Author: Mateusz

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.

Do a little dance.

Let’s make myself look bad for once.

Andreas has just gotten his first cellphone and has way too much time on his hands playing with it. For example, he films his friends when they’ve had a few daquiris too many.

Lo and behold, for I am dancing:

The grainy quility is actually a good thing, since I’m quite certain that I was singing along as well. And we don’t want my contorted face to show in quite such detail. No we don’t.

Also, since I can’t be having just me looking bad, here’s a vid of Anna trying to explain to Lasse what a blog is, and that he’s going to be on it. Alas, only in Swedish:

The ‘happy birthday mom’ thingy

The project finished succesfully. One person actually heard my cries for help and emailed me a clip. So thank you very mush Nina, I appreciate it a lot.

As for the rest of you lot who saw this page but didn’t bother helping out: Screw you big time, you slackers.
Internet bridging the gaps between people my ass; More like Internet allowing people unlimited ways of doing a lot and doing nothing

In the end, I had eighty-something videos, but decided to edit it down to fifty (since, you know, it was my moms fiftieth birthday?) and here’s the resulting video. (with which, of course, I created a dvd)

To the people who participated: Thank you very much. It made my mom happy.

An eventful weekend

Oh oh oh! There was this show that we had! And oh oh, then mom & bro (mobro!) came visiting from Stockholm, and oh, then there was this party and a loooot of beer and oh oh oh(!) I had to work the day after! Hilarious! Oh oh oh, smelly I was, in store I standing was! Oh, and then, then I had a lot of tea and we had sushi, and mom ate way too much wasabi and her tummy ached and today is Sunday and mom and bro (mobro!) just left on a train, and now I’m sitting here and I want more coffee!

At some point during the evening Mari took my camera, I think she’s to blame.

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.

Underlying

I tried to distill the motivation I have for The Boy with Half a Pinky, and arrived at these three paragraphs:

A project to measure the load-carrying capacity of text, an attempt at outright lying without speaking falsely and an illustration of automatic, biological narrative.

How far can one stretch the imagination to accomodate for ones beliefs in the face of contradictory (or inconclusive) evidence, and what is the quality of succesful propaganda (both the quality of the propaganda and the quality of our reaction to it, as well as the mechanisms that bridge the gap between what is presented and our internalisation of a message)?

Where exactly are you lost in the transition between presupposed understanding (unselfreflecting knowledge) and the rest of the world?

The galleries webpage is located here, where you’ll find more info about the exhibition.

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.