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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
—
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?
I’ve been living off a bag since August. Technically homeless, bunking down in benevolent c/o addresses and optimising baggage allowances. Yet not travelling enough to brag about it. At least my carbon footprint is in check then.
Now, I get on with a two-part lowdown on the last eight weeks. The events take place in Helsinki metropolitan area.
Lectures and presentations
Someone said that the English language is devoid of the word sivistys / die Bildung. I guess the closest word is cultivation. Anyhow, the first one was about X and technology, and second one about X and the political left.
The grand old man of communication and technology, Osmo A. Wiio talked to a middle-aged audience about surviving in today’s technoscape. There was hardly any beef there; buy an Apple computer and get spared from viruses, is not much to write home about. However, Prof. Wiio has been around since 1940s and should just be let to tell stories from the course of his life – that would be priceless. Now he just scraped his reservoir of anecdotes.
A more engaging talk was given by dramaturgist Outi Nyytäjä to another middle-aged group, namely the intellectuals of the social democrat party. Nyytäjä is an elderly woman and thus excused to behave outspoken, even badly. Sharp witted, Brittany based and fluent in several languages she did her best in trying to spark up the ideological flame of this very mossy party in a clueless situation.
Megapolis 2022 event attracted crowds to Vanha. Headline: “Environmental problems are solved in cities”. Speaker lineup was rather media sexy indeed. As a satellite event there was a presentation by fantastic artist duo HeHe. Over the winter they’re working on Nuage vert laser projection in Helsinki. This was also the first session of the Pixelache University. In the lobby I made the first contact with the Wikiparty – a young movement of great expectations.
Then, there was also a Graffiti Research Lab show & tell and laser graffiti night, where my bicycle also got pimped out with LED throwies.
Football
My pals Markus, blogger of Lighthouse, and ml – top commenter and Bird-list contributor on this blog and I went to see two FC Honka matches. Matches at that point of the season seemed a bit lacklustre on Honka’s part, but Markus had a great anecdote about Honka’s and HJK Helsinki’s extraaathletic rivalry on the heights of stadium light posts. Obviously, no visit is complete without a visit to Gallows Bird where I’ll be heading next on St Thomas’ Day for traditional winter solstice brews session.
Earlier this year I thought the Finnish football culture had taken a social turn, when I saw people flocking at pubs to see Euro qualifications. Maybe that’s just because they’re are on pay channels now, but during the Belgium match everything was absolutely packed. Except one, and as told by a film critic, “Going to an Iguana is like FU’ing yourself”.
Cultures
On that Megapolis 2022 day I opted out from presidential keynote and accepted Keltanen’s offer to see Get Yor War On at Espoo City Theatre. Fantastic political play after eponymous comic completed with extensive choreography on overhead projectors. Tickets courtesy of Riikka, extending thanks here and now.
I’m not contributing to Prenzlauer Berg’s baby boom in the foreseeable future, but the children’s play Ahmatti I saw at the Alexander Theatre courtesy of the director, was damn good stage art for children over five years. Parents ahoy!
Because monolingualism is overrated, I gained an ego boost from keeping up with Jag är min egen fru at the Swedish Theatre. One-man play about the prominent Berlin transvestite Charlotte von Mahlsdorf, who assumed life of a housewife hoarding Gründerzeit memorabilia. Without the turbulent historic circumstances, that would not be the most exciting theme, but it made a satisfyingly laid out play nevertheless.
Freja cordially tipped off to the opening of their Megafån group’s Feminist Wallpaper exhibition. I’d personally rather be pro-equality than pro-feminism or any other gender-biased ideology, but I like this work. Prime example of crowdsourcing in art as well.
To conclude I went to the Helsinki Book Fair for the first time. My friend Taina published her new book on the relationship between religion and politics there, which I’m looking forward to read in the holidays. Karstein was on the panel there as well (missed that, but luckily we had the pints @ Pikkulintu) and he’s come out with a new Fakta book (#3). Congrats!
Otherwise, I scanned about half a dozen interesting titles, but my personal baggage allowance would not bear any weight of paper.
They’re closing at Melis now, so we must have a break here.
