October 2009 – Monocultured

[The] Sound [It makes] as you move across the room is important. Also: Hair.

Adam Lisagor, better known as lonelysandwich in the podcast You Look Nice Today, has started a new fashion blog with Jessy Thorn of Sound of Young America, and it seems to be designed with me as it’s target audience. It’s called Put This On: A web series about dressing like a grownup, and it doesn’t focus as much on trends as just general hints on how to approach clothes if you want to pass as an adult. Since I’m going through some sort of sneakers & synthetic pants phase at the moment, I think it might be time for me to move to something a bit more snappy. I don’t know if “adult” is what I’d call it, but anything that would make me look more serious is in the right direction. I already have the dour face going for me, now I’d need some attire to go with it.

Also, hair! I’m going to get my hair cut next week and this time I don’t want to say “oh, just make it spiffy” so I’d like som advice on style. Please suggest haircuts which would suit me. If no-one posts anything I’m going with “asymmetric punk” and where do you think that will get me? Smoking crack on the tram, that’s where.

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During the diving course this past summer we got the Garrett Hardins The Tragedy of the Commons to read and ponder. This years Nobel laurate of economy, Elinor Ostrom, won the prize partially because of work she did that contradicted the “tragedy” part of Hardins theory. She’s interviewed over at Planet Money and gives a brief introduction to her research. It’s odd that it’s taken until now for market economists to realise that there might be other forces at work than “rational free agents” or that such agents always constitute the lowest — and most flexible — denominator in economic systems. Has anarchism really gone so out of fashion that no-one reads Kropotkins theories on mutual aid anymore?

If you fancy listening to something interesting today, perhaps to brighten yet another day at the office, you could do much worse than to check out what Steven Stein has done: He took a crapload of preachers and put together an hour of ambient fundamentalism. It’s lordtacular! Go listen here: DJ Steinski Presents: Southern Preachers On The Radio. Via WFMU

Sibiria: A show about nothing.

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Ten years ago I studied “Creativity and Innovation” in Karlstad. The extracurricular activities were more interesting than the studies; We got the student radio going and and had some five shows running each week. I had my own hour, Sibiria, which was patterned on the public radio show Frispel, a brilliant experimental weekly run by Fredrik Grundel at P3. Frispel was a freeform show which mixed samples and spoken content with music and effects, and it was original for it’s time. (If anyone has backups of those shows, please let me know. They’re difficult to get your hands on)

Out of the twenty or so shows that I did, I only have backups of two. A show about nothing came about when I didn’t have any ideas about what to do, and just ended up using bits and pieces I’d accumulated: A friend talking about light beer, the kings new years eve speech, computer game samples, and a whole bunch of audio effects. (I think I did it all using SoundEdit 16 with VST plugins which kept crashing)

This show was made almost ten years ago, so the music and aesthetics are a bit dated. Lucky People Center International had just been produced and I might have seen it by the time I ran Sibiria. For what it’s worth it’s a mostly well edited — occasionally slow going — hour of random stuff. If you wish to download a better quality version, right-click on the following link: Sibiria_2000_A_Show_About_Nothing_192kbps.mp3

(Thanks to Arne-Kjell for providing the MiniDisk player required to save the shows from bit rot)

Konstnärsnämnden: The audacity of hope. (Föreläsning)

Konstnärsnämnden hade i onsdags en två timmar lång presentation om sin verksamhet, stipendier man kan söka och vanliga misstag folk gör. Jag spelade in den tillsammans med frågorna som dök upp och fotograferade den Powerpoint som Lars Olof Gustafson hade med sig. Man kan höra min kamera surra till ibland; Jag tror inte att jag missade någon projektion.

Lars röst hörs främst i höger kanal, emedan frågorna ligger på den vänstra. Hörlurar rekommenderas. Notera att detta är en slideshow, inte rörlig video, så samma bild ligger ibland kvar några minuter

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För mer info om konstnärsnämnden, kolla in deras hemsida: www.konstnarsnamnden.se

Om du vill ladda ner presentationen så högerklicka på den här länken till flashversionen och välja “spara som…” Videon finns även på Vimeo, där du kan titta på den och ladda ner den i Quicktime-format: vimeo.com/7223127.

Upptäcker ni några fel i videon eller renskrivningen av frågorna, låt mig veta. Vill ni visa uppskattning för denna kulturgärning så kan ni gå ihop ett gäng och köpa mig en julklapp.

For our regular readers: This post only concerns Swedes (more or less) so you don’t have to worry your pretty heads about it. We’ll be back with the regularly scheduled programme presently.

The professional dilettante.

As much as there is talk about the “death of the professional” and the “century of the amateur” I’d like to propose a new title, which just happens to fit with how I’ve been making a living lately: Professional dilettante.

This would require a slight change of how the word originally was used, with less emphasis on being an interested amateur, and more on someone who does a little bit of everything. I guess there’s already the term “jack of all trades” but it just doesn’t look good on a business card. The skillset of people has changed so rapidly that there’s now a great deal of people like I, who are qualified enough to do professional work without doing it full time. You never become technically great at something, but you’re great enough to get interesting work.

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The trick is not to identify yourself too much with your profession, or rather to be able to switch between roles quickly, not like a chameleon afraid of being caught but rather like a Barbapapa; Equally comfortable as a harp as a car. The past two weeks have been a bit extreme, but let’s list what I’ve done that people have paid me for:

Taught advanced digital photography at ArtCollage
Technical support at a doctoral disputation at HFF
Host & bouncer at fashion show
Updating a homepage for the Museum of Architecture
Substituting at three other photographic courses at ArtCollage
Buying equipment and recording sound for the Art Faculty at the University of Gothenburg

And at one point I drove three drunk guys downtown for money cause I had nothing better to do. It’s truly the Niko Bellic approach to employment, with the difference that I don’t kill anyone (Except that once, and that was an exception!) and generally I’m not paid by italians.

I’ve registered with the unemployment office in the hopes of getting something out of the agency. Elections are coming up next year which usually means that the ruling party is throwing money at the unemployment problem hoping that the statistics will improve enough to get them re-elected. So if you’re looking for seed money to start your own company, or need some on-site-experience you stand an OK chance of getting it right now.

One of the projects that the government has started is the employment of “job coaches” who are supposed to go over your CV, job applications and personal hygiene, and generally try to improve your chances of finding employment. Just this year the government has set aside 1.1 billion SEK for this project, hoping to get 27’500 jobs out of it. This translates roughtly into 40’000 SEK per job created.

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As a result of all of this money laying about, hundreds of coaching companies have sprung up overnight. It’s a buyers market where each person who qualifies for a job coach (which is anyone registered with the unemployment office) can choose which coach is right for them, and the coaches get some 9’500 SEK per person they coach, with an additional bonus of 1’500 SEK if that person finds a job for at least one month.

It would seem that the numbers are unbased in any reality except someones wishful thinking. The coaching companies have very little merit to go on, so the prospective clients are left sifting through hundreds of web pages, trying to gleam from the often bombastic presentations which company, and which individual in each company, might be right for them. And the project also seems to assume that 27’500 jobs are waiting to be filled by people who just can’t seem to layout their CV correctly, or who write so abhorrent job applications that they are disqualified from positions they would otherwise be perfectly suited for.

The matter isn’t helped by the miserable way the unemployment office is listing the companies offering coaching services. At the moment there are 150 companies listed alphabetically, ten per page, with no information about them except a link which might or might not be a pdf-file, which might or might not work. You can limit your search geographically, but not according to competence (if you’re an economist, you don’t need coaching by someone who knows only agriculture) or any other metrics (how long they’ve been in business, have they been reviewed somewhere, etc.) so you’re left with hours of work trying to understand what the fuck some of these companies actually do – They are throwing so many positive and cheery superlatives around on their homepages it would seem that you will climb the career ladder propelled on a rainbow coming out your anus, on top of which you will find fulfillment and joy just by being touched by them in a very special way, should you just have the good judgement of picking their company.

Once this whole coaching thing will be eveluated, to see where the 2.9 billion went, I’m guessing that at least 2’000 of those “27’500 annual jobs” are going to be filled with “job coaching.” In a twisted way I guess it makes sense; Paying people to dig a hole and pay others to fill it in.

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I’m not above taking advantage of other people taking advantage of tax money, so I went to this job coaching fair which is in town. A 100 or so companies are cramming the halls with stalls and tables full of photocopied mission statements and slogans. The first thing that struck me was the similarity of the coaching business and the SEO business; If you think about it, the comparison actually is rather fitting. The SEO’s are telling you that regardless of who you are or what your product is, it’s all about presentation, and by adding a few key phrases here, getting some link exchanges there and “going viral” you’ll be raking the dough in in no time at all. Douchebaggery and selfgratulatory bullshit, in other words. And going by what some of these coaching companies are writing on their homepage, the rhetoric sounds similar.

Anyway. I walk down this hall and there seems to be a 2:1 ratio of coach to job applicant, and they look so hungrily at me that I pull out my cell phone and listen intently to voice mail. There’s a presentation going on entitled “Networking your way to a job!” and for every exclamation point or smily face I stumble across I whimper and curl in on myself. The halls are narrow and just walking from one room to the next you can’t help but to rub up against promotional material, which acts on the coaches much like the spasming of a fly in the net alerts a spider of dinner. Don’t look anyone in the eyes and don’t stop, or they’ll get you.

I’m chalking my trip to the fair down to experience, and will make a second attempt tomorrow morning. After all it would be a good idea to brush my cover letter up a bit, and I would like to discuss with someone about whether or not to include my Twitter posts with every application — especially those where I call people names.

Let’s break things!

Before deciding on A message to be found me and Olle discussed the point of the project back and forth a couple of times. The postcard idea was something that Olle had had lying about for a while, and we thought it’d fit under the wide ambition of breaking the Internet. Email and other information technologies are instantanious by nature — or at least try to be — so that’s the easiest way of thinking about online communications. If you force a delay, be it random or deterministic, the idea is that you’ll think differently about emailing.

You could make the analogy to how if you stumble across a bus that won’t depart until it’s full, it’ll gives you a different take on how transport can be organised. It’s a tall order when it comes to restructuring how we communicate everyday, especially when the change isn’t necessary or mandated by great outside forces. (E.g. spam filters, central censorship, pay-per-priority-email or exceptionally slow connections.)

Speaking of the big G, a while back I did The Uncontested Order of Things – A Slideshow Curated by Google which I guess falls under the heading of generative art. The point was to see what bias we could deduct from the image search function, in an attempt to discover what we take for granted, or rather what Google takes for granted about us, stuck in loop of confirmation bias. It touches upon the same issues as A message to be found, but from a different angle, since we’re looking at the technologically neutral phenomenon of instantanious communications, rather than a service provided by the dominating company.

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I haven’t written much about the trip to Copenhagen, so I thought I’d at least tell you of one of the more interesting pieces there: Relax, I’m just going to fuck with your mind by Stine Kvam. Wearing a helmet with a screen mounted inside of it you saw the world through a camera mounted somewhere in front, and Stine guided you through a few exercises which grew more disconcerting as time went by.

I might have missed part of it because my Danish isn’t what it ought to be, but the whole participatory performance is about the disconnect between what you see through the camera and what you feel and hear inside the helmet. What you see on the screen and what you get to feel with your hands becomes disjointed, and since you no longer can trust your senses you’re forced to trust your untrustworthy guide; She is your only guide here, and at least metaphorically you’re at her mercy.

Once you catch on to what is happening it becomes a riddle. At least I went from “What is happening, and why?” to “What will she try next?” Something is lost in the transition from thoughtprovoking to rebus.

Reminded me slightly of Avatar Machine by Marc Owen where you’re not as much being fooled by someone else but rather messing with your own head, using the learned habits from computer games to change your self image in real time. I wonder how his third person perspective would work on someone who hasn’t played those kinds of games. Here’s another video with the artist, courtesy of Boingboing.net.

Mental health and you: The incentive to exaggerate.

Went to the doctor today to get my anual vegan probing. I get bloodwork done to determin if my morally correct habits have left me with crippling disabilities on the insides; B12 deficiencies, tumours, wheat penis, etc. As usual, I try to pack as many things into this meeting as possible, so I do my best to get sick just before I go.

I’ve had this stabbing pain in one ear for a month, but after much poking and peering, the young Dr. Benjamin folded his arms and did a meh, concluding that since he couldn’t find anything let’s wait until the symptoms become worse, or better. It will be a consolidation if I end up with half my head amputated because of his wait-and-see strategy, but then again maybe it would be even better if the pain would just leave me the fuck alone.

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Also, I thought I’d get some theraphy out of it. As long as you get a remittal from a doctor, you can get theraphy (cognitive, psychodynamic, whatever) rather cheaply. So I figure since I have horrid mood swings during which I consider kicking dogs in the head (not that there’s anything morally wrong with disliking dogs, the filthy creatures) and often stare blankly into space at the slightest provocation, I might get some state sponsored theraphy to deal with it. No can do. The interview was short, and I’m way too normal to be cookoo.

— So, how long are these apathetic attacks that you get?
— Oh, a day or two. I just stare at the screen, worry about wasting my life away.
— Yeah, that’s perfectly normal. How about sleep, is it giving you any trouble?
— Oh yeah, I sleep very lightly and grind my teeth.
— How many hours of sleep do you get each night?
— Lately between four to eight hours.
— Yeah, perfectly normal.
— But can’t you put me on the list? I need some help here!
— Right, I’ll “put you on the list” right away.

Even though most people are at least as neurotic as I, and the fact that one in ten Swedes is on psychoactive drugs, it can’t possibly be good to feel this way. Goddammit, I want to concentrate my self-centeredness to one session every two weeks, not have it as my main hobby. There are no two ways to go about this I guess: Some dogs are going to wish they never barked in my direction…

Generative art and its discontents.

For an inexplicable reason I love generative projects. Maybe it’s the appearance of magic that I like, or maybe the embodiment of an abstract idea seemingly discorporated from a human mover. A ghost in the machine for as long as you can suspend disbelief. The Perpetual Storyteller Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus is one such project where the you could be forgiven for staring at the machine, trying to get some meaning out of its scribblings.

Because magic is about diverting your viewers attention, much of generative art leaves you trying to decipher how something is made or what the internal mechanism is. Once you realise that the stunning graphics that you see are pulsating in rhythm to a certain noise, there is little but aesthetics and perhaps admiration for the technical skill of the artist left. And while technical skills are important to have, we don’t make art to show them off but rather hope to tell a story or present information in a way or setting that is enlightening or amusing.

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Back when I lived in London, I saw Scott Draves in a pub where he presented a beta of what would become the famous Electric Sheep project. By having abstract patterns — “sheep” — swap genes with each other from one online computer to another, and having users pass judgement on which sheep they liked most, an ecology of sheep was formed, pretty and less so. It’s an excellent example of a generative project where the process (strings of software that communicate and mutate while your computer is “sleeping”) gives us a new take on computers and their relationship to each other, while the end product speaks leagues of the end users aesthetic sensibilities. (The individual sheep which we’ve voted up or down, thereby influencing their reproductive ability)

But this is an old project, epochs ago in Internet years, and I have a hard time finding interesting generative art made today. I’ve been poking a bit at Processing, a programming language geared towards artists and similar folk, which is perfectly suited to take any data and muck about with it. Since it’s relatively simple and accessible it has generated a lot of projects that are half baked and conceptually weak; This is fine as long as we view the projects as stepping stones, as experiments in visualisation. But it’s so easy to get stuck with fiddling the knobs of random parameters that you end up spending you time changing hues instead of a coming up with a reason for why you’re doing it in the first place.

In the time of Flash 1.0 I was in awe of what Joshua Davis was doing over at Praystation.com, and most of that was only him fiddling with autonomous processes and the possibilities of Actionscript. Today we have Flickrvision and We Feel Fine, which take their data from the cloud and present them in a new way. This is good stuff, but it’s the exception to most other art or “new media” projects that show up. Computer art too often lacks either in technology or theory, and it ages miserably.

(My mum stopped accepting “hand-made presents” some time ago, so one should hope that artists would be self-critical enough not to show every ashtray they’ve created.)

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But perhaps there is a truth to get at behind a generative, or random, process (not that the two are interchangable, but they are similar enough for this topic) if by a “controlled randomness” we utilise a background noise to decide the outcome. Maybe it reveals an underlying truth about the universe or somesuch. That would certainly be in line with numerology and astrology; Trying to discern a pattern. Perhaps the cosmic microwave background radiation is interferring with our world and by looking long enough at the noise of a tv showing static we discover the pattern of God. The movie Π comes to mind, as does the ramblings of any number of nutters who’ve stared into the sun long enough.

I’ve included this here mostly for completeness sake and because it’s an old and interesting sci-fi idea: If the universe is deterministic there can be no true randomness. The “real” that shines through, the almost invisible hand of the maker, will show in everything — why it should appear more in “beautiful” works of art is another matter — and there is a Truth in there. Thank Goodness for the uncertainty principle I say. There is randomness, so there doesn’t have to be a pattern for us to find, and maybe what we enjoy is randomness. Whatever.

What Duchamp did with his 3 Standard Stoppages was interesting because it spoke about our relationship to art. It’s not the result, nor the process in itself that was interesting, but audience going “oooh” at the audacity.

So a goal of using magic where you are allowed to see what the magician is doing could be that the end result is valuable, not the process itself. Someone mixing flour, yeast, water and salt will make a bread – itself an extraordinary transformation of the starting material – but they’re not doing it because the process is awesome but because bread is a good thing. And it’s not art, or at least not interesting art; The latter is a worse offence.

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In the above video, made for Delinquest, I dick around with After Effects: The horizontal blur reacting to the music. I haven’t made the effect, but I control the parameters. It’s a nonsensical example, but still an example of a generative process. It always starts with someone telling someone else to do the work, and then you end up with instructions being the work and suddenly you’re back at the screen, watching the iTunes visualizer, experiencing beauty like a child and patting yourself on the back for choosing this particular song.

I’m not saying the end product is irrelevant or – heaven forfend – isn’t art, but one has to realise that even though aesthetics can be appreciated as something good, they’re not a discreet phenomena but at one end of a sliding scale which has “abstract beauty” at the other end. Or maybe “being a smart-ass.”

Treehuggers unite, buy ebook readers.

The book fair came and went, and I went there and came back with a small folder with information on an ebook reader by NUUT that’s being launched in Sweden by Royal Line. It was the first time I got to see eink up close, and it does read just like paper. The model was rather slow on updating the pages, and the controls were limited (I would have loved to be able to bookmark specific paragraphs, not only pages) but it was a neat machine and I can see it becoming a staple in every house and academic institution once the kinks are ironed out.

The price is still a hurdle though. It was sold at a discount for 2400 SEK, which is at least 1400 too many monies. Hopefully they’ll get some stiff competition now that Amazon Kindle is being released in Sweden for 2000 SEK. It seems to be their six inch version that will ship, and although its functionality is somewhat crippled (no web nor RSS feeds if the articles are correct) it still seems to be a better deal than the NUUT.

Now you know what to get me for Christmas. I will as usual assume that a check valid for “massage with full release” will suffice as a reciprocal gift. Except to family members, who instead get checks for “just massage.”

Flora & fauna. (Mostly flora)

I don’t know why, but I’m channeling Attenborough at least once a month lately; It’s my own romantic period. Imagine his voice when reading this post and see if it makes more sense. I almost guarantee it.

Rachel Sussman has photographed the oldest living organisms that we know of, and the pictures are available here. The pictures themselves are unassuming, and even though one might be disappointed with the blandness of some of the flora, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there; To not judge a book by its cover, or something equally profound and boring. [Via Wakaba, who just got back to Japan]

While working in London I tried to occupy my time thinking up websites and community projects. One of those ideas that never took off was Tree of the Month, a website where I imagined that people would document a particular tree that they had a relationship to. While researching the subject I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Pakenham called Meetings with Remarkable Trees, wherein he tells stories associated with 60 trees in the UK. It’s a fascinating book if you have a penchant for contemplating the vastness of the universe and the short span of human life. In other words, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at a yew, crying because you’ll be dead and buried before it will grow out of childhood, you might like that book. Apparently, there are plenty treehuggers about since he’s published two more books in the series. You are encouraged to buy Remarkable Trees of the World and send me a copy.

By the way, seeing as the domain for Tree of the Month is still available, does anyone know of an arborist who’d be interested in working on this? The idea needs to be fleshed out, but still. Trees, dude.

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In the same vein of “the universe is wicked, yo!” NASA and MTU has been publishing Astronomical Picture of the Day since 1995, and if you read space fare (Like Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks or the brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin) you’ll have no trouble whatever imagining yourself in them, the laptop screen a porthole onto the galaxy. Some of the colours might be false, but look at the size of those space clouds! I’m a huge space weenie, as explained previously.

While on the topic of future: Why not learn Esperanto instead of farting into your chair? Or are you happy to make do with Europanto, the hodgepodge language that all Europeans speak whenever we’re talking to someone we don’t understand? Willen you vielleicht desert haben efter food oder vamos to playa direct?

Although meant as a pisstake on Esperanto, the idea of a common language that you grow aggressively by using what little you know of your listeners vocabulary is interesting. It’s easily dismissed as nonsense, and much of it reads like gibberish, but instead of looking at every language that you need as a discreet set of rules, you take a modular approach and just use words in whatever syntax you think is appropriate. Adaptive tourist linguistics.

Closer to home, there’s plenty to be fascinated by. WTF Nature! is a Livejournal dedicated to crazy stuff that surround us. Again, reading science fiction or fantasy you grow accustomed to descriptions of strange creatures and places, but if you take a detached look at your surroundings you might cultivate some wonder at how bizarre yet together our planet is. Why don’t you nip outside and ponder a bush or fondle a beetroot, hmm? Let that inner hippie out and feel as one with the cosmos for a bit. It’ll do you good.