Absconding, ascending, aloneliness, aenerisms

I’d like to apologise for not posting much the past week.

And this isn’t much in the way of making amends, but anyway:

* My back was hurting. Then it stopped. Now it’s hurting ever so slightly again.
* I cough something awful. There’s something charming about that.
* Nice party past weekend, even though I’m slightly under the weather.
* Someone crashed the party and the alcohol dried up. I have video!
* Yes yes, I’ll post the video later tonight
* Looked at my bank account and almost cried last Sunday.
* I’ve spend fifteen hours looking and calling for work. I need work. Moniez. If you prick me, do I not bleed? If I’m hungry, shouldn’t you give me food? That fucking computer I’ve been saving coins for looks further and further away…

As far as the studies go:
* The poster is done. Need to print it. Will post gif later.
* The “Appropriate christmas” soundproject is halfway done. Need to mix it and put up a homepage
* Haven’t done shit about the lockpicking project past week. Will do s’more tonite.
* Essay has a deadline for Friday? Friday? Moly mackarel Batman! That’s no way close to funny! Golly!
* I’m skipping a trip with the class because I’m too broke. How fucking depressing is that? On the other hand, I’m pretty good at convincing myself that I don’t like to travel, so I’ll be fine.

Ok. Now I need to go back degrading myself by whoring my time and effort in exchange for currency that is not made out of “good will” or “chocolate”.

in progress

i don’t want to sweat the poster too much. currently it’s six different variations along the same punky theme. i need to spice it up a bit, twist it a bit, and tweak it a bit, but i’m hoping to be more or less done tomorrow.

two colours + paper white works. less colours, less mess – i’m silkscreening this and the alignment is never perfect.

feedback is much appreciated. oh, and would you buy this for yourself or someone else? what price point? i could go the limited edition, signed prints way, or the hey, a cute & bitter & trashy poster way, and the price will change accordingly.

i’ve already spotted one spelling error, and i’m sure there are others. lemme know.

and going through my music library i found this: DJ nono / Fuck Happy

[audio:http://www.monocultured.com/audio/Happy_Happy_Joy_Joy.mp3]

cold. so cold. (#34)

winter arrived officially in gothenburg yesterday. it’s now really fucking cold™ and i should start wearing longjohns and a big thermo-coverall and not leave the house unless there’s a lifethreatening situation.

so. past couple of days using images:



uno) i’m fiddling with the layout of the “what i’ve learned…” poster, and might go for a more gender neutral title to allow both sexes to enjoy the bitterness.
dos) i woke up yesterday and this was the view outside the window
quarter) some sassy sources claim that my hair is now quite close in appearance to “brandon” in beverly hills.
zink) i drink a lot of coffee. too much to bother washing the cup in between refills days months, and this is how it looks sideways (for example, if you’re laying with your head on the desk while gently hyperventilating, this image is a fair representation).

i’m modelling later today. in two hours in fact. i’m getting slightly freaked. only ever so slightly.

A week of friendship and statements

Past week:
Friends that are not on friendly terms which makes me feel like a child caught between divorcing parents again, one friend I’m slightly pissed off at, one woman who made my heart go ouch and one woman who might be un-ouching it, while other people have privacy issues with the blog, and I’m slowly but surely running out of money.

Seen in relative terms, I really have no cause for complaints. I’m even coming to grips with some sort of life artistique, in that I might be able to put together one of those hated artist statements.

Artist statement in short: The process is the interesting bit. Learning lockpicking and reading about the esthetic of hate and global social movements seen from a non-west point of view, and fixing our leaking faucet using wax instead of a bought plastic drainpipe.

On the project description of guiltyguiltyguilty.org I wrote that I’d like to be a superhero known as the facilitator, and the image has stuck in my mind. It’s not that I’m only passing on information or helping people find stuff, I like to scrutinize ideas and debate things and even though I often end up going for the lowest common denominator (e.g. ending up in existentialism territory, what with personal morals and relativity) I’m good. Seriously.

It’s not the facilitating itself that I’m into. It’s seeing my behaviour as a valid approach to art practice: It’s not the end product, it’s not the documentation or anything tangible (necessarly) that is the art, it’s the combination of seeking things out and manifesting the combination of those as new queries – occasionly producing a work of art, but not striving towards it.

Actually, this is the closest thing to an artist statement that I’ve gotten.

Of course I could write that i’m fascinated by all the things that make up human existence. But that’s just so lame and filler. There needs to be a boundry of my interests. How about I’m interested in people as a phenomena, but not interested in the people themselves. Is that good enough? That would mirror my approach to an artistic practice, even though it’s still somewhat fuzzy around the edges (and slightly sociapathic).

I’m working on a poster entitled “twenty things i’ve learned from women i’ve been together with in a more or less chronological order & in a horribly simplified fashion”. I’m thinking about going about this thing much the same way i did the relationship evaluation form a couple of years ago: I sat down with different friends at different times and jotted down their suggestions, ending up with a two page questionére.

Obviously, if I’m soliciting suggestions from others, then the whole biographical overtone might seem diluted. I’d argue that it’s more or less stilistic help – most people have had a couple of relationships, and been both the asshole and the one being assholed and all shades of shit in between, and I’m quite certain that barring extreme gender role experiences men and women have similar experiences.

So see this as an invitation to post comments with sentences or sentiments pertaining to what you’ve learned from relationships. Bitter, honest and funny are key words here.

As a sidenote, of course this project was born out of bitterness and an emotional trainwreck, but it’s flexing it’s legs and moving about on it’s own by now, and I’ll want to have this as a finished poster in two weeks time or so. I’m thinking like one of those cabare type posters: Different typefaces, all scribbly and crap, and some hand lettering and my horrendous drawings as well.

The above idea has an imposed time limit because I’d like to finish it before a sell-your-soul art fair in a couple of weeks. The second thing I’d like to do is to finally use those 9GB of xmas songs i downloaded last year. A one hour horrendous mix containing all the songs, running simultaniously but within different freaquency ranges. I did a small scale version of this a while back, and it’s just as nauseating as it sounds – nightmarish low AM-radio type ambient. Just the thing to set the correct christmas spirit, I’d say.

Jolly fuck. Just had another uplifting msn chat. MSN is turning into this goddam minefield. About the only person left in my 40-something list that I’m actually talking to is my dad. And that’s mostly business. I’m gonna bloody print all the chat-logs and use those as a diary. Maybe i should take a hint and fake my own death and start over: Too many things on my to-do list regarding people.

Fun with your body:
I think I’ve lost almost all the subcutanious fat on my legs. As a result, my legs look like they’re bending inwards. Hum. All pain, no gain?

I link, you blink!

Todays sentiments:

1) Yes, everyone and everything is against you.
2) Friends are few and far between.
3) You are born, you live, and you will die alone. Get used to it.

Findagrave.com: Find out where people are buried, both famous and not. There’s a spyware thingy that might try to install itself on your computer if you’re running windows and javascript (don’t know if it applies to all browsers) that’s emanating from errorsafe.com. Block any traffic to that site if you can, or just use the firefox browser with high security settings.
(version 2.0 of firefox is officially appearing tomorrow, so wait a few days before setting out – there are always some bugs. I just downloaded it for shit and giggles)

• In the usa, tax lawyers have started to patent different ways of managing your taxes. Not tax applications or forms, but the actual combination of tax deductions you can do. Awesome. If i lived there I’d patent a way of breathing. Imagine the money I’d be making!
International herald tribune article here.

Image A) If this is what your to-do list looks like, you might want to act on that.
Image B) If you buy another pack before the old one runs out, you might want to focus on your to-do list instead of smoking.

• Speaking of nothing in particular: Remember when North Korea was trying out their intercontinental ballistic missiles a while back and the western leaders had a fit? How the fuck is it possible for south korea to test an ICBM and I can’t even find it on google.com/news? C’mon people! we know NK is evil and there’s no love lost on Kim Jong II, but do you seriously have to be so obvious?

Money is the stuff, work is the pimp.

I should:

a) Be working on my quite interesting master thesis that will somehow include Leibniz monadologie.
b) Be doing at least one art-work a day.
c) Be happy to be alive.
d) Write that goddam grant application!
e) Throw a party?
f) Appreciate my friends more, I think.

I should not:

a) Worry about money.
b) Being utterly crushed by the sinking sensation that even those horrible rent-a-worker places might not have any use for me.
d) Consider medical testing or prison a viable solutions.

General mood indicator:

Pity of self —78%
Shame ——–60%
Physique —– Pretty good, getting awesome.

Move on up, move on down. Da-dum da-dum

Mark Melvin, the promising and strapping young artist from England, left two weeks ago, and it was sad. There’s definetly a vacation feeling to all of this, only that I’m going to return to a university that doesn’t seem to have my best interests in mind, and it’s a bit unsettling – there’s five of us left in the class, and since the course is being discontinued, I’m looking forward to the curriculum…

On a more or less sudden impulse I bought me a ticket to Warsaw. Leaving tomorrow in the early morn.

The past week has been uneventful. I’ve been working at the store.

And that’s it.

OK, OK, last weekend I went out with a friend from work and his sister, and that was nice. I actually have some nice pictures of that, but since I’m on a stupid pc I can’t really be bothered downloading an iPhoto replacement just to resize the images off the camera (I mean, c-hraist).

I’ll get a Polish cell-number tomorrow and’ll post it here.

Have birthday on Wednesday. Send me pictures of you naked.

Well hung

Yes, well hung indeed. The gaps between the four prints is visable, but since they align quite well, it doesn’t bother much. What I ment to write is it doesn’t bother me much, but that goes without saying. The first fucker to ask me the symbolism of the cross-pattern the prints make will get a blank stare though.

I managed to surprise myself with how the finished work actually resembles the photoshopped dummy I made a couple of days ago.

Show opens Friday.

Sound course: Coarse sounds in my head.

I missed the last week of the sound course, and this week we’re back at HDK – I missed the first half hour and never got the name of the Stockholmian chap that was presenting his work. It had something to do with creating sounds for commercial installations (think event-based marketing and added consumer experience stuff).

This could all have been fine and well; It’s always interesting to hear how advertising agencies make us drool like oh so many retarded Pavlovian dogs. Problem is that we’re supposed to do something as well. Which is the point in the lecture where I dart off (in the cover of lunch – I am still rather polite about things. or, well, i try) to buy sushi and write this post.

Except some odds and ends I doodled in the notebook, i also did this.

Don’t know if the sound that my lonely felt pens made in the silent classroom counts towards an performative sound art installation, but give me a day or two an I’ll draw up a theory around it. Or not, it would be rather boring.

Anywho. The people in the class are nice enough, and the course description is nice enough, but I can’t get my head around what the hell I’m supposed to do. On one hand, I like the freedom to do whatever I’m interested in, on the other hand I’m not interested in working with other people. Seriously, it’s nothing personal (most often i should add. some people are just idiots) I’m just not cut out to brainstorm in a group to come up with an idea of lowest common denominator.

Avant garde falafel run

When you’re used to working on a few pieces of art-produce a year, there’s something liberating with getting a very short time limit and goal for a production. I’m taking a full time sound-art course this semester (apart from my regular full time studies at context & media), and we’re hopping around different faculties and trying stuff out.

This week we got divided into three groups, each of which had two days to produce a work according to instructions. Me and a music student (the first person named ‘Vanessa’ that I’ve met in real life) were supposed to put together a walk. That is, a audio-guided physical walk for people to listen to and walk/obey/experience/yawn at.

We went the low-brow way and came up with Falafel run: A sound thing for two people – One of whom is sitting in a couch reading, and the other is going to buy falafel. The two have phone contact through the whole thing, and the idea is that others who are listening to this are gonna follow the same route and end up with two falafels.

I wouldn’t call this a ‘good’ work, but rather ‘fun’ or ‘veering in an amusing direction’ maybe. if you’d like to give it a listen (or a try, if you’re in Gothenburg), just click below. If you’d like to download the files, they are here: www.monocultured.com/audio/falafel_run.zip

This is the walker
[audio:A-mixdown.mp3]

This is the sitter
[audio:B-mixdown.mp3]