Category: Doodles

Beans, romance and biking

A couple of days ago I’m standing in the kitchen rinsing the monthly batch of beans under cold water, and Sara is making tea next by me, absentmindedly singing “the thrill is gone.” I believe it’s called “the good life” as everything is mellow and comfortable at the moment.

But in order to mix it up it was a blast to go for another alleycat Saturday: Svartkatt 2012. We donned some makeup — Saras and Zenobias more elaborate than most — and biked around for a couple of hours, looking for clues to riddles, counting stuff in dark places and generally running around suspiciously with headlamps. As a sidenote, this was the first time ever that I’ve used a headlamp, and it’s so bloody useful that I’ll be using one at the slightest pretence — my God, I could actually see stuff without chipping my teeth on a soggy flashlight. What times we live in when this is possible!

Just as last year, I solemnly swear that until the next time I will actually exercise and have more than illusory muscles. Because of an organisational snafu we rode the second part of the race first, and once that was over my thighs were melting fillets of glue and painfully painy pain, so I called it a night and had a beer. Sara and Zenobia only rode the second part, swearing over the too big borrowed bikes. As of now they’re looking for race or road single speed bikes, so if you have one lying around get in touch.

Also, perhaps there is a gadget which could help Zenobia not to be half an hour late to the start of the race? Like a watch, but perhaps with an electric shock function?

In other news, I got a grant to do some outreach work with 3D printers. This is excellent since much other work has dried up, and I get to spend some time and effort to see what all this fabbing can lead to. I’ve taken the plan of cutting back on the number of projects too far and do hardly anything; certainly not my intention. So back up into the saddles, etc, which will be easier with the grant money. And this here brand new laptop I’m using.

Math and ambitions

With only three weeks left of the math course, I gave up on it. And five minutes later I thought I’d give it a shot anyway. Shortly after which I threw up my hands in disgust at my indecision and decided to put away the calculator. A minute later I picked it up again with a “fuck it all to fuck, let’s do this thing and take it to the next level” etc. And what do you know, in ten days time I managed to scrape through. This was done with the smallest of margins, and with the pitter-patter of a TI-82 haunting my dreams, but I passed Math C. So with a “yay me” I applied to the introductory course to natural sciences, and ended up way back in the reserve line — apparently because I’d forgotten to send in the grades from high-school. So two steps forward and a stumble backwards. Regardless, I’m glad I got it done, as I now can apply for computer courses and other such things which my mom is hopeful will “perhaps one day land you a job — a real one, I mean”.

Seeing as I need to make more money than I am, and that what little ambition I have is spread very thinly over too many half-assed ideas and projects, I’ve made a resolution not to have more than four things running at the same time. It’s time to reassess if what I’m doing is out of habit or if it’s actually moving a “career” in a “direction.” As so many other “previously ambitious” people, I’m way under-stimulated and seem to lack the drive to do anything specific. It’s people in my position who I imagine are snatched up by cults and set to typeset Glorious Masters Bowel Cleansing Guide to sell at the airport.

I used to say that I was interested in communication, in how meaning is created and in turn creates more communication. Driving that interest is the hope that it’s not all arbitrary – that there’s actually something developing, evolving, in this collective exchange – but my lack of communication, and actually lack of interest in doing art work lately, might stem from me not having anything important to say at the moment and not trusting that the process will generate something. For all the talk of the wonderful things happening online, I haven’t found new homes there to replace those that I’ve lost; old KDX servers and homepages which didn’t tie into a Facebook infrastructure of likes and accessibility. Also, I don’t hang out with as many artists as I used to, so there’s that as well – I’m a wide object with little mass, so the friction of everyday life slows me down tremendously and I come to rest at the shallowest of indentations.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I’m bored and need to get a project of the ground, into the air, and either crash it spectacularly into a mountainside or land it successfully, applauded by relieved passengers.

Water under the bridge, through the pipes. Summer

I’ve never thought much about the practical applications of fluid dynamics as much as now that the water in the bathroom is turned off and we’re flushing with a ten litre bucket. Where previously a steady flow along the rim of the bowl gently swirled the fear of ID away, three hand-poured buckets of water do little but break yesterdays dinner into its constituent parts. Let’s celebrate the ability of modern science and engineering to deal with shit!

Summer is supposedly already here, but you wouldn’t know it without looking at the calendar. It’s wet, windy and I’ve been able to show of my calves in shorts for only two days — to the disappointment of the public at large. Work has petered out and is almost non-existent at the moment, which I understand is known as “vacation time” for those with jobs, and once I’ve managed to get the math studies out of the way I’ll have time to catch up on all those projects scattered about the place.

I’ve badly neglected my and Olle’s garden. Partly due to it being so cold there was little sense in planting anything earlier, partly due to low ambitions. You’d be forgiven if you believed, as did I, that Olle wouldn’t be able to dedicate as much time to the garden what with a new kid to cuddle and coo at, but you’d be mistaken. He’s very serious about his schedule and so has weeded and tended the garden despite the weather and having more to do than I. This makes me feel bad, and I’m thinking to make up for it by building a totally badass perimeter enclosure for our lot. In my head, it will be beautiful. Also in my head, the sun is fucking shining.

The pirate ebay: Fabbing

This can be interesting: The Pirate Bay is sharing 3D models for printing, so far only using the category Physibles on the original site. Right now there are mostly dupes of stuff from Thingiverse, and seeing as the interface is the usual forum link-dump there’s no preview or version control, but it’s still an interesting development for two reasons: For one, once 3D sharing sites will start to be harassed on IP-issues, there will be be a chilling effect on the distribution and usage of models, so we’ll need a safe haven for that. TPB has proved rather resilient.

(Further on, it’s easy to foresee 3D-printers which won’t print non-signed models, taxation on printing materials used privately, consumer protection laws which are stretched to encompass personal fabrication, etc, so there will have to be forums to discuss circumvention and open source practices)

Think about it this way: If piracy of IP today mostly is a concern for a few companies in the western world – regardless if it’s clothes, movies or medicine — what will happen when the manufacturing industries start to feel threatened by the infringement on their manufacturing prerogative? Previously, someone ordered 1000 Gucci bags from your factory and you spat them out, regardless if the person you ordered them from was a pirate or Gucci; either way, you had a business model – making stuff. If now the pirates are not only threatening the IP of some of your clients, but also the necessity of including you in their piracy, you’re suddenly standing with a factory without orders.

I think that fabbing can be a boon to humanity in many ways, but as always with disruptive technologies there will be a huge backlash, and the sooner we can build infrastructures for dealing with reactionary policies the better. Which ties in with the second reason this is interesting, which has to do with the development of a public discourse on the subject.

So far the ideas surrounding fabbing are best described in science fiction and by those in the field – Bruce Sterlings Shaping Things comes to mind — but they’re slowly gaining mainstream attention; Petter told me he saw 3D printing mentioned in a lifestyle & decoration magazine which usually is concerned with spring colours and feelgood food. Just as in art though, the debate will sooner or later come down to what we are printing, rather than that we are printing, and if TPB can be a platform to foster experimentation with fabbing, we’ll have another generation which is used to remix and copy and paste and mash things up, only now with physical objects rather than media. But for that to happen there needs to be practice and debate, and tpb putting it’s weight behind the issue can only accelerate that.

On the decay of the civilized world

—It’s miserable, utterly and totally miserable.
—Miserable, really?
—Yeah, really. It’s not clean enough, people leave stuff everywhere, and then someone does something like this.

She waves at the noise from the two furthermost washing machines. Someone had had the temerity to use the machines she had booked, and hadn’t left a note explaining that the two other machines were free to use; the guy had shown up early and switched sets. —Really, how thoughtless and stupid can you be?

One has to sympathise with anyone who gets up early on Saturday to disorder sown by an interloper, who doesn’t even have so much courtesy as to be present for a good telling to. But “misery” is something I’d reserve for suffering dysentery on a bus with overflowing bathrooms, or losing an arm in an industrial accident because you’re worn out by pulling double shifts to afford chemo. Poor scheduling just doesn’t fill out the burlap sack of “misery.”

The woman doing the complaining was my age, perhaps slightly younger, and I was surprised that she chose me to commiserate with. Granted, I was the only person available, and possibly she suspected that I was the culprit and tried to shame me, but still; What did she expect once I’d mumbled sympathetically to the first two stanzas?

When I moved to my own place a while back I had to engage with a lot of stuff that I hadn’t given a thought of before. On Facebook, I asked for advice on which dish rack to get. The post received more comments than any other I’d made, so clearly I had touched a nerve. I took it as an informed debate on the merits of different materials and designs, but I got another perspective on the matter when I spoke to Anna some time later. She was upset exactly because the question had garnered so many replies.

And I can understand the unease and even anger: Is this really something which is worthwhile to think about, let alone discuss? Isn’t this a typical example of the banalities we complicate to give ourselves meaning? There’s an impulse there to say “fuck it, we’re googling ‘dish rack’ and ordering the first hit,” but to give up conscious thought in favour of apparent randomness, seems misguided at best and possibly disingenuous.

Of course, I think that being upset at the smaller preoccupations of everyday life only has a limited use. It’s good because it forces you to set clear goals for yourself, and make manifest your values and those expected of your surroundings. On the other hand, if you sweat the small stuff too much you’ll soon start to think of yourself not as someone who has control and ambitions, but as someone who has to obey certain rules and keep standards, and then you lose track of the bigger picture. In fact, you might end up wondering why your idiot neighbour doesn’t understand the importance of lint in the dryer.

Lying through white teeth

My cousin is visiting with me for a couple of days, and since I ran out of ideas for sightseeing after one day, yesterday found us sitting in a bar and me forcing him to lie to the camera; this is the resulting video. You will note that it says “01” which is indicative of my ambition of making him lie some more. The next time I’ll set the audio levels lower.

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Turku: Spatial presentation

As my residency is coming to a close, I’m getting to the things I’d initially thought I’d get done the first week. Like for example putting up a presentation of Gallery Titanik where the residency is housed. With the co-operation of Kimmo Modig, the director of the gallery, I finally got around to it.

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Let us eat cake!

Sara and Tura woke me up this morning with a cake and a song, possibly related to my birthday. You know how it feels being woken up by a five-year old stomping on balloons? Fucking adorable, that’s how. The chocolate cake was excellent and so sweet it’ll cause diabetes in fish downstream of the sewage treatment plant.

For once I wasn’t too stressed out about my birthday, and proceeded to have a nice day with Sara at the demonstration against building high-rises on our allotment gardens (annoying GP TV autostart link) after which we drove Anna and Jan to the airport. They were running a tad bit late, and Jan informed me on the peculiarities of Gula Faran en route, seeing as I’d be driving it back. It’s funny that; In driving school I was never taught that if the outside temperature is higher than 30°C the brakes might not take and not to “rev more than 3500 rpm on fifth or it’ll downshift to fourth. Or maybe third.”

I’m not good with travel-induced stress, having missed important flights and trains and hating myself for it, and I was glad of not being at the other end of Jans phone when people already at the airport were calling and wondering where the hell we were. “We’re there!” is such a patent lie in that situation: If we were, you wouldn’t be having that phone call, now would you? My reaction might hark back to being a kid, waiting for my parents to come home from shopping, looking at the clock and dreading it would pass the time when they said they were going to be back. Not that the fears are the same, but time is a recurring theme, is what I’m getting at.

Back home, with only slightly ominous rattling as accompaniment, we had dinner and I manhandled Saras Nintendo. Super Mario Bros is still fun, although the platformer feels so much more limited than I remember it. The breadth and story I imbued it with as a kid isn’t there, replaced by an eagerness to complete the levels and find speed runs and easter eggs. Compared with how boring it feels on an emulator with keyboard, having the joypads indent my palms is all that is required to want to jump over more blocks. I am now looking for a NES.

Look what I did, ma!

That which is outside the norm only becomes revolutionary if enough important people are threatened by it, or if in itself it changes something. Since art doesn’t really do “real” these days, the former criteria is most often in evidence when discussing the rebellish of art. So if no-one cares about your molasses performance, it’s not necessarily bad, only non-threatening. So before we ask what art is in this day and age — and how it might become revolutionary — we ought to know whose definition we’re working with.

There’s no difference between an art thing and any other thing, only your added value of labour remains. And since traditional labour, with behaviours and signs particular to the artwork, has given way to labour which looks remarkably similar regardless of what you do (At a desk, before a conveyor belt, fiddling with bits and bytes) how do you value your labour as an artist? There is only performance left, regardless of what you do; Art objects left as droppings are useful only as proof of a presence — as long as an animal shits, at least we know it’s alive, sort of. Whenever you pull the squeegee across silkscreen you create value, often regardless of the outcome as long as you’re able to properly frame what you’ve done and why.

In an e-flux editorial, we read about the art world:

In essence, these attempts mistook the art establishment for being in the business of producing an aura of authenticity, when in fact the real commodity has always been this attention itself, the care and custodianship bestowed upon objects by this system.

Sven Lütticken continues, in the same issue of e-flux in Art and Thingness, Part One: Breton’s Ball and Duchamp’s Carrot with tracing our relationship to the art object from modernism to today:

While many surrealist objects emphasize that they “function symbolically,” the readymades do not. In this, ironically, they foreshadow in their own way the future of the commodity, in an archaic guise: they announce the profusion of goods that are bought for their coded distinctiveness in the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. In the 1970s this becoming-sign of the object would lead Jean Baudrillard to diagnose fundamental changes in capitalism by supplementing the categories of use value and exchange value with his concept of sign value. […] This triumph of fetishism—of commodity fetishism as an active agent—results in object-signs that suppress most traces of their history, of their trajectories. Their lives seem to be lived in a realm of pure semiosis.

The article is a roundabout way of saying that branding is all there is, and that the value of the art brand is decided by a very small segment of the total market. An art value oligarchy.

The readymade bears no semblance of value from the original object. The conceptual work only bears the symbolic value of the material used. The post-modern infuses the banal with value, regardless of what the object is. In this last instance, when there’s nothing interesting left to say about the objects of art, only being an artist has value, and that is a buyers market where the threshold for newcomers is non-existent (Higher art education is a leaky levee, stemming the tide of people with ambition and time on their hands.)

So let’s just have fun. Lets exist on the margin between accepted society and the art world, and let’s not ask permission but rather forgiveness with our fingers crossed behind our backs. If we’re lucky we might just upset the right people.

It is by will alone I set the hoe in motion

I’m getting the hang of this whole “gardening” thing. It mostly consists of moving a whole lot of earth a very short distance — usually just inverting the vertical position of a “shovelful” — and exterminating everything which grows there, supplanting the thriving and natural state of things with a chastised vassal fief, creating orderly rows of ambitious homogeny and thrift. A colonialism of dirt, one might say. I’m currently looking for a pith helmet and should anyone volunteer as my “man servant” or “boy,” I promise to be a lenient master and offer perks, such as an abundance of radishes.

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