Finland should mark August 26th 2006 as an important day in its history. It was on that day when its land area has been reduced by 50 m². But this time it wasn’t the Russians who are to blame for taking over some of the Finnish territory, rather it was one of their own fellow compatriots, Ari Paska Peltonen (yes, Paska as in Shit paska) who took over a piece of territory and claimed independence.

Come again?

But there really isn’t anything new about it either. You know, already for a while quite many such micronations, or microstates, have been in existence and every once in a while a new one pops up. There’s the almost 40 years old Principality of Sealand, fundamentaly artistic Ladonia, the universal state of NSK-State, the state of all boundaries unified in Kingdoms of Elgaland&Vargaland, and the utterly civil Transnational Republic. In fact there are enough micronations in existence that in 2003 the first Summit of Micronations was organized in Helsinki. But if you keep a list of micronations, you can add a new one: Valtio.

Naturally one should ask, Why is this necessary? and Do we really need another state? I guess it’s quite clear that all these micronations could just as well be called egonations as most often they are brainchildren of various artists and serve no other but purely egoistical purpose of their creators. But then again, how does that differ from the purpose of many other “real” nations. I’ll let you muse on that one.

According to Ari Paska Peltonen the founding father of the Valtio (which literally means the State) the first sparks around the idea for the Valtio were made around the brief encounter and inspiring conversation during the Laibach concert in Helsinki where representatives of NSK-State were also present. The concept brewed in his head until he decided to get his own state. How to do it?

In a recent article in Nyt liite Mr. Peltonen describes in what can be seen as Valtio’s manifest and public proclamation of independence, that his next step in the genesis of his State was to contact a professor of international law who told him that in order to have a state one needs at least three things: land, citizens and international relations. That easy? So, Ari went shopping for statehood.

He got the land for Valtio from Ilkka Malmberg a Helsingin Sanomat journalist who years ago out of curiosity bought the cheapest piece of land he could find in Finland–a hectare, to be exact. Being a generous fella, Ilkka donated a whole 10 by 5 meter piece of land to Ari. One down, two to go. Ari now needed only citizens and international relations. Piece of cake.

Creatures of the universe who intercept this transmission, and you dear earthlings too, can apply for Valtio’s citizenship by sending an email to Ari Peltonen. I guess he cannot be too picky about his citizens as many states have become over time in granting something devoid of meaning that they mutually recognize, so I’m sure that your chances of obtaining Valtio’s passport are pretty good right now. And I’m telling you this is an investment in your future. Read on.

Ari has already set up a government with four ministers and himself as the prime minister, president and the monarch. In September 2006 the government of Valtio had their first meeting and so far it looks like it is more stable then the new Swedish government appears to be, or Hungarian, for that matter. And now that they have the basic structure up, Valtio has already started the process of joining the EU, the UN and they are already looking into details on how to participate in the ice hockey, football world championships and, what is most important in the almighty Eurovision Song Contest. Paska has got all of it figured out. All these integrations will catapult Valtio into the last frontier of statehood; into having relations with other nations. But Valtio and Ari really do have stars on their side as the current EU’s commissioner for enlargement, Olli Rehn, speaks their language.

In fact, according to Ari Valtio has already applied for the EU membership and Olli has been positive about their application. All they are waiting for now is the official letter of invitation from the EU. And, of course, there’s a minor detail I forgot to mention, the Finnish parliament must first decide whether they will give Valtio their independence or not.

So far, so good. It seems that Mr. Paska does not have any problems with the Finnish authorities. Although it is really hard to establish what the Finnish politicians make out of it. It seems like they have taken Ari’s actions in a typically relaxed Finnish manner and as a witty move, rather than a serious attempt to alienate a piece of their land and ruin the country’s integrity.

No worries, I’ll keep you posted on how Valtio is doing.

Mladen

How do you know that you’re visiting Linz during the time of Ars Electronica Festival? When half of the passengers on your plane to Linz are Japanese. What is otherwise a small sleepy city in the Upper Austria, annually becomes a bustling world center of electronic and digital art for a week in the beginning of September. And it was exactly the Ars Electronica festival that has put Linz on the world map.

I’ve been coming here for quite a few years now, and whenever I’ve visited I’ve never left disappointed. Quite the contrary, this is such an exciting place that I can easily forget to eat and sleep while being here. Might be a bit hard to understand, but those who are similarly passionate (no matter what your passion is) know what I mean. And I am not the only one. During the week long festival a lot of festival goers, artists, researchers and art lovers consume art and attend lectures during the day and party hard into the morning hours.

Every year the organizers assign a topic for the festival which is then discussed in the symposia, discussions and brought to life in a variety of workshops. The topic this year was simplicity. The discussion was at all times about how the striving for simplicity in our increasingly complex world, what to do to reach it and why is it so important. An interesting topic, which has spurred many an interesting presentation and discussion.

But lectures are just a forum where ideas are verbalized. The majority of attention falls on the exhibitions. And every year the festival program is richer as more venues and events where visitors can enjoy the works of digital contemporary artists are added to the list. But, speaking about quantities is not really that interesting. I’ll rather mention details that caught my attention and which I’ve enjoyed most.

Practically all art presented at the festival is divided into six categories: interactive art, digital musics, computer animation/visual effects, digital communities, net vision and u19 - freestyle computing. Although one cannot really measure progress in arts, it seems like a certain level of achievement satisfaction can be attributed to the computer animation/visual effects category.

The works presented in this category have clearly reached an incredible level of complexity. Less than ten years ago, one could see clever works, but they nevertheless resembled garage works. What one sees at Ars Electronica nowadays is outright incredible display of high quality art and technological prowess. The viewer doesn’t have to pretend anymore that they don’t see the patched up low-tech with a good plot and a nice twist. Practically all the works are polished to the very last detail. Not in the sense of Hollywood blockbusters (although there’s every year at least few of those who get some attention too), but rather in Hollywood superficial sense. Whereas works submitted by Hollywood received a lot of attention for years, the independent or school projects now kick their ass. Hollywood should learn from these people. Thus it comes as a no surprise that the award winners in this category this year supposedly already got lucrative job offers.

It is amazing to witness how the presence at the Festival pulls artists from obscurity and into the center of digital arts scene. At the Festival almost without exception receive a whole barrage of invitations and offers.

One of my favorites was indisputably Ryoichi Kurokawa and his intensive, visually striking and musically rich audio/video performance. His incredible skill of combining sounds with visuals almost drives you crazy. The piece he has performed was both technically perfected, as well as aesthetically complex yet balanced. In fact, it was so beautiful that putting it to words comes nowhere near to experiencing it in first person. Browse around his site and try to catch him play.

Another act that really impressed me was the Graffiti Research Lab group. The Lab was thought up by New Yorkers James Powderly and Evan Roth who tend to describe themselves as not gutsy enough to do the graffiti themselves, but admire all those phlegmatic graffiti artists who are responsible for enriching our urban landscapes. But they wanted to give them a hand and augment the paint bucket and spray can. The duo came up with several immensely clever albeit simple ways of doing this. And they excel at it and even NY cops love it.

GRL guys have won the hearts of the public with their throwies: a 1 buck, 20 second retrograde hi-tech graffiti solution. By strapping together a simple consumer LED light, battery and a strong magnet, they have started a whole craze around the net and on the streets. All of a sudden they became magnetic themselves as they were approached even by the Absolut marketing machine (cooperation with which they have blatantly - and rightfully so - refused). Their throwies stick to any ferromagnetic surface and thus far have adored everything from buildings, bridges and sculptures in New York, to, after their most recent action, Linz trams. Make sure you check the videos on their site.

At this years’ Ars Electronica I have also immensely enjoyed works by Zachary Lieberman. Besides the performance/lecture done in collaboration with artist/engineer Golan Levin and media archeologist and Finnish star professor Erkki Huhtamo, Zach had three of his works at Ars: drawn, The Manual Input Station and Messa di Voce (the latter two done in collaboration with Golan Levin). Although all these works are interactive and children love them, they are also ingenious visually elegant sound works. They all demand interaction from the audience and are great for jamming. But I have to say that seeing Zach and Golan perform with their creations was truly inspiring. Especially make sure you check out the videos on the sites of these projects, since it’s all in the interaction.

Then there were the nerd-retro Papierpixel and PingPongPixel; the unbelievably cool self-destructive (but also self-assembling) Robotic Chair; undeniably cool Khronos Projector and Hello World!. I think I could go on and on about all the projects I have liked. If you’ve never been to Ars Electronica, you should go. So far I have not met anyone who wouldn’t have fun there.

But Ars Electronica is also all about networking, partying and hanging around with the most creative people in the digital contemporary arts.

Later tonight I’ll update the gallery with a bunch of images from the festival. Make sure you check it out as there’s some pretty nifty stuff there too.

Mladen

Last weekend I’ve finally made that short trip to Estonia’s capital Tallinn which I have written about when I came back from Stockholm. Thus below you can find a list of seemingly random notes and observations from this short trip.

Going to Estonia is simple, rather quick and Finns do it almost as often as they hop on a bus or tram. And judging by the frequency of ferries and boats floating between Helsinki and Tallinn, one would quite even easily find connections with city transportation. However, on a second thought this is hardly surprising as the whole travel business to Tallinn is mainly propelled by the alcohol tourism I’ve already written about when I went to Stockholm. Although going to Tallinn is so much quicker that there are several, often sold out, boats a day connecting the two capitals. Another big difference between Stockholm and Tallinn is that in Tallinn retail businesses have developed around the idea of people getting there to buy booze. Check out the gallery for more details on that. It’s quite nuts, but I think I’m actually slowly becoming adjusted to this and might begin losing interest in booze amusement. Or maybe not.

I’ve never before been to either Estonia or Tallinn and I was pleasantly surprised with Tallinn. It’s a wonderful medieval city of completely manageable size. I’ve spent two days there and it was definitely enough for a first impression, although I will definitely return for more as there are other interesting sites around Tallinn that need to be explored. While the surprising tidbit is that the first thing upon entering Estonia I was asked by a female border control officer: “When are you going back?” Back where? Oh, the idiocy of borders.

The city of Tallinn itself has an old part which is enclosed within medieval city walls where I found a mash of cobbled narrow streets and passages. A real gem for strolling and enjoying a surprising historical and architectural varieties. The heart of old town is a small knob from atop of which you can get a fantastic view of the city and beyond, if the weather is nice … and weather-wise it was definitely a jump into the future (at least comparing to Helsinki, not to mention Jyväskylä) as there was no snow, anywhere.

Large part of the second day of my stay in Tallinn I’ve spent in the Kadriorg part of the city. It’s one of the nicest and these days is becoming even a prestigious residential area. Otherwise Kadriorg is known for it’s wooden architecture (similar to Puukäpylä in Helsinki). Just as I’ve mentioned the prestigiousness of Kadriorg I should mention that it is almost immediately evident that social differences are huge in Estonia. These are reminiscent of wild forms of capitalism based either on bad legislation or high corruption, or both. I don’t know which is the case in Estonia, but the social differences are evident even to a tourist. And just as in any society where people got rich quickly, the first thing they do is that they go crazy with their big and expensive cars, while at the same time big parts of the city are literally deteriorating and it took Estonia more than ten years to build a single museum of art. And that museum of art is KUMU in Kadriorg. The average gross income in Estonia is 520€ (for comparison, in Finland that amount is around 2500€). Enough said.

Estonia has only around 1,3 million residents and it regained its independence in 1991 after the demise of the Soviet Union (it was already independent between the 1918 and 1944 when it was recaptured by the Soviet Union). Considering how few people live in Estonia and that the Russian government used to and still thumps minorities’ rights including their languages, it is surprising that Estonians managed to preserve their language during the Soviet era at all. But even more surprising than this is that recently there have been quite strong tendencies in Estonia to reform the higher education with a brutish lack of understanding: the proposal was that the official language in institutions of higher education would be English. I have a really hard time comprehending such an idea.

There’s a lot of talk that Estonian and Finnish languages are very close. True, they do belong to the same Finno-Ugric language group (actually, linguistically they are even closer, as both languages are Baltic-Finnic). But just how close actually are Estonian and Finnish languages? Not that close. I’ve spoken about the issue to both Finns and Estonians and both could point out similarities in words and grammar whereas on the functional level languages cannot be interchanged. Thus both tend to use English for straightforward communication. Both languages don’t have a distinctive future tense, both use inflection of words and both lack grammatical gender, however Estonian words are usually much shorter than Finnish counterparts, while some words have completely different meanings in the two languages.

All in all I’ve really had a great time in Estonia and will definitely visit again. And if you get a chance, I encourage you to go.

Have a good one,

Mladen

Another fantastic weekend went by. Naturally, the weekend already begun on Friday when after morning lectures and short snooze in the main library I met with my DGL and NACS friends. We went to the movie theater to see Jali ja suklaatehdas. I can’t really say I liked the movie, but it was the camaraderie that made me happy. Movie theater entrance fees around here are akin to those in New York, so one does shell out 9E for a movie. I know, it’s obnoxious. But, let’s say I was happy enough that as a student I saved 2E by buying student ticket from one of then well hidden elokuva lipput shops on one of the university campuses (I better not say which one, because then it wouldn’t be hidden anymore).

And yes, it was my first real Finnish movie experience (OK, I’ve seen the actual Finnish movie - Nosukausi - in early September. This was organized as a part of the orientation week activities in Kampus Kino). And it was the experience itself that mattered more than the content. Since I don’t have a TV, it was really interesting to see some of the pre-movie commercials as well. Then there was a real pleasant surprise: the movie subtitles were both in Finnish and Swedish (as Swedish is the other official language in Finland). The audience was also quite amusing to observe as they were laughing at stuff that wasn’t really funny - or maybe it’s just me that didn’t get most of the 5-year-olds’ jokes (There were mostly children in the audience).

And at first it seemed like that was it for the evening, but oh no, the movie was just the matinee, the prelude into the evening festivities. The group went to the local alternative music and culture bar Vakiopaine. I have to say that so far this is the coolest place to hang around in Jyväskylä. Not only is music normal and enjoyable, but they also stage all kinds of non-mainstream cultural: from poetry readings, comedy shows, plays, to concerts. And we just happened to drop in when a concert was about to begin. I have no idea what the name of the band was, but make sure you check the images in the gallery. The performers were a duo brought to the Vakiopaine by a time machine: it was glitter rock with factory preprogrammed synth rhythms on steroids. Believe me, the performance was one of a kind and we have on several occasion questioned ourselves how the hell does the duo keep straight faces during their rehearsals. Anyhow, the audience was all fired up so they actually did two anchors. It was cool and that night I ended up getting home quite early … in the morning.

Then on Saturday in the early afternoon I went on a pleasant bike trip around Tuomiojärvi and Jyväsjärvi (with a short stop over at the Vesillina tower cafe on the hill in the city center). The weather was absolutely fantastic. After that ride a friend of mine introduced me to some Finnish music and I guess it was pure coincidence that one of the bands I was listening to was playing in town that night. So naturally we went to the concert. The name of the band is YUP and they played in the old factory turned into concert venue Lutakko. It’s The concert place in town to go. I like the setting in that place and will definitely be coming back for more gigs.

When I come to think about it, the concert was really enjoyable and I really liked the show YUP staged. Now, I found it really surprising that the entrance fee was actually only 10E (after being charged 4.5E for a goddamn beer, admit it, 10E really isn’t that much for concert). Later I heard that internationally acclaimed band The Rasmus played nearby and they charged 25E for the show. So I guess, concerts can are the only reasonably priced entertainment in Finland. Which is great news for me as I love going to concerts.

One thing that really surprised me is how alcohol consumers are treated in public venues when entrance is not restricted to 18+ years. In Lutakko where YUP played, there was a special fence, or almost a kind of a cage, and it was only within that confined space that the audience was allowed to drink alcoholic beverages. Yeah, I’m used to holding my beer can/bottle in the first row and I couldn’t do it here. Oh well, I’ll get used to the idea. But I do like their relaxed attitude regarding the show timing: the actual beginning time is not announced, they just let their audience know that their shows never start before 1100pm.

Make sure you visit the gallery to check out some of the images I took over the weekend.

Mladen

I guess Venice never fails to impress me. No matter how many times I’ve visited this small city, there’s always something there that turns the trip into an enjoyable experience. And this time around it was no different. When we (my mom accompanied me on this trip) arrived at around 9am we headed straight for the Giardini where the national pavilions are located and afterwards we went to Arsenale - a venue that was added to the biennial not too long ago - where individual artists display their works. There’s also a whole bunch of locations spread throughout Venice that either host performances or exhibitions that are directly tied to the biennial, but we’ve managed to visit only a few of those.

At this year’s biennial there were quite a few interesting and creative works on display that I really enjoyed. And I was taken by surprise to see so many video works. Now, I am not gung ho on painting, but I really enjoyed Ed Ruscha’s project Course of Empire (read an interview with Ruscha here). It consists of a series of black-and-white paintings entitled Blue Collar that he did in the 1990s which epitomize the American industrial culture and paintings that he did for this Biennale which respond or reflect on those earlier paintings. The black-and-white paintings speak about times long gone, while his new color series speaks in Ruscha’s words about his “doubts about progress in the world, and hopes for the world.” It is striking to see those images juxtaposed.

I’d also like to point out aero and sound installation Idiot Wind by the ProvMyza duet (Galina Myznikova and Sergey Provorov). It’s a series of dimly lit halls with varying degrees of wind force which escalates to strong wind at the end of the last hall where a small room is positioned. Ultimately this tactilely-aural experience (the halls are lined with hidden speakers emitting various ambient sounds) is the interplay between reflection on our immediate personal space and playfulness of audience that actively participates and cocreates this work. Idiot Wind is both contemplative and amusing at the same time.

Then there was also a piece (if it can even be called “a piece” since it is immaterial) by Tino Sehgal who has developed a specific form of art which takes shape only at the moment one’s encounter with it. At first, I was taken by surprise when I was approached by one of the pavilion attendants who offered to refund half of the entrance fee if I speak about market economy for several minutes. After she made that offer I peeked into a huge empty space behind the passage where she was standing and I immediately realized that it us at this very moment that are Tino’s work of art. His work thus presents the climax of Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel’s raison d’etre which they expressed in their manifesto published in 1963: “We wish to put the spectator in a situation which he initiates and transforms. We wish to develop in him an increased capacity for perception and action.”

Here’s a list of links to a few other artists whose works I particularly recommend at La Biennale 2005:
- Guerrilla Girls
- Eija-Liisa Ahtila
- Regina Jose Galindo
- Antoni Muntadas
- Robin Rhode

I mean I could go on at length about these and other works I liked, but I really think that these works speak best for themselves. So if you’ve got a chance to visit La Biennale, you should (it is open till November 6th 2005).

Mladen