Entries from Medienschmerz tagged with 'art'
This spring has been very eventful and it shows on the worsened update frequency on this site. Anyhow one of the better events has been the first Pimp My Passport workshop on 16 May 2009. Remember PMP was first introduced in Riga last autumn but now we actually got hands-on.
Mari and I were invited to Jyväskylä by the media art working group Live Herring. They're currently appointed as "regional artist" which is a radical move in Finnish cultural politics. The workshop was held at the university lobby during the city's "long night of the arts" so there was a lot of buzz and people on the move.
The idea was to facilite a workshop where people could make their own shielded covers for their new RFID passports and in the process discuss and get informed about the issues related to technology, privacy and biometric passports.
We set up our tables at the university lobby which itself is an Alvar Aalto landmar and put up lots of scrap and recycled material including used coffee packets, info sheets about RFID and passports plus a sewing machine. The amount of visitors exceeded all expectations. The first people arrived minutes before the official start and the last participants left at 00:05. During the eight hours the booth was never empty of visitors!
It was also nice to note that people of all ages came by. Young women were the most active group, but seniors and children took part as well. Creative flair was shooting through the roof all the time. At the end we counted some 40+ covers were made.
Press showed some interest to the event, regional newspaper Keskisuomalainen put it on page five where we were pitted against the Ministry of the Interior. Another paper from Turku also took note of the event and concentrate more on the crafting side. Unfortunately none of them checked out the vibes themselves but resorted to phone interviews.
The event night and the afterparty presented Jyväskylä as a very jovial and friendly city. It might well be the "most underrated" city in Finland. A world of thanks also to Soile of Live Herring for her kind efforts and support.
Links:
Gallery on Flickr
DIY instructions (fi)
Article from Keskisuomalainen (pdf, fi)
Blogpost and reaction by Live Herring (fi)
Article on Turun Sanomat (fi)
I spent the last weekend in Riga at the 10th Art+Communication festival titled SPECTROPIA. The title hints at artistic investigations of electromagnetic spectrum. Mari and I were invited to present the Pimp My Passport do-it-yourself workshop, which could be described as a civic action to reclaim electomagnetic privacy in the age of RFID and biometric passports. The initial concept was introduced on this blog in April 2008.
In addition to the exhibition, the accompanying conference was very inspiring and overwhelmingly dense. So dense that it was impossible to give every presentation the concentration they deserved. But if you too want to dig into this I've compiled featured projects on my delicious under tag spectropia.
As for Riga, I also stumbled upon a limerick which I'd like to quote to end this
There was a young lady of Riga
Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;
They returned from the ride
With the lady inside,
And the smile on the face of the tiger.
Sent in a proposal for Art+Communication festival in Riga in October. This year's festival is about "artistic explorations within the invisible space of electromagnetic spectrum surrounding us" so I think an examination of RFID and passports could fit in nicely.
Here's a description:
Pimp My Passport
The project examines DIY and hacking prospects as well as control and privacy issues of RFID passports currently being rolled out throughout the European Union. It also plays around with the notion of nationality and its symbols - seeking new ways to signal identity by "pimping" personal travel documents.
Although dealing with heavy subject matter like electronic privacy, big brother and nationality, Pimp My Passport is a playful, hands-on project that anyone can take part of.
For Art+Communication festival we'd like to propose a 1-2 day workshop with following structure:
- Probing sessions using RFID transceiver to read passports remotely
- Crafting of protective "Faraday cage" passport covers
- Pimping sessions e.g. working on re-interpretations of national symbols used on passports and other decorations
I've already talked about this to some of you long time ago, but now that I wrote that much down I might as well blog it and see how the forest answers!
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Some related links:
I've been to Wonderbar at an event where Claire Huot and Robert Majzels (left) presented their very interesting poetry concept called 85 letters.
It is fantastic on multiple levels. The output as simple as haiku – you have 5x17 characters in grid but written without gaps between the words and from top to down, right to left. Because of this awkward way of reading the recitals are quite odd from traditional.
For the material dimension of the concept they've made delicate prints on Chinese ghost paper. Some examples (and videos) are to be seen on authors' blog 285 Bungalow Drive.
The background of this project digs deep into Jewish mysticism, sinology and the art of translation in which the authors are both experts. It was also their response to the problematics of Chinese-English translation and notions of otherness.
Quite mental, right? Any questions, and I'll get into the details as far as I can in the comments...
It seems no-one in this stony city keeps their WLANs open. Where's the local Petteri Järvinen¹ who has scared everyone off about the dangers & dragons of the Internet? Okay, there's at least one house in the Rykestrasse, where a couple of tenants are sharing one connection (and its costs too). It's the one that still has the bullet holes from 1945 on it. But they're hippies over there, some smoke grass and all that. They are not even the hippiest community I know. The ones who call themselves anarcho-communists even had the MAC address² filtering on their base station. Nobody knew the router password, except one guy who didn't live there anymore.
Disaster from a distance
So I've been in a bit of a news penumbra, but imaginably in Finland there's been only one subject to talk about: Jokela school shooting. Everybody's shocked and our thoughts are with the afflicted. I don't know anyone involved, but I grew up in a neighbouring settlement³ in 1978-1981. The top attraction was Aleksi Kivi's death cabin⁴.
I've been thinking that the Jokela shooting might well be a Black Swan in front of our eyes. Black Swan is a concept coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. Basically it is an unexpected eventuality with three characteristics: it is rare and unpredictable, carries a massive impact, and we tend to find it very explainable in hindsight.
Obviously nobody (at least anyone with the power to stop it from happening) expected the tragedy to take place. Similarly, we've been very good at being not surprised at all in retrospective (lots of guns, lots of mental problems in the country). As to the impact, it has been terrible to victims' friends and families, but on the scale of a society, the effects are still unclear. In the worst case the reactionary forces prevail and we get more surveillance and control. In an acceptable scenario, we get better mental health care. In the best case the attitudes of an entire society change for better. Now, that will be a matter of time.
Trip to Karosta
I shared the trip to Berlin via Karosta with mkk. Of all the possible itineraries we chose to travel slow to Latvia, but to skip Poland and fly over it.
The departure was on 30th October and those days it can get quite stormy. Luckily Linda Line hadn't cancelled their first departure to Talliin at 8:00. The later ones were. M/S Jaanika is a robust hydrofoil, but even she needs to stay at port when the wind speed exceeds 15 m/s. Forecast for the day was 16 m/s. Had they cancelled it, we would have missed the bus to Riga. No redunancy in plans.
This time I developed a new technique to tackle sea sickenss. I had earlier read that professional orienteerers, when they examine the map, construct a mental 3D model of the terrain out of it. They work top-down. I attempted to do the same bottom-up: I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the water terrain. Just to get into the rhythm with the jerks and bumps – inducting the terrain based on the sensory flow and then anticipating the movement. I think it worked well, but might as well have been placebo.
Bus trip from Tallinn to Riga was uneventful. Looking out from the window, I recalled one of Tuglas Society's podcasts and a quote from Lennart Meri: "If you are a traveller, not a tourist—pass by the knights' castle and instead—take a beautiful picture of a field, that has been cultivated for 2000 years. It is a greater history, because there live both the past and the future."
For a hasty stopover lunch we opted in for the lowest common denominator - Hesburger! Then we tried to find a souvenir from Stockmann department store, but I beeped at the gates (not at the door but at the escalators, somehow). So I had dig through all the underwear for that unzapped RFID chip. Finally found the unexpected contraband, it was my paperback copy of Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines, bought used from St. George's. I'm a traveller after all.
Next, it turned out that the bus to Liepāja was "overbooked" and as we didn't figure out the elbow tactics in time, there were no seats left. It all felt like a memory of scarcity: if you don't rush, you'll be left without.
From the oxygen deprived interior of the bus I remembered, how dark a country Latvia is. Not many lights lit up in the countyside after the sunset. Two days later the locals mentioned another kind of darkness; smiles can be few and far between too.
Twelve hours after boarding the ship in Helsinki we arrived in Karosta district of Liepaja city.
This time there weren't any other guests around, residence artists⁵ nor visitors. So, the Admirals' House was literally stone cold when we arrived, but on the other hand, we got some undivided attention from Calle and Kristine, the people who established K@2 centre in 2000. There seemed to be much in the air. A new media art progamme with the Liepaja Academy was about to start. Visiting architects had remixed one of the roofless buildings and renovations had proceeded in others. Plenty of playground in and outdoors.
The bridge connecting Karosta to Liepaja proper was still half gone. A tanker rammed into it a year ago and took down one half of the pivoting structure. They sent a repair bill to Georgia, but most likely EU has to intervene.
Kristine had two adorable and sociable dogs Pūce and Ūpis⁶. Due to the increased police response times brought upon by the bridge's demise, they come quite handy as well.
Technomadic Berlin
It is nothing short of fantastic to know on arrival that Jodi had returned to Berlin and that John was in town as well. That sort of lineup can only mean two things: art and dinners.
Art seemed to be mostly about blowing stuff up.
NGBK hosted the exhibition Achtung Sprengarbeiten! where my attention was grabbed by Ruth Toma's and Rudolf Herz's "Das Haus der Kunst abtragen" – a Super8/U-matic video experiment from 1980 about a plot to detonate Munich's Haus der Kunst⁷. With a stretch of imagination the piece could also be a bastardly Chris Marker (La Jetee) and Peter Greenaway (The Falls) collaboration.
At Hamburger Bahnhof no-one fared better than mad-hatter Roman Signer whose art comes about in a MacGyverian fashion by engineering various kinetic devices, warheads and mortars and the artist himself setting them off from a close range. This could be shared thanks to artist's wife having videotaped it from a bearable distance. Never grow old!
Fragmented dinners instead of one big one, so it's until February then.
Jodi, mkk and I made it to a lunch at Spätzle Express. They serve nudels Swabian style. If I ever manage to get fit for triathlon, this is where I'll come for t-24h tank up. Later, John joined in an we had a chat at Villa Orange (one of my favourites) before proceeding to see theremin diva Dorit Chrysler in a previously unnoticed hideaway behind Prater Biergarten.
The other night we managed to catch up with mi_ga⁸ as well and Fernanda, who brought the latest buzz from Web 2.0 Expo to the roundtable.
Yeah, what else... three punctures in two days. Cyclists beware. Going to go collect the yellow Jopo on Thursday. Need to see if there's a way to vulcanise that rupture in the rear tyre. All back to normal then.
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¹ I attribute this expression to Ari N.
² Every network device has a fixed, unique MAC address
³ Kirkonkylä, not Jokela
⁴ National writer, 1834-1872, died in poverty
⁵ In 2005 I met Seriall and Peter Puype
⁶ Meaning Owl and Eagle-owl, respectively
⁷ Perhaps most known for hosting Nazis' "Degenerate Art" exhibition
⁸ Remember the ASCII carpet?
The weather in Helsinki is crisp and sunny, but there's an uncomfortable amount of street dust in the air. A steady, 5-10 m/s west by southwest current of air makes cycling into and out of the city a bipolar experience.
Pixelache festival is almost finished now and I've been around sporadically. At presentations, technical glitches are commonplace as ever. Wireless network doesn't work, display resolutions don't match, presentation laptop's iTunes version is not current enough. I actually feel these interruptions add an unitentional, but sympathetic level of humour the the event.
VJ acts look more and more sophisticated these days. Resolume is still popular, with the difference that beat sync seems have become a default. Screens at venues are plenty and we seem to have reached the post scarcity age in the number of projectors and plasma screens. Gone are the days, when VJ's had to scale walls and ceilings in order to hang bedsheets to project onto.
The main act of the main event, Hexstatic was a huge disappointment. Lazy mix of cheesy hits and music videos didn't really cut it for me. The lads were evidently lazy and indifferent on the stage. The most affecting AV performance was delivered on Sunday afternoon by Kira Kira feat. Samuli Kosminen & co. With a cute female lead and toy instruments it couldn't really go wrong. Grainy visuals with 8mm film look matched the Icelandic post-rock undercurrent. The taste of forest berries with a sprinkling of salt water in the nose. Bonus points awarded for playing Melodica and for extending percussion department by using gaffer tape as an instrument.
John's remote presence workshop culminated on Saturday evening party at MUU. Eclectic, comfortable atmosphere resonated a kind of a harmonious energy the participants had accumulated.
Teemu started unoffical discussion about the coming 5-year birthday of Amfibio. As a collective, we've passed the ball a long time ago, but It would still be nice to commemorate the busy days in 2002/03, when the Helsinki VJ scene really blossomed.
Caspar David Friedrich (1798) meets Frank Hurley (1915).
Artist Heidi Lunabba has mashed-up the best thing since sliced bread - a floating sauna. And that's not all, its walls are punctured with two lensed holes on opposite sides, meaning that it also functions as a camera obscura.
About eight visitors at a time can comfortably experience the smooth heatwaves from wood-heated stove (given that nobody forgets to add wood to the fire!). As the raft floats around, its surroundings are projected inside, on the walls, on the steam and on the visitors bodies through pinholes. This is achived optically, without mediatechnological intervention.
...in a society, where webcams and cameraphones are commonplace, the emotions raised by Camera Obsucura are almost magical - we find fascination in real pictures, created without any machinery [. . .] The image is sympathetic, friendly intimate, not overseeing or preserving.
Sauna Obscura visited the waters of Weißensee in Berlin as part of Normalnull festival. My snapshot above is not completely representative, the ones on festival website give an idea what's it like inside.