Visual Performance 29-31.10

Teching Hsieh and his works get me so deep into the previously mentioned subject of what-is-art. There is no doubt that his one year performances should be included in the definition.

He’s done six major performance projects that make me feel difficult feelings:

1) Staying in a cage for one year without any entertainment or communication with the rest of the world
2) Stamping a timeclock and taking a photo of himself in his studio every hour for one year
3) Staying outdoors in New York for one year, not entering any indoor space or vehicle
4) Being tied to another artist with a 2m rope and not touching each other for one year
5) Not doing, watching, talking about art for one year
6) Doing art for 13 years but never presenting the results to any public audience

The two questions these things raise in me:

a) does a performance need an audience?
A good example is his 13-year plan. Nobody knows what he’s doing. He claims he is doing art but he’s not going to show it to anybody. Nobody is going to witness anything done, but the mere sentence that claims art being born makes the FACT about creating (maybe unexisting) art interesting and therefore art itself. Okay, if nobody knew even this fact, it wouldn’t be a performance. So yes, somebody has to know about it.

b) isn’t any everyday routine or action, when claimed art, simply a very bad performance?
If I state that I shall take a walk in a park today, it will be a really lousy one because nobody is interested in me walking in a park. But if I were to hop on one leg in the park for a week with no rest, some would take interest because of the bizarre movement and a long period of time. Just to see if I can do it.

In his case, the thing is not staying indoors or staying outdoors or being tied to another human being. The catch is the gigantic time lapse that it takes to get to the end of the process. The act of repetition gives a simple gesture great importance. Everybody can do stupid things. But to stay stubborn in the madness is what makes an artist special. To be able to sleep, walk and go shopping for only 45 minutes because then you need to take another photo of yourself. The surrealism of this continuity makes the act of taking a photo bigger and more significant. And interesting, yes.

Art is art when somebody claims it art and somebody takes interest in it?

OK, most of the Visual Performance class was jumping around and feeling the freedom. Fun, but not very educating. Adrian Heathfield is a writer, curator and teacher of performance art. He’s so much into his subject that it makes one envious. But it seemed that the designers weren’t that vain to enjoy the freedom of performing and got tired of playing after the first day.
In the preliminary information we were promised discussion and viewing of the work of (follows a long list of intriguing names). But we ended up mostly analyzing our own feelings when occupying the studio space in one way or another. It felt good, of course. I haven’t spoken to people much lately and saying what comes into my mind is really refreshing once in a while. Feels like the free art classes of the first year. With the difference that I had nothing to say back then.

Light as visual art. Opening seminar 24.10

At end of the day we had Terike Haapoja visiting. I’m glad I didn’t have to take the early boat. She had a point. A point I liked.

Terike showed us some of her work – lately she’s been fond of temperature sensors that create a picture graph according to the heat waves it registeres. She’s done video installations showing body heat of humans remaining on surfaces and videos of animal bodies cooling down after their death.

Her interest is in the information. A heat sensor is not a camera. What we see on the video is not a visual recording. It is actually a data graph. The image really means numbers. Beautiful numbers.

Very often art remains a merely aesthetical, visually interesting installation, making no statement whatsoever. A lot of lighting is made just because “this looks cool”.

I also think things should be made for a reason, whether the message eventually shows or not.
I’m not claiming that one should be able to explain every beam of light on stage. But for what I’m going to put up for our exhibition in March I need to invent a reason for existing.

Aesthetics of Light opening seminar 23.10

So we got together to discuss art. The ever-pondered painful questions like “What is art?”, “Who is an artist?” and “When is lighting art?”.

Now I’m supposed to give birth to a whole essay on the latter subject. Which is not a problem. The awfully big research is what frightens me timewise. We were offered (for example) Vittorio Storaro (love him) and Christopher Doyle (love him, too). Where am I going to take the time to go any deeper into this kind of worlds? You cannot make a research on things you like in two evenings.

What I’m actually happy about (I know I shouldn’t be, reading takes time, takes it away) is that I have to read the zillion referred books. It’s been a while I’ve been pondering anything about the theory or history of the subject. Plus, I like reading.

Before I get to writing any essays, I need to write down this bizarre problem I have. There’s a lot of discussion about really being an artist, being sometimes taken for a mere, supposedly humble technician, not having the artistic freedom (to do what?) and yada yada yada. Maybe two years ago I also took it seriously. Now I must claim different:

The problem of what can be called art and who can be called artist seems like cat-fighting to catch a balloon you haven’t blown yourself. I think an artist does not make art. Art is what happens on its free will. Those called artists are people who do things they think might make art happen. One is an Artist if the result of the work can be claimed art. If I’m the only one to see art in my work, I might need to force other people to agree with me. Aye, there’s the rub. There’s no way you can be an Artist for everybody.

I think that if somebody doesn’t quite cope with you, either this somebody is right or you are in a wrong place. In both cases it’s a 50:50 chance you can do something about it.

A new thought for me is that you don’t need to be technically skilled to make good things happen. Even just proving oneself good with enormous quantities of technology doesn’t make the artistic result good for sure. Somehow in the world of high-speed development it’s easy to get brainwashed into believing everything will be great if you can use all this new stuff we want to sell you. I would like to refer to a piece from the latest ODE magazine – What the West can learn from rest: finding solutions for what’s impossible. If you can make something happen that nobody else can – I think that’s the magic.

We are what we are, we do what we do. Call it art, science or stupidity. If you do it well, you’re happy with yourself. Zen, dudes, zen.

Download finished

I stumbled upon this lovely movie project when looking for french subtitles or original dialogue for Kieslowsky’s Trois Coleurs.

“Download Finished transforms and re-publishes films from P2P networks and online archives. Found footage becomes the rough material for the transformation machine, which translates the underlying data structure of the films onto the surface of the screen.
The original images dissolve into pixels, thus making the hidden data structure visible. Through Download Finished, file sharers become authors by re-interpreting their most beloved films. “

The site removes key frames from compressed movies on filesharing networks. Consisting of only delta frames, the picture has remainings from the previous scenes of the film.

Having broken key frames in any digital media (be it a downloaded divx or a perfectly legal digital TV channel) is annoying. Having all the keyframes cut out is a different thing. I think that it philosophically adds an artsy new dimension to the picture.

Unfortunately the search field is gone fishing so I couldn’t try to download any of my favourites. Still, some of them had been converted already.

Literature shopping

I just spent 200 euros on video tech books on Amazon.co.uk

I got really pissed for messing up some codec formats in a project sequence in Final Cut and spent about a day extra time to figure how to export anything in 16:9 aspect ratio. Eventually I made a copy of a backup file and copy-pasted all the clips into a new sequence. The old one is still berserk for some reason. Grr. I know I’m to blaim myself. I have no idea what the codecs and formats are really about and so far I’ve managed with… bluff and improvisation. Sorry.

Soon I’ll have this and this and this book.

At some point you should to know what you’re doing. At least when getting paid for it (haha, just joking).

Idea presentation for “Lighting and Sound for Dance”

So we had to make some plans what we want our dance performance to be. I think the process of our work was quite bizarre.

We met four times (I think). At the first meeting I suggested Daniil Harms short stories as the basis for the script. I think everyone agreed. Next time we brought some photos we thought were interesting and I had a book about propaganda posters from the last century – Spain, Russia, Germany, China. There was a section with the hand motive used – hands shaking, hands pointing, gestures of different meanings. We ended up with a tiresome messed up dialogue about a person being pushed around by the society and the need to go with the common rules.
The third meeting was about a gigantic stage construction shape we couldn’t decide.
When we got back together for the fourth time, we still hadn’t made up our minds about anything. Whether there was going to be a story, what characters were the dancers supposed to be, in what place was it supposed to take place or what kind of a world were we talking about. Some were saying some things about some things that didn’t really attach to any other things said before and others were bitching about the things said. As I had promised to be a nice person (see entry from september), I decided not to care that I got no sense or details or concrete ideas out of anybody and tried to look like I’m just going with the flow. When that didn’t work, I tried some bitching myself and then came up with an obsessive idea about Pixar-style table lamps with flowery petals attached and some people even seemed to like it. Eventually I ended up blowing dishwashing gloves into balloons and sticking them onto a LED-flashlight at home. It seemed to work, we’ll try to make some flower bushes out of them.
The presentation today was a miracle, I think. Everybody looked really depressed just some minutes before we walked into the teachers’ room, not exactly knowing what we’re going to say. At the presentation, everyone just made up some thematic bluff on the subjects we had discussed before. And my oh my, in the end the pieces somehow seemed to fit together. We have a spiralling stage of fake grass, transparent costumes that pass light, pink dishwashing gloves as flowers and a stadium-like atmosphere with some chopped up beats to dance to.
Yes, we’re all great fans of David Lynch and Matthew Barney.
To be sure of the thing, we went to Milenka and had a beer and swore that we’re now going to stick to these things, live with them and not start with new ideas anymore.

Tallinn-Helsinki

I’m going back and forth again. Tallinn-Helsinki this morning, back in the evening. The same on Thursday. It’s cheaper to travel (10eur discount offer) than Helsinki-Tampere (12.50eur) and about the same as Tallinn-Tartu (about 9 eur).

In Moscow, New York and London it takes the same 1,5h to travel from the suburbs to citycentre.

This somehow makes the world smaller for me. I know there are people in France and Germany and other big countries that take the highway to work for two hours daily. Compared to them, my 90km and 1,5h while reading a book is nothing.

The book is great, by the way. I got a six-months-anniversary present called “Electronics and radio technology”. Love it, love him.

Reality check

Johan Lemaitre’s presentation named “Concept design in retail environment” at the Fagerhult seminar was a reality check too early in the morning.

Of course there was much truth in it and that what scares me. Johan Lemaitre is from WACO, a Fagerhult partner that does lighting for retail – shops, boutiques etc. I’ll briefly share his ideas.

Some time ago, the shops were a scene for a battle of brands – Armani, Gucci and Calvin Klein had their products sold in the same store space and therefore had to stand out with slogans and brand names ON the products.
Now every brand has their own boutique and the whole shop has to catch the eye – the battle is now between the stores.

The diversification now comes from the interior, exterior, wider product selection (Ricci perfume), side brands and products (BVLGARI hotels) and cooperation projects (Prada+LG). A trade mark must create a global culture, make people reckognise the brand, create global tribalism and dictate a lifestyle. Get them in and make them buy! And it’s easy to sell stuff through the cool-looking image connected to it. There are no jeans in sight on Levis’ web page. The NIKE front page features music, events and other lifestyle features. It’s so much more than just buying the product.

The slogan was – we’re not in lighting business, we’re in the bagfilling business. The design of the shop is just another way to make people consume. If the lighting makes the shop comfortable, the people will stay (and buy) for a longer time.

I’ve been thinking about this thing a lot during this summer. I’ve had basically no income and I’ve consumed about as reasonably as possible. Most of my money went on food, alcohol and boat tickets to Helsinki. Okay, I could’ve skipped the booze. But I’ve been looking at the people shopping in the mall and the advertisement campaignes in a bit of a different way when out of the system myself.

The main point, however, made a lot of sense. You cannot install the same lighting fixture in the Boss and MEXX store of the same street. Picking from the catalogue is thinking inside the box. You get out of the box by individualising. Get rid of the box – adapt to the culture and combine the techniques. Oh please, mister WACO, pimp my lights!

LED T-shirts

Yep, it’s LED-s, Erki. Let’s make you a shirt with a flashing pink pony. Get some diodes and let’s get soldering! Rocknroll!

Audio Visual 2007 (Helsinki Fair Centre)

After two hours of interior lighting, I found more stuff upstairs: Audio Visual 2007.

Poor me.

As seen on exhibition by RGB OY, the Philips 3D flatscreen television even kind of works. Makes you sick, but it works. As Philips describes it on the web, “Multiview lenticular technology allows multiple viewers wide freedom of movement without sacrificing 3D perception. A sheet of transparent lenses, is fixed on an LCD screen. This sheet sends different images to each eye, and so a person sees two images. These two images are combined by our brain, to create a 3D effect. Because the sheet is transparent, it results in full brightness, full contrast and true color representation.”
The idea is, you have about nine different places in the room that give you a 3D impression. If you stand between the points, you’ll just get dizzy. Luckily, you can turn the 3D off and enjoy the toy like a normal LCD television if you want to.

Another cool thing that really works, is the DirectionalAudio PANPhonics speakers that carry sound in a very narrow direction. Just a step from their way and the sound’s not disturbing you anymore. E.g. this way you can have cafeteria music at the tables only, not disturbing the counter. Or maybe good for brainwashing commercials in the hall of the mall. Not really good for classical music, but speech and stuff got out quite clear. And they’re flat as paper (4mm). Scary.

A pleasant thing – many exhibitors had free workshops all day! I took a seat at the Avid booth and got it jiggy with colour correction. Shit, if I’d known it was so easy! I was really surprised what some clicks improved in the un-white-balanced-image. And they claim you can buy Avid with 180 euros if you’re a qualified student. Tomorrow I’ll go and check out the other features of the program, maybe it’s better than I’ve thought.

P.S. hearing the guy on the big stage talk sleek and rapid about digital video for the “home user” on Pinnacle Studio Plus, I got really angry about not really understanding many things he said. There are these new weird things like AVCHD format and blu-ray discs that I’ve never seen yet. I wonder how normal (un-nerdy) people manage to keep up with their home electronics with such speed in the developement.

Edit: reading about blu-ray, I find out that DVD guys have also made a little improvement towards HD DVD with an article way too long on Wikipedia to read through. Where have I been when all this happened?