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20170427

Cute short on the state of affairs between Art & Politics: Best Friends Forever (2017) by Liu Shiyuan and Kristian Mondrup.

Revisiting Greener Grass (2010) by Mari Keski-Korsu. Today the work is even more relevant.

Visited Arttu Merimaas’ Grandfather’s Leather Club exhibition at Sinne gallery. It is great. Thanks to the Cruel Radiance… course we hosted I got an updated view to his art and with this insight the exhibition felt like a warm handshake. The pieces were critically materialistic but optimistic. Instead of making crude suggestions (as seen in the Autochthonic Fantasy) he displayed queer fearytail aesthetics with faint references to public monuments in Helsinki. There were horse pictures too! After Sinne I visited Hippolyte for Pekka Niskanen & Robert Aeberhard Sounds That Shouldn’t Be There. I read it as a sacrifice on the grave of modernism.

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20161215

They want us to use our bodies as keys. Fingerprints and iris scanners open doors.

The Cruel Radiance of What Is course came to an end. My last teaching gig was on Monday but all of the students skipped class! Only 2-4 students attended the course in general so their absence didn’t feel like a protest. People who joined the kettlebell workout were really delighted of the style of teaching I’m currently into. We met with Mikko, Miina & Arttu and two students yesterday for our final joined meeting. We ended up talking chop but the event was fun.

Visited Perfo performance event in Tampere on Thursday. Saw performances by Asko Nivala (a “failed Hannibal Lecter” / meet-is-murder cabaret), Suvi Suvereeni (a very fluid collaboration with Siri the intelligent personal assistant. A low key, personal approach to the technology yielded revelations on how the technology perceives us!), Tuuli Tuikka (an anti-art & anti-capitalism manifest on how nature and creative experiences are commodified. She shredded and packaged a flower into plastic containers) and Joulumaa (a four member noise ensemble doing a faux-ritualistic, holistic noise show. The sounds were too orchestrated for my taste and their stage work came of as flamboyant. I did get to see a 16 channel mixer being used as a percussion instrument, which is a novel sight).

After the festival I chatted with Janne Rahkila about rejoining the Perfo crew for next year. I’d continue working with the streaming system.. I’m hesitant about the gig. I don’t believe in live-video streams anymore. Perhaps I should make interviews of the artists as text and brief synopses of their performances instead. Also met with Timo Bredenberg and we had the last meeting of our “In the Flow” (Groys 2016) reading circle (some ideas in the book are useful but the authors style is too tandy).

I’m now preparing for a grant award event at the Taidehalli. I got a “The Young Artist Grant” from the Finnish Art Society. Also got a techo gig (with a workout theme) for next years Kontula Electronic. I’ll likely be joined by Kristian Ekholm (and Pietari if he finds the time. I haven’t talked about this with him yet). Also got news from Antoine that our Trans-Horse proposal for Signal festival is being processed by the production crew.

Uplifting news all around.

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20161109

I’m happy to see the world burn. In 2002 I made a watercolour for my friend Kalle Salonen in celebration of the end of his military service (and short career as army staff). I wrote a poem into the picture too. The poem speaks of a wall which is being build. It will cover the world and we’ll be caught inside. Towards the end people will gather around faint fires, which will warm us like wetting our pants. Donald Trump’s presidency will change what is understood as “a Trumpet”. Brassy music for our last post.

Met with “The Cruel Radiance of What Is” course teacher crew (Arttu&Miina and Mikko) to finalise our schedules and plans. The course is build in a poetic tone. The educational acts we’ll engage with the students resemble performance art pieces. Instead of pumping students with facts or developing specific creative skills, participants will be invited to think about “stuff” which inspires them and build artistic agency in relation and about “stuff”.

“As part of the modern capitalist society music is in danger of perishing in random samples, data, markets, instrumentation patterns, institutions and computer nets, or of suffocating in the gigantic tautological machinery of the media industry, that continuously sends back the opinions of the masses, that they, as media, formulated.We need music that is the differential, that neither compromises or thinks of surrender, but carries on even in the shadow and disguise like the guerrilla fighters and draws active disappearing lines in the fields of society. We need music that is a labyrinth, a rich ensemble of relations; diversity, heterogeneity, breaks, unexpected links and long monotonies. It is the vision of a life that opens the ways and allows the horizon of resistance to light up.”

Writes Dror Feiler in MUSIC, SOUNDS, GARBAGE, NOISE and POLITICS post from 2009.

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20161108

Burning Man at Google lecture by Fred Turner explains how companies like Google foster (and capitalize) creativity and a sense of community using architecture, mailing lists and other nasty schemes. Turner argues that engineers and coders are the primus motors of social change and culture (like artists and poets were in the past). The talk makes it easier to understand what artist/facilitators like Andrew Gryf Paterson are after with their work- and talkshop activities. Technology (and art) is a tool for social (re)organization. It is made and used to express desires. The talk also discusses the growing role of self-reliance (and how survivalism is related to it). “Vocational ecstasy” (Ideological work) is also an interesting concept. It describes a creative mode people can arrive to when working in teams on creative tasks. Individual egos fade away through joined unpaid labor and participants feel transferred something else (work on modular technology is key in the experience).

I’ve been trying to motivate myself into editing Horse Porsche Show documentations I shot with Hanna. Also contacted the Workhorse hobbyist association in regards of their winter forestering workshops. Trans-Horse activities are progressing slowly and I’m having trouble with setting goals for next years activities. The funding I’ve managed to accumulate is not adequate for building collaboratory schemes together with professionals in the horse-community. Making mere representations (videos, texts etc.) of their work and horses feels boring.. Particularly as the reception of our “Come Together, Leave Together” (2015) movie was so lame (We didn’t get it into any festival screenings in Finland and it’s been rejected from the YLE (Uusi kino) programming too). We got positive reviews from peers and horse culture collaborators but the movie has failed to reach audiences through mainstream channels.

Alex Schweder continuing on Performance Architecture (lecture).