather add to its incomprehensibility. And they often even manage to become slower despite becoming faster.

Computer systems should also make their own inner workings as observable as possible. If the computer produces visual output, it would use a fraction of its resources to visualize its own intro- and extrospection. A computer that communicates with radio waves, for example, would visualize its own view of the surrounding radio landscape.