The rest of this week I will be spending in Berlin at the other digital and electronic art festival, Transmediale 07. I’ve arrived last night, am staying in the incredibly cool East Berlin and will be networking and wallowing in what the event has to offer until Sunday. Hopefully a lot of events will be interesting as there’s no lack of interesting people around here.

I have just participated in a very interesting session about the very little known electronic artist Mary Ellen Bute. It’s a surprise how someone who has done such incredible work in the electronic arts gets so easily overlooked. During the session which basically served more or less as an introduction to the recently established Institute for Media Archeology, Sandra Neumann spoke about Mary Ellen Bute and has shown three animations made by Bute. And in one word, her work is impressive.

Unfortunately Bute’s work is not very easy to get by, so I just can’t give you a link and let you experience it by yourself. There are a few stills here and there on the net, but they are nowhere near as telling as these electronic and light animations are when they are in motion. Bute not only experimented with light and shadow, abstracting different utensils from beaters and egg cutters to ping pong balls, but also used oscilloscopes and cathode ray tubes to visualize sounds. Most special about Bute is that she did all this from 1930’s onwards.

Her animations are quite intense and even though she begun using various electronic equipment already in the 1930’s, her work is fast paced with many, many short cuts, very much late 1990’s music video kind of cuts. Which is a reason why one of the session presenters hinted that Bute used music to sooth down the motion of animations. Some of her work could be characterized as an animated version of Kandinsky. But what I would like to see is her visualization of part of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.

It’s interesting how just in the last few years electronic artists like Bute are all of a sudden being rediscovered. I’ve been following digital and electronic arts for around ten years now and pretty much all the time almost all the works have been revolving around the latest technology and gadgets. Unfortunately this is not just the position held by the festival curators, but also by the researchers and writers who have 95% of the time nonchalantly ignored electronic and digital arts’ roots. So I was happy to see that, for instance, Eliane Rodigue resurfaced at last years Ars Electronica. I am sure contemporary artists could learn a lot from their roots.

Mladen

Finland is getting ready for the parliamentary elections this coming March. I have to admit that I haven’t been following very closely politicians’ promises and debates, but there is one particular event that has cought my attention.

Jaro Koikkalainen might not ring any bells to you, however, Koikkalainen came up with an very ingenious way of campaigning for his seat in the parliament. All the major Finnish political parties go with the good ol’ newspaper add, poster, billboard combination, and most have even thrown in a blog (as is fashionable nowadays). A rather regular marketing campaign, one might say. But not for Koikkalainen.

The Central Party candidate Koikkalainen is campaigning on a tight budget with only 2,000€ to spare. It’s not really like he could go shopping for a marketing agency with this budget. Instead he collects questions from interested citizens and then once a week makes a vlog where he personally replies to the citizens’ questions and posts it on YouTube where it is available to the whole nation, and the rest of the Internet population.

Mr. Koikkalainen is not a major player in Finnish politics and he might not even have much chances for getting a seat in the Finnish eduskunta, but it is not hard to imagine many big fish politicians following suit and begin campaigning in a similar fashion. I call it campaigning on Google’s googol€ budget. Clever.

Mladen

Whether you live in a Western society or not, you probably couldn’t have escaped the term information society, or even better, the knowledge society. Of course not, those are buzzwords. If you want your country too look good both nationally or internationally politicians and businessmen will be talking about their populations living in an information and/or even knowledge society today. With what they just want to say how advanced they are. Being one of the model countries in many ways, I’m sure Swedish politicians and businessmen are doing the same around the world. Maybe they should, but their society is very much still a paper-based I-don’t-know-how-to-help-you knowledge and information society.

Buzzwords aside. Whatever they want to call it, I say it’s first and foremost an overly paper-counter-clerk trio bureaucratic society. From educational institutions to Internet providing services and libraries, public transportation and banks (not to mention the state itself), you cannot do anything, absolutely anything useful without your arm being twisted. It is a country where the Swedish personal number and not the king, as many like to believe, rules.

A personal number? Yes, it’s a several digit number by which you are recognized wherever you go; it is your personal trace and I think pretty much every adult knows what I am talking about. So what, you get that once and from then on your life is a breeze. Yeah right, as if it was easy to get the Swedish one. The taxation office that is in charge of giving out these personal numbers, has a selective eye, as it turns out.

But it took a week of meandering from door to door before I have even reached the local taxation office. Everyone on the way (some of them I’ve mentioned above) knew only that they need a personal number from me, none where does one fetch one. Until I stumbled upon the wise one.

After a week of trying to sort out things that need to be sorted out when moving to a new country, I came across an official (I don’t remember where exactly it happened as I’ve seen a few too many) who actually even knew where I can get this elusive number. To keep a long story short the visit to the tax office looked like this: I provide them all the information about myself they need before assigning the number, return to the counter where stiff official looks at me carefully, walks away, comes back, and finally utters that they will give me the number once I find a job. But I’m here to study and need the number for who knows how many things? Find a job first! There you go. Maybe I should just make one up.

That’s only the regular life part of the Swedish information/knowledge society. The other one is school related. And I don’t know anymore which one is more, both hilarious and obnoxious at the same time. At Valand School of Fine Arts where I have been accepted to study, I have been repeatedly met with blank stares and who-are-you questions. In spite of the fact that Valand is a small school with only about 60 students, the most frequent reply to my “But, your school has accepted me into one of the programs”, is “I haven’t heard anything about you before.” And that’s after talking to the administrative personnel of the school where I have been accepted and after I have presented a letter of acceptance they have issued just a few weeks ago. Not enough?

No, the administrator also wants to see the proof that I am a student at the university from which I am coming. Luckily I have that too, I think to myself. She leaves the room to take copies of both documents. Upon her return I feel triumphal as things are finally moving somewhere, yet my joy is met with “I can’t register you.” Why? What else do you need? My Swedish personal number? You name it, I’ll produce it. All I get in reply is: “There’s nothing you can do. I don’t know you and I didn’t expect you.” As if I wouldn’t have already noticed myself that I cannot do anything. I briskly leave the office after I am handed a university reference number on a heart-shaped red Post-it note. Am I in a Buñuel movie?

Have I mentioned bureaucratic obstacles somewhere already, or is this just an elaborate practical joke?

Before I register with the Göteborg University I cannot use any of the supposedly many university services, from student health care and other benefits students in Sweden are entitled to, all the way to their libraries, Internet connections and information systems. While without the Swedish personal number, the Swedish taxation office refuses to give me, I can’t do anything else. My hands are tied.

It feels weird. Sure Göteborg University has excellent premises, a variety of courses, at 5,500 they sure employ a lot of people, all of which is nice, but it is definitely a pain in the ass to even get a schedule for your courses. I should start counting how often I’ve been told to visit Mrs. Nextdoor, tomorrow, of course.

Coming from a much more efficient system put up by the Finnish society, I’m slowly beginning to loose my patience here. Have you seen the super-cheesy movie The Terminal? Well, I feel exactly like Mr. Viktor Navorski felt like when his light-green form has been rejected for the n-th time. In my case it hopefully won’t take nine months to sort things out before I can begin a living a bureaucracy free life in Sweden. Or am I asking for utopia?

Mladen

Sweden is a safe society. Surely their politicians do get shot or stabbed every once in a while. But if you’re one of the common folks, then you’ll be just fine.

Especially kids, Swedes do make sure that their kids are playing safe. In this land they dress up all children with walking capabilities into fluorescent yellow and orange vests. Yes, kids wear them even as they are playing in the playground between two huge apartment buildings with no roads or highways in sight. And these kids are even enclosed in a fenced area. I happily observe small fluorescent balls rolling on the ground, as they appear from my 8th floor apartment building. At least I know they are safe.

But safety for common folks does not end here. No, no, that’s where it begins. Take for instance well organized public transportation. Not only it runs exactly on timetable, but they also make sure that your boss and wife don’t have to worry while you’re on your way to and from work. When I first took a ride on one of the trams in Gothenburg I was outright stunned. In that single tiny carriage there were at least 8 CCTV cameras. Eight small, but, of course, big enough to notice, black domes hanging from the ceiling. Just to make sure I was not riding some kind of special bank to every-Swedish-home tram, I jumped on another one. Same thing. Bus? Sure enough, they were there too, actually even more of them.

I don’t know about you, but these things don’t really make me feel any safer or cozier. I definitely didn’t feet like taking a nap, knowing that a watchful eye will look after me and my belongings. And neither did I see anyone else dozing off. Quite the opposite, the whole camera ordeal just makes me think what is (or was) going on in the city that made them install all this surveillance.

But then I found out that for some reason or another, Swedes want to be surveilled. They already are under some heavy surveillance already, and what came as a surprise to me, Swedes nevertheless think they are not surveilled enough. According to a recent survey, nearly 80% of Swedes would actually want to have more surveillance. There’s more, 87% would even grant the police the right to eavesdrop on their phone calls and emails. How weird is that? But wait, there’s more. 51% of Swedes support the national DNA register and a whopping 91% want camera surveillance in the public spaces. Who were they asking in this survey? The Bush family? What’s going on here?

Although, I am a bit skeptical about the realness of all those cameras. I mean, what the hell, who wouldn’t put in fake cameras just to make the population placid and satisfied. At least I would, if my citizens would have wanted more surveillance. I guess I have to go out and make something stupid in the tram, just to see what happens.

Oh, this overly careful society, all those useless cameras, but they don’t even install electrical plugs in their bathrooms. Yes, men have to shave in their kitchens and women dry their hair in the entry hall, if they were to do it at the same time. I’d definitely like to peak more into the private life of a common Swede. All this voyeurism. It is already catching on me.

Mladen

This time not posting to my blog was not caused by procrastination, but rather by the St. Internet not being on my side. Yes, Sweden is one of the most wired societies in the world where practically every citizen takes the access for granted. Also, it is a place where you get even the unfathomable 28MBit/s link for peanuts for the even more inscrutable 16€ per month–yeah, it is a turn-on for the geekier readers, believe me. And you get it within a few days. A dream come true for anyone like me, and much geekier people. All that until I you wake up and smell the coffee, fired onions actually.

Not so fast my friends. All things mentioned in the previous paragraph are true, including the smell of fried onions. Unfortunately difficulties do arise when you move to Sweden and want the Internet at the same time. Because before Swedish ISPs will allow you to send your mom an email from the comfort of your new home, you need nothing less then a Swedish social security number. Ta-dah. Until then, surfing equals to surfing on an artificial lake where you, naturally, have to pay someone big bucks to make those waves and surf for you.

And it is expensive. Just as everything else, but the at-home-Internet, costs more then you would expect, paying for sunny and windy weather is no exception. Approximately 5€ per hour, or if you use such commodities the way I do, then it’ll cost you 3,720€ per month. Not exactly peanuts anymore. Of course, there’s always an option of sponging on your neighbors’ links. It might be mildly unethical, but it falls out of the question when all of the 38 connections are encrypted and you don’t want to be more than mildly unethical. For once I wished my neighbors were a bit dumber.

I wanted to abstain myself from any direct comparisons, but really, I can’t. When I first moved to Finland it was a Saturday night. By Monday afternoon I was connected to a pretty fat pipe–much earlier than any of the withdrawal symptoms kicked in.

Mladen