Estate

Estival solstice / June 21

I N

Estival solstice / June 22

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Estival solstice / July 1

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Estival solstice / July 25

Estival solstice / August 1

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July 14

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peltoaukeama

Estival solstice / August 15

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Estival solstice / August 18

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September 21

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Estival solstice / August 25

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Estival solstice / August 30

sun burn (a hole made with a magnifying glass)

sun burn (a hole made with a magnifying glass)

Estival solstice / September 3

burn

Koska minua on yksi henkilรถ, on minua jo aika monta.

Estival solstice / September 4

Estival solstice / September 5

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Estival solstice / September 7

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Estival solstice / September 14

äin. Hiljalleen alan tottua , sillä mahdollisuus on ensimmäinen ahdistuksen

aatii pitkäjänteistä mieltä, nen vaatii. (Winograndista ttävät sitä; ja minä väsyneenä uolinen, ja se on todella hyvä. ään alkaa se kirjatapahtuma, ttoa. Pieni aamupala kämpillä

minen. Ahh, omaa ihanan väsynyt naula on päässä vaan, aksalainen jamppa on hyvä lla tasolla, helposti ja ni niitä surkeita puolia, kun en ovat hyvin pinnalla näin nihkeimmässä paikassa,, no sitten istua puistossa, puistossa, päivät. Ei mulla oo rahaa syke on viipyilevä, täysin

Estival solstice / September 15

Estival solstice / September 16 / Man and technics Part 2000

Day Three Mun täytyy mennä näyttämään sitä yhtä luomen ympärystää, ehkä sitä jalkaakin, en tiedä, mua syyhyttää joka puolelta. Vähän vaikeuksia vieläkään saada kiinni oikeastaan yhtään mistään.

Nii, eihän se mikään vakava välttämättä ole, mutta luultavasti ikävä, jos se alkaa leviämään muuallekin kroppaan.

Kokeilen nyt jollain tavalla saada itsestäsi otetta; Whitney Lower East Side Siitä positiivisesta asenteestaan tässä on kyse, että mun pitää alkaa olemaan tosi tarkkana.

Mun pitää pystyä rakentamaan tämä elämä täysin uudelle pohjalle, ehkä tämä reissu voisi olla jonkinlainen ponnahduslauta siihen, toivottavasti niin.

Täällä on joko velttona tyyppejä tai superurheilullisia menestyjiä, kirjo on suuri ja mulla on vähän löysä olo koko ajan. En mahda sille mitään, en tiedä mihin suuntaisin askeleeni tänäänkään, ota nyt rauhassa, mieti rauhassa. Pääsenkö etenemään kirjan kautta? Se Veeran tuttu täti? Vai lukisitko omaani?

Kokeillaan.

Tässä puistossa, Brooklynissä päin, Voi olla, että mun pitää kirjoittaa nämä kaikki paskat vielä myöhemmin läpi, Anyway Day Three,

Estival solstice / September 17

18.9. (Day four) Päivä alkoi taas yhdenlaisena virheellä, otin ihan liian ison kaffen! Dollari liikaa ja liikaa kaffee! Ois kiva ehtiä 12 sinne festareille. Meen vielä tämän kerran neljännen päivän putkeen, ja jos kaikki menee putkeen ehkä ostan sieltä jotain tuliaisia, mua jännittää jo nyt ne tuliaiset, jos en saakaan ostettua mitään.

Mielikuvitus on aika vähäinen, ehkä mun vaan kannattaa mennä sinne festareille, se on aika lähellä, ja se on selkeä, onhan mulla sitten vielä useampi päivä. Tää oli nyt päätarkoitus..Kyllä kyllä. Sitten on vielä kolme päivää.

Tänään teen kunnollisen listan Whitney Coney island Eli huomenna hyvin aikainen aamu, ehkä jo tänään illalla siihen pyykkimestaan! Joo iltapyykille, ottamaan vähän kuvia, Samoin ajattelin, että metrossa ois hyvä kuvata ihmisten käsiä, lähiksiä, tms.

Estival solstice / September 18

Estival solstice / September 19

Estival solstice / September 20

20.9.2016 (Day Six) Somewhere in Harlem, There´s no rush, I´ve been in a construction site, That´s What I learned from this lady, it would be texts with different lengths Apertureen insertti, jossa on tätä mun meininkiä osittain, Viikon mittainen paketti.

A week.

(AM / PM Ante..post

Estival solstice / September 21

meridian..)

Estival solstice / September 22

Analyse

Estival solstice / June 22

Potentials in the dark Camera obscura in the digital era

Technical freedom Camera obscura in the digital era

Estival solstice / June 22

Estival solstice / June 22

Introduction

“Freedom is to play against apparatus”

-Vilem Flusser

The first time I experienced a light phenomenon called the camera obscura it occured on the wall of a moving truck. The back of a truck was covered and thus made completely dark even the day was bright outside. There was around twenty of us driven in the direction we were not supposed to recognize but fortunately a tiny hole on a wiggly wall made of tarp let some light in and I could witness this beautiful landscape gliding magically on the opposite wall. On that crispy-cold winter day I saw some silent trees below the horizon moving fast across the truck while the other passengers were too tired to keep their eyes open. I couldn´t close mine pondering the reason why these images were upside down. I felt like I was dreaming too.

Five years later, now being a photography student in a school of applied sciences, I took part of a week-long pinhole camera course. After making the first efforts with a camera made of 4x5 inches film box, I got anxious and decided to put a black & white paper straight to my mouth and use it as a camera. I walked out, opened my mouth like a fish, and came back in develope and fix the thing in a darkroom. The result was amazing - a grey and wrinkled paper with some evidence of saliva!

At the time this episode belonged merely to a category of school humour than a serious attempt to stretch the boarders of an apparatus, but anyhow this experiment left distinct marks on me. In this text I will return to this subject of using one´s body as a camera later on.

Now eight years from the previous episode, in February 2013, I had a conversation with an elderly lady called Anni. She told me a short story of a warm summer day in her youth as she was hiding in a wooden house somewhere in the Finnish country-side. It was dark and only a key-hole passed beams of light in. She was baffled realizing a moving picture of the yard on a wall - upside down. That experience was her reason to come to meet me downstairs of a service house where she was living and I was having a camera obscura workshop. At the end of the day I gave her a couple of cameras made of meatball cans loaded with unexposed photographic paper, and wished her good luck. Next time we met, she carried exposed camera-cans back in her trolley. We made a little darkroom in a public toilet and opened the cans, developed and fixed black & white papers under a red safety light. After finishing these procedures we stepped outside to have a better look on the results. I was relieved because all the exposures were calculated correctly enough to perceive images. These pictures we saw were negatives of still-lifes she had composed in her room upstairs with one to one-and-a-half-hour exposure times.

(photo: Anni Heikkilä) Estival solstice / June 22

The purpose of this text is to present multiple potentials for the use of the camera obscura and rethink it´s value in the digital era as a social, artistic and philosophical tool. For me, it´s quite natural to think the camera obscura through a dichotomies between darkness and lightness, also interior and exterior, which are the main factors needed to have a picture emerging. For at least thousand years it has been known that, when light passes through a small hole into dark, enclosed interior, an invert image will appear on the wall opposite the hole. “But it is crucial to make distinction between the empirical fact that an image can be produced this way and the camera obscura as a socially constructed artifact.” In other words, ”the formal operation of a camera obscura as an abstract diagram may remain constant, but the function of the device or metaphor within an actual social or discursive field has fluctuated decisively.” (Jonathan Crary, Technics of the observer) Acknowledging a variety of possible experiences inside a darkened chamber throughout the history, I´m wondering how the current experiences in the camera obscura could be compared with the previous. And has this fluctuation of interpretations already stopped, and if so, when was that?

Some charasteristics of the pre-technology that I consider fascinating are its simplicity and apparent naturality - the possibility to experience and influence on images without any photography products. A certain “do-it-yourself ” attitude is a way of taking power to one´s own hands and I consider the camera obscura as a historically interesting counterpart for the movements of resistance. “The “liberation” of vision” happened “in the nineteenth century (..) in the absence of juridical model of the camera obscura,” when there was “freeing up of vision, a falling away of the rigid structures that had shaped it and constituted its objects. Once vision became localis in the empirical immediacy of the observer´s body, it belonged to time, to flux, to death. The guarantees of authority, identity, and universality supplied by the camera obscura are of another epoch.” (Crary, Technics of observer) The camera obscura announces a contradiction to the black box which “is one of the main topics of Vilem Flusser´s philosophy of apparatus and programs, the main characteristics of post-history. The black box works like a complex technical system, which can only be decoded by the specialists who programmed it.” (Rainer Guldin, Flusseriana) Acknowledging the flusserian ideas of apparatuses I´d like to make a comparison between technical devices (in this case cameras) and institutions, which both can be seen as black boxes or programmed constructions that people are not meant to see through. For an example; though a modern society could be defined by its transparency, and the word ´transparent´ is actively used in politics, there is cases where people are kept like prisoners inside other institutional buildings than prisons, against their own will. As a pre-technical phenomenon originating well before the modern institutions were born, the camera obscura which isn´t programmed by anyone, tempts to be used in these stabilized circumstances as it´s primary ontology suggests.

Mark Wigley points out that “buildings have always been seen to stabilize, to secure, to produce a sense of order on a chaotic world. Architectural discourse begins with the thought that the first buildings kept turbulence outside. (...) More precisely, architecture produces the effect of an outside. It invents the idea of exterior, the unruly territory that is tamed by a shelter. It is not so much the construction of a secure interior as the production of a picture of external agitation, which is seen to buffet the building but not move it. Architecture paints a picture of chaos giving way to order, control, safety, security, stability, etc. It frames agitation. (Mark Wigley, Towards turbulence) Thus, another strong dualism of the camera obscura locates between the interiors and the exteriors. “The dichotomy inside/outside has been one of the most central unquestioned assumptions within Western metaphysics. It has uncritically structured all thinking from antiquity to present day. The inside has stood for the positive. The spirit of the inside has been set against the outside world and its anxiety and uncertainty. The inside has been considered as the warmth of the home, which borders must be defended against the threats of the cold outside world. (...) Could the inside and the outside be considered in another way?” (Veli-Matti Saarinen, www.tanjakoponen.com)

Estival solstice / June 22

The architecture of a room is the most apparent restriction as a physical space and metaphora in this work. Another relevant and practical form is a compressed shape of a box. Thinking outside of the (black) box means working with unorthodox-shaped, hazardous cameras, also with bodily functions. The structural analogy of shapes can be transferred from a room to a container and from a camera to an eyeball.

ANALOGY OF QUALITIES AND SHAPES

1.

A room

Institutional / square

2.

A box

Practical / square

3.

A camera

Intersection

4.

An eye

Natural / round

5.

The Sun

Universal / round

In the following pinhole camera works I will use procedural methods with different literal and spatial restrictions. The procedural workflow will be controlled by formal and repeatable principles, rules and methods which are deliberately chosen in advance. The aim is to articulate ontological parameters which evolve from the technic used – to the way of presenting the outcome. The idea of making restrictions comes partly from the experimental writing tradition and oulipoan (ouvrir de literature potentielle) way of defining the constructive parameters before the actual writing happens. These parameters resemble recipes or coded scripts. In the realm of ou-x-poan thinking has emerged also ouliphopo (ouvroir de photographie potentielle) – a way to restrict photographic creation. I find it curious how essential part certain formal limitations play with the intriguency of pinhole-photography technics. As a medium the camera obscura is rooted in the unique restrictions of it´s own. To work with a pinhole-camera follows the logic of a traditional research methods.

Constant attempt of detecting meaningful parameters leads to furher understanding of possible usage of the light phenomena. For example the restrictions might be using a specific room as a camera, or exposing exacactly 24 hours to demonstrate an idea of 24/7, which “announces a time without time, a time extracted from any material or identifiable demarcations, a time without sequence or recurrence. (..) 24/7 is inseparable from environmental catastrophe in its declaration of permanent expenditure, of endless wastefulness for its sustenance, in its terminal disruption of the cycles and seasons on which ecological integrity depends” (Crary, 24/7) The limitations are quite different from more advanced photographic technics and thus can free one´s creation to surprising fields. Technical approach may lead to poetic way of seeing and experiencing time differently, or making complex systems of multiple lens-units or huge cameras as a continuum of restrictional thinking. Restricting ones freedom is either a voluntary or a forced state. In art making a systematic thought of restrictions works as a tool for getting away of judgmental, romantic, or irrational mind and turns the whole creative process closer to the practice of disciplined research. Compared to individual artistic practices and issues of free will I find it relevant to treat also a question of one´s freedom in institutional level.

The use of translatable Oulipoan restrictions that doesn´t necessarily tie the potentials of a literal composition in a certain language or a culture is a method that´s based largely on mathematics. The code of obscura might be concidered also as a scripture; a mark-making mechanism which is even more universal than writing. Basically it´s drawing with light. This thesis is not about constraints but something that the use of constraints might reveal using the camera obscura and pinhole camera technics.

Estival solstice / June 22

Estival solstice / June 22

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FREE ASSOCIATI

Estival solstice / June 22

ION PRESS

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REE ASSOCIATION PRESS

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