February 2014 – Monocultured

Preface: The Suffering

As a teenager I would listen to Frispel, which was broadcasted on P3 Sunday evenings. It was a pre-taped one hour experimental show, mixing fact and fiction, and focused a lot on creating an interesting atmosphere. Once it was cancelled, I wouldn’t find anything like it until Radiolab many years later, or perhaps some of the odder This American Life episodes. I still have a soft spot for radio turntablism stuff – and the movie Lucky People Center International is one I revisit every couple of years because of the tight editing and rhythm — so this weeks project was a short attempt to create an atmospheric clicky ambient thing, on the subject of suffering.

The music is all fiddled in Reason and the samples are from a lecture with Yo Hoon, available here. The track is finished as it is now; but I hope to return to the topic. Many years ago I did an ambient sound work called Appropriate Christmas which combined 2400 christmas songs into one long meditation, and in keeping with doing things for holidays, I’ll try to look into the nature of suffering and do a longer piece on it in time for easter.

Being a lapsed catholic the subject matter might not surprise anyone, but at least I’m not doing “guilt.” Yet.

Delinquest: And then gone
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Performative lying

What with all the surveillance-state bonanza going on, and a general feeling of unease and fear of shadows, I figure that now would be a good time to finish the video below. It’s a monologue on my experience as a doorman at various events. The premise is that I take a few minutes out of every hour and pretend to be a doorman. Very meta, but there are some valid points there; the main one is “don’t trust your instincts to obey”.

The original HD source files are lost — or they’re just hiding on one of the drives somewhere — but with the 2000-isch look I thought the SD video looks fine. Seeing as “good taste” is so easily acquired and/or faked, we might as well go for the “æsthetics of arbitrariness” as a valid expression.

Since I’m writing this in English, you’d think that I’d taken the time to subtitle the video, but as always I’m doing this at the last second and so the subtitling will have to wait. I’ll still count this as a win on the “do one thing a week” list though!

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Another week, another thing

Ok, so this week might be a bit of a cop-out. What free time I’ve had has been spent re-painting the hallway at home. We’ve talked about doing something there for a while, and even though the shelving isn’t cut to size yet, we figured that painting the space would be a good start. Unless you’d argue that the white paint is meant to symbolise the white box of modern art galleries, it’s nowhere nere anything creative. But it’s done, and it took long enough, so I’m putting that up on my list of “getting one thing done a week” list. Hey ho, next week will be more fun, promise!

Oh, and an update on last weeks pin-project: I’ve heard back from three of the five manufacturers I contacted for making the pin, and once they’re back from Chinese New Years, I’m hoping to have enough information to order a sample mold. It might be cheaper to manufacture over there than here, but it’s still a bit of money, so I’m trying to vet the companies with what little China-slothing I command…

Saturday evening was spent at Gabriels cabin, where five of us sat in a sauna for three hours and intermittently bathed in a 4°C stream. After a couple of times it didn’t feel as dying anymore. Haven’t done winter bathing since Turku, and it was brilliant. The steam fogged up the camera and killed the flash though; Next time I’ll rig something to better capture the expression of turning into an ice lolly.