posted
  • place: en route Pääkäri - Turku - Salo - Helsinki, Finland

back on land

no longer surrounded by the sea.

the return from the island. temporary. permanent. who knows. the returns at some point in life are overwhelmed by last visits to anywhere. the drift continues. Jerneja & Tapio head to Helsinki in the very deep green and very fast Jag. I hop the train with two minutes to spare in Turku. such a different train than the one that carried me across the Rockies a few weeks ago. this one new, solid, smooth, modern, clean, like an airplane with lots of room. passing the horizontal compressed flatness of dark farmed soil, small vertical fir trees, tunnels drilled through billion-yeared gneiss, granites. and the head filling with tiredness. until the eyes are closed, dreaming. passing Salo, where once Sanna’s elderly grandmother said I had nice eyes, when I first was introduced to her. then to the family, and then dinner with the parents. her father just a few years older than I was, yikes. they hand the basement sauna along with a few beers over to Sanna and I to enjoy, later clad in sweat only.

free wifi on the train. the car is silent except for a crying baby accompanied with a tired mother who keeps taking the baby out to another part of the car, a glass-doored area with a handicapped bathroom with a wide cylindrical automatic door.

get back in town and run into a bunch of the Pixelache crew, so end up in Kallio hanging with them. I knock a beer stein off the coffee table that we are gathered around, it smashes into safety-glass pieces. Tapio and Jerneja show up, along with Amanda fresh in from Brooklyn on a residency with Pixelache to share her prodigious arts management experience. lovely to see her! talk to Jenni about meeting tomorrow when she is back late from Tallinn. late-ness seems to be dropped from the spring calculations about time here, now, when night is only a soft impression of not-near darkness. a low-risk approach, no, a clear divergence from the winter’s heavy blot. knowing how this is, the vast human awakening that occurs when the sun comes out and out and out is no surprise. teenagers already in practice after Vappua celebrations early in the month, they are not firmly rooted, roving outdoor parks all through the night, partying with some long-suppressed spirit. good for them, in the altered state of their convocations.

posted
  • place: Pääkäri, Saaristomeri, Finland

in the Archipelago

on the island, with Tapio, Alejo, and Jerneja. wind, water, birds, working, fishing, writing, editing, eating, drinking, sauna every night (where night is only a sliding attenuation into a dusk that never finds darkness). beautiful on all counts. network connection, and some photovoltaic energy. for two more days.

posted
  • place: Circular Quay, NSW, Australia

Temp°Sauna

Mika arrives back in town a few days ago from Newcastle and presenting Temp°Sauna at electrofringe (part of the this is not art event). the Nordic Embassy finds out and asks him to present the project — in the foyer of the Dendy Cinemas right on Circular Quay next door to the Opera — for the opening of a Nordic Film Festival. I cruise by on Thursday to help with the set-up which is a bit tricky because of a blustery wind blowing the entire evening, at one point almost knocking the whole rig over with the red-hot Finnish Army wood stove cranking away. there is a fancy opening with plenty of Finlandia vodka drinks, sushi, and posters from Saab and so on. at any rate, he managed to get a couple of the gals associated with the Embassy to jump in the sauna. I did too, with only one question — when would the next opportunity arise to do a real Finnish wood sauna there on the Quay? it was plenty hot, and we had a good laugh hanging around in towels as did the guests watching us at the opening reception. it’s a nice scene, and so I hang around to help shut everything down after some hours.

back again tomorrow?

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

welcome to Finland

a routine jump from Hamburg to Vantaa airport, in from there on the Finnair bussi and Nathalie meets me on the corner in front of the building where the Kiasma flat is — Museokatu 23, in downtown, shows me around to the flat A 11, and we talk about the situation so far. her organization of the practical matters is impeccable. then after a few minutes unpacking and settling in, I head over to the Lasipalatsi Cafe where I find Sophea and Andrew hanging out. then it’s off to the avanto sauna on Suomenlinna. it’s men’s night — as is customary in public saunas in Finland, split genders — and we meet Juha at the ferry terminal. there is little ice around, a few spans of rotten left-overs around the sheltered parts of the island. avanto is the deLightful Finnish habit of chopping — or, in contemporary times, chain-sawing — a hole in the winter ice so that one can take winter-tired body and jump into the water for a

leisurely paddle. tonight it’s a good 25 meters between the sauna building and the avanto dock — across gravel. that’s enough for me. I take the pictures instead of going in.

posted
  • place: Rösrath, Germany

swimming

Susanna comes by and we go to the Mediterana spa in nearby Bergisch Gladbach. in my spacey jet-lag way, I forget to bring earplugs for swimming, so am stuck swimming in the small and warm indoor pools. dang. Volker and Susanna go for the full sauna thing. it’s like the spa I went to with Chris and Steffi last spring. seems to be quite the fashion across Germany, these very high-end places for relaxing and exercising.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

placard7

the placard session with Sophea goes okay, after a late start at Fred’s apartment with a few people in attendance. Juha put a page with some photos from the evening before, some recognized faces! nice vibe. now about to head to Shinji and Tarja’s log cabin in the green and leafy ‘burbs for a tour of the coast, a wood-fired sauna, and dinner.

posted
  • place: Tallinn, Estonia

glacial till

staying in Mare’s flat in the Old Town. the building dates from the 13th century. bedroom window wells are a meter deep, lined with the gray Paleozoic limestone/dolomite which seems to be the sole natural building material available here. turns out, it overlies extensive deposits of oil and alum shales as well, the Ordovician Dictyonema oil shales (polevkivi) used to supply the country with a domestic energy source along with peat production. but mining has decreased steadily since the 1980’s because of a lowering in cost of competing energy sources.

Dictyonema oil shale (DOS) is a formation of the Tremadoc stage (Pakerord and Varangu regional stages) of the Early Ordovician. It is often called Dictyonema shale, Dictyonema argillite, alum shale, etc. The name “dictyonema” was given after the benthonic root-bearing [i]Dictyonema flabelliforme[/i], which turns afterward to a planktonic nema-bearing [i]Rhabdinopora flabelliformis[/i]. DOS is not a methamorphosed formation like a common argillite, so the fragments of name “dictyonema” or “argillite” do not carry the true scientific meaning. In our works we stressed the quality of Dictyonema shale to be a low-grade oil shale, but DOS was mostly known as a source rock for uranium and some other heavy metals. — R. Veski, V. Palu

the limestone has a completely different architectural energy from Helsinki’s dense black-red granite, not least because of the age of the buildings it was used in. not sure if this region was at the edge of the Weichselian (Holocene) glacial coverage of the Scandinavian region, but suspect so. how else would the small berg of limestone that the old town rose on have survived? any serious glaciation would have plowed it flat. all the soft sand of the coastline, not to mention the south Baltic basin coast itself suggests that this was the fringe, like the Great Lakes were.

can’t figure out how to turn the sauna on, but, oh well, enjoying the very quiet evenings. noticing my predilection to snap on any media source for a fill of anti-silence. so it goes. and missing the news fix.

posted
  • place: Tallinn, Estonia

back & forth

En route to Tallinn.

Last time here was with Stefan in 2000, the fall, meeting Ivika. I guess I was teaching at the Academy in the fall of that year as well.

Super sea cat, Italian boat, like a huge speed boat. Stupid interview in bad English on Finnish raydeeoh. No translation. The Cranes. The deejay is pointless.

This way of blogging is pretty lame.

Like writing in the notebook.

The hydraulic properties of water are very much felt with the cleaving of the water by the ship, it hits the waves, and there are sharp shocks. Sky-sea interface, back to the infinite half space concept. Sailing between two infinite half spaces. On one, through another. Heavy traffic here in the Baltic. Cats, freighters, ferries, tankers, roro’s, containers.

Ivika meets me in the terminal with blond hair. Looking very different than the last time when Stefan and I popped over from Helsinki for a day visit back in 2000. It’s brisk out. We walk from the harbor to Mare’s flat in the Old Town, in a 13th century building. 51 Pikk Street. Beautiful space with a sauna even. The city has rapidly changed from the dour shabby outlook of Soviet times to the slick consumer surface of globalism. And is still transforming. Watched by the glazed and red eyes of the drunken Finnish tourists. And somewhere, by invisible rich business-men between their buying and developing spells.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

the lost films

have the chance to catch The Lost Films that Stan Brakhage made in 1995. so in-spiring to receive these energies of his life. after he has passed away last spring. an honor to have been taught by him. even when he would sometimes leave the room when screening a film, and forget to turn off his wireless microphone on the way to the drinking fountain or the bathroom, or in an encounter with a colleague in the hallway. when I was doing my MFA back in the late 80’s and again when I was a visiting faculty in the fall of 1997, my office was next door to his 3×6-meter cubby-sized office with a sloping roof on the upstairs hallway where the photography grad students had their darkrooms. it was in that little office where many of his hand-painted films came together, on a glass-topped desk. with the pigments standing ready. how did he conceive, map, from working tediously frame-by-frame with a loupe, the projected brilliance of 24 fps? astonishing crystal clear will-to-see, and to apprehend the world as-it-is, and as we adsorb it through wide-spectrum eyes, corners of eyes, through eyelids, blurred tears, and squinted eyelashes. Light-receivers, life-receivers. and how he conjured humor to arise from chaotic abstraction, magmatic? no, more like a tremoring breeze through new aspen leaves. the coursing of wind mingled with the temporal deflections, resistances of leaf. and the leaf laughs. “it’s the same.” as Lightnin’ Hopkins says, “if you cain’t say it, then … SING boy!”

notes for The Lost Films:

1) A travelogue “nocturne” on the City of London as illuminated by “glaze” finally off the surfaces of Turner’s paintings.

2) A travelog to the north of Finland, shepherded by the midnight sun.

3) A hand-painted work, a “midsummer’s night dream,” still reflective of the previous summer in Finland.

4) A multiply pastel-toned balloon of optical fog triumphing over the barest hints of photographic representation in the lower right-hand corner.

5) A mountain meditation primarily in blue “mountains” of the mind shaped by amorphous dull yellows and faded violets.

6) A hand-painted film, some of the same colors of the previous films moving through sandbars and oceans of thoughtful recollection.

7) This is the eternally ephemeral process of attempts to remember imagery “giving-way”/ being-displaced-by the contemporaneously practical sighting of what confronts any given viewer at every shift of open eyes (or, as in the film, at every shift of camera, optical focus and montage of edit) — the skeins of the Atlantic, the particularities of Boston night Lights, and illuminated points West, ending on a garbage truck in a parking lot by the deserts of New Mexico.

8) A dark “sea chante” of absolute photography.

9) The color negative of “truth” — that is to say it is the whole truth (insofar as hand-painted film might aspire to achieve it) and a counterbalance epiphany to any such “truth” as might be put in quotes.

— Stan Brakhage

Once, I think it was in 1997, Stan and I were talking about his trip to Finland for the retrospective at a small film festival, he was telling me of a peak experience he had while in a rowboat coming from an island in a lake after a sauna. the Light. he broke down and cried from the seeing.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Selkä-Sarvi

sweating in a hot bath. memories of Finnish sauna experiences. on the island, Selkä-Sarvi or so. back in October 1998.

Man who is born of woman — how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers; like a shadow he fades in the dark
He falls apart like a wine-skin, like a garment chewed by moths.
And must you take notice of him? Must your call him to account?
Since all his days are determined and the sum of his years is set —
look away; leave him alone; grant him peace, for one moment.
Even if it is cut down, a tree can return to life.
…
But man is cut down forever; he dies, and where is he then?
The lake is drained of its water, the river becomes a ditch,
and man will not rise again while the sky is above the earth.

— Job, as translated by Stephen Mitchell

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

heart problems

pieces of a puzzle or perhaps an example of seeing what one wants to see: I have still only seen two instances of a woman driving a car with a man sitting in the passenger’s seat. and one of those was when the woman was driving up to pick a man up. then Harri mentions he is going to a funeral tomorrow, of a 46-year-old man who had a heart attack. he said this area of Finland specifically has a very high incidence of heart problems among men. hmmmmm. then later, I meet an elderly fellow in the sauna who tells me, among other things, he has had a triple bypass and a stroke, explaining why his English isn’t so good, the blood to that part of his brain dealing with language was interrupted — he had to re-learn Finnish as well. piecing together bits of a strange puzzle in this place that was on the front line of the Winter War.

unsatisfying swim (a workout in a public pool is a metaphor for life always: I like a lane to myself or with someone who is sensitive that they are sharing a lane!). I have opinions, I have points-of-view.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

rumpled sheets

stepping over the barriers. to thought, through thought. and back into the body, bodies. Saturday nite in Helsinki. getting only small doses of life, but enough to … stay alive. Sanna’s warm offer of a Bulgarian film on video and a bottle of wine is too good to turn down, especially with the rain and too-long a line at Saunabari. we catch the 14 bus to Töölö … dozing on the couch, crawl to the bed in the alcove, rumpled sheets, in the comfortable position of intertwined-ness out of habit, bodies calling, re-calling each other. since, what, a week ago, nah, more.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Green Hour

tipsy, riding home (a relative term) from Mari and Esko’s place, after a sauna and dinner and some wine (Chilean and Spanish), it is a white night. midnight, the sun only just below the horizon, no wind, the clouds and rain of the day gone, but it is cold, only 6C. piss behind the oil-fired power plant, must be a 10 megawatt station. overtake a body doing a drunken side-step on the bike path. and children standing in a playground, standing looking mute, expecting a parley with the drunk, but that is some minutes and eons off into a future that is made certain by the lack of wind and in the moment of the Green Hour. L’heure verte, Green Hour, it came and here it is, jumping into a loose narrative that leaves being and presence far behind and instead wobbles into an uncertain future in a nowhere locus. silent, except for the drunks, furtive night-day children who are learning to be drunken and hidden at the same time. running in packs, or desperate pairs, no, at least threesomes. the river as high as it has been in 30 years. at the one meter mark on the bridge pylon. I theorize what the construction standards are for those same structures. deep seated– all the way to the glacial bedrock?

La fée verte, at L’heure verte, from the times in France when the consumption of the brilliant green and bitter drink Absinthe made from wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). but also when the air stills, in the northlands, and the color of day wanes, sun dropping into the red of humid sunset. a state of being.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Tallinn, Estonia - Riga, Latvia

arrival

reLab HQ, Riga, Latvia, March 2000

When the gaps in these notes are so large, there is a distinct lack of continuity between here and there. When the here’s have been so many, and the now’s are rapid and brimming with the negation of writing: life, empty space becomes the content. And the there’s are forgotten. Heading to new lands. New and old friends. Riga, after exactly twenty-four hours of travel. From Lapland to Riga. Flights, if you had good connections would take about five hours total. But connections never seem to be good here on the perimeter. Tornio was a short week of snowy brilliance, a couple hard workouts, running to the pool, not so far away, but enough to make me feel like I need to push body against the barriers that make it uncomfortable. Running to the pool, swimming hard for 30 – 40 minutes, running home. After taking the time for a sauna, of course. Yeah, in a train now, so time for a few reflections: No more short teaching gigs in the next year. Minimum of two weeks, with preference for four. The idea of doing six one-month workshops at different places seems very appealing. Then the balance of time in the southwest of the US? Can it really work? Time is passing so quickly that dreams run away. Only just now arrived. Twenty-four hours full on the road. Getting too old for this kind of action, but where will it cease? Movement was quite a bit easier than I had thought here at the border of the Evil Empire. But the atmosphere has that tinge, an edge of desolation somehow, a bit of wildness. Flatness. Arrested construction — the Soviet could not concentrate enough energy to bring the society to a point of self-sustained possibility for its members. So it goes. Riding the bus from Tallinn. The landscape is peaceful smooth, not so extreme as Finland, already enough south to get away from that edge feeling. Though Tornio seems always familiar despite the extremity. Mountains of snow lining all the streets. Impressions. The first moment in E-Lab here in Riga. I’m early, I caught an earlier bus leaving from the harbor in Tallinn. Rasa and Raitis are not here in the moment, so I wait and write instead. Overlooking the river. A dark gray-green monument to a struggle sits below on the bank of the river near the railroad bridge, two figures fighting something that is invisible, something over there, downstream.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

no endlessness

days are continuous. nights left awhile ago. a stolen night, one last weekend in another town, in a hotel: it’s about surreptitiousness, laughing, serious talk, and settling some things. time seems to be going so fast now. there is no endlessness anywhere, except in the challenges that humans apply to each other’s survival. trapezoidal .ram files drill cauterized holes in between neural target groups. and I get tired. teaching seems ended for the year, none too soon. ran out of steam (what about a sauna?). but the interaction seems to bear fruit. I look around at those who are collecting around me, and they are beings of Lightness, of energy, and of generosity.

posted
  • place: Selkä-Sarvi, Finland

wood-fired sauna

before the sauna, Selkä-Sarvi, Finland, October 1998

Sanna goes on to Tornio to pick up the video camera and the car, while I hang out at the Kemi library and read magazines. we did not have a good night. I never sleep well on the train, though I prefer to take the night train to or from the north — the day train is paralyzingly boring and tedious. I end up in the bar on the train writing manically through much of the night, and finally crawling back into bed, exhausted.

I recall Riikka’s dream from Grenada. How the aliens abducted her and flew her out to a place in the desert (recalling the outlines of the mountains). And then began to tell/show her about the rods embedded in the earth there. Sticking a meters out of the ground, they were semi-metallic – (semi-conductors) – that went several kilometers deep into the earth. Through the natural high-intensity of the earth’s magnetic fields there … and so on … Electromagnetism.

While I lie here almost naked in a small moving room on a train, the Santa Claus Express. I should be screaming with laughter. Train #69, The Santa Claus Express. Heading north. A woman-girl fast asleep in the other narrow bunk. She sleeps, and my hair still falls out along with the dandruff.

Gotta piss. Maybe head for the bar. Do so.

Here, I’m from a different planet. Fuckin’ heading north to the fuckin’ unknown. Coasting into the fuckin’ winter of my life on the Santa Claus Express. Sober (a shot of Tequila?). Hardly moving. Hanging at the bar. The train has stopped, but nobody has noticed. (Has somebody pulled the brakes?) No fuckin’ way. So it goes. The Others sharing the space here continue to paw their way through life. Unable to sleep, I come here. Just to write as I have so many times before. These thin contrasty lines that keep only part of the self alive.

Approaching a station. Jarkkala or so, couldn’t understand the announcement, an automated woman in Finnish, Swedish, and English. She tells us where we are. The train moving slow. The moving only a shaking back and forth. Nothing else. Blackness outside. Black clothes on. Suddenly I think we have changed direction. While the drunken Finnish fellows sing English (Amurikan) songs. (We have come to Parkano, or somewhere). Another place name. In between coming and going. (I am lost again!) The fellows get louder and louder. And it all goes on (hyvää, hyvää, one says, trying to break in and tell something. joka paiva ja joka ikinen yo.) Military guys, well, still wearing fatigues. hair stringy and dirty. sticking straight out around the neck like the bearers slept with head dropped straight back, slack-jawed, mouth wide-open gulping air like a gaffed cod. eyes glazed under crusted lids. (Can I remember another life, other from this one, here, now?) doubtful. Buried in the detritus of present saturated busy-ness. The boys singing “rollin’ on the river.” And counter voices lifting up — so all conversation eventually stops, is subsumed: they either sing or sit in drunken silence.

I wobble back to that small moving room and squeeze into her bunk. There’s no room. She sleeps. and I think about sleep and movement, and what comes at the last stop. Kemi finds me still awake and wired at high latitudes.

she picks me up from the library and we head to the harbor at Aljo, where we meet Eero, the ship captain and park ranger who will take us to the islands for the night. the boat is a ten-ton speed-boat used for patrolling the area of the national park and conducting research. I study the charts and instruments carefully. We visit two islands first, Sanna making several shots. The main reason she wanted to come and shoot was to capture some scenes of bad weather for her video, which was shot so far under mostly ideal weather circumstances. This is the last weekend Eero will have the boat in the water until next year. The sea here, not being very saline, with the temperatures in winter well below zero degrees Centigrade, freezes with up to a meter of ice. The islands are accessible by ski and snow-mobile by Christmas, although people seldom visit them. As we sprawl intertwined in the sauna, we are talking about how the entire scene is a perfect script. Our long running conversation of the day which has traversed so many levels of emotion and situation; the abrupt shifts of sensuality and language whenever Eero enters the scene; the powerful physical setting; the drama of the weather which eventually threatens to strand us on the island for an indefinite period, the traditional wood-fired sauna — something which is always special to me, as well as to every Finn, and so on. bodies steaming in the night airs.

posted
  • place: Unari, Finland

40th

40th year comes on slow through the thin white curtains with blue Light skin and Lightening dreams. and the heating musk of bodies intertwined and motionless or so. the placid river running under two bridges and over one dam. not frozen, with the tannin color of a bitter root drink. horizontal clouds differentiated into cool and flat warm tones. above the Arctic Circle. and the day ends, blue as the beginning in a silent place on a lake, a sauna sweat, two or more fires. burning. white birch with crackling oily skin flares dry and makes fast yellow flames. silence, within another cosmic movement. a bright red toadstool grows in the yard all the white night — I look at it once, through the kitchen window, in the dimming Light, inside I stand naked and skincool, drinking a glass of water. I look again and eyes blur into standing sleep with warm arms wrapped around me and moist breath on my back.

posted
  • place: Köln, Germany

Colonia

Claudius Therme in Köln-Deutz with Peter. post-modern laughable kitsch Las Vegas architecture with as many things there to do as DisneyLand. this old Roman colony, Colonia. shows it’s roots. mixed-sex locker-room, surprise! but all the saunas and other forms of hot and cold water are refreshing.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

naked meaning

there are some social circles where leaving hairs stuck to the bar of soap in the shower is a serious infraction against the prevailing system of decorum. I have lost sight of my dreams for the moment. can’t remember how long it has been since there were real ones that guided both internal and external events. head down to concentrate on the slick sidewalk which turns out not to be so treacherous as it appears what with sharp pea-sized fragments of shattered granite scattered almost everywhere. a first sign of spring comes to sight — small melted rivulets cut into the ice that covers the walkways — where the drains from the roofs lead — the sun is heating the roof and that slightly-warmed water is making its way down to street-level where, wrapped in shadow, it retains enough energy to cut canyons through the ice before spreading out and forming frozen deltas of ice with no gravel. these are the most dangerous areas to avoid or at least walk with that stiff-legged demeanor meant to stave off the possibility of complete imbalance and potential disaster. all on a walk out to the lake, and it IS frozen, somehow this is surprising, is it safe to walk on? there are ski tracks and footprints, though not too many of them. aiming towards the harbor breakwater (why a breakwater in a small inland lake?) I walk through the stretched-out moon-shadow of a factory smokestack cast far into the white darkness by the almost full moon. past the breakwater. to some center which is defined only by an absence of Lights. it is too bright for celestial mystery, only a fraction of terrestrial silence, but with the brightness there is sound or at least the impression of sound. noise, culture-noise. what about going to a cabin in the woods? deep in snow-covered trees and the muffling shapes of inverted nothing. no sauna even yet. no hot water bath. shopping at the Euromarket barely 50 meters from the front door of the College. having to scrutinize each package, all except the ones that I already know from these previous lives here in this land, anything new requires self-conscious label-reading, hoping for a bit of Swedish that I can decode, the Finnish still largely a mystery — vocabulary expanding though, to say, 200 words. like a catalog to draw from. nothing like what language is, at least mother-tongue. a poor substitute that carries little if anything but bare naked meaning. who cares about that except for those cases where that is the only role — a priest reading the last rites, hail Mary mother of god, our father who art, in the beginning, I am the Alpha and the Omega. so sick of the teevee in the foyer of the two-bedroom guest suite, downstairs there is a decent tape deck in the lecture hall, Miles/Coltrane, yes, something to hear and to live by. I struggle to face the fact that once again, this locus for my text-based musings has no direction, no energy, and, worst of all, no spirit. Given my activities for the past five months (can it be only that short a time that I have been into this newest wave of teaching/employment?), perhaps I should not be expecting a flood of creative impulses and action to be sustained, energies have been aimed elsewhere.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

Lahti

Lahti is the sister city of Akureyri in Iceland, although it is several times larger in population. It sits on a lake (as do most (all?) cities, towns, and villages in Finland), and claims to be a Business Center in the country. It is also known for its ski jumping towers. The morning and evening are spent taking care of paperwork, correspondance, and some planning for the course here, as well as settling into my room which is actually in the school building itself, right across from the main office. I will be here for four weeks — almost the entire month of February — not counting weekend forays into Helsinki to visit friends, network, and shop (hah!). I write to Kate in Ann Arbor:

sotto voce: Much has gone down, much goes down, and much will be going down, until all is down, dirty, and done, then all will rise, not for the judge, but for the Judgment of what has gone down before the time arrives for it to be judged. like, something strikes the FAN. and other things are simply passed over. the good, the bad, and that which is neither — the contents of time-bound life and living.

When I arrive in Lahti last night, I am met by two Spanish exchange students who find a cab to take me to the school. They were waiting for a compatriot to arrive, but he is apparently delayed at the airport and was not on the same bus as I. All this reminds me of the incredible opportunities young people who are studying have in Europe at the moment. One wonders where the constant exchanging of these intelligent adventurers will lead in a Europe that has seen few decades of peace in its entire history. Most of the art academies have a transient population that is steady at 15-20 percent of the student body, and a majority of students will take studies for at least a half-year at another institution before graduating. The ERASMUS and NORDPlus consortium exchange programs include students all across greater Europe, and frequently institutions have multiple contacts on every continent. This mixing forms strong and intimate bonds across cultural borders — something I have been a proponent of for years. In my class I will have four Spaniards, a Belgian, and six Finns. Nice. I have a theory that email and these exchange programs will have a fundamental effect on the cultural life of Europe. Not only do the students have the opportunity to make contacts, but they have the tool to maintain dynamic collaborative situations. This also has the effect of leveling regional cultural differences, but allows for new forms and identities to arise. It turns out that my old friend Terhi is actually attending school at the Institute, and she is here when I arrive — it is a very pleasant surprise, as I had not heard from her for a few months since we worked together on net.sauna at Ars Electronica last September. She is working towards a continuing education BA diploma after some years of not studying. In the frigid temperatures, after a quick tour of the whole school, we head to the closest bar that serves Guinness. Back in, Finland! This time in winter. Full winter, though not as dark at all as expected, guess that was lived out between Arizona and Iceland. During the last few days I have had several instants where I will shift into a state of concentration and observations begin to flow. I am hoping to harness these energies in the next days to begin, well, to continue work on something of substance here.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

open-x retrospect

Retrospecting on the disheveling week of near-constant stimulation and activity that was the Ars Electronica FLESH FACTOR event. Five hours sleep was a miracle which was as remote from reality as was the idea of downtime. A thrashing whoosh of flesh factors and virtual emulations and emanations and emissions and manifestations accompanied with the appropriate techno-beats, subtronic and subsonic throbbing, visceral vibrations and skittering cathode-ray-tube radiations. I spent a vast portion of my time within the comfortable, though frenetic, Open-X space where something of a revolution took place. A revolution of interface design between audience and artist, participant and observer, creator and consumer, networker and networker. As far as I know or can ascertain in discussion with other networking artists, Open-X is a first as far as restructuring the relationship between artist and audience — although even this pronouncement is a rather näive and surficial reduction. The space was occupied by about 50 networking-artists working on a variety of projects from finished web-projects, to live web-radio, to collaborative events (like our net.sauna), and a full-tilt live documentation of the entire festival. I should point out that this term networking-artist is something of a misnomer, or, at least, a scraping bow to the traditionally relegated identifications of this and that. Previous to this event in the heritage of conference, traditional paradigms have absolutely prevailed for electronic media festivals, exhibitions, and symposium. I came away from the festival feeling virtually invigorated and physically completely wiped-out. The 18-hour flight from Linz to Frankfurt to Washington to Denver was almost total torture for my back. I was constantly checking the count-down timer on my watch, the seconds tripping by far too slowly for me to remember anything through the constant hot-nails in the lower back. In the last hour, I got to digging my fingernails into my palms to make me forget the pain in my back.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

The ElectroThinker

Well, as Terhi, Tapio, and Liisa and I begin working on our net.sauna project for the Ars Electronica festival in September, I suddenly have to laugh as a memory from the surfacing of a deep personal history. I think I was around seven or eight years old,

living in Clarksburg, Maryland, in the rural suburbs of Washington, DeeCee. The Clarksburg Elementary School that I attended had an annual community festival each fall. For one of these events, I think it was in the fall of 1969, my friend Peter and I decided to do a project. In vogue with the fact that we were both sons of engineers, and that computers had landed two men on the moon that previous summer, we embarked on the construction of a large device that we dubbed The ElectroThinker. We crafted it from a large refrigerator box, painting it blue and grey and yellow, and attaching as many Lights and switches and knobs and such as we could collect from my fathers cluttered workshop and elsewhere. There were various electric bells and noisemakers. Of course, the heart of the machine — a machine that could answer any question for the small sum of a nickel, five cents — the heart was the imaginations of two kids writing answers on small scraps of real(!) computer paper and making some strange speaking sounds. My own memory fails to recall how much money we made, but the event itself is a small evidence of the impact that my cultural and social upbringing had on my relationship with machines, computation, and technology. The second instance that comes to mind following this remembrance is the time that one day, when foraging near the ruins of an old cabin — a place I rarely went for the profusion of poison ivy and snakes — I came across the intact trans-axle of a very old Ford truck. It had the wheels, tires, differential and some kind of transmission box. I was consumed with the mission to deconstruct this device and see what was inside it. I must have been only ten or eleven if that. I remember taking all my father’s heavy wrenches, hammers, chisels, whatever I could in a wheelbarrow into the woods, and spending a number of days hammering, unbolting, chiseling at this thing until I had taken most of it apart. I was rewarded by a huge collection of shiny gears, Timken® taper bearing sets, and assorted solid brass bearing axles — all which I cleaned up carefully with gasoline and displayed in my room.

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  • place: Tornio, Finland

soon come

Kati and Harri make vihta birch bundles out of fresh green birch twigs, wrapped tightly together for the sauna tonight. This is one part of the Finnish sauna tradition that is very special, whipping the body with these vihta that have soaked in water a bit. The smell is electric, the same smell that invades and clears the head on a walk outside at this time of year. Birch life-essence exploding everywhere along with the mosquitoes that, though not yet exploding quite like the birch, are, as the Jamaicans say, soon come. The energy of the Solstice is building (it seems like there will be a full moon as well, which is just what we need to heighten the astronomically measured crux).

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Desdemona

The second day of the workshop, after a strong beginning with a lot of information, software seems to close down the openings. Tapio’s new/old bike appears at MediaBase, thanks to Kati, as wheels really help to get around town. I am exhausted by the condition of my back. I do go swimming, but cannot do much of a workout, and instead spend time in the sauna, enjoying that traditional Finnish luxury (well, not a luxury but an essential element of daily life). I contrast that in my mind with the Icelandic hot water, which, to be sure, is a rather new custom. Immersion in the heat of being. In this travelog, I find that I have little will to move my observations to much more than very arbitrary points of view, something like my photographic work to date. This attitude stems from the fatigue that generates from my broken back. The constant muscular pain and nerve stimulation drains me. I am deconstructing my life to discover why I suffer this ailment, but can find no answers. There are sensual circles that I cannot escape, monaural chants in both ears, eyes closed, but open. Tapio and Susanna are in Amsterdam for a few days, so I am now staying at their place until Tapio returns on Friday. Desdemona, their cat, craves company, and, of course, food. I listen to a RinneRadio CD and Deutsche Welle radio and the small noises of the street as the slow twiLight comes together in my tired head. I read the latest issue of SIKSI, and wonder at the usual-ness and unsurprising-ness of the Nordic Art World, like the rest of the Art World. The Hierarchy. Built and Built and Built. Torn by time and fashion and politics and its own dogs of war. Built and Built and Built. And the texts that reinforce all this. The texts that cumulatively are not dialogue, but are monologues of silent disposition.

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  • place: Pori, Finland

Anna’s cabin

Tervetuloa Suomeen (Welcome to Finland)! Waking up in Pori, Finland, a town on the mid-western coast about five kilometers from the Baltic. It is still cold and gray, heavy clouds full of water. I sleep in until 11 in the morning. Each day of this travel seems harder on my body and mind. But, I suppose a 21-hour day is nothing to pretend is easy. In the afternoon, Jim and I drove to the seaside at a deserted resort near Pori. We walk into the wind down the beach long enough to feel the presence of the earth. The strong and chill wind blew all of the day. Where is spring here? A sauna and dinner is planned at Anna’s cabin in the forest at Noormarkku, about 10 km from Pori. It is a short drive on a sandy road to her beautiful cabin where she lives with her son. Her cabin is one of many buildings of a major estate owned by one of the wealthy Swedish-Finn families involved in the paper/forestry business. It gets colder by the hour and ends up snowing. I thought I would not see any more snow until next winter after the white stuff that dogged me in Vienna a few weeks ago — no such luck. However, the sauna takes the edge off the chill. Birch boughs from last summer – with leaves on them still: vihta in Finnish – are used to slap the body, stimulating the circulation of blood to the skin. They are soaked in cold water first. We roast sausages over the sauna stove to eat for dinner. Anna is managing one of the famous houses, Villa Mairea, designed by the Finnish architect, Alvar Aalto, near Pori, and, she is preparing to visit the USA for the first time in June to research a number of similar architectural sites. We will meet again in New York City on the 4th of July…

God, the sky is beautiful. And so still. Just the sound of water, near and far. And the wind has died down with the setting of the sun. — Geoffrey Hendricks