Change begins with you and your cellphone.

Ring signals intended for cellphones capable of using mp3-files; Submit yourself and your surroundings to what I present to you here. Download, load up and get down, with the following sound:

Download all of the sounds in one, handy, 1.5 MB file: Ring signals 2 (Previously)

How would you like it?

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You shine… (hearing voices remix)

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Pscha — guide to Polish pronounciation.

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Vocabulary extension: Abash.

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P.M means after lunch.

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20 second attack and fade.

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On the gentle art of Winning.

For a whole month, a while back, I started my day by filling out every online-competition I could find. Using sites like Bli en vinnare [Become a winner] I’d suck their RSS dry, answering inane questions and coming up with slogans for crap I don’t really need. As a kid I used to do the same thing, and there’s something completist about filling out forms online.

Just like personality evaluations, IQ or EQ test, aptitude or Myers-Briggs analysis, there’s something rewarding with the feeling that this anonymous internet form cares about me. Also, there’s a bonus in that you’ll learn to rhyme on cue, incorporating brand names or explanations of why this shade of lipstick would make you feel glorious! It’s all about the gratification of winning — regardless of what the price might be — so in that regard it’s similar to kleptomania or any ADD condition; A completist competetive disorder.

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So about 100 competition later, an anonymous package arrived and I still don’t know what competition generated it. No accompanying letter explaining why I’m getting an iPhone charger and mount. The charger is actually rather nifty, with adapters for the whole world built into one rattling piece of plastic. The mount is of more use to someone with an actual window to affix it to, not to mention an iPod to put into it, so Jan got it for early Christmas and I kept the charger as an incentive to travel. Also, the cellphone which I disparaged about a while back arrived, with no dead fish in the package!

All is fine and well and then This American Life chimes in:

When a new Chick-Fil-A sandwich shop opens, people line up 24 hours in advance to be one of the hundred people to get a free year’s worth of chicken sandwiches. [Link to show here: In the middle of the night]

[audio:https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/12/TAL_395_middle_of_the_night.mp3|titles=This American Life 395 – in the middle of the night|Artist=This American Life]

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The forum of blienvinnare.com has close to 19’000 members, and the pages are full of hints and pointers for how to compete, what company has put on the best competition, how to deal with cheaters — apparently it’s common practice to take all coupons from a store to hinder others, which is bad sport — and how to complain to the organizing body in case the competition isn’t fair or has some other fault.

Some people take this shit seriously indeed, and in comparison I’m a lightweight, a dilettante dillettante amongst people who’ve made slogan-writing into a noble pursuit which can land you one years supply of cheese. If you’re inclined to read Swedish, check out the post listing what people won during the Christmas calendar competitions and perhaps you’ll see the temptation. Or weep for humanity, whichever.

Hey kids, let’s consider terrorism!

What with the climate summit in Copenhagen bringing back memories of my own trips to large meetings of important people, I’ve been thinking over the merits of action, and more particularly, the benefits of terrorism.

If we know with n% certainty that an 1°C rise in temperature would cause huge changes to our environment — causing human misery along with extinction of biotopes and what have you — and we are equally certain that it’s our own carbon emissions that are the main culprit behind the rise, there seems to be little room to wiggle out of actaully doing something. I don’t follow everyday politics, so very little noise has reached me about what action is being taken to remedy global warming, but let’s assume that it’s “not enough,” shall we?

So even thought there are humans who are affected now — or will likely be affected in the future — by changes in the temperature and subsequent changes in their living conditions, these changes are all mediated through the planet, and blame is easy to shift. When 6.5 billion people are shitting in the same river, it’s hard to tell whose corn you got stuck between your teeth.

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Maybe it would be simpler to see the environment as something with class interests but with no representation?

I’m depressingly convinced that positive change usually comes about only if there’s a threat of a popular uprising or other such change of power distribution. Power is never given, only taken by force — implied or otherwise. This force doesn’t have to be violent as such, but holding vigils and giving out flowers is what happens after the actual fight; It’s not that which initiates the struggle but that which kisses and makes up.

So what is a concerned citizen with a global pathos to do? Where can your limited energy and time be spent and still have an effect? Might I suggest that terrorism offers most bang for your buck? “Terrorism” is just another word for “non-governmental” after all, so besides having to carry the burden of proof you could have the moral high ground; Especially in the eyes of a hopefully grateful posterity.

But whom to terrorise, using what means and for what particular ends? No-one likes vehicles which run on petrol, but hydrogen cars aren’t much better, and who’s going to deliver the food to the store, not to mention drive me to the airport when I’m going on vacation and hey look I pooped in the river again!

Ought you to follow in the footsteps of ELF or Earth First! by burning urban sprawl or logging machinery, spiking and/or climbing trees? The slogan “No compromise in defence of Mother Earth” is alluring but doesn’t make much of a plan. The Unabomber had a plan, albeit a haphazard one, but I don’t know if he brought about any positive change; Does anyone remember much except that scraggly beard?

Perhaps we just ought to think more spectacularly: bigger, better, badder, boom; Chaïm Nissim gave the following reason for firing five rockets at a nuclear powerplant:

These terrorist attacks were part of a movement and each little piece has its importance. People fired rockets, myself for instance. We had found a bazooka by German terrorists and we fired it. We failed, as the closest rocket missed the important part that we targeted by one metre. It was nevertheless quite beautiful. And, symbolically, it was a token contribution to the larger movement. Via Wikipedia

As Chaïm writes, such spectacular action is mostly symbolic (except the actual damage to property, if you’re inclined to take offence at that) but might have a positive long term debate — setting the stage for diplomacy — but make it spectacular enough and the backlash will be awesome.

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Humanity is treating this impending environmental doom as a fait accompli and our own future is suffering the Genovese syndrome. I don’t know what would entice me to stick my neck out even though I know it might be the right thing to do, so I can’t for the life of me come up with a plan of action here. Tell me, good people, what ten buildings or industries or people or symbols do we attack — with what force — to what good purpose? What would you be willing to do, to what cost to yourself or others? Do we puncture the tires of cars or give people bikes? Is knocking out powerplants a way forward or forcefully installing micro wind turbines better? Burn buildings to reduce sprawl or occupy land by force and start a new land distribution reform?

Fabbing, contd.

Desktop Factory might be the LaserWriter of additive manufacturing. Priced at under $5000 it’s cheaper than the LaserWriter was, and would allow individuals to buy it for themselves or collectives to scrounge funds together. I would love to play around with it; Barring too high running costs (think of the ink in printers) you could do limited edition runs of stuff.

Maybe the RapMan would be good starting kit for a workshop on building and using 3D printers? I’m actually more interested in building the kits than I am using them, but I guess that the practical applications will reveal themselves once I know what can be done. Or whenever I need a new filterholder for a on-camera-flash or something such.

In the end, I’d probably do what everyone does when confronted with a creative outlet with endless possibilities and print genitalia. But it would be a rapidly prototyped genitalia how cool wouldn’t that be!

The link to Desktop Factory came via Fabbaloo, an excellent fabbing blog with a silly name. Then again, once the 3D printing revolution happens and your ten year old kids will print the latest manga characters, they might very well shout “Faa-baa-loooo!” so perhaps it’s just good brand positioning on their part.

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Over at blog.ponoko.com there’s a debate in the comments section about how object models will be pirated, and what effects this will have on the designers and manufacturers of stuff. It’s odd how similar the discussion is to the one about music and movie piracy.

Morals don’t always dictate if we pirate or don’t, but rather convenience. What is considered ethical will be adjusted to the technological lowest common denominator, just as will the job market. It’s not a fair way of going about it, but I don’t know how designers of stuff will make a living in a post-fab world, nor how they can hope to stem the tide of obsolescence. Sitting back with some popcorn and watch the slowly dawning realisation on the faces of panicked designers might become the new spectator sport.

Fabb it all and let the added value sort the back end, maybe? This approach hasn’t prevailed among the more litigious media companies, nor curbed their enthusiasm of that business model. I don’t see the future of fabbing to be any different.

In Neal Stephensons book The Diamond Age nano-manufacturing is a reality. People use matter compilers (MC) to make food or clothes or anything else that they might need or want. (Similar to the cornucopia machines of Charles Stross Singularity Sky, the acronym of which is CM, curiously enough) As long as they have the blueprints for something, they can build it. As long as you have access to a feed line you can use it to make stuff. (This is part of what fabbing might offer, even though we’re far off from nano-assembly)

In the book there’s talk of the seed, a concept where you’ll have self-contained seeds that can grow into whatever you’d like. The difference being that their energy stores are self-contained and wouldn’t have to rely on a centrally controlled feed, much like a seed draws upon the earth and surrounding nutrients when growing. One variation on this theme is presented on by Sascha Pohflepp in the work Growth Assembly, a series of drawings reminiscent of the Codex Seraphinianus but with real-world application instead of high fantasy.

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As for fabbing in art, I still haven’t found much worth mentioning. I might be looking in all the wrong places though.

Peter Jansen did a sculpture series, Strange Attractors, using 3D printing to create molds which are then cast in bronze. the shapes themselves are created using the Chaoscope software, which itself is used to generate representations of strange attractors (something I’m wholly unqualified to tell you anything about except that it’s related to chaos theory) examples of which you can see in their gallery. They make for pretty pictures, and to someone who understands the math involved I’m sure there’s an theoretically beautiful part that is unknowable to the rest of us, but it’s just not very interesting. Casting them in bronze doesn’t add much conceptual value to them, neat though it might be.

A better beginning would perhaps be Peters Human Motion series, but I’m not certain if they’re fabbed or traditionally sculpted and cast. As a comment of a technology on its relationship to space and previous art — Nude Descending and Muybridges studies of motion — it might be an interesting statement of intent. But halting there, making the object itself the work of art, would be dull. As it stands I don’t even know if the motion series was fabbed, but one would hope that there will be more to the tech than mere convenience for sculptors. Not that I begrudge them that, mind.

The link to Peter Jansen came via Metafilter: Human Motions

Professional dilettante: The Photoshop proletariat.

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.

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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.

So, you’ve emailed 162 job coaches. Now what?

If you plan on emailing more than a handful of people and ask for simple information, don’t include your phone number. I’ll tell you of how I learned this: The webpage listing all eligible job coaches is a pile of shit, impossible to search in any other way other than alphabetical, so I spent twenty minutes collecting all the email addresses and an evening setting up a bulk emailer to send the same email to each of the 162 addresses on my list: 1) Have they any experience working with freelance artists, and 2) Do they know the business end of the modern artworld?

To a certain degree, coaching is more about helping you find the answers to your questions and making sure that you ask the right questions, but I’d like to have the help of someone who might know something of the process for applying for grants, where to look for shows, and so on. An ideal would be a cross between a therapist and an agent, but I’ll take what can I find.

I’ve got some seventy replies, many of them using so many exclamation points you wouldn’t believe, and I’ve found a few who don’t seem completely off the mark or insane. Reading the answers, I realise that I ought to have been more specific in my email, explaining a bit more about what I’m doing — In Swedish, “art” can imply both modern art as well as crafts, and is tangental to culture in general, leaving me with a lot of emails about how they “love to knit and be creative, so let’s arrange a meeting, yes?”

Since this coaching business is a buyers market, with many newly started companies vying for government money, I should have known better than to include my phone number with the email. It’s part of my standard signature and I didn’t think anything of it until my phone started ringing early next morning, not letting up until two days later.

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As most people know who know me, I’m bad at pickup up the phone. Most often this is because it’s on silent and I’m wearing headphones, but when I suddenly had ten people calling me before lunch I realised what it might be about. So I started screening every call, letting all strange numbers go to voicemail. Some of them sneaky bastards tried calling right back using the *31# prefix — showing up as number unknown on my phone — which I guess should give them a star in the margin for ambition. None of those who called answered yes to my questions, but were quick to point out that coaching isn’t about knowing the market but rather helping you out defining goals and guiding you to the tools necessary to reach them.

Which is all fine and dandy, but given a choice I’d go with someone who might have an inkling of why I’m fucking my grant applications up, and who doesn’t clog my phone up when a simple email with a “no, but x” would suffice. Also, I’m bloody awful over the phone and too weak to say no to persuasive people; Had I not dumped it all to voicemail I would probably be in a group session right now, telling the others what precious flower I am, practising on my networking smile. (Prejudiced? Me?)

I’ve recorded all the messages from my answering machine, but they’re not fun enough to present here and I don’t know what to do with them yet. Suggestion go in the drop box (where I notice there’s a lack of comments regarding hair cut mentioned previously. You need to get with that people, or my hair is gonna get got.)

Also, it would seem that I have a hip bursitis, which sounds sexier than it is. I can walk or stand for about half an hour before the slimebag in my hip gives out and hurts like a sonofabitch. I limp about like Warren Ellis only with much less gravitas. I make faces and scare children, but it hardly cheers me up at all…

[The] Sound [It makes] as you move across the room is important. Also: Hair.

Adam Lisagor, better known as lonelysandwich in the podcast You Look Nice Today, has started a new fashion blog with Jessy Thorn of Sound of Young America, and it seems to be designed with me as it’s target audience. It’s called Put This On: A web series about dressing like a grownup, and it doesn’t focus as much on trends as just general hints on how to approach clothes if you want to pass as an adult. Since I’m going through some sort of sneakers & synthetic pants phase at the moment, I think it might be time for me to move to something a bit more snappy. I don’t know if “adult” is what I’d call it, but anything that would make me look more serious is in the right direction. I already have the dour face going for me, now I’d need some attire to go with it.

Also, hair! I’m going to get my hair cut next week and this time I don’t want to say “oh, just make it spiffy” so I’d like som advice on style. Please suggest haircuts which would suit me. If no-one posts anything I’m going with “asymmetric punk” and where do you think that will get me? Smoking crack on the tram, that’s where.

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During the diving course this past summer we got the Garrett Hardins The Tragedy of the Commons to read and ponder. This years Nobel laurate of economy, Elinor Ostrom, won the prize partially because of work she did that contradicted the “tragedy” part of Hardins theory. She’s interviewed over at Planet Money and gives a brief introduction to her research. It’s odd that it’s taken until now for market economists to realise that there might be other forces at work than “rational free agents” or that such agents always constitute the lowest — and most flexible — denominator in economic systems. Has anarchism really gone so out of fashion that no-one reads Kropotkins theories on mutual aid anymore?

If you fancy listening to something interesting today, perhaps to brighten yet another day at the office, you could do much worse than to check out what Steven Stein has done: He took a crapload of preachers and put together an hour of ambient fundamentalism. It’s lordtacular! Go listen here: DJ Steinski Presents: Southern Preachers On The Radio. Via WFMU

Sibiria: A show about nothing.

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[audio:Sibiria_2000_A_Show_About_Nothing_128kbps.mp3|titles=Sibiria: A Show About Nothing|artists=Mateusz Pozar]

Ten years ago I studied “Creativity and Innovation” in Karlstad. The extracurricular activities were more interesting than the studies; We got the student radio going and and had some five shows running each week. I had my own hour, Sibiria, which was patterned on the public radio show Frispel, a brilliant experimental weekly run by Fredrik Grundel at P3. Frispel was a freeform show which mixed samples and spoken content with music and effects, and it was original for it’s time. (If anyone has backups of those shows, please let me know. They’re difficult to get your hands on)

Out of the twenty or so shows that I did, I only have backups of two. A show about nothing came about when I didn’t have any ideas about what to do, and just ended up using bits and pieces I’d accumulated: A friend talking about light beer, the kings new years eve speech, computer game samples, and a whole bunch of audio effects. (I think I did it all using SoundEdit 16 with VST plugins which kept crashing)

This show was made almost ten years ago, so the music and aesthetics are a bit dated. Lucky People Center International had just been produced and I might have seen it by the time I ran Sibiria. For what it’s worth it’s a mostly well edited — occasionally slow going — hour of random stuff. If you wish to download a better quality version, right-click on the following link: Sibiria_2000_A_Show_About_Nothing_192kbps.mp3

(Thanks to Arne-Kjell for providing the MiniDisk player required to save the shows from bit rot)

The professional dilettante.

As much as there is talk about the “death of the professional” and the “century of the amateur” I’d like to propose a new title, which just happens to fit with how I’ve been making a living lately: Professional dilettante.

This would require a slight change of how the word originally was used, with less emphasis on being an interested amateur, and more on someone who does a little bit of everything. I guess there’s already the term “jack of all trades” but it just doesn’t look good on a business card. The skillset of people has changed so rapidly that there’s now a great deal of people like I, who are qualified enough to do professional work without doing it full time. You never become technically great at something, but you’re great enough to get interesting work.

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The trick is not to identify yourself too much with your profession, or rather to be able to switch between roles quickly, not like a chameleon afraid of being caught but rather like a Barbapapa; Equally comfortable as a harp as a car. The past two weeks have been a bit extreme, but let’s list what I’ve done that people have paid me for:

Taught advanced digital photography at ArtCollage
Technical support at a doctoral disputation at HFF
Host & bouncer at fashion show
Updating a homepage for the Museum of Architecture
Substituting at three other photographic courses at ArtCollage
Buying equipment and recording sound for the Art Faculty at the University of Gothenburg

And at one point I drove three drunk guys downtown for money cause I had nothing better to do. It’s truly the Niko Bellic approach to employment, with the difference that I don’t kill anyone (Except that once, and that was an exception!) and generally I’m not paid by italians.

I’ve registered with the unemployment office in the hopes of getting something out of the agency. Elections are coming up next year which usually means that the ruling party is throwing money at the unemployment problem hoping that the statistics will improve enough to get them re-elected. So if you’re looking for seed money to start your own company, or need some on-site-experience you stand an OK chance of getting it right now.

One of the projects that the government has started is the employment of “job coaches” who are supposed to go over your CV, job applications and personal hygiene, and generally try to improve your chances of finding employment. Just this year the government has set aside 1.1 billion SEK for this project, hoping to get 27’500 jobs out of it. This translates roughtly into 40’000 SEK per job created.

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As a result of all of this money laying about, hundreds of coaching companies have sprung up overnight. It’s a buyers market where each person who qualifies for a job coach (which is anyone registered with the unemployment office) can choose which coach is right for them, and the coaches get some 9’500 SEK per person they coach, with an additional bonus of 1’500 SEK if that person finds a job for at least one month.

It would seem that the numbers are unbased in any reality except someones wishful thinking. The coaching companies have very little merit to go on, so the prospective clients are left sifting through hundreds of web pages, trying to gleam from the often bombastic presentations which company, and which individual in each company, might be right for them. And the project also seems to assume that 27’500 jobs are waiting to be filled by people who just can’t seem to layout their CV correctly, or who write so abhorrent job applications that they are disqualified from positions they would otherwise be perfectly suited for.

The matter isn’t helped by the miserable way the unemployment office is listing the companies offering coaching services. At the moment there are 150 companies listed alphabetically, ten per page, with no information about them except a link which might or might not be a pdf-file, which might or might not work. You can limit your search geographically, but not according to competence (if you’re an economist, you don’t need coaching by someone who knows only agriculture) or any other metrics (how long they’ve been in business, have they been reviewed somewhere, etc.) so you’re left with hours of work trying to understand what the fuck some of these companies actually do – They are throwing so many positive and cheery superlatives around on their homepages it would seem that you will climb the career ladder propelled on a rainbow coming out your anus, on top of which you will find fulfillment and joy just by being touched by them in a very special way, should you just have the good judgement of picking their company.

Once this whole coaching thing will be eveluated, to see where the 2.9 billion went, I’m guessing that at least 2’000 of those “27’500 annual jobs” are going to be filled with “job coaching.” In a twisted way I guess it makes sense; Paying people to dig a hole and pay others to fill it in.

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I’m not above taking advantage of other people taking advantage of tax money, so I went to this job coaching fair which is in town. A 100 or so companies are cramming the halls with stalls and tables full of photocopied mission statements and slogans. The first thing that struck me was the similarity of the coaching business and the SEO business; If you think about it, the comparison actually is rather fitting. The SEO’s are telling you that regardless of who you are or what your product is, it’s all about presentation, and by adding a few key phrases here, getting some link exchanges there and “going viral” you’ll be raking the dough in in no time at all. Douchebaggery and selfgratulatory bullshit, in other words. And going by what some of these coaching companies are writing on their homepage, the rhetoric sounds similar.

Anyway. I walk down this hall and there seems to be a 2:1 ratio of coach to job applicant, and they look so hungrily at me that I pull out my cell phone and listen intently to voice mail. There’s a presentation going on entitled “Networking your way to a job!” and for every exclamation point or smily face I stumble across I whimper and curl in on myself. The halls are narrow and just walking from one room to the next you can’t help but to rub up against promotional material, which acts on the coaches much like the spasming of a fly in the net alerts a spider of dinner. Don’t look anyone in the eyes and don’t stop, or they’ll get you.

I’m chalking my trip to the fair down to experience, and will make a second attempt tomorrow morning. After all it would be a good idea to brush my cover letter up a bit, and I would like to discuss with someone about whether or not to include my Twitter posts with every application — especially those where I call people names.

Let’s break things!

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.

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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.