Tag: Art

Black bird, running.

I’ve restored most of the stuff that I lost in the crash, but the drive is beyond salvation. The only things of importance that I’ve lost are a few images, and anything in the downloads folder. Any attachments you might have emailed me are now roaming the pastures of the great beyond.

Korpar kan det vara? Vid Arkitekturmuseet

Regnbåge på Konsthallen i Göteborg

There’s an exhibition going on at the art museum right now, concerned with painting. The modern art world being what it is it encompassed performance and installation as well, and since I haven’t been to any shows lately it’s such an odd feeling when I go. An essay is taking shape somewhere in my brains about my chosen profession and my role in it. I’m obviously not going to great lengths to establish a career, but I go through the motions of doing it. I buy magazines, see shows occasionally, have 2000+ articles in my RSS reader about grants and exhibitions, and most of my friends are part of that scene.

In lieu of artistic work, I take great pride in the wheezing and panting I do every other day. When I started running I was at one point overtaken by a lady pushing a baby stroller. It was sort of a low point, and I had to take a picture to illustrate. The whitish dot disappearing under the viaduct is she, three minutes after she overtook me. Today I would totally kick her arse as long as she didn’t keep her tempo up for longer than three minutes – that’s how long I can run without stopping. I’m moving up to five minutes on wednesday.

WTF en kvinna med barnvagn går förbi mig

I spoke with Stefan yesterday, and we discussed moving somewhere. Not somewhere in particular, but just the urge to move. He asked me why I’m still in Gothenburg, and it took me a bit by surprise. I haven’t thought of it much lately, but I guess that this is as close to a home that I’ve ever had, and I’m wont to enjoy the feeling.

Sooner or later I’ll be in good enough shape to do a Forrest Gump, and I’ll take off for Taipei or the horn of Africa, but until then I stay put.

Fans, fever, frolicking

I’m at home with a slight fever which I aquired last weekend (totally worth it though) and am drinking paracetamol and snake oil. I’ll head to work within the next hour, but thought I’d do my bi-weekly post instead of watching Battlestar Galactica(there are only so many episodes left that I haven’t seen, and I need to pace myself).

The message of the day: Backup your data, kids!

Lars, the architect I’m working with at the museum, hadn’t done it for a while, and his internal drive packed in. The data recovery people said that the driver head had scratched the platterns beyond salvation. A couple of weeks worth of work moved into the great wide yonder.
I immediately bought SuperDuper! and now have schedules backups of everything. I’ve also ordered a new drive to mirror my internal one.

While at it, I also bought Defcon, a tactical nuclear war simulator based on the movie WarGames. Between the sparse graphics and the eerie ambient sounds, it’s an utterly engrossing game that I’m looking forward to spending a couple of hours with. One of the more interesting aspects of the game is that you can ally yourself with anyone else, but are also at liberty to end these alliances at a whim. This makes paranoia and psychological warfare just as important as any military assets you might have, and might give a better understanding of the Mutual Assured Detruction doctrine. It’s like playing chicken with nukes.

Most of my friends and collegues don’t play games more complicated than Tetris, so I need new gaming friends. Get in touch please.

In between days when I don’t do anything but work, the thought has occoured to me that come May I’ll need to make money. Nothing that I nor the Gothenburg crew does lends itself to making money directly from a paying audience, but relies on either getting grants or selling art to collectors or investors. And there’s not a whole lot of that going on.

On that note, it’s impressive how independent writers, musicians and game programmers manage to eek out a living using mainly online self-publishing. It’s not for everyone, and requires a total dedication not only to your craft but also to your audience. If you look at the tremendous work that writers Scott Sigler or Mur Lafferty put in maintaining an active fan base, it soon becomes apparent that their “job description” is similar to that of a herder of cats, or perhaps the Pied Piper.

I’m not sure how well writing compares to the work that I and my friends are doing, which usually involves galleries and curated shows, but as far as making money is concerned, I feel that there are great things to be made and gained from taking a step back from the dead-end-job/show/grant/show/dead-end-job cykle that so many of us are stuck in.

Boingboing.net linked to an artikle by Kevin Kelly that seems right up the ally of so many people who are stuck in the mindset that making a living is an “either/or” proposition (including me): 1000 true fans.

It’s a more personal approach of the whole ‘long tail’ discussion from last year, and if what you do involves an audience, you’ll appreciate the article. Go read.

Finished: Appropriate christmas

I got tired of writing on the essay yesterday, and with a numb brain I set about finishing the homepage of the Appropriate Christmas sound piece.

You are ordered welcome to spread the link to the homepage.

As always, feedback in encouraged.

—[from the homepage]—

The Appropriate Christmas is a audio mix of some 2400 christmas tracks that I’ve downloaded over the years. The collection is mostly compromised of albums published in the English speaking world, although there are exceptions. (most notably Swedish albums)

Having grown up with the image of Christmas being an all-family happy happening, I’m one of those people bitter about promises never fullfilled, presents never delivered, families never being what they should be. There’s a reason why the suicide rate is it’s highest during christmas, and maybe by listening to the ambience of christmas destilled it’s possible to get a distance to all the expectations. Or maybe it just further drives you into a delerium.

Money is the stuff, work is the pimp.

I should:

a) Be working on my quite interesting master thesis that will somehow include Leibniz monadologie.
b) Be doing at least one art-work a day.
c) Be happy to be alive.
d) Write that goddam grant application!
e) Throw a party?
f) Appreciate my friends more, I think.

I should not:

a) Worry about money.
b) Being utterly crushed by the sinking sensation that even those horrible rent-a-worker places might not have any use for me.
d) Consider medical testing or prison a viable solutions.

General mood indicator:

Pity of self —78%
Shame ——–60%
Physique —– Pretty good, getting awesome.

Work in progress…

I’m working along the lines of the title The Boy with Half a Pinky and this photoshop is one way to pull it off.

Here’s the idea, as it is:

* The boy with half a pinky is an image of a young man sitting and smoking and looking slightly miserable. It’s blurry, except for the hand that holds the cigarette & which doesn’t miss any digits. Looking at the other hand you can’t really tell, because of the angle.

* What would be the point of this?

* This might look like an excercise in stearing the viewer, but it’s such an obvious point to make. Look, if I tell you that an image is about one thing, you’re gonna interpret or at least look at the image in relationship to what I’ve told you. And if I lead you on by saying something that either is

1) not verifiable
or
2) not verifiable & an outright lie

You’re not going to get anything true out of looking at the image, and it might actually make your perception of the image, and thereby your grasp on reality, slightly more false than you’d like. Of course, we’re constantly reminded of that others lie to us, or are otherwise not in a position to communicate anything un-false to us (how few and far between are the experiences of understanding, anyway?) and maybe we’re aware of this well enough.

* Basically, the above line of reasoning could lead one to believe that I’m just taking a piss and want to annoy any viewer, while at the same time creating an argument based on the falsehood of images and making a Descartian demon out of myself; An imbecile sitting by the roadside giving false directions to passersby, chuckling under my breath.

Ugh. But maybe that’s good enough? Or maybe good isn’t the right word to use. Maybe it’s plausable enough? The good part might come in if someone gets anything from looking at this while it’s hanging in a gallery, eat a breadstick and between munches says “uhm, this was nice. I’d say it’s even good.” That’s where the good part comes in?

I can’t seem to stear clear of the obvious trap here – I tend to treat what I’m doing as riddles that I have to reverse-engineer in order to figure out the true meaning of. Darn it. Darn it to heck.

One way to make clear that this image doesn’t matter in the slightest is this:

The second image is a heavily rasterised version of the one on the left. You can’t really make out any details unless you back a few steps away. Both images are made up of smaller parts – they’re stapled to the wall, taped with duct tape on the back, i.e. not being cared for very much.

There’s something fun about putting so many hours into a work that you finally decide to staple the shit out of. This might actually come as close to release as I’ll get on this side of legalised prostitution.

* Just had a smoke break with Mark, and he asked me the unwelcomed question I don’t see what you’re getting at, especially with the rasterised image.

Damnation.

So, what we end up with are a bunch of negative descriptions; Things that i’d like to point out that are wrong, but without offering an exit or a way out. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, since I just need to offer a way in, but, well, anyway. Nevermind. I’ll just prep the image for printing (it’s gonna come out on four sheets) and go home and eat soup.

Soup is good for you,
Soup is good for me,
and when you eat soup together
the company is free.

My camera makes people hate me, then they run away, then they cry.

Well, no. Not really.

Loop anything and it’ll look funny. The only solution is to never ever under any circumstances get caught on audio or video tape.

Interesting concert on saturday. Experimental electronica. It was so pretentious and with such a lack of thought (except the thought “if I look very goth and light some candles, it’ll all work out”) that I found myself listening with closed eyes. Then it was sort of okey half the time.

Kriget ended the show, and they’re nice.

Today is Monday, bloody Monday. The show at 300m3 opens at Friday, I haven’t finished the images, my mum comes by to celebrate her 50th birthday on Thursday, so I need to be finished before then, and jolly crap my last-minute ideas (I’ll leave a jar of peanutbutter on a plinth and call it “revenge of the Sith”) seem better and better in the shoddy light emanating from caffeine-fueled braincells shining out through my manic eyes.