Is love an emotion or our interpretation of our behaviour?<\/p>\n
Visited “WASD” exhibition<\/a>\u00a0by Reija Meril\u00e4inen, Santeri R\u00e4is\u00e4nen & Eetu Sihvonen at Oksasenkatu 11<\/a>.\u00a0They presented\u00a0a chair-shaped controller\u00a0which guest could use to play a dialogue driven adventure\u00a0game. The chair-controller referenced fleshy interfaces\u00a0recognized\u00a0in\u00a0Cronenberg movies. To start the adventure players had to navigate through a 3d\u00a0model of the\u00a0the exhibition space. The\u00a0simple trick of presenting a playable virtual copy of the gallery was enough to immerse me into the the gameplay. The rest of the\u00a0game\u00a0took place inside a sphere shaped world. Players were invited to engage in “Dr. Sbaitso<\/a>\u00a0like”\u00a0therapeutic\u00a0discussions\u00a0with NPCs. If the dialogue was fruitful\u00a0they begun\u00a0to follow the player but\u00a0characters also tried\u00a0to trick the player into resetting the game. I didn’t learn what the objective of the game was but I enjoyed it’s melancholic mood. One segment the world presented a free\u00a0roaming\u00a0horse’s ass, which was previously\u00a0seen as a part of\u00a0Meril\u00e4ises work for the\u00a0Such gallery<\/a>\u00a0(Reija’s piece for Such referenced a\u00a0riding trip we made 2015<\/a>).<\/p>\n Visited Antti Majavas exhibition opening at\u00a0the Helsinki Art Museum<\/a>. He had build a hull of an airplane and presented various\u00a0landscapes through the plane windows. Some landscapes where actually sketches of clothing\u00a0Malevich had designed\u00a0for the “Victory over the Sun<\/a>” opera, others where aerial images from Google Earth, views through\u00a0a car window and diary like footage showing advertisement imagery. Some parts (if not all) of the installation were running from electricity\u00a0provided by Mustarinda residencies powerplan<\/a>. The exhibition was accompanied with texts in which Majava shared his frustration with avantgarde art. Gathering from the texts he\u00a0was making an anti-(avantgarde)art statement. He had identified a cultural icon through which our perception of the globe is build:\u00a0The Aeroplane Window.<\/p>\n Also saw “Harmaja +10 l\u00e4nsiluode 35m\/s” by Paula Lehtonen at the Hippolyte gallery<\/a>. Lehtonen had designed a wall mounted dome which was\u00a0used as a projection surface. A video showed\u00a0partly computer generated dystopian scenery from Helsinki. She had divided the room the work was in with\u00a0a fake wall, so that she could project the video\u00a0on the\u00a0dome from behind. A very nifty device. The work had an audio track made by\u00a0Rasmus Hedlund but the exhibition opening made hearing it impossible. I’ll have to revisit the exhibition.<\/p>\n I’m very frustrated with\u00a0Margo Demello’s “Animals and Society: An Introduction to Human-Animal Studies”.\u00a0The book provides a decent overview of the areas of interest for human animal studies but it doesn’t approach the field critically. It reads more as a long and detailed pamphlet advocating animal rights. I’ll have to reread Jason Hribal’s “Animals are Part of the Working Class Reviewed” to purge my thoughts. We are preparing the “Horse and Performance” course for the Theatre Academy of the University of the Arts Helsinki which starts in a week.<\/p>\n