everyone shouts out when I say I’m from Iceland, “Oh like Bjooohrk”) was asked about her musical development in Iceland and on the music scene there at the Late Night with Conan O’Brian she answered the following:
2 https://www. youtube.com/ watch?v=oowg0i_ l0tw
“Oh it’s a lot of sort of isolated people who actually know how to control and operate electricity, but uhm, (...) they are kind of isolated and they kind of sneak in and listen to American radio and they kind of like, get sort of what’s going on in Europe as well, and then they kind of, like, misunderstand it in a kind of beautiful way.2” Here I think she really summarizes it, with a bit of irony towards the popular belief that Iceland is still quite underdeveloped (at least before it became a tourism-trend), she somehow explains the way Icelanders relate to the ‘outside’ and how playful they allow themselves to be with the information they gain. A new creation is in a sense already happening there in the transmission itself—through misunderstanding. Secondhand knowledge has been the main means of knowledge-providing in art throughout history. Craft masters had disciples whom they passed their knowledge onto, stories were told in households and then passed on by travelers, folk dances were passed on between people and places and always changing in the meantime. No one can really pinpoint when it was made and who made it. Secondhand knowledge also plays a big role in society in different ways. In religion, for example, it is the most common kind of knowledge passed on, the source is absent and therefore it relies on belief and trust in priesthood, representatives or mediators. In law secondhand knowledge plays a major role in forms of testimony and in interpretations of lawyers and judges. More broadly one can also find this in media reports and other testimonies. Now with the existence of the internet the distribution of knowledge is made easier to all places, considered central or peripheral. It is both easier for unverified knowledge to be passed on but also it is easier to fact check. When it comes to art and dance in particular, this brings another kind of experience of art. We can all agree on that it is not the same to look at a google image of Rothko as to stand in front of a big red painted canvas at Tate Modern. We can all know more, but at the same time somehow less. But this is also a creative process, as the information passed on by the internet is continuously changing between the provider and the receiver—a new form of folk culture is already happening on the internet and without boundaries of nations. The utopia of a verified and objective firsthand knowledge can also quite easily be debunked—well at least when it comes to societal knowledge. We always have some way of
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