reflections at the end of first quarter

I've found it increasingly difficult to combine this project with other aspects of my life and keeping the flow of production going. This is mainly because I cannot dedicate as much time to it as many of my ideas would need. I guess this has become one of the main challenges for me. Some ideas can be sketched, experimented and uploaded in a matter of day or two, but many ideas simply don't fit into the time constrains I've set for myself.

So instead of shutting down this whole operation, I've decided to give myself a little breather now that I'm 1/4 through the project. Call it an autumn vacation. I will keep on producing things with the "run and gun" idea of quick sketches and experimentations, but I may not be able to do 52 pieces in 12 months. We'll see what happens.

So far though, this platform—even if I'm just talking to myself here—has been a great excuse and a motivational force to try out some things I otherwise might just keep on stacking in my head. Some very conceptual, some more aesthetic and some just silly. I'm happy for making every one of them so far.

A pleasant surprise for me has been my focus on working with sound. In many cases, I've actually spent more time with the sound in postproduction than with shooting and editing combined. This I did not expect, and I'm interested to see where things will go from here. Sound has always been an important factor for me—something that's never an afterthought, but an integral part of the whole process from beginning to end. But it's always been sort of complimentary to the image. Now I see that image and sound are starting to find a different balance in my work, where they are on the same level, neither one the subject of the other, but two expressions of an idea that resonate together in fascinating ways.

I see also that my work has trouble staying in the constrains of what a "film" is usually considered to be, and branching out to the realms of text and music. For me this is not a problem, but in fact a positive thing. But I may need to rethink the premise of this project more during my autumn break.

Thank you for tuning in.
I'm looking forward to producing more pieces with renewed energy.

Best,
Juha

week 13

Sunset revisited

In early June I made a long walk along the Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, to see and feel how the city changes along the 24 miles, without being sealed inside a car. I documented this walk with a series of photographs, field recordings and writing and compiled the material into videos I posted in week 2 of this project.
Originally I had a vague idea to use whatever I write during the walk as occasional voice-overs in the video. Because of my goal to produce a constant flow of new work every week though, this proved to be beyond my time-budget. So I went through my scribblings and produced this essay instead. I hope you enjoy it in conjunction with this re-edit of the video which has an improved image quality and a slightly slower pace.

Walking the Sunset

Of experiences and observations along Sunset Boulevard’s 24 miles

The morning is cool and the sky misty as I start walking the Sunset Boulevard. There’s always a peculiar tranquility about mornings, as life is still waking up, be it in wilderness or in the city. People start their work or travel to their jobs. But still not too much traffic, not endless lines of steel and flesh stuck on the roads in frustrated queues (though reality would be very different on 405). It’s quiet enough to hear some birds singing. The air fresh and humid after the night. The misty sky making the light very soft and even.

Sunset Boulevard begins close to Downtown Los Angeles and winds its way through varied neighborhoods for 24 miles before reaching the Pacific Ocean and the Pacific Coast Highway. One of my first observations as I approached Los Angeles by air was the exceptionally long streets, a huge pattern of lines stretching seemingly infinitely, a web for man-insects or giant veins feeding the city. Douglas Adams noted in the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, that our cities, seen from above by an alien visitor, would look like they have been constructed for cars—them being logically the dominant race of the planet. I never felt that description to be more accurate than while being in L.A.

The first district I pass through while traveling from east to west is Echo Park, a colorful and diverse neighborhood. Slightly run down in some places still, Echo Park used to be a cheaper place to live, mixing mexican immigrants and left-wing artists. Recent years it has become more and more gentrified and stories of gang warfare on the streets feel now more like an echo. Treading the sidewalk, both sides of the street are mainly residential areas, small houses as in suburbia, yet at the same time the atmosphere is definitely urban. Walking further into Echo Park the streetsides begin to fill up with small shops, cafes, restaurants, bars, galleries, a bookshop, a market for time travelers, a record store. Weeds push through the concrete.

After and hour I stop to a have a morning coffee and write. The day is still relatively quiet, but traffic is increasing. It feels pleasant to step out of the stream and observe it from a different perspective. So much of people’s lives in L.A is spent in transit between points —home, work, market, coffee shop, gym. A constant current of traffic, pushing on determinately through the asphalt veins of the city.

Continuing through Silver Lake the landscape keeps changing yet remains the same. It’s a strange combination of a neighborhood that obviously used to be more poor and rough, but now next to one another on street sides are yoga studios, cheap motels, tandoori pizza, thai massage, mongolian barbecue, liquor stores, organic juice bar, laundries, more cafes, sidewalks decorated with graffiti, fashionable skinny young white people and sunscorched homeless, pushing shopping carts filled with their collection of possessions, like the father and son traveling in the ashes of a dead world in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road.

Where Sunset meets Santa Monica Boulevard and Hollywood Boulevard, the city changes again. Admits tall hospital buildings is a sky-blue castle, the church of Scientology. It’s getting close to midday and the sun has driven the clouds away. I decide to walk in, hot and sweating. Inside a spacious and cool lobby I’m greeted by receptionists who escort me to a series of television screens, a self guided tour to principles of scientology and the life of its founder L. Ron Hubbard. I sit down to drink some water and watch some videos. His life is presented as a quest in search of knowledge of the universe and Hubbard like some sort of movie star. I watch through more videos trying to understand what their religion is about. To me it doesn’t seem like a religion at all, more like a pyramid marketing scheme. Though now I see why Hubbard’s peculiar self-help cult, which seems to mix psychoanalysis, buddhism, perhaps a bit of anthroposophy, wrapped up in a simplified package of life-lessons, appeals to people especially in Hollywood. Hubbard is painted as a heroic and adventurous figure, a culmination of all the american virtues, a super-boy scout who unraveled the secrets of life to hand them to you in a convenient and easy to use package. A spiritual Indiana Jones telling you how to live your life successfully.

I walk out and enter the much more humble temple next door, The Self-Realization Fellowship, established by Indian guru Paramahansa Yogananda in the early 40’s. The place is just open, I walk in and a lady passing by comes over to greet me. She answers some questions I make and at the end she assures me that ”we won’t try to convert you”. A strategy that appeals to me. I walk the grounds and end up sitting in the meditation garden in a comfortable shade under a tree. I space out for a while. There’s a wonderful atmosphere to the place and eventually I have to force myself to continue my walk.

A different kind of world greets me again as I continue my way. The rugged yet joyful neighborhoods of Echo Park and Silver Lake give way to a rougher landscape of ugly strip malls and warehouse stores. People sleeping or begging on the streets. The sun is high up and hot, the air full of noise and exhaust fumes. A man sits on the sidewalk, sobbing hysterically. He holds a piece of paper on one upraised hand, showing it to the world, a testament or evidence of something, while eating french fires with the other at the same time. On the ground beside him some candy bars.

I’m passing through Little Armenia and entering Hollywood and West Hollywood. A wasteland of traffic and billboards and homeless people. Stretching on as a straight line, polluted, noisy, hot… For some reason I find myself thinking of Waiting for Godot. I begin to feel exhausted.

On the street in front of Sunset Plaza Liquor a man probably in his 30’s, tall and skinny, steps out in front of me on the street and informs me that he will kill me. Obviously out of his mind, living on the street, suffering from exposure and malnutrition. He had just been raving to some young kid a moment before, who deftly avoided the man and just continued on his way. I decide to try the same method, supposing that the man, though definitely threatening, is not likely to actually attempt to kill me. So I mutter something and keep going, showing my open palms to him, in some instinctual universal sing language of ”I’ve got no quarrels with you” and he does not attempt to block my passage. He remarks I look like Bon Jovi and then tells me again that he’ll kill me. I keep going and don’t look back.

Poverty is the great equalizer…

And traffic. And madness.

I have not yet seen any single common attribute to the people living on the streets. They are of all skin colors, men and women of all ages, except children. That’s the difference compared to places like India. Otherwise there’s so much poverty, visual, in your face poverty, as I have ever seen in any in any country that likes to call other countries ”the third world”. They sit there on the street sides, their bags of worldly possessions around them, or piled up in a trolley, they wrap themselves up in the junk, like human waste-magnets. Visible but invisible, people passing by do their best to try and wish them away, to imagine there’s nothing there. Devoid of any contact with people, it’s no wonder so many of them start to talk to themselves. Like a person in sensory deprivation, who starts hallucinating a world around him to interact with. The saintly bus drivers of Los Angeles are the only ones who give them attention or recognition, like taking care to lower the ramp for them to enter with their bags and sacks and carts. When they get too loud, the drivers tell them to shut up or go, but they get the same treatment as everyone else: the opportunity to use the public transit. Perhaps this is also one reason why so many homeless use it.

Then the landscape starts to look more expensive. Some fancy hotels appear. Boutiques and restaurants. The skyline is filled with advertisements; every inch of the field of view has been attempted to block with commercial messages advertising booze, films, tv shows and more booze. It would only be more effective if everyone was to wear augmented reality glasses with personalized advertisements darkening the sky. I wander through the fields of commercials, every signpost striving to catch my attention. The only remaining space free from commercials is the asphalt eroded by constantly grinding tires, but I imagine some day in the future they’ll come up with entropy resistant smart asphalt that rearranges its pigment to produce changing advertisements. There will be nowhere to hide.

The price of space. The price of air. The lack of public spaces on this street is striking. Even the sky isn’t free anymore. There aren’t any places to go, unless you go to buy something. And just walking on the street your attention is being demanded by signs and signals wanting you to want things. I wonder how the poor on the streets relate to all this. Have they stopped wanting, stopped paying attention? Or are they trapped in an internal gnawing feeling of wanting all the things around them, yet not being able to reach any of it? And at the same time, lifting my gaze even higher are the villas and palaces of the upper layer of society, the movie stars and executives, overlooking this wasteland. The contrast is incredible.

The contrast gets even more striking, as suddenly Hollywood ends and Beverly Hills starts, like a line drawn on the city. The dusty, hot and polluted street changes into a lush landscape of tall trees and rows of hedges hiding the big houses behind them. It’s pleasant to walk underneath the shade of the trees. The traffic jam next to me is not so pleasant. It’s late afternoon and the street has turned into a parking lot of frustration. I keep walking. There is nothing else to do, there is nowhere to go; couple of bus stops with benches, a small park with a fountain and a man dancing ecstatically to the tune of a psychedelic organ solo from his traveling set of amplifiers. Further into Beverly Hills even sidewalks disappear. There’s just the road and a corridor of hedge-fences. The billboards reaching for the skies have been replaced by trees, but beyond them there are just the little signs of security companies proclaiming private property and armed response.

I reach my half-way mark, the edge of the UCLA campus grounds. The angle of the sun is pleasant now. It’s green here, walking between the campus grounds and Bel Air. Very few people can be seen, mostly it’s just cars. The air feels more fresh. Occasionally I catch the scent of eucalyptus or tea tree, or the chemical scent of detergent from joggers passing by. I enjoy this stretch of walking –even a sidewalk has reappeared. Then suddenly I arrive to a river of noise and steel, the Interstate (parking lot) 405. The sound during the late afternoon rush hour is like listening to a waterfall. Thousands of people locked in their cars. Useless honking. A bundle of flowers is tied to the fence on the bridge arching over the freeway. Memory of someone. Then past the bridge landscape continues similar. Fences, hedges, houses, the road and nothing else. Like an empty stage. Where did the people go?

Then I enter Brentwood Village. Shops, cafes, restaurants, very suburban, feels slightly upper-class. Neat yet lifeless. I sit down to write at Starbucks, outside by the street. Listening to the sounds of people passing by. I overhear a small group of men, evolved to speak loud and with a squeaking high voice so they are sure to be heard. Talking is like a pitch, like telling a story or trying to sell something. Another guy passing by stops to ask for the time. His skinny little dog comes sniffing at me excitedly. He tells me the dog doesn’t usually like males. He also tells me he has six cats and another dog. He seems like an interesting character and he’s my first friendly random encounter but he does not stay to chat longer.

Moving on the local urban center soon changes to houses and hedges again. Except everything is not as neatly trimmed and managed as around Bel Air. A theory: the amount of gardening and landscaping is directly comparable to wealth.

The land is more hilly now and the road becomes winding. I pass by a memorial ground made for a young girl who apparently died in a car accident on Sunset. Signs urge drivers to slow down. Goodbyes from friends and family stapled on a tree. The little shrine is touching. And it’s true that many drive like maniacs even on roads passing though residential areas like this. A symptom of lives spent in traffic is lives lost in traffic as well.

As I continue on I can feel the ocean in the air more and more. It’s moist and slightly salty. While I stop to take a photograph a bunch of young guys crammed in a car standing at the traffic lights shout at me: ”Take a picture of this!” I’m not sure what they are referring to and I cannot really see anything that interesting happening so I just continue with my shot of a security service badge in the bush. ”Take a picture! Asshole.” And they drive away. Perhaps they thought I was a paparazzi spying on some celebrity. I shrug and continue on.

I pass through another fancy neighborhood. This one has a golf club. Houses and hedges one a after another. This walking really starts to feel endless. More houses and more lawns and fences after another, on and on.

Passing by Will Rogers State Park there’s more trees around for a moment. Buildings are more sparsely spread along the road. Sun is setting. I listen to the sounds of the forest and wish I had the time to make a detour to wander around some forest paths. The neighborhood has a more rustic feel to it that seems more dominant to me the closer I get to the Santa Monica mountains.

After an hour or so, I reach Pacific Palisades. Fancy shops, restaurants, cafeterias, an expensive-looking rug shop, a shop selling barbecue grills, yoga studio, several banks… Certainly upper class, but still having a nice atmoshpere. The mountains are getting closer. Topanga Canyon is not that far away. It certainly affects the atmosphere, that and the vicinity of the ocean. It’s getting dark. A signpost warns me of a neighborhood guarded 24/7 by armed patrols. Creepy gated community manifestations. So much for the niceness.

The road continues on. Would have thought to reach the ocean sooner, but compared to the straight lines of Hollywood, the road winds its way like a snake and it makes the way seem longer. And more varied. But it’s well past sunset and I’m still on Sunset.

The road becomes narrower, a residential area without streetlights, without sidewalks. I keep on going, determined I should reach the end of the road soon. The road descents in a long curve. It’s dark now. Hillsides around are littered with lights. There’s a big party happening somewhere across the small valley opening in front of me, bright lights and music. I can see the ocean now. I pass by a large temple next to a small lake. The road widens again. Blocks of flats. The last stretch. Fast-food restaurants appear and I can hear the noise of the PCH. I see a familiar bus no. 2 standing by the side of the street. It’s the end of the line. Then the ocean is there. Dark. A pitch black mass of rolling waves on the other side of the highway. Like another universe, carved out of this one by the stream of headlights flashing by. End of my journey.

Epilogue:

I met a man at a bus stop by the PCH. He was waiting for the same bus as myself and wondering if it was still in service this late. He turned out to be homeless. Sleeping on the beach, trying to find some work on a boat. Ex-marine, in his late thirties, with a patch on his right eye. Could have passed for Woody Harrelson look-alike. Somewhere between a pirate and a beach bum, he was actually a sailor, with a boat license. Arrived in L.A early this year. He told me he was living and working on the east coast, but something happened and he lost everything. Somehow connected to the big oil spill. Then he headed out to California.

The guy was very nice and seemed like a person with a good heart. Living in a rough spot but still keeping his spirits up. He just wants to work. He was heading towards Venice to one of his sleeping spots. And a shower. He said there were public showers on the beach.

Finally the bus came. We got onboard and sat down. More homeless people on the bus. A man in front of me was ranting about something, carrying with him a pile of newspaper clips, books, magazines - text in all forms. He gave me a page from a newspaper with a story about the scarcity of fresh water in California and told me to pass it on.

On Ocean Avenue me and the pirate got out of the bus. We shook hands and went on our ways, me to wander around and watch the nightlife on the Santa Monica pier, him towards a free shower and a spot to sleep at.

week 12

Chocolate milk variations (for Steve)




A little sonic experiment with phase shifting, this is something I always wanted to try and now had the perfect excuse to do it.
Big thanks to my talents Theo and Paloma and thanks to Steve Reich for inspiration.

week 11

The Man and the River - trailer 2

This is an "editor's cut" (a curious paradox eh?) of a trailer.

The film in question, "The Man and the River - A portrait of António Cabrita" was directed by Sebastian Boulter and tells a story of changing landscape, ecology and society through the eyes of the protagonist who has witnessed the destruction of an important river mouth in his home town in Portugal.

The first trailer can be seen here.

Why this version? Just because of my own curiosity towards the material and as an exercise to see what shapes it can take.

week 10

Reality: Performanssifiesta 2012

This is a documentation of a beautiful performance by Terho Sire and Philip Luddite at the Performanssifiesta festival. The space is the old match factory in Tampere, Finland.
Handheld camcoder camerawork hopefully aligns with the roughness of the surroundings.

week 9

Mutual Daughter (Mutual Core remix)



The other week I took part in a contest on Beatport and made a remix of "Mutual Core" by Björk. Here's the resulting mix.
What do you mean you can't dance to it?

week 8

Morning dew / Afterglow




A montage of sunrises and dew in late july, combined with a poem by Jorge Luis Borges, read in original spanish by Noel Svetec. The music is a collage combining excerpts form violin improvisations by Sanna Natunen and piano improvisations by yours truly.

Originally I imagined this piece as just a collection of images capturing the dew and the beautiful light before and after the sunrise using time-lapse techniques. For soundtrack I though I'd just use recordings of natural ambience from the locations and go with a very simple and minimalist approach. But while editing the images seemed to scream for something more to accompany them. At the I had been reading a collection of poems by the Argentinian master Borges, and this one poem in particular had stuck in my mind. So I decided to try it out to see how it changes the associations and the atmosphere of the images. Then I took a piece of a piano improvisation from I recording I had made on location during a brake while shooting another short film and combined that with snippets of violin improvisations gratuously played by Sanna Natunen. With this triangle of sound elements the piece turned out to be much more like a music video, or film-poem, or something. This I had not imagined while I started filming, but it came out as a delightful surprise for me. Though I worry that the soundtrack is almost to crowded now (and I'd love to record my piano again, better & without the sound of the clicking fingernails).

Due to software issues, some of the material on this video is of inferior quality. Also a major part of the material I shot was left unused for this version. I plan revisit this piece again in the near future and to render some of the time-lapse sequences again with better quality.

morning dew

Midsummer in Finland is rather magical time, to say the least. The days are long and the night is really just a few hours of gloom instead of proper darkness. And then the sun comes up again.

As most people, I imagine, I have always been attracted by the special light of the time of sunrises and sunsets. The distant glow after sundown and the magic hour just before the sun appears from the horizon have a special warmth and softness to them.

During the past few weeks I've been getting up early, or rather staying up late, to shoot sunrises and the light just before and after it. My initial focus was to make a Joris Ivens type of piece about the morning dew, but I found that catching a common natural phenomena like this is sometimes more challenging than one would presume. Actually for the dew to happen properly, I have learned, it takes certaing kinds of conditions, namely cool nights and no or little wind (and preferrably clear skies to catch the amazing light). With the summer in Finland being extremely cloudy and rainy, many mornings I've found my mission obstructed or handicapped by adverse contitions.

Anyway, I do have plenty of interesting material and soon I'l be uloading a new piece.
And perhaps I will keep shooting more sunrises, the romantic fool I am, and upload another film with more focus on the actual dew.

week 7

Textures of summertime Finland combined with a little piano improv I recorded while taking a brake on a location of another shoot.

The music was recorded with a phone and it's very raw. I've been very shy about using my own improvisations because, well, it's an improvisation and as it's composed at the same time it's performed, there are always unwanted notes. I'm trying to overcome my self-criticism though - after all that's the whole point of this project.

week 6

Surfaces #2

This film came out as a total surprise. I had no idea what I was working towards for, just fooling around with some sequences I shot at Santa Monica & Venice beach. Once again, the soundtrack, field recordings form two different sites, made all the difference.

week 5

Surfaces #1

A montage of surfaces from Patagonia.

week 4

Week 4: A day in the life of a tree




For a while now I've been thinking of how interesting it would be to document a year in the life of a single tree. This piece takes a quicker approach and documents some fractions of a single day in the life of a tree.

week 3

Week 3: Dream on




This experiment is something I'm sure to be building on later to do a more extensive version. All material was shot and recorded using my phone.

week 2

Veins: Walking the Sunset

This piece was born out of the interest to study some of the veins of our human culture.
In early June I walked the Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles and documented the journey by photography, recording and writing.

You can look at two different versions of this experiment, with different speeds. Remember you can also click on the videos to make them fullscreen. Headphones or good stereo system recommended.



Sunset Boulevard starts close to Downtown and continues towards west for 24 miles until it reaches the Pacific Ocean and Pacific Coast Highway. I split the walk into parts to have time for documenting and introspection. During my first day of walking I also ran out of daylight, which makes photographic documentation rather futile. This is why there is an observable jump in the levels of light somewhere 2/3 into the film.

Initially I planned to hang a camera on my neck to take random pictures every minute or so and then constructing an animation from the material. However, I was advised against walking around like a tourist with a fancy camera hanging on my neck, so I decided instead to take quick snapshots while I was walking, roughly an image or two per each block I was passing by.

week 1

Currents #1

in memory of Ray Bradbury

Wednesday morning, just as I was uploading a video I had been rendering overnight, I took a look at the news and there, topmost, in just an hour before, was the news of Ray Bradbury's passing.

I was shaken deeply and I guess I still am. It felt a friend had passed away. I had never realized his importance to me was really so deep. The whole of my childhood came back to me, the joy of discovering his stories and the wonderful journeys I took with him.

I can vividly recall the copy of The Illustrated Man (Kuvitettu mies, title of the Finnish translation) on my parent's bookshelf. How luring it was. I must have been about eight or nine years old. I had been reading mostly formulaic children's adventure stories, and just started the transition to more ambitious reading with Clarke's 2001: Space Odyssey. Holding "The Illustrated Man" in my hands, I knew this was something else, something new and exciting, a great adventure to come. And it was. 

The stories sucked me in like nothing before. After finishing the book I continued to read any Finnish translation I could find in the city libraries. And to this day I am still amazed by the joy that shines through his writing. A feeling that writing in itself is not just labor, but an exciting journey, that words can flow out, just as music can flow out, almost as if they have a will of their own. And that feeling always stayed with me when I would venture into my own fantasies, when I’d sit at midnight in my room, filling up notebooks or typing away with a Macintosh.

To me Ray was always like a mysterious spirit. I knew him through his words, the deep pools of imagination, the beautiful dance of his sentences on paper, but I never read about him as a person. I did not know that he had lived 50 years in the same house in L.A, that he didn't drive, that he wrote Farenheit 451 in the basement of UCLA library in nine days.

Therefore I had no clue that as I was spending my first two months in the US, in Los Angeles, they were the last two months of his life. That I was wondering around the same campus grounds he had, sitting on lawns and benches and writing in my notebook. That he had been a familiar face in the city’s libraries and bookstores. That he was living his last days just few miles from where I was staying. And now he is gone. 

There was something beautiful written about him online (though he himself might have resented that, considering internet a great distraction):

"He said that God put people on Earth so we could hear the trees fall in the forests."

Seeing the fantastic in the ordinary, the wonders in the everyday life, is perhaps just the reason why Bradbury was so special to me, and to many others. He helps us see that life is as mundane as we make it to be. That adventures are ours to embark on any day we choose. Many of the fantasies he dreamt up did not exist in our world, but they exist now, inside the covers of books, waiting in the shelves of libraries to jump out and take root in the reader's mind, even when he is no longer here. That's a real miracle.

I wanted to finally launch this project this week to mark the start of a new year and a new cycle in my life. But instead, now I want to dedicate it to Ray. I hope that the magic of his work will continue to remind me to see and celebrate the miraculous in the world. That is all I have ever wanted to convey, and the mentor I never knew and never met, has again reminded me of this essential truth.

the approach

Often the best way to find if an idea is really workable or if it could produce anything of interest, is just to try it out. In a way it's like the whole scientific method, formulation and testing of hypotheses: test, test, test and test once again. That is what I intend with my project here, to try any idea that comes along, explore any interesting angle on things and just produce, produce, produce. The good old trial and error.

On a practical level, working on a new project every week, the schedule would typically be 1-2 days developing and researching an idea, 2 days shooting and 2-3 days postproduction. Perhaps maximum of 20 hours per week. This will likely result in very rough pieces of work, but it should be enough to know whether the idea has anything to it or not. Mostly I will be producing these videos simultaneously with whatever other projects I happen to be working with at the time. I imagine I’ll be also collecting materials for different pieces constantly, as interesting things come along. 

Another practical level is the technology available, which in our day and age is simply amazing and evolving with great speed. I am more interested here in the idea than the technology, and often things will be produced with very light equipment. The camera and microphone of my phone is already sufficiently advanced technology to be considered magic, and enough for me to produce many pieces. This is not a purpose in itself, to do things low-key, but practical considering my time limitations.

I expect many of the videos to come will be inspired by the environments I happen to be in, as I tend to move around when possible. Many of them might be documentary in nature, atypical or experimental in structure and style. Some might be more about image than sound and some might more about sound than image. They might resemble more video art than short films, whatever that means.

However one will categorize them, all of it is beside the point. Which is in exploring an idea and producing combinations of images and sound as a result of that exploration, and only then thinking how the piece fits into the existing frameworks of cinema and art. It will be a surprise for me as well to see what they are, but surely they will be experiments, exercises, essays and sketches, unfinished attempts - fragments of the way I experience and perceive the world. 

A definition of trial and error:

"a method of discovery, solving problems, etc., based on practical experiment and experience rather than on theory"

Collins English Dictionary

introduction - first kill the cop in your head

The world is full of ideas. Each day is filled with new observations and realizations, from small to large, whether we really pay much attention to them or not. The everyday reality we experience offers so much impulses and information that there are practically infinite number of ways to examine and combine our thoughts and experiences to create different synthesis. In other words we live in a vast sea of ideas and possibilities.


Creating in one form or another has always been an important outlet for me. A way to examine the world and rearrange my experiences, first primarily with writing and later with images and sound. Yet I often find myself struggling with the feeling that the ideas and observations I have are just not good enough or don't have the potential to merit a more detailed examination. For years now most of my ideas have stayed just as they are - ideas, slowly decomposing in the Immateria. My internal critic has a very cruel eye and it seems to be doing me a big disfavor.


So I've begun to wonder, where does this critic, this brain police come from and what nourishes it, what kind of mental soil does it thrive in? And more importantly: what could be done to challenge it?


In introspect it may be easier to shoot down ones own ideas than to go about producing them - it allows a back door to slip quietly out of instead of facing the reality of dealing with them. It may also be the cultural climate and ecology that we live in, the fast food culture of consuming images, text and sounds. The amount of audiovisual material that surrounds us every day is also so massive that at times it seems to eradicate any meaning it might have. It's all just noise, and very little signal. Contributing to that often just feels useless.


But in the end, all of the above are really just excuses. The critic has to be dealt with.


This is why I'm starting a project of creating a new work of images and sound each week, over a period of a year. This challenge ought to eradicate the mental blocks and clogs I have accumulated in my system for one reason or the other. Having a constant deadline will not leave time to worry about whether I'm sweating out shit or gold.
As the old saying goes "first kill the cop in your head".


This blog will serve as a platform to show the work I'm producing (along with Vimeo) and as an outlet to write about my experiences and thoughts. A new piece will be uploaded once per week, starting soon.

Who are the brain police?