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20220412

Visited the Tuulensuun lähteikkö [Windmouth Spring Opening] in Vantaa (N=6685977.209, E=386036.606). It flows to Krakanoja (ditch) and further to Vantaan river and is featured in Vantaan virtavesiselvitys [Vantaa Current Flow] (2010) Aki Janatuinen. It’s the same site which Tea visited to collect water for the artwork they presented at the Huokoinen ele exhibition in Artsi. The spring opening is located at the east bank of the Krakantie living area, in a small forest behind a Lidl, a highway and apartment buildings. A very urban site. I accessed the water via an abandoned well and accidental dropped some soil to the spring while prying the lid, so the taste was a bit muddy. A rough translation from the document offers details of the site.

The spring opening is an 1x1m open pool, surrounded by a 5x5m mossy & wet swampy patch. The water in the pool is clear and around it you will find ten separate spring vortexes which move the sand on the spring base. The water was 7,1°C degrees even when the temperature outdoors was 20°C. This spring opening is the finest and most valuable site discovered during the survey and unlike other sites which were observed, the water is clear. Northeast of it, there is a well (constructed on top of a spring) and the water from these sites forms a very valuable nature site (also including a separate small wet patch to the east). The entire area might include rare plants and insects, which are specific to the spring habitat. The spring is “natural”. Northeast of it is a “sister-spring” which has been made into a well. The well might be threatened by construction as the area is designated for apartments. Building initiatives could have an impact on the “natural” spring opening and the Krakenoja area which depends on their flow.

Beyond the Flesh and the Real (2020) Morgan. A cyberpunk-transsexual celebration of vocoders as an emancipatory technology. Spotted the article via the sacred cyborg harmony script release thread on llllllll.

We reshape our flesh at will – at least, within the limits of our position within racial capitalism and our ability to navigate Byzantine healthcare systems set up to murder us – and in this way we are the most obvious manifestation of modernity, or so the argument goes. As Preciado has more than amply demonstrated in Testo Junkie, cis people chemically and surgically alter their genders just as much as trans people do, but of course their participation in the pharmacopornographic regime doesn’t attract the same fascination and revulsion.

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20210409

Learning from the Virus (2020) Paul B. Preciado. I read the article as a plead to prioritize social and existential diversity in the face of a body flattening pandemic. Diversity has to be activity performed because societies are faced my enormous pressures by the constant surveillance executed by cyber-conservative forces (professors and priests peeping into my bedroom using the Zoom.app — We should explore the kink potential of this arrangement!). The text introduces a lot of fun terms such as “pharmacopornographic” and “cyber-oral”, which references a form of post-internet literacy. “We must go from a forced mutation to a chosen mutation.” Preciado calls and I fear I spot an accelerationist tone (but agree).

We are still in the throes of the transition from a written to a cyber-oral society, from an industrial to an immaterial economy, from a form of disciplinary and architectural control to forms of microprosthetic and media-cybernetic control. In other writings, I’ve used the term pharmacopornographic for this type of management and production of the body as well as to describe the political technologies that produce sexual subjectivity within this new configuration of power and knowledge. […] I use the term pornographic because these management techniques function no longer through the repression and prohibition of sexuality, but through the incitement of consumption and the constant production of a regulated and quantifiable pleasure. The more we consume and the better our health, the better we are controlled.

I’m under a ridiculous workload.  Ridiculous, as in I can only respond to it with a strange smile and the work evades attempts to structure it. It comes like a stealth bomber. Seems like rescheduled events from the past year (or two) are being organized during the next month. These zombie-events come with weird hybrid-baggage. Some talks are organized online but thanks to a recent drop in death counts, there is an interest to organize events face-to-face too. So, there are always two events organized. Performers execute a face-to-face performance bundled into online-performances, wrapped into publications. Working double time space! I’m not worried about a burn-out… I’m morbidly curious as to what shape it will take.

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20160923

A more detailed reading of Angel Archer’s article “Botline bling” opened a new trail of thought concerning the anthropocene and post- / trans-humanistic sexuality. Dorothy Howard looks at sex, hyperreality and the politics of intimacy in “Loving machines: A de-anthropocentric view of intimacy“. The writer also investigates the deep emotional relations we form with technologies (We sleep with our screens). Paul B. Preciado’s “Contrasexual Manifesto (Excerpt)” explores sexuality and gender as capitalistic tools aimed for exploitation of the others (If I understand it correctly). “Queer Atonality” by Alexander R. Galloway seeks to build awareness on how the usage of queer terminology and methodologies is being appropriated by various (normative) academic disciplines and used in political rhetorics. He approaches the theme through an analysis of “The Molecularization of Sexuality: On Some Primitivisms of the Present” article written by Jordana Rosenberg.

Rosenbergs article is pretty complicated. It is critical towards Object Oriented Ontologies as “object-ontologies are origin narratives not just because they are compelled to project forms of ‘ancestralness’, but more specifically, because they exchange frictionlessly between two sets of seemingly opposed orientations – origins and prognostication. Object ontologies, in other words, cast a twin temporal shadow: the ancestral and the futural. Or, the primitive and the brink.” The author continues: “[…] the ontological turn reiterates a version of this settler rationality, borrowing – or, rather, capsizing – a set of arguments from queer studies in order to grasp biology as a kind of sheer queerness (or, aleatoriness) that enshrines a primitive/brink temporal logic while appearing nonnormative and in some fundamental way resistant to the demands of capitalism’s logics of time, discipline, and subject-formation.”