Spring at Geassemahjohka
(2024)
author(s): Maarit Mäkelä, Priska Falin
published in: Research Catalogue
The video is part of artistic research that explores a dialogue between human, non-human, and forces of the land in Utsjoki, Finland. In this artistic research, walking is used as a method to connect with the environment. During the walks, small amounts of soil – sand, stones, and clay – is gathered and processed further in a studio. Some soil is transformed to slips and used when painting hand-built vases made from the gathered clay. The fired vases are placed temporarily in local rivers. The result is a series of three vase experiments done in a dialogue between human, soil, water, and the forces of the land.
The video presents the third vase experiment, where the vase is built from the local clay. The motifs of the painting are the nationally endangered animals: arctic fox, fell owl and glacial salmon. In the River Teno catchment, small juvenile salmon often spend some of their first years of life in tiny tributaries, which they enter from their birth place, the spawning areas in the main stem of the river. One of these nursery streams being Geassemahjohka. The vase is positioned in Geassemahjohka, which is running to the main stem of the River Teno some 70 km upstream from the estuary. Via the experiment we speculate: can act of crafting vase be conceived as act of caring, the vase being thus a symbolic shelter for the salmon?
Data Holds Your Truths. The Avatar Complex: I trust your gargoyle id more than I trust you.
(2024)
author(s): Megan Annette Irusta Cornet
published in: Royal Academy of Art, The Hague
The Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2023
BA Photography
Within this piece of writing, different styles of writing have been approached as a performance strategy, a guise we humans willingly and unwillingly commit to every day, online and offline. The overarching themes this text seeks to tackle are alienation and escapism; what I think are the prominent can of worms which ooze from the Internet. Double-edged swords; beautiful and horrifyingly ugly. Alienation to oneself as well as alienating others through the digital sphere. With serious regard to the importance of avatar customisation as a form of expression, yet also acknowledging the destruction within it, it is also the very thing which is actively dislocating us from the IRL (in-real-life). The core to understanding who you are online, how you present yourself online, compared to who you are behind the screen. The text’s leading objective is to hypothesise a world where humans are given the option (highly recommended) to extract our online data to make more of a truthful analysis of who we really are. The prevalence of how capitalistic structures only feed alienation more. If the future consists of post-human and/or transhuman existence, by transmitting our data to gargoyle avatars, creatures which will take the form of one’s avatar, gargoyles are said to protect what they serve. A new gargoyle is designed by your data alone. Data anthropomorphism, the Avatar Complex.