Work in progress…

I’m working along the lines of the title The Boy with Half a Pinky and this photoshop is one way to pull it off.

Here’s the idea, as it is:

* The boy with half a pinky is an image of a young man sitting and smoking and looking slightly miserable. It’s blurry, except for the hand that holds the cigarette & which doesn’t miss any digits. Looking at the other hand you can’t really tell, because of the angle.

* What would be the point of this?

* This might look like an excercise in stearing the viewer, but it’s such an obvious point to make. Look, if I tell you that an image is about one thing, you’re gonna interpret or at least look at the image in relationship to what I’ve told you. And if I lead you on by saying something that either is

1) not verifiable
or
2) not verifiable & an outright lie

You’re not going to get anything true out of looking at the image, and it might actually make your perception of the image, and thereby your grasp on reality, slightly more false than you’d like. Of course, we’re constantly reminded of that others lie to us, or are otherwise not in a position to communicate anything un-false to us (how few and far between are the experiences of understanding, anyway?) and maybe we’re aware of this well enough.

* Basically, the above line of reasoning could lead one to believe that I’m just taking a piss and want to annoy any viewer, while at the same time creating an argument based on the falsehood of images and making a Descartian demon out of myself; An imbecile sitting by the roadside giving false directions to passersby, chuckling under my breath.

Ugh. But maybe that’s good enough? Or maybe good isn’t the right word to use. Maybe it’s plausable enough? The good part might come in if someone gets anything from looking at this while it’s hanging in a gallery, eat a breadstick and between munches says “uhm, this was nice. I’d say it’s even good.” That’s where the good part comes in?

I can’t seem to stear clear of the obvious trap here – I tend to treat what I’m doing as riddles that I have to reverse-engineer in order to figure out the true meaning of. Darn it. Darn it to heck.

One way to make clear that this image doesn’t matter in the slightest is this:

The second image is a heavily rasterised version of the one on the left. You can’t really make out any details unless you back a few steps away. Both images are made up of smaller parts – they’re stapled to the wall, taped with duct tape on the back, i.e. not being cared for very much.

There’s something fun about putting so many hours into a work that you finally decide to staple the shit out of. This might actually come as close to release as I’ll get on this side of legalised prostitution.

* Just had a smoke break with Mark, and he asked me the unwelcomed question I don’t see what you’re getting at, especially with the rasterised image.

Damnation.

So, what we end up with are a bunch of negative descriptions; Things that i’d like to point out that are wrong, but without offering an exit or a way out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since I just need to offer a way in, but, well, anyway. Nevermind. I’ll just prep the image for printing (it’s gonna come out on four sheets) and go home and eat soup.

Soup is good for you,
Soup is good for me,
and when you eat soup together
the company is free.

My camera makes people hate me, then they run away, then they cry.

Well, no. Not really.

Loop anything and it’ll look funny. The only solution is to never ever under any circumstances get caught on audio or video tape.

Interesting concert on saturday. Experimental electronica. It was so pretentious and with such a lack of thought (except the thought “if I look very goth and light some candles, it’ll all work out”) that I found myself listening with closed eyes. Then it was sort of okey half the time.

Kriget ended the show, and they’re nice.

Today is Monday, bloody Monday. The show at 300m3 opens at Friday, I haven’t finished the images, my mum comes by to celebrate her 50th birthday on Thursday, so I need to be finished before then, and jolly crap my last-minute ideas (I’ll leave a jar of peanutbutter on a plinth and call it “revenge of the Sith”) seem better and better in the shoddy light emanating from caffeine-fueled braincells shining out through my manic eyes.

Last minute! Bomb ticking! Help me be a good son!

Ok ok, I’m a reasonably good person, and a reasonably good son, although i really really suck at remembering birthdays and so on.
This has proven problematic since my moms 50th birthday is coming up… Which prompted me to create this homepage, which you should check out if you want to save me. Unless I get something nice together my only other options are either to
1) Stop smoking as a gift to my mom
2) Cut my hair as a sacrifice on the altar of ‘looking decent for once’
or
3) Get a tattoo of my mom

Truth be told, I don’t think number 3 is all that popular, since according to mom only convicts and bikers have tattoos. Anywho. Check it out, and help me the hell out…

All those megabytes add up to a whole pile of gigabytes

Even though I don’t consider myself to be a stuff-junkie, I’ve found myself in a situation where I more or less everyday walk around with a bunch of gear. The stuff itself isn’t all that interesting; An external harddrive, a USB2-stick, compact digital camera, iPod & cellphone.

It struck me that I’m a walking storage facility. Let’s calculate a bit

iPod: 40gb
HD: 80gb
USB2-stick: 2gb
Digicam: 500mb
Cellphone: 80mb (Memory Stick + built in memory)

Not accounting for the formatting, that’s 122.580GB of storage that I carry around with me more or less all the time. (Which is why sewing a really nifty backpack is quite high on my to-do list.)
Ok, so the harddrive is usually nine tenths full, as is the iPod. camera, stick & cell are say one third full.

There’s no point to this post, just that it’s all rather cool. If I could only offset my lazy monkey-brain memory with some on the hd, I’d be set!

And of course, I took a look at my desk and there’s roughly 300 cds & dvds (50% of each), a harddrive from a bricket iPod, one 4GB and one 40GB hd that I used in my bondage-iMac & a DSLR with 512mb. A lot of space.

If all the empty and unused space in the world saved data in a forest and there was no-one there to use it, would it make a wooshing sound or would only the trees shudder because someone sooner or later would try to print all that data?

Post exhibition traumatic syndrome

Yesterday, in spite of the hang-over, I could actually be seen whistling and even humming to myself. Not often that happens; I’m in a sweet spot – I’m not totally broke, I finished my two week stint at the store, the exhibition came together “well” (by “well” I mean “it’s over and no-one has hit me in the face”) and the allergies & accompanying asthma have left me for now.

Here’s the video I’m showing at monumental, followed by the text from the exhibition catalogue.

“The uncontested order of things: A slideshow curated by Google image search.” 2006

More a proof of concept than a finished work, The uncontested order of things was created by following a set of predefined rules applied to google image search.

The search query consisted of each letter of the Swedish alphabet (A-Z + Å, Ä, Ö), and the first forty resulting images were downloaded. Duplicate images were not downloaded, nor were gif animations, although they retained their position in the “top forty”, resulting in some queries resulting in less than forty downloaded images.
One random image per queried letter was then put into a slideshow in the order of the alphabet, and the resulting movie was adapted for the 90-second screen time.

The motivation for this process, of which the resulting slideshow is but one possible combination (let alone one possible way to present the combinations) is:
1) To see how many apparently random images we can fit into a narrative, and
2) Given the omnipresence of Google, how easily received/understood/accepted the images are when
3) A qualitative analysis of the images (and search results in general) shows an (apparently) unproportional US/EU presence, which in turn should
4) Kick us in the nuts for too easily accepting the perceived “freedom of the Internet”, and not reflecting enough on what our online behavior tells of ourselves, but also what actual and very manifest power we are supporting by our actions.

And of course, since Mark actually beat me in ping-pong this afternoon, T don’t command respenct around here anymore, and am thus reduced to making comments in poor taste about people who are dead:

The pretty pictures of the past days

Our Apropos 90 show opened yesterday, so now we only have another show at gallery 300m3 to worry about in two weeks time. The catalogue for the Valand spring show is here: www.valand.gu.se [2MB pdf link]

The ones finishing their MA this year showed at Konsthallen, but even though I made my best effort imbibing, nothing much was exciting (mind you, I rarely find anything exciting, so this is more of a rule than an exception), although some of the stuff shown by the un-masters was quite nice. (Problem is that as long as we’re in an institution, there’s a feeling of school assignment creeping in. It’s not necessarily a reflection on the work, but rather that we’re showing at the university with other people who are our class-mates)

The rest of the evening followed a by now familiar pattern of fine drink, fine people and some fine ping-pong.

And it’s always rewarding to look twice at images. For example, I hadn’t realised that the terminator was at the same party as I, standing behind me.

Ad lib 101

Found this on boingboing.net this morning, and it’s making it’s rounds on the Internets. An unknown cab driver was mistaken for the guy he was driving and was interviewed live on BBC in regards to the lawsuit Apple (the old Beatles record company) had brough against Apple (the computer company). The video isn’t fun unless you know this, and now you know this.

inspired by this, i used up all of five minutes of my employers time to do this:

*Update*

Ok ok, so the guy turned out not to be a cab driver but a guy looking for work at the BBC. Still a case of mistaken identity though, and his initial reaction is golden. Doesn’t matter really, he’ll be “that BBC cab driver guy” and people will argue in bars going “nuh-uh, he wasn’t a cabdriver” “was to”, etc.

More info here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/4774429.stm.

Update on the downloading hampster thing…

I don’t know if I should be surprised, but here are the search strings that have guided people to the blog…

So, two people looking for kiddie porn light ended up on my site, and one whos brain must have been rotting in another way did as well. I Googled it, and the blog shows up as number 9 if you search for the term. The tracker that started it all was on top of the list. Oh dear, how we all leave our marks…

The party at the end of the tunnel is just another tunnel that tries to look fun.

Ok ok, so I’ve just had a boring day, no need to deny that something fun might actually happen sooner or later, but today has been ugh.

From the top:
* Long distance shot of demons milling about an illegal party.
* Mark points in the direction of fun happening.
* Anna enjoys herself in Rasmus bike while he pokes the chain a bit.
* Anna enjoys herself in Rasmus bike, while rasmus yells something.
* Handbook for physical theraphists who like to snap peoples necks.