I had a Lost moment on the flight when I saw former Swedish prime minister Göran Persson entering the plane. I was pretty sure the plane was going to crash on a secret remote island (Åland?) where we would have to spend many years fighting our way back to the real world. But to my relief we landed safely at Helsinki Airport and I stepped out into the gloomy March morning and got a taxi for the Kereva Art Museum, located in the dull city of Kerava, a suburb of Helsinki. It was my first day of the 2010 edition of the Pixelache electronic arts festival. I was invited because I am the director of Pixelvärk, the Swedish node in the Pixelache network. Every time I go to a festival of this sort I am used to perform in some way, so to just participate as a guest and having travel and boarding paid for felt a bit luxurious.
This first day was dedicated to a Bar Camp session. For those not familiar with the Bar Camp concept, it´s a conference where the participants generate the content, usually under a common theme of some kind. A huge schedule board divided in time slots and meeting areas was placed in the main area on the second floor. We were given post–it notes and markers to get us started posting topics on the board. There were only two rules for this day, 1) Participate, 2) If you don´t like a group, just change to another. There wasn´t really an outspoken theme for this Bar Camp but in retrospect I can say that a lot had to do with open source hardware and software and other grass root community related things.
Speaking of grass roots, the first meeting I attended was about guerilla gardening. Suddenly a French speaking subgroup was created that took off into a corner. The remainder of the group took a __________________________________________________________________________  bizarre turn and came to talk about Helsinki´s rabbit problem and a guy that is allegedly paid by the city to kill bunnies with a crossbow. And to top it all, he makes soup out of his prey.
The day continued with meetings of various topics that went on simultaneously. Some were more memorable than others. The audiovisual group had some nice presentations. I specifically liked a movie from a project were a guy sitting in an old dentist´s chair was tickled, touched a manipulated in various ways by a dancer/massage therapist. The guy´s brainwaves were tapped and interpreted into light and music which in its turn affected the guy in the chair even more, like an emotional feedback loop. It was almost erotic without being the least bit naked.
The presentation of the open source project Puredyne was pretty interesting too. This project distributes an installation of an open source operating system with bundled software for artists. It´s totally free, fits on and boots from a CD or a USB–stick on your Mac, PC or Linux machine. After a pleasant dinner with some other people from __________________________________________________________________________ |
 the Pixelache network it was time to cross the water to the island of Sveaborg where our hostel was located. There is really no budget for 5–star hotels in this festival circuit. I´ve been staying there before and I always wonder why they use this place. Don´t get me wrong, it´s a nice place but it´s in a very remote location. As a civilian you can only access the island by boat and the boat stops running about 1 am so if you´re out clubbing you have to keep on partying until 7 am when the ferry starts running again.
Sveaborg is an old military island with a fortress built in 1748 by the Swedes during the good old days when Finland was part of the Swedish empire. In 1982 a tunnel was built to the main land supplying the island with heat, water and electricity. In the early 90´s the tunnel was modified to be able to run emergency vehicles through it. I´ve been dreaming of finding the entrance and the key so that I don´t have to take the ferry anymore. I know that people have gone on drunken hunts for that tunnel during previous festivals. But the remote location of the hostel also makes for bonding between artists festival visitors and random locals.  We had just completed a round table breakfast session at a hotel in the city about open source technologies moderated by the French feminist and cyber evangelist Nathalie Magnan. The discussion got pretty heated as the Purdyne people firmly believe in their open source approach to life in general, whereas others were advocating sticking with commercial products that have better workflows. Then Li, a guy from Shanghai involved in the world exhibition, explained how open source is not really in the Chinese vocabularies since most common people don´t even know that you are supposed to pay for commercial software.
On the boat back to Sveaborg, I started talking to Emanuele and Lordana, two Italian design students from the Networked Media program at the Dutch Piet Schwart Institute. A discussion that was one of my festival highlights. At the program, they are using only open source software, kind of as a challenge. They explained how these softwares weren´t highly productive or helpful in completing traditional design tasks but they had found completely new ways of design. We immediately started bouncing more or less sane ideas for __________________________________________________________________________ |
 projects, where live manipulated typefaces were one of them.
I spent my Saturday afternoon at Kiasma, Helsinki´s museum of modern art. This is the epitome of design museums, super modernistic, designed by American architect Steven Holl. Pixelache has had a long good relationship with Kiasma who has kindly hosted many of the festival´s events. I attended the Fritzing Arduino workshop that was held in Kiasma´s foyer. I was a little bit disappointed that the large museum didn´t have a better space for us but it was soon replaced by my excitement over finally getting started with the Arduino platform. Arduino is an electronic prototyping kit that lets you design physical interactions between man and machine. It´s pretty simple and can be programmed from a computer. My knowledge of electronics is on a high school level so I can´t say that I got very far but I programmed some LEDs to blink and a servo to move and was pretty happy with that.
No better way of ending a Saturday night than with a big party. Pixelache was throwing a big event together with the IHME __________________________________________________________________________  organization at the Vanhaa student house in the middle of Helsinki. It started out kind of lame with a hipster DJ playing a potpourri of terrible music and some feminist girls joining in a spontaneous dance train to the Finnish version of the Pippi Longstocking theme song. But things were to improve drastically when the untipped combo of drone rock band Black Horse, in their first ever live performance, hit the stage together with graphics guru Sakke Soini as VJ. It was actually one of the best audio and visual combos I´ve ever seen. The whining grinding guitars went very well with Soini´s mystical light orgies and slo–mo unicorns.
The final live act was a lot more up–tempo, the Swedish band Slagsmålsklubben got the whole place ecstatic. They were accompanied by Danish visual artist Sune "Motorsaw" Petersen who was displaying his homebrewed geometrical animations on the big screens. Even if it almost got me motion sick at times when he went too fast, I really enjoyed these visuals too. Perhaps there could have been more variation in places, but there were some details I really liked – for example the variation of stroke weight that is seldom being __________________________________________________________________________ |
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 used to interpret music.
Since I had abandoned my idea of getting home with the last boat to Sveaborg, there was little to do but join the after party. We ended up at the concept agency Yatta. It´s the kind of place where you can´t really figure out what they do there and nobody gave me a straight answer. It looks like the kind of place where people discuss the color white for hour–long meetings at high rates. The music was streaming from a laptop and alcoholic beverages, probably leftovers from the Christmas party, kept coming until I finally decided to gun for the first boat back to the hostel.
My Sunday was not very productive at all. I sat in the Kiasma café for a few hours until it was time to head out to the airport. I headed back to Stockholm tired but content and with a pocket full of new ideas for the next Pixelvärk festival and a few personal projects.
www.pixelache.ac/helsinki/ |