— Mateusz, you handsome devil, what is it that you do for a living?

I get this question more often than you’d think, even though the phrasing might be slightly different. My mother, for example, might sigh “Have you got a proper job yet?”

Every once in a while I go through an identity reassessment, especially when sketching a new version of the blog or a business card, or when I stumble upon a piece of insight like Merlin Manns “Watching the Corners: On Future-Proofing Your Passion” — the premise of which is that we hang our identity on old merits long after those merits have ceased to be relevant.

What got me thinking was my first ever end-of-semester gift I received from the students at Chalmers.

I teach courses in photography at community collages in Gothenburg (Folkuniversitetet & Medborgarskolan), and I work as a guest tutor at the international Master of architecture and urban planning studios with Ana Betancour at Chalmers and KTH, teaching people how not to fuck up public presentations, discussing the value of film as an analytical tool in architectural practice and generally asking future architects stuff which I wouldn’t ask if I’ve had architectural schooling.

Many of them don’t seem to know why they want to be architects, nor is there any consensus regarding what an architect does, so the area is ripe for someone like me to come in and ask what they think they are doing — it’s great fun.

The photography courses present a rather mixed crowd, from people who’ve taken pictures their whole life and who just want to learn the digital end of it, to people who’ve become parents and want to document their toddlers with the shiny dSLR the friendly salesperson sold them. I draw diagrams of focal length and JPEG compression algorithms.

That’s the tofu and potatoes of my life, and it’s pretty awesome. Teaching keeps you on your toes and I’ve learned to draw on the eclectic knowledge I’ve amassed, working with people to reach interesting conclusion and alternative angles to problems. The work description could be “talking with people” but in my more interesting moments, and with enough caffeine pills, I become an apophenic Eliza, channeling the on/off-lined world.

I haven’t done freelance media work for a while, but should anyone want to give me money for recording their seminar, proofread their dissertation or photograph something I could give references and manage it. So the question of how I make money is easy enough to answer, but the problem arises when it bleeds into my understanding of who I am, especially when there’s a discrepancy.

For example: I’m not paid to do art. I occasionally apply for grants, which in a sense amounts to spec work, and I do art works and publish them on/off-line, but I’m not getting paid for it. I do it, and my formal art-education opens up related fields (e.g. the urban architecture courses) but it’s not my livelihood per se. I know that this shouldn’t bias me against seeing myself as an artist, but I have always had the notion that one is in part one’s job description, and ones job is the thing one does for money. So if you describe yourself as someone who does something for which you’re not getting paid, the jump to describing yourself as monetarily worthless isn’t big. It’s a way of thinking which is hard to shake.

All this doesn’t interfere with what I actually do, as I’m doing more art now than before, but it’s a shift in perspective which I’m adjusting to.

It dawned on me yesterday that I’m becoming that guy. I bike wherever I go and show up with a sweaty t-shirt, fanning myself and going “boy was that a climb! I’m all drenched here, phew-e!” not realizing that it’s the tenth time in a row that I arrive like that, and it has become the norm rather than the exception.

I’m the dude with a manic smile and rolled up pant leg, and even though I’m not wearing bike pants, an image of tights would show up on an aural image of me. If the country wasn’t so eager to promote a “healthy lifestyle” I would be beaten for showing up to work in this state long ago, and probably deserve it.

I would like to apologize in advance to those commuters whose personal space I will invade with au de wet dog and would you please let me know when the sweat dripping onto your blouse becomes annoying.

Incidentally, public announcements regarding my crotch have gone up dramatically, and I disperse the status of balls and ass freely and without prompting. Sorry about that, but that’s probably how things will be from now on. I’m really sorry.

For the benefit of the less technically inclined among you, I recorded a short video on how to recover lost data on a dead harddrive. When I tell you that I “need some supplies” before helping you out with your busted computer, it is likely beer, incense and occasionally a screwdriver.

With this insider information you can now go forth and repair any harddrive out there, and you’ll totally be the boss of anyone with hardware failure. You’re welcome! And in order not to be too snarky, below is an article on the fallibility of even technically competent people. Go read.

If there’s a niche, a parasite will fill it. There’s a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only way to eliminate unfilled niches is to keep everything simple to the point of insignificance.

→ Locus online, Cory Doctorow: Persistence Pays Parasites

We told the R&D guys they could come up with anything they wanted, as long as it could be thrown together from existing ingredients, cost less than 40 cents to make, and looked enough like dog shit that impressionable lardbutts like you would get a food boner the first time its commercial ran on whatever basic cable reality show keeps you from killing yourself for a week.

→ Kung Fu Grippe, Merlin Mann: A new brown thing you’ll totally eat

Crappy Taxidermy is a visual blog dedicated to exploring the bizarre world of taxidermy. The pictures within are exceptional examples of the strange, the grotesque, and the awful. Though our title may say “crappy” we respect the dedication and talent of the taxidermists who created the works pictured within.

→ About: Crappy Taxidermy

I would kindly like to inform you that I’ve been a vegan for ten years. Unless you count the Snickers bars I ate out of economic necessity when living on in Iceland (where vegetables are paid in installments) in which case I have one more year to go before reaching ten. Ok, let’s rephrase: I decided to switch to a vegan diet ten years ago, and initial Snickers bars notwithstanding, I’m doing well.

To recap: When studying in Karlstad I ran a weekly radio show modeled on Frispel (mentioned previously) where I’d put together a one hour show on a whatever topic I pulled out of my arse. I interviewed a dentist who did hypnosis, a priest about the onthological proof of Gods existence, and this one time I started doing one on milk.

I had spoken to a chef who mentioned that unless the lactal enzyme in our guts have a constant supply of lactose, they disappear and you’re left intolerant. This, he argued, explains why proportionally large number of people in parts of the world are lactose intolerant — milk and other dairy isn’t widely consumed and we producing the enzyme as a result

This is more of less accurate. The enzymes are developed by you own body when you’re young, but with age you stop producing them. Supposedly, this is so that we can be breast-fed as babes, but with the anticipation that we stop drinking milk after we’re weened off it. Historically, milk hasn’t been a staple of human diet so intolerance is common. A majority of all adults in the world are lactose intolerant as a result of the stuff just not being in the food chain.

The first dietician I tried to interview scolded me for not knowing the difference between allergy and intolerance, so I plowed through two books on nutrition and health and return two days later for the interview. I called the Swedish Milk Council (Mjölkfrämjanded, a pro-milk lobby. Originally, named “The Swedish Milk Propaganda” — Wikipedia: Mjölkpropagandan) as well as the National Food Administration and had them comment on a study of osteoporosis prevalence among a group of nurses. Seeing as the report was hosted on MilkSucks.com their reaction was predictably not favourable. (I think they criticized poor methodology)

I barely touched on the whole animal rights issue. As so many others I hadn’t given the question much thought, and found the environmental and health aspects of dairy more interesting. Somewhere in the process of doing the show I came to the conclusion that the only environmentally conscientious thing to do was to switch to a vegetable based diet, which also seemed to be a healthy way of eating.

Of course, now I know that “vegetable” doesn’t always equate “environmentally sound” nor necessarily “healthy” if you take processed foodstuffs into account — even skirting the necessity of B12 supplements. If you are an omnivore who eats with moderation you might not experience the adverse effects of cholesterol and whatnot, and locally raised beef might have a smaller environmental impact than a soybean transported halfway across the globe.

The question of food and where it comes from is very complex, and if you are so inclined I encourage you to read the The State of Food and Agriculture 2009, the yearly report from FAO (the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations) or why not just skim Wikipedia: Environmental effects of meat production. Of course, once these folks get in vitro meat going we might satisfy the tastes of everyone except those bent on organic food.

Having written that, today it’s the animal rights issue which is the deciding factor for me. There’s overwhelming proof that we’re causing suffering and pain to animals directly by using them for food or other products, and there’s secondary misery caused by the environmental impact of rearing animals. You could do worse than to read All animals are equal, by Peter Singer as a more well-put introduction to “animal rights” than I could give.

It took me 21 years before reaching the conclusion that veganism is a step in the right direction, and I don’t remember anyone else influencing me one way or another, so I try not to preach, but every once in a while I get into a debate on animal rights. It can be fun, but is more often a losing proposition, as illustrated by a thread over in Metafilter, where the subject usually turns into an anti-vegan dogpile for some reason: Operation Pancake.

Also, I have a standing bet with a chef friend that if he can make me a human steak out of someone who hasn’t suffered and the eating of which wouldn’t cause anyone grief, I’d eat it. Rather disgusting, but that’s what you get when debating veganism drunk.

Over at We Make Money Not Art, there’s a brief description of the work Hello Process which is being exhibited at the Process Becomes Paradigm show. In a related vein, Rhizome just published an editorial by Jacob Gaboury on the art collective JOGGING which are all about process instead of product. JOGGING are indeed mostly interesting in terms of process, as most of the documentation / made for net / performance, is undistinguishable from a Onion parody of art, or perhaps a Mcsweeneys piece.

While each piece may seem unimportant on its own, when viewed as part of a growing collection of work unconcerned with the materiality, permanence, or the importance of the individual piece, any insistence on the auratic quality of the object itself falls away. Indeed the content of each piece is doubly immaterial. Not only do they exist in passing, as documentation, or not at all, they are also unconcerned with the question of quality or importance, and are relevant as process rather than as product.

→ Rhizome, Jacob Gaboury: Immaterial Incoherence: Art Collective JOGGING

It’s through editing we make something beautiful appear. This Youtube choir, bringing together 185 individuals in a performance is inspiring — despite the slightly cheesy look of the stage and conductor Eric Whitacre — not because it resulted in this particular musical arrangement, but because there is a sense of universality to the participant’s ambitions. There’s a common denominator which becomes visible exactly because it’s mediated through a webcam, each video independently recorded. It’s the audience performing for itself.

The arrangement of the singers and panning over their individual videos in faux 3D also changes the interpretation of the piece; Compare the feeling of this version to the previous experiment he did, Sleep, in which all videos are arranged on a flat grid. The edit of Sleep creates a monumental feeling of the choir, whereas Lux Aurumque seems made up of individuals acting in concert. [Via The Technium]

As an aside, my name appears in an Excel file at one of the largest dairy producers in Sweden, Arla, since I sent in a bogus recipe containing cottage cheese to a competition. I don’t know if I’ve won anything, but judging from the other entries (all visible in the same document) I’m not the only one who’ve fibbed a love to that product. Twohundredandeightysix other people filled sent in their recipes to win whatever it was one could win. Imagine if you could get 287 people to spend those five minutes working doing some work for you, paying all of them fractionally more for their time than they stand to gain on average from a competition and thereby creating a win-win! What would you do with those 24 hours of labour? Or is an XLS-file with slogans enough?

After four days of travel to and from the funeral, I’m back in Gothenburg. Playing chess in granmas room felt odd with her not present, and suddenly every medicin and picture on her dresser took on new meanings. The blanket I’d used as a backdrop for her portrait was on her bed, and our youngest half-brother was sitting on it, dispensing dubious chess advice.

Once in Sanok, seeing relatives I hadn’t seen for years was truly a memento mori moment — gray hairs, walking canes, half-serious comments of “it’s us next” over dinner and photo albums. The jovial uncle who used to tell dirty jokes now tells of the dirty jokes he told the nurses when recovering from surgery.

Below are all the pictures I took in chronological order. I don’t know what grandma would have thought of the video, but she might’ve asked if doing it hadn’t made me hungry, and perhaps I ought to have some dumplings.

When I visited Poland with Anna and Andreas a couple of years ago, my paternal grandmother delighted in having new guests for dinner, especially since my veganism interfered with her understanding of proper food. At one point she cried when I asked her to not feed my friends because they were in a hurry to another dinner.

When my maternal grandmother died last fall I stopped by my dads place, and she was bedridden and ill. She’d been on the go for most of her life, but despite the radiation therapy, the cancers were making her worse. Her prediction that it would be the last time we’d meet proved right, and she died Friday morning.

Tomasz is better at keeping in touch with the family, and after a recent visit he mentioned that she only had few months to live. I called her on her birthday afterwards; She was tired and sad. I was planning on visiting in May, when work will ease up a bit; Now that I’m leaving for her funeral, shuffling a few appointments around doesn’t seem like such a big deal that I couldn’t have done it earlier. Odd how ones priorities change.

As far back as I remember her, I remember granma as worrying and caring. Caring often came down to a question of food, as it often seems to do with people who have seen war and scarcity. She would rise early to make dumplings or tenderize pork, and eat either standing up or sitting near the kitchen so that whoever seemed to run out of something would get a refill. Dinner was always a three course affiar.

She worried about her extended family and did her best to accomodate everyone. She’d offer you the clothes off her back, and did so literally — I once complimented her scarf, and later found it packed in my suitcase, next to a container of jam pastries and sandwiches.

She worked as a waitress at a diner in Dalarna when my dad had some business up north, and between running a bed & breadfast in Polanczyk and caring for her son’s families, her work ethic was beyond reproach. She used to sell Amway to do something with her spare time. She would enjoy coffee and cigarettes, promising to quit but laugh when taking up smoking again an hour later.

The last three years she’d become progressively worse, and the last six months, as so often is the case, sucked. For someone who always worked and never wanted to be a bother, her illness added insult to injury. We don’t get to choose, but it would be nice if we could die doing what we love, or that which gives us purpose. It seems unfair that she saw herself become unable to work, then move, and finally even to breath.

End-stage pain is the price the sufferer pays for the survivors to be able to see death as something other than only tragedy, and that helps people to move on, but regardless of how it ends we’re one person short.

A couple of months ago there was a outrage and general brouhaha over an how ACORN — an organisation which helps underclass folk in US with getting bank loans and such — supposedly was advising a pimp & hooker couple on how to start a child prostitution business. It turned into a giant shitstorm, and it’s only now that the dust has settled and the source material has been examined that a more true version of the story is emerging.

→ MSNBC: Rachel Maddow explains how Fox News bought and sold the ACORN story. [Via Media Matters]

“This place,” says Bahram, shouting somewhat, it’s amazing. You can’t imagine! The schools, the hospitals, the way they live! And nothing is done by hand, even the baking, even cleaning the street. They have these little carts, just press a button. The police, they smile at you and say “hej.”

→ From our own correspondents, Monica Whitlock: Adjusting to Swedish life after the Andjian massacre

I do not want to prescribe a means of viewing images of Fabienne’s death. I am interested in informing the public about the photographers who witnessed and recorded the event.

→ Prison Photography, Pete Brook: Fabienne Cherisma [via A Photo Editor]

But what makes it all such good fun is the element of surprise. No matter how much you practise or prepare, many of your best mammal behaviour shots will be of moments you hardly remember – because they happened so fast. These are the ones that make all that effort worthwhile.

→ BBC Wildlife Magazine, Mark Carwardine: Mammal Behaviour [scroll down for individual PDF]

It’s odd what will make you sad.

Between 1998 and 2004 I ran Hotline and KDX servers, dedicated to political material and whatever else I fancied. In a time when online storage was expensive and legally risky, running a small server with files on your home computer felt safe, and if you managed it well you got to know people who would log on to your computer regularly and chat for a bit. I still have chat-logs of conversations ranging from trite bullshit to discussions on abortion and propaganda…

What sets places like a KDX server apart from cloud-hosted communities (Facebook, MySpace, Betapet) is that you actually feel like you’re at someone’s place when you log in. When I was running the Tiny Socialist Server I had a rule that you had to greet everyone who was logged on before downloading anything; It’s common courtesy to at least say “hi” when entering a house, even if all you want to do is to sit on the couch, so I started to kick people out if they logged on and downloaded stuff without greeting the other users. Anarchism requires you to have some fucking manners.

The other day I needed to transfer 7 GB of video so I brought the KDX server back from retirement.

While I was at it, I decided to find an old KDX hangout on which I knew some people, the Documentary Archives. This server was a giant in its time, with scores of users, many of whom I considered some sort of friend. My old bookmarks didn’t work, so I logged into another server — one of the few remaining — to ask if anyone knew where I could find DA or what had happened to it. The response I got was:

[netfreak] I’ve heard of that place but never was on it

I felt both excited and depressed at the same time. Excited because something which I had been a part of now was considered “history” by the newcomers, and depressed because I missed the place; I’ll never find the fragmented, reformatted, erased or mothballed harddrive sectors I remember hanging out at.

Is this how people felt when FidoNet servers started to drop out in favour of WWW, or when their favourite MUD/MUSH shut down? Considering the hundreds, if not thousands, of hours I put in to make my server run smoothly, chatting with people from all over the world, and nesting in general, I feel a personal sense of betrayal that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page dedicated to KDX, to say nothing of the Documentary Archives, only a mention in the Hotline article.

For a time I nourished the idea that I should be logged in somewhere at all times. By running my own server, I could be online and present at a place where others could see me, and often I would log in to servers or join an IRC channel just to be somewhere while I slept. Even though you are not conscious of your surroundings when you sleep, you still exist; And it felt important to think of myself as existing online, not only to me, but as a proof of the possibilities that the net embodied.

This wasn’t about being connected 24/7, but rather an acknowledgement of that you belong at one place at a time — that even if you’re jumping across continents from server to server, your attention is still mediated through a sense of place; Running servers and visiting others’ servers helped me establish who I was — and still am — online.

The feeling of sadness and loss is pure nostalgia though; Today, my presence online isn’t defined by a logged in piece of software, but rather though the ubiquitous connectivity afforded me by my cellphone — alas, the nerd I has merged with the physical me, and we’re once again meat and fat wrapped in a sack of skin, only with a smartphone stuck to the side of the head.

Almost ten years and a score ago, my family made landfall in Sweden and settled down in Hudiksvall. While dad worked at a concrete factory my mom was busy gestating what would become Tomasz. We stayed in Hudiksvall for two years and a week ago I briefly revisited the place.

Anna and Jan arranged for Markus Anteskog to show his work Virtual Waters with Skup Palet, and the cheapest way of getting the 1m×1m×1m works to Gothenburg was to rent a lorry and drive 1600 kilometers, returning with both art and artist properly secured.

With a merry “Right ho,” me and Petter set out in a giant Renault early Monday morning. Not five minutes had passed before I was frantically ringing the rental establishment for instructions on how to operate the non-cooperative sound system. They weren’t able to offer any help in the matter, so we turned to the Internet. Using a combination cellphones, wireless broadband and laptops, I soon had a question up on Metafilter and after a couple stops I had wrangled the player into submission. The car rattled too much for my spoken word podcasts to be audible, but Petters supply of rock music tided us over.

After an uneventful journey we met with Markus in Hudiksvall, lifted the God-awfully heavy boxes onto the lorry, and left looking for our hotel. Anna, in a gesture of motherly affection, had found a place north of Hudiksvall which judging from the pictures looked like a manor. Its webpage boasted of a fitness center, sauna and beautiful surroundings. We were to have luxuriant Italian toiletries and designer towels.

Imagine my shock upon discovering that the internets are not always faithful to the truth! The house was big-ish, but a glorified bed-and-breakfast rather than a grand guesthouse; A hard toffee was the only concession to luxury afforded us. The wifi was excellent, but I would gladly have settled for a slower connection in exchange for something more extravagante than Italian soap (no shampoo) and a backed–up shower drain. The towels might have been designed, but as one who has occasionally employed dirty shirts in lieu of traditional devices of absorption, my taste can hardly be called discriminating.

Anna, who had felt that she needed to compensate for the previously mentioned “motherly affection,” had unbeknownst to us called ahead and asked the proprietors to spare no efforts in making our stay as romantic as possible, since I and Petter had been eyeing each other for months and this would be the first time we’d be able to express the gay. Apparently, homosexuality hasn’t been invented in Bergsjö (population 1 243) which would explain the resulting tiptoeing. Also, the mirth expressed at the request of an additional duvet to the king-sized bed was better understood in light of Annas preplanning.

We had dinner at the one pizzeria which was licensed to sell beer, and trudged home. We’d been shown neither sauna nor fitness centre, and soon we fell asleep, with nary a fondle or caress. Breakfast was a toast–and–yoghurt affair, and pretty soon we were off in the truck again. The stereo had regressed to it’s previous state of being a broken piece of crap, and no amount of poking would convince it to work. I tried to entertain with the speaker of my cellphone, but Jay-Z just doesn’t carry the necessary oomph at such meagre volumes. We picked up Markus in Hudiksvall and off we went.

The highlight of the trip was having lunch at Dragon Gate, some twenty kilometres outside of Gävle. It’s an eight story Chinese pagoda with a surrounding wall, where you can eat lunch, get a massage or watch the largest collection of replica terracotta soldiers outside of China. We had spotted the place on our way up, and it was immensely gratifying to stop for a stir-fry, which we enjoyed in a dragon-shaped boat. Petter has already vowed to arrange any future wedding there, and I will most certainly recommend it to anyone going in that direction. The place is other-worldly; A mix of post-apocalyptic Chinese fortification combined with the concept of clave in Diamond Age.

With bellies full of tofu and rice, we continued the uneventful journey home. Long after dusk, with a lingering taste or french fries and coffee we’d picked up, and with lower backs bruised by unforgiving seats, we arrived in Gothenburg. Our precious content was delivered — art and artist in one piece, the latter only slightly worse for the wear — and we went our separate ways, sleeping the sleep of the well deserving. The show opened just the other day, and will be open until 28th March. Check out Skup Palet for more details on hours and so forth.