I have no pictures of the weekend before midsummer because my skills failed me. Or in more practical terms: I relaxed the crap out of myself and couldn’t be arsed to take pictures. Sara, I and Petter left for the countryside for a couple of days, staying at his cottage an hour north of Gothenburg. I slept until late noon, had a breakfast consisting of more than oats, and then sat with a coffee on the porch, forcing my way through the shittier parts of the Nights Dawn trilogy.
The whole experience was such a sensory overload of idyllic post-card super-reality it had me giggling. It’s difficult to take such an experience seriously. It’s not only that I’m slightly high-strung and can’t really relax properly, but also because reading a book for five hours straight is something so unproblematic by body doesn’t know what to do with itself. This hasn’t happened since I was a teenager, and since then relaxing into a book has been rather more difficult.
Had Bambi showed up and fallen asleed in my lap it wouldn’t have made the place and experience any less extreme. This kind of existence is what is allured to when advertising a product which is supposed to appeal to a sense of Sweden. Only the hangover on Sunday reminded me of home, but even that was soothed by wind, water and dozing off on the porch.
Apparently, my cracking knuckles found their way into Saras snoozing. I would make for a really poor ninja, but we knew that already. Polish people aren’t ninjas, we dress in fur hats and kill people from horseback. Failing that, we charm our friends into helping us in the garden.
Remember that allotment garden me and Olle were queuing for last summer? Well, three weeks ago I got a call with an offer to sign up for a 46 m² lot. It’s been left fallow for a year, so except a few raspberry bushes there’s not much there except w a whole bunch of weeds. I took some pictures and posted them to ask.metafilter which yielded some answers, and I’m constantly asking other people for advice, with the hope of actually learning something here.
As things stand, and with Olle away on vacation and leaving me with dictatorial power, there will be heritage potatoes, unions and possibly tulips here. Failing that, whatever will take.
Petter had too much work last week and brought me in for some photoshopping. Confident that whatever retouching was required I would be up to it I set about poking at the material. How hard can it be, right?
Emerging four days later, having slept at his place with scant time for food or personal hygiene, I had much more respect for people who do this for a living. I’ve used Photoshop since 1995, but never worked with it full time and so have huge gaps in my knowledge of how to streamline the work. And apparently my instincts regarding geometry, colour, sharpness and common sense are lacking as well.
At one point, when phone was ringing every fifteen minutes to check on my progress, I could taste zinc in the back of my mouth. For more than one hour I was in an adrenalin buzz, laughing hysterically to myself, my hand cramping around the tablet pen and both feet describing an accelerating cadence for the neighbours below.
I’ve been tasked with doing two slideshows for Landstingsarkivet in Stockholm thanks to my work with the Museum of Architecture, and just got the audio for one of them. One is about a home for idiot children from the beginning of the last century; Children who were deemed to be mentally retarded or in need of special education were sent there to either get treatment and rehabilitation or to be taken care of for the rest of their lives in case they were “incurable.”
It makes for a harrowing read, where some of the diagnoses mistook poor vision for retardation, and the slideshow is supposed to tell the story of eleven kids admitted to the home for idiots, victims of circumstance and the (often well–intentioned) application of psychology, sociology and Christian morals.
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.
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.
We just got back from the alternative Copenhagen art fair. It’s too early to say if we were a smashing hit, but at least some people got smashed so let’s call that a partial win. It’s not always obvious what you take away from a happening like this. You’re supposed to hobnob and get to know others in your field and get invited to co-operating with galleries and such. Etc. Some of us did get invited to other spaces, and Skup Palet is more corporeal now than it was before, which is a good thing.
Because Skup Palet is such a diverse group I guess we all had different ambitions with our presence. I for one wanted to see what this whole art fair business was about — never been to one more than five minutes — and watch performance art or at least talk to performance artists. As therapy, you understand. There was a flesh-and-blood dadaist doing his thing, which was so quaint it went to bad and back to good again. There is little avant-garde left when nonsense poetry is regarded as something “classic.” Goodiepal did a performance in the shape of a lecture, a form I used for my MA and which Olle thinks is awesome; I found it “cool and stuff.”
We represented with Frustration Canon and A Message To Be Found (the latter a project that Olle and I put together) and visitors and other artists seemed to enjoy both. Both were interactive; The former more ambitious and the other taking the shape of the ubiquitous “laptop with a webpage,” where all the relational aesthetics in the world can’t hide the fact that the my Macbook was incidental to the situation. (Much like a movie on slavery needs a person of colour, any colour.)
Frustration Canon is an idea based on something that I threw together some years ago. Ever since I put that thing up, Anna has urged me to do something more with it, to take it a step further as she puts it. Which sounds like a good idea but I have no inkling of what it implies. To me it was only ever about making a webpage where three people bang their heads on a desk. When I envisage “taking it further” I can only imagine variations on a theme, but not all that much new content. More banging, banging on other surfaces, banging in high definition.
It’s flattering when someone likes ones work, and the art fair was an opportunity to make something more of the idea; Anna and Jan took the original concept and ran with it. Together with Pär, who set up the video playback in PD, they attached a contact microphone underneath a table and invited people to bang their foreheads on the red X, a vinyl sticker taped to the surface. There are other details to the setup, but that’s basically it: Invite people to booth, promise them it won’t hurt too much and put them on the big 42″ screen mounted prominently on a wall.
As it turns out, people are quite happy to hit their heads in exchange for a pin and a smile. I don’t reveal it that often, but when I apply myself I can become an intolerably cheerful fucker. With a manic grin, flattery and a kind of friendliness you wouldn’t believe, I raked clients in one after another, all the while most others of our troop looked like undertakers annoyed with the living, doing little to dispel the image of artists as brooding and difficult.
What made Frustration Canon a good choice of work to show as an introduction to Skup Palet is the overly symbolic gesture of literally “banging ones head in frustration” as it applies both to an artistic “struggle” as to working in a group, with all the inherent difficulties of organisation and egos getting trampled. Ten artists pulling together is more often than not an exercise in futility – it’s like herding cats; Angry, philosophical, drunk, cats. It takes a great deal of work to make teamwork work, and if you take away nothing else from the video then perhaps use it as an illustration of your own life as a member of any given collective. Originally, we had talked about letting the “bang” synchronise once every half hour or so, but that was a bit too complicated to pull off at such short notice.
The version below is a more recent edit, with people from Enrico Pallazzo banging their heads, synched to make a melody. I think Robert might have done the edit, I’m not sure. The look and sound of the piece is different from what we presented in Copenhagen, but the individual framing of the shots are more or less the same. In Copenhagen the videos were shown in a 4×4 grid, randomly appearing and occasionally in a different pitch.
My and Olles work, A message to be found, has the shape of a website service; You write a message and then hide it for as long as you like. It’s a delay of a day, a week or tens of years. You can add an image to your message, and are encouraged to tag what you’ve written. If you write a love letter to your boyfriend, you might tag the message “John Doe, love letter, Bombay 2009, honeymoon” and those keywords would end up somewhere on the generated page. The idea being that the search engines (today that means “the Google”) will index the page based on the keywords in lieu of the content – since the content won’t be visible for another n years. Until the message is revealed you only see a countdown timer.
It’s a message to be found but we don’t know by whom or under what circumstances. In five years time pages might be indexed differently. HTML 4 might only be accessible by legacy browsers when the whole Internet moves into the next iteration of Second Life or Facebook or smell-o-vision. The project is based on Flash which looking back hasn’t been the most search-friendly format, although that might resolve itself with time and more computing power thrown on the ambition of a semantic web.
There are similar services, like Future Me which allows you to delay messages, as well as services that send out notices if you don’t ping their server for a while (the service, assuming that you have died, sends out your missives from beyond the grave) but A message to be found differentiates itself by being a delayed public publication. The distinction is small, but it’s an interesting enough experiment and it’ll be fun to see what indexes will pick up the messages, and what messages have been written. Every once in a while Olle checks in on how many messages have been written, and there’s a small but steady stream of them being entered.
As an aside, Radio Lab recently made en episode where some of the above mentioned services come into play. It’s the After Life episode and you could jump to the end of the show if you want to hear that segment, or listen from the start to an excellent hour of excellence.
I ended up honourable mention in the Michael Jackson monument design competition. Do I put that on my CV?
And just a couple of days later Warren Ellis links to an article about anti-cancer nano-tech. If it comes shaped like a glove, my five minutes of Photoshop messed up some scientists’ five year on a pun. Still, I better get royalties.
I’m on the outskirts of Copenhagen right now, where SKUP PALET is participating in the Alt_Cph. The show opens at 1400 and we’re “adding the finishing touches” as it’s called. All is going swimmingly. There’s an assortment of people and I’m looking forward to the opening in a couple of hours. Petúr might show up with his half-clone later which will be interesting. I wonder if the kid skateboards yet.
Besides dreaming about taking a spaceship boat into the great unknown, another popular escapist fantasy is gardening. Back to the hoe and the illusion of self-sufficiency. Annas brother Andy has gone nuts with the two plots he’s running and generously shares his veggies and thoughts on gardening. Apparently planting in “mixed squares” is what the cool kids are doing these days.
So we’re sitting in a bar, me, Olle and a couple of his friends, when someone starts talking about how there’s this one gardening collective nearby that gives out new plots to people based on who’s there earliest on a particular day. Because we’re drinking beer it seems like an awesome idea to show up on that day and sign up. There’s talk of bringing a tent and camping outside to ensure a good place, and the more beer we have the more enthusiastic we are about the enterprise. We’re gonna grow carrots and beans and flowers and that salad thingy whaddaya callit, oh yeah “chard,” chard is awesome, gotta grow it hey who’s more beer want?
I had already beed offered to share a plot with Anna and Andy a while back, so I can’t really put the finger on why I thought this was a good – or new – idea. Maybe it’s nest building; I own a bed and a laptop, and have nothing but student loans and library cards in my own name. I have no material sense of belonging, so perhaps a 7×7 metre plot of land holds an allure of homesteading? (Technically it wouldn’t be my plot since I’d be sharing it with Olle, but it would be my name on the deed.)
Or maybe it’s the peripheral stuff that appeals to me. Unlike other projects I’ve been enthusiastic about, this one happens to involve someone else which gave it enough momentum to be carried through. The project would in that case obviously be “queue early in the morning” and not “gardening.” Anyway.
Like many ideas that are spawned while merry, this one was blissfully forgotten until I happened upon Sara and she reminded me. It turned out that the signup occasion was just around the corner, so me and Olle decided to spend Friday sober and stand in line before eight on Saturday morning. Waking up early is always painful unless there’s someone with a cup of coffee or a my dick in hand, but I drag myself into a pair of shoes and onto a bike. Olle was standing with a very manly scarf by Röda Sten, scanning the river and trying to come up with a clever remark on my tardiness.
Instead of looking at a map and learning the proper road to get there, we lock our bikes and take the same goat path that Olle had walked on the evening when we first spawned the idea. “Not the fastest way but we’ll get there” is the sentiment which has us struggling up a mountain. We’re walking up the the crags by Röda Sten – where the dub party took place a while back – and at half seven in the morning it makes for unsteady and whining progress.
A small trail leads us through the patch of wood and we emerge onto a parking lot next to a community garden. It’s not the one we’re heading for, but just around the corner there’s another garden and we can see people milling about. Unless they’re the gardening undead, they’re there for the same purpose as we. Someone has posted a bill with numbers, and we pull our tab. It’s not even eight o’clock and there’s already 14 numbers gone before ours; Some have been there half the night and the mood is subdued albeit cheerful.
We settle in, wait for the sun and drink coffee from a thermos. Had me and Olle been gay it would have been romantic; Others are sitting on benches or walking through the different gardens and it’s indeed very pretty. 120 small plots of land are being cultivated in as many ways; From a distance I can only recognise the sunflowers.
One of the guys who’d originally informed us about this event shows up. He’d been there at six, but took off once he had his number secured. He showed us around and I get to eat raw borlotti beans. Someone shows up with a portable beehive and is describing its function to some kids who are delighted and frightened. More and more people come and before you know it it’s ten o’clock and we’re signing our names on a list.
That’s it. There’s no certainty that we’ll get the plot, but I and Olle are now officially #15 on a waiting list, hoping for a call in November or thereabout. I haven’t started in on the seed catalogues yet, but I’ll get there I’m sure.
We saunter back down the hill – Olle would badly sprain his ankle on the same slope a few days later – and I go home to start a productive, although comatose, Saturday. There’s much more to say about the whole nesting thing, and should we get started with growing stuff I’m certain that I’ll be dumping all manner of ambitions here, but until then this post might serve as a reminder of how things get started – not with a great plan but for the hell of it, with a fuzzy idea based on nothing but a hunch.
It just struck me that I’m not the only one who is nourishing make-believe escapist ambitions among my acquaintances; is this an age thing? Is 31 the age at which you want to find meaning in life and feel the dirt beneath your fingernails and whatever? Maybe I just ought to compost myself on the plot and fertilise someone’s produce; I’m sure “corpse potatoes” would fetch a good price on eBay.
Post title from Depressing Comic Week over at Explosm. They’re already famous, but I bet you don’t read it.
For the first time in a while we ended up having a “normal” dinner with mom. She was with her boyfriend and my brother brought his girlfriend. (I brought a retarded smile) We ended up discussing curtains, salaries and euthanasia. We left with a big bag of plums and apples, plucked from very ripe trees.
We’re heading to Copenhagen with Skup Palet. We’re still not decided on the details of our presence, although our involvement is clear – we’re going to represent ourselves, and with that an alternative mode of art organisation; Most of the other people there are either going to be presenting their galleries and publications, or they have a common goal.
There’s nine of us in the org. Our only common denominator is also the lowest one – facilitate the creation of whatever it is that its individual members are interested in. I think someone wants to invite speakers, someone else print a book. Most of us want to make money on doing art, not an easy proposition under the best of circumstances.
With the thoughts about career that have popped into my mind as of late, there is also the question of place. I’ve entertained the idea that now might be the time for me to move somewhere where I’d be alone, spend some time reading the books that are mostly gathering dust and maybe use the laptop for stuff other than occasional bloggery and Internet pop culture. Y’know, learn things or something. It’s all very hazy.
Chalk this ambition up to whatever category of delusions are common for frustrated people. None of my friends that I’ve asked about this have been supportive. Three of them have independent of each other said that I’d literally go insane should I go into seclusion. And not just in a “oh hey it’s kinda boring here in the forest” insane but rather “let’s smear faeces on the walls and pray to the moon godess.” I take it they mean I am a city person.
Petter is talking about buying a boat and such talk sparks ideas of getting a houseboat or sailing around the world. (By the way, once you’ve gone around the world, where else is there to go? What modality of existence or nature haven’t you experienced?) But beyond nurturing escapist fantasies too grandiose to fulfil, what is a manboy to do?
I was looking at bikes with Jonas the other day, and it struck me that I’d like to have more money. Hey, there you go, an ambition! I hardly recognised it it’s been so long! So part of this ambition would be to find a niche where I’m happy enough and make enough money and progress to support myself.
So photography maybe? My brother and I are once again talking about the possibility of going freelance as a reporting team, but the exact details of financing the project are still in need of some ironing. As far as I know it would entail us living out of a car. Well, whatever. Let’s start with updating the homepage, then we take Berlin.
The other day, while helping a friend move out from the apartment he shared with his girlfriend, I was wondering how I would have reasoned about dividing up stuff. It’s never occured to me that stuff like this would come up (which is telling of how experienced I am with relationships) outside of movies where a couple that are breaking up bicker over record collections. Your material possessions don’t so much possess you as they socially glue you to your surroundings; Stuff as interaction manifested relationships in itself, or somesuch.
–I bought this jar of pesto and by God I’m taking it! Oh, and this water heater that you bought only after breaking mine? I’m trashing it by accident, fuck you!
The only thing we trashed was an oven form that I dropped a bed frame on. Ah yes, the spoils of war and love.
Midsummer was spent in the lovely company of friends, and my birthday was spent on a boat with Anna & Jan and an engine that only fired on one cylinder and gave up the ghost next to the industrial dry docks on the shitty side of the river. Improvised team building, as it were. After poking and swearing at the engine for half an hour, we called Janne who was all manly and stuff, actually managing to fix the engine well enough to get us to an emergency port. My contribution to our efforts was limited to sunbathing and being a human fender.
(Before you ask: Yes, I do keep tabs on who forgot my birthday. You are on a passive agressive shit list.)
I’ve spent the past weeks learning how to scuba, working on my Polish tan, doing some freelance web stuff and buying a bike. And even though diving is great fun, I love my bike silly. There are many like it, but this one is mine! I’ve never had a bike this fast and I love me the commuting and silent cruising down dark streets.
True, the first thing that happened was that the front brake gave up on me – unsettling since it’s the only brake – but it’s given me reason to learn about fixing stuff, something I’m usually only good at in theory, or rather “theoretical theory,” meaning I know how to use Google. (which I call “knowledge aquisition” in my CV)
The bike is a frankenstein of different parts put together by Martin, and I posted a description + pictures on Happymtb in order try to identify it. I haven’t received much help in regard to identification, but plenty suggestions on which wheels I could get and how much a paintjob would cost. People I’ve asked seem to lean towards that it’s a French 70’s cheapo bike; Looking at old Peugeot models they have some similar details. If you have any hints, I’d appreciate your input.
Congratulations are in order for Jenny and Tobias on the successful production of a child! May they all live long and prosper like hell! I’m certain their half-clone will be awesome and dressed in stuff with printed skulls on it.
Tobias, previously known for his Photoshop prowess, failed to deliver a time lapse video of the event so I’m substituting the miracle of birth with the miracle of men mounting a football fence outside my window. If you whistle Circle of Life while watching it you might tear up. I know I do!
