Apollo lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility / Temporary sauna at Biscay Bay.
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Apollo lunar module in the Sea of Tranquility / Temporary sauna at Biscay Bay.
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Actor Daniel Radcliffe / Minister of Finance Jyrki Katainen.
]]>Temporary sauna at Biscay Bay from Mesq on Vimeo.
In February 2009 I travelled to the Basque Country to join Demos Helsinki & Co's "basecamp" in Donostia-San Sebastián. I brought a portable DIY sauna with me and one evening we built it on a remote beach. This is a 2,5 minute video how it happened. Camerawork by Kirmo Kivelä.]]>
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)
Greetings from the beach! I'm in Playa del Ingles overcoming tourisim until 10th April with mikroPaliskunta 'The Finnish on Holiday' expedition. Follow us on www.mikroPaliskunta.net
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In Berlin, there's the 18th Long Shopping Night instead...
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Senior people misusing umbrella bin / Wind-blown people misusing garbage bin.
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I haven't been reading enough blogs lately, because I had missed out on the Dynamic Tower of Dubai until the latest issue of National Geographic.
The skyscraper also known as Da Vinci Tower has 80 floors, each of which rotates individually – extending the whole architectural experience into the "fourth dimension of time". It is also wind and solar powered and claimed to be self-sustaining with enough surplus to power up five other similar buildings.
Like much of the spectacular architecture of these days, it is being built in Dubai and should be completed in 2010. The presentation is very pretentious, leaves behind even Khan Shatyr in Astana of Kazakhstan.
I'm curious to see how it works out. Not everyone is convinced of its feasibility.
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I created a public profile on Dopplr, so that friends and friendly-minded can keep up with my comings and goings. If you're a user too, just add me as a fellow traveller.
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Pictured above is a way to do the dishes with a minimal amount of water using only a sponge and the foam from washing up liquid. A friend of mine learnt this from an Israeli cook. Considering the water resources of the Holy Land, they must have a good number of methods like this.
]]>January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
In general, as a rising trend I got to see quite a lot of theatre.
Finland:
Hildegard Knef (Koko), Köyhyysballadi Leipäjonoballadi (Takomo), Seitsemän veljestä (TTT), Tuntematon sotilas (Kans.)
Berlin: Der aufhaltsame Aufstieg des Arturo Ui (BE), Darwin-win (VB), Die Dreigroschenoper (BE), Ein Sommernachtstraum (SB), Die Möwe (DT/VB), Ubukönig (VB), Winterreise (DT)
It is intersting to see what's going to emerge this year...
Thank you for your love and support – I wish everyone a happy new year!
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Thanks to Google Books I've been able to track down a reference to a concept of Medienschmerz that predates this blog.
From Internationalizing Media Theory by John Downing (p. 223)
Cultural imperialism is a perspective that has largely been identified with leftist analysts such as Schiller (1969, 1989), and is therefore often dismissed, especially in Schiller's case as a kind of generalized Medienschmerz that blots out any capacity of the world's citizens to resist or appropriate in their own fashion the messages of global advertising or US television, and additionally presumes that worries about cultural survival are uniquely provoked by policies of the major powers, and not equally by nation states against ethnic minorities within their own frontiers.
That's one (compound) sentence by the way. Downing's thick writing style verily reminds me a lot of media studies exam books in the university. Can it be just a coincidence that the scholar menitioned in the passage is called Schiller?
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Left: Antisolar glory over Gdansk Bay. Right: ENKI interface presentation.
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.
Shashlik grill / "Kicker" – table football game popular in Germany.
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I'm finally retiring my Nokia 6510 handset, which I've had as my main phone for six years this autumn. Excellent tactile design. Only now it's starting to give. The menu button produces no clicks or double-clicks. Compliment to the engineers and designers who created 6510, it has been a fantastic product - and not quite matched by Nokia's current offering.
Some statistics from the phone's call counters:
Dialled calls' duration 80:20:46
Received calls' duration 240:10:49
All calls' duration 320:31:34
Last call duration 00:14:42
That's almost a fortnight on the phone.
The 6510 worked fine on the presumption that mobile phone is good for phone calls and texting. Now that you're supposed to be able to do all kinds of smart things with your mobile, it seems it's the iPhone that finally delivers those promises.
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