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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Went to the doctor today to get my anual vegan probing. I get bloodwork done to determin if my morally correct habits have left me with crippling disabilities on the insides; B12 deficiencies, tumours, wheat penis, etc. As usual, I try to pack as many things into this meeting as possible, so I do my best to get sick just before I go.

I’ve had this stabbing pain in one ear for a month, but after much poking and peering, the young Dr. Benjamin folded his arms and did a meh, concluding that since he couldn’t find anything let’s wait until the symptoms become worse, or better. It will be a consolidation if I end up with half my head amputated because of his wait-and-see strategy, but then again maybe it would be even better if the pain would just leave me the fuck alone.

[flv:https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/askfat.flv https://monocultured.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/askfat.png 640 350]

Also, I thought I’d get some theraphy out of it. As long as you get a remittal from a doctor, you can get theraphy (cognitive, psychodynamic, whatever) rather cheaply. So I figure since I have horrid mood swings during which I consider kicking dogs in the head (not that there’s anything morally wrong with disliking dogs, the filthy creatures) and often stare blankly into space at the slightest provocation, I might get some state sponsored theraphy to deal with it. No can do. The interview was short, and I’m way too normal to be cookoo.

— So, how long are these apathetic attacks that you get?
— Oh, a day or two. I just stare at the screen, worry about wasting my life away.
— Yeah, that’s perfectly normal. How about sleep, is it giving you any trouble?
— Oh yeah, I sleep very lightly and grind my teeth.
— How many hours of sleep do you get each night?
— Lately between four to eight hours.
— Yeah, perfectly normal.
— But can’t you put me on the list? I need some help here!
— Right, I’ll “put you on the list” right away.

Even though most people are at least as neurotic as I, and the fact that one in ten Swedes is on psychoactive drugs, it can’t possibly be good to feel this way. Goddammit, I want to concentrate my self-centeredness to one session every two weeks, not have it as my main hobby. There are no two ways to go about this I guess: Some dogs are going to wish they never barked in my direction…

For an inexplicable reason I love generative projects. Maybe it’s the appearance of magic that I like, or maybe the embodiment of an abstract idea seemingly discorporated from a human mover. A ghost in the machine for as long as you can suspend disbelief. The Perpetual Storyteller Apparatus by Julius von Bismarck & Benjamin Maus is one such project where the you could be forgiven for staring at the machine, trying to get some meaning out of its scribblings.

Because magic is about diverting your viewers attention, much of generative art leaves you trying to decipher how something is made or what the internal mechanism is. Once you realise that the stunning graphics that you see are pulsating in rhythm to a certain noise, there is little but aesthetics and perhaps admiration for the technical skill of the artist left. And while technical skills are important to have, we don’t make art to show them off but rather hope to tell a story or present information in a way or setting that is enlightening or amusing.

Back when I lived in London, I saw Scott Draves in a pub where he presented a beta of what would become the famous Electric Sheep project. By having abstract patterns — “sheep” — swap genes with each other from one online computer to another, and having users pass judgement on which sheep they liked most, an ecology of sheep was formed, pretty and less so. It’s an excellent example of a generative project where the process (strings of software that communicate and mutate while your computer is “sleeping”) gives us a new take on computers and their relationship to each other, while the end product speaks leagues of the end users aesthetic sensibilities. (The individual sheep which we’ve voted up or down, thereby influencing their reproductive ability)

But this is an old project, epochs ago in Internet years, and I have a hard time finding interesting generative art made today. I’ve been poking a bit at Processing, a programming language geared towards artists and similar folk, which is perfectly suited to take any data and muck about with it. Since it’s relatively simple and accessible it has generated a lot of projects that are half baked and conceptually weak; This is fine as long as we view the projects as stepping stones, as experiments in visualisation. But it’s so easy to get stuck with fiddling the knobs of random parameters that you end up spending you time changing hues instead of a coming up with a reason for why you’re doing it in the first place.

In the time of Flash 1.0 I was in awe of what Joshua Davis was doing over at Praystation.com, and most of that was only him fiddling with autonomous processes and the possibilities of Actionscript. Today we have Flickrvision and We Feel Fine, which take their data from the cloud and present them in a new way. This is good stuff, but it’s the exception to most other art or “new media” projects that show up. Computer art too often lacks either in technology or theory, and it ages miserably.

(My mum stopped accepting “hand-made presents” some time ago, so one should hope that artists would be self-critical enough not to show every ashtray they’ve created.)

But perhaps there is a truth to get at behind a generative, or random, process (not that the two are interchangable, but they are similar enough for this topic) if by a “controlled randomness” we utilise a background noise to decide the outcome. Maybe it reveals an underlying truth about the universe or somesuch. That would certainly be in line with numerology and astrology; Trying to discern a pattern. Perhaps the cosmic microwave background radiation is interferring with our world and by looking long enough at the noise of a tv showing static we discover the pattern of God. The movie Π comes to mind, as does the ramblings of any number of nutters who’ve stared into the sun long enough.

I’ve included this here mostly for completeness sake and because it’s an old and interesting sci-fi idea: If the universe is deterministic there can be no true randomness. The “real” that shines through, the almost invisible hand of the maker, will show in everything — why it should appear more in “beautiful” works of art is another matter — and there is a Truth in there. Thank Goodness for the uncertainty principle I say. There is randomness, so there doesn’t have to be a pattern for us to find, and maybe what we enjoy is randomness. Whatever.

What Duchamp did with his 3 Standard Stoppages was interesting because it spoke about our relationship to art. It’s not the result, nor the process in itself that was interesting, but audience going “oooh” at the audacity.

So a goal of using magic where you are allowed to see what the magician is doing could be that the end result is valuable, not the process itself. Someone mixing flour, yeast, water and salt will make a bread – itself an extraordinary transformation of the starting material – but they’re not doing it because the process is awesome but because bread is a good thing. And it’s not art, or at least not interesting art; The latter is a worse offence.

[flv:https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Delinquest_sleep_logo.flv https://monocultured.com/blog/blog_video/Delinquest_sleep_logo.png 640 360]

In the above video, made for Delinquest, I dick around with After Effects: The horizontal blur reacting to the music. I haven’t made the effect, but I control the parameters. It’s a nonsensical example, but still an example of a generative process. It always starts with someone telling someone else to do the work, and then you end up with instructions being the work and suddenly you’re back at the screen, watching the iTunes visualizer, experiencing beauty like a child and patting yourself on the back for choosing this particular song.

I’m not saying the end product is irrelevant or – heaven forfend – isn’t art, but one has to realise that even though aesthetics can be appreciated as something good, they’re not a discreet phenomena but at one end of a sliding scale which has “abstract beauty” at the other end. Or maybe “being a smart-ass.”

The book fair came and went, and I went there and came back with a small folder with information on an ebook reader by NUUT that’s being launched in Sweden by Royal Line. It was the first time I got to see eink up close, and it does read just like paper. The model was rather slow on updating the pages, and the controls were limited (I would have loved to be able to bookmark specific paragraphs, not only pages) but it was a neat machine and I can see it becoming a staple in every house and academic institution once the kinks are ironed out.

The price is still a hurdle though. It was sold at a discount for 2400 SEK, which is at least 1400 too many monies. Hopefully they’ll get some stiff competition now that Amazon Kindle is being released in Sweden for 2000 SEK. It seems to be their six inch version that will ship, and although its functionality is somewhat crippled (no web nor RSS feeds if the articles are correct) it still seems to be a better deal than the NUUT.

Now you know what to get me for Christmas. I will as usual assume that a check valid for “massage with full release” will suffice as a reciprocal gift. Except to family members, who instead get checks for “just massage.”

I don’t know why, but I’m channeling Attenborough at least once a month lately; It’s my own romantic period. Imagine his voice when reading this post and see if it makes more sense. I almost guarantee it.

Rachel Sussman has photographed the oldest living organisms that we know of, and the pictures are available here. The pictures themselves are unassuming, and even though one might be disappointed with the blandness of some of the flora, perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there; To not judge a book by its cover, or something equally profound and boring. [Via Wakaba, who just got back to Japan]

While working in London I tried to occupy my time thinking up websites and community projects. One of those ideas that never took off was Tree of the Month, a website where I imagined that people would document a particular tree that they had a relationship to. While researching the subject I stumbled upon a book by Thomas Pakenham called Meetings with Remarkable Trees, wherein he tells stories associated with 60 trees in the UK. It’s a fascinating book if you have a penchant for contemplating the vastness of the universe and the short span of human life. In other words, if you’ve ever found yourself staring at a yew, crying because you’ll be dead and buried before it will grow out of childhood, you might like that book. Apparently, there are plenty treehuggers about since he’s published two more books in the series. You are encouraged to buy Remarkable Trees of the World and send me a copy.

By the way, seeing as the domain for Tree of the Month is still available, does anyone know of an arborist who’d be interested in working on this? The idea needs to be fleshed out, but still. Trees, dude.

In the same vein of “the universe is wicked, yo!” NASA and MTU has been publishing Astronomical Picture of the Day since 1995, and if you read space fare (Like Peter Hamilton, Iain M. Banks or the brilliant Ursula K. Le Guin) you’ll have no trouble whatever imagining yourself in them, the laptop screen a porthole onto the galaxy. Some of the colours might be false, but look at the size of those space clouds! I’m a huge space weenie, as explained previously.

While on the topic of future: Why not learn Esperanto instead of farting into your chair? Or are you happy to make do with Europanto, the hodgepodge language that all Europeans speak whenever we’re talking to someone we don’t understand? Willen you vielleicht desert haben efter food oder vamos to playa direct?

Although meant as a pisstake on Esperanto, the idea of a common language that you grow aggressively by using what little you know of your listeners vocabulary is interesting. It’s easily dismissed as nonsense, and much of it reads like gibberish, but instead of looking at every language that you need as a discreet set of rules, you take a modular approach and just use words in whatever syntax you think is appropriate. Adaptive tourist linguistics.

Closer to home, there’s plenty to be fascinated by. WTF Nature! is a Livejournal dedicated to crazy stuff that surround us. Again, reading science fiction or fantasy you grow accustomed to descriptions of strange creatures and places, but if you take a detached look at your surroundings you might cultivate some wonder at how bizarre yet together our planet is. Why don’t you nip outside and ponder a bush or fondle a beetroot, hmm? Let that inner hippie out and feel as one with the cosmos for a bit. It’ll do you good.

Here you go kids, four new ring tones for your mp3-enabled cellphones, all courtesy of Delinquest! Show the world what it means to suffer the too-cool-for-school attitude of someone with a speakerphone and no empathy!

With a 100% guarantee of looping, download them in a package only 381 kilos of bytes: Ringtone_01.zip

The Lebensraum of tomorrow, today!
[Audio:Lebensraum.mp3]

Please dont, I can pay.
[Audio:Please_dont.mp3]

Who did let the dogs out?
[Audio:Bang_boom_boom.mp3]

Do you enjoy food?
[Audio:Food_food.mp3]

We just got back from the alternative Copenhagen art fair. It’s too early to say if we were a smashing hit, but at least some people got smashed so let’s call that a partial win. It’s not always obvious what you take away from a happening like this. You’re supposed to hobnob and get to know others in your field and get invited to co-operating with galleries and such. Etc. Some of us did get invited to other spaces, and Skup Palet is more corporeal now than it was before, which is a good thing.

Because Skup Palet is such a diverse group I guess we all had different ambitions with our presence. I for one wanted to see what this whole art fair business was about — never been to one more than five minutes — and watch performance art or at least talk to performance artists. As therapy, you understand. There was a flesh-and-blood dadaist doing his thing, which was so quaint it went to bad and back to good again. There is little avant-garde left when nonsense poetry is regarded as something “classic.” Goodiepal did a performance in the shape of a lecture, a form I used for my MA and which Olle thinks is awesome; I found it “cool and stuff.”

We represented with Frustration Canon and A Message To Be Found (the latter a project that Olle and I put together) and visitors and other artists seemed to enjoy both. Both were interactive; The former more ambitious and the other taking the shape of the ubiquitous “laptop with a webpage,” where all the relational aesthetics in the world can’t hide the fact that the my Macbook was incidental to the situation. (Much like a movie on slavery needs a person of colour, any colour.)

Frustration Canon is an idea based on something that I threw together some years ago. Ever since I put that thing up, Anna has urged me to do something more with it, to take it a step further as she puts it. Which sounds like a good idea but I have no inkling of what it implies. To me it was only ever about making a webpage where three people bang their heads on a desk. When I envisage “taking it further” I can only imagine variations on a theme, but not all that much new content. More banging, banging on other surfaces, banging in high definition.

It’s flattering when someone likes ones work, and the art fair was an opportunity to make something more of the idea; Anna and Jan took the original concept and ran with it. Together with Pär, who set up the video playback in PD, they attached a contact microphone underneath a table and invited people to bang their foreheads on the red X, a vinyl sticker taped to the surface. There are other details to the setup, but that’s basically it: Invite people to booth, promise them it won’t hurt too much and put them on the big 42″ screen mounted prominently on a wall.

As it turns out, people are quite happy to hit their heads in exchange for a pin and a smile. I don’t reveal it that often, but when I apply myself I can become an intolerably cheerful fucker. With a manic grin, flattery and a kind of friendliness you wouldn’t believe, I raked clients in one after another, all the while most others of our troop looked like undertakers annoyed with the living, doing little to dispel the image of artists as brooding and difficult.

What made Frustration Canon a good choice of work to show as an introduction to Skup Palet is the overly symbolic gesture of literally “banging ones head in frustration” as it applies both to an artistic “struggle” as to working in a group, with all the inherent difficulties of organisation and egos getting trampled. Ten artists pulling together is more often than not an exercise in futility – it’s like herding cats; Angry, philosophical, drunk, cats. It takes a great deal of work to make teamwork work, and if you take away nothing else from the video then perhaps use it as an illustration of your own life as a member of any given collective. Originally, we had talked about letting the “bang” synchronise once every half hour or so, but that was a bit too complicated to pull off at such short notice.

The version below is a more recent edit, with people from Enrico Pallazzo banging their heads, synched to make a melody. I think Robert might have done the edit, I’m not sure. The look and sound of the piece is different from what we presented in Copenhagen, but the individual framing of the shots are more or less the same. In Copenhagen the videos were shown in a 4×4 grid, randomly appearing and occasionally in a different pitch.

My and Olles work, A message to be found, has the shape of a website service; You write a message and then hide it for as long as you like. It’s a delay of a day, a week or tens of years. You can add an image to your message, and are encouraged to tag what you’ve written. If you write a love letter to your boyfriend, you might tag the message “John Doe, love letter, Bombay 2009, honeymoon” and those keywords would end up somewhere on the generated page. The idea being that the search engines (today that means “the Google”) will index the page based on the keywords in lieu of the content – since the content won’t be visible for another n years. Until the message is revealed you only see a countdown timer.

It’s a message to be found but we don’t know by whom or under what circumstances. In five years time pages might be indexed differently. HTML 4 might only be accessible by legacy browsers when the whole Internet moves into the next iteration of Second Life or Facebook or smell-o-vision. The project is based on Flash which looking back hasn’t been the most search-friendly format, although that might resolve itself with time and more computing power thrown on the ambition of a semantic web.

There are similar services, like Future Me which allows you to delay messages, as well as services that send out notices if you don’t ping their server for a while (the service, assuming that you have died, sends out your missives from beyond the grave) but A message to be found differentiates itself by being a delayed public publication. The distinction is small, but it’s an interesting enough experiment and it’ll be fun to see what indexes will pick up the messages, and what messages have been written. Every once in a while Olle checks in on how many messages have been written, and there’s a small but steady stream of them being entered.

As an aside, Radio Lab recently made en episode where some of the above mentioned services come into play. It’s the After Life episode and you could jump to the end of the show if you want to hear that segment, or listen from the start to an excellent hour of excellence.

Exactly! We don’t have answers to any of these questions. We are Googling “cockroach eggs maybe bed why? please no” currently. We might have to burn everything. EVERYTHING.

→ Manical Rage, Garrett Murray: One of the Worst Things Ever Happened to Shawn Last Night

Patrick McLean has finished podcasting How to Succeed in Evil and those of you who’ve held off on listening to this until the last episode would be available have to wait no longer. Go listen to his soothing voice and excellent story. You will enjoy it.

Here is a sound toy for you to make adorable 16 note loops on: Inudge.net. [Via Manical Rage]

I ended up honourable mention in the Michael Jackson monument design competition. Do I put that on my CV?

And just a couple of days later Warren Ellis links to an article about anti-cancer nano-tech. If it comes shaped like a glove, my five minutes of Photoshop messed up some scientists’ five year on a pun. Still, I better get royalties.

I’m on the outskirts of Copenhagen right now, where SKUP PALET is participating in the Alt_Cph. The show opens at 1400 and we’re “adding the finishing touches” as it’s called. All is going swimmingly. There’s an assortment of people and I’m looking forward to the opening in a couple of hours. Petúr might show up with his half-clone later which will be interesting. I wonder if the kid skateboards yet.