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20201213

I remember being angry in 2012 because it felt like our performance with Hanna and Pietari, The Heroes of Art was not getting the traction it deserved. I talked about it to Jussi who calmed me down by asking: “Why do you care about museums so much? Don’t you have more important things to attend to?”. This made me aware that if I really wanted to renew  institutions, the best response would be to work on and with, the ones which accept me as I am. I think he was urging me to invest more effort to Tehdas Ry. Jussi wasn’t calling for me to “cancel” museums, just to ignore them. This made me a healthier artist.

I was reminded of this when reading The Strongest Reactions to the Philip Guston Show’s Postponement Miss Two Key Points. Here’s What They Are—and Why They Matter (2020) by Ben Davis. He identifies two phenomenons which hinder museums capacity to respond: “Context Collapse” meaning that the “professional art discourse don’t center the ‘cultural conversation’ anymore; the trending social media conversation clearly dominates. ” which leads to the “original intention” of an exhibition to be is “easily overwritten.” The other hindrance he identifies is “Paranoid Reading” a style of “interpretation in which, no matter the object at hand, the exposure of its secret negative side would recur as the main point of interpretation.” The term is credited to Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading (1997) Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick.

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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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20200325

Schools are closed and kids are taught trough the web. Domestic spaces are used for remote classes and parents are made into web-technicians (I use 4-5hours a day to help in school work). Turns out our society is operated by google and microsoft. All kids have been assigned email addresses and are expected to use the ms-office365 suite and different google services. This is a really sad and shameful turnout. There are open source alternatives to all of the services the kids need and nothing to stop schools from using them. ms and google stuff is just as complicated to use. Corporations are using this situation to unashamedly establish their services as the infrastructure of all social and work related interactions.

Also turns out schools are absolutely obsessed with quantifiable results. This situation is teaching kids to perform school as a series of questionnaires and online presence which does not involve interaction. They are essentially learning to fake working. Schools in Finland should back down on their desire to “keep the kids in schools” during these times. Schools, with big class sizes and mass curriculum’s don’t really work for online learning. Learning online happens best when a student is given the liberty to decide how they pace their work and allowed to set their own goals. The schools current strategy of maintaining daily presence trough online services (ms/google) is hindering learning possibilities. Technically savvy families get the “faking working” experience with virtual punched cards and online meetings which are organized for the sake of having meetings, while other families are dropped out.

How can I help in this situation? I’ve written feedback to the schools and the Ministry of Education and Culture about the situation and asked them to give families more liberties in pacing school work. I don’t think my critique of the situation has any impact. Unfortunately it seems that our modern, corporation reliant, mass-society is combating these challenges by evolving to an even more modern and more controlled organization. This is a really bad strategy: Mass culture has no future, evolving into a surveillance society (which focuses on quantifiable performances) should not be an option. I don’t think my critique will be heard because citizens are using mostly social medias as a platform for organizing and voicing their concerns. It really feels one has to be a member of a corporation (though fb/twitter) to be a part of society! Why is our society allowing this to happen?

Pietari made a strong critique of the tone of a recent Kone foundation grant procedure. I agree with him: This crisis should not be made into a creative project and this crisis does not bring about an opportunity for change. Change happens after a crisis, when people feel secure enough to voice their fears and desires. Crisis only teaches people how to survive a crisis (or how to suffer) but it does not change people. Change requires resources, time and research. Rushing it causes people to retreat to established models. Which is why a call to use a crisis as an force to drive personal development feels like a hostile act. Why isn’t anyone offering their support for arts unconditionally? This would be a really good time for such a gesture.

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Easternational* (noun)

/ˈiːstənˈnæʃ(ə)nəl/

  1. Mobility and cultural activity between people and organizations that operate in European and West-Asian countries, which is deterrioralized by the shivering of the iron curtain (“No, it’s not about the money. Frieze London is of little interest to me and wines in Chișinău are much better. I’m more of an Easternational Artist”).
  2. Kinship manifested by people whose histories and present identities are deeply affected by the fall of Constantinople.
  3. Easternational Philosophy: A fringe of philosophical understanding which is know for a forthright critique of phenomenons of “development and progress”. It is rooted on the framework and lived experience of collapse as a state of being (best manifested by survivors of Chernobyl disaster). As a sociological investigation it studies guild caused by desires which could not be manifested (due to collapse). (“I never even wanted to have a microwave”).

* Term coined in a discussion with Andrej Polukord during the Performing the Fringe event in Stockholm. Moldovian views to contemporary easternational condition on Pietaris (new) blog atomipuutarha.blogspot.com (Finnish).

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20190325

Late-capitalistic public transportation etiquette advocates that traveller’s moving without tickets are granted unblocked view to the tram stops, so that they may identify ticket inspectors.

All passages obligated by the inspectors to present their tickets should work to do so very slowly, to give peers traveling without tickets time to escape.

Ticket inspectors who are camouflaged (without uniforms) can be identified because the move in pairs and are accompanied by bulky guards.

Digging Pietaris broadcast which reports on the Finnish war and cold war period cultural policy with Maija Koskinen (in Finnish) Kylmä sota jylläsi Suomessa – Yhdysvallat voitti Neuvostoliiton pehmeässä infovaikuttamisessa (2019).