June 14
I'm dividing the time I have between the forest and the internet. Very different kind of places, the contrast between the virtual and the concrete space is obvious. Today I made a drawing of the experience of the space in the forest. The trunks of the trees frame the visual space and create a good condition to practice the depth modulation of the gaze. I tried to remember how it is to walk or just to stand on Rue Neuve (the shopping street in Brussels) on Saturday afternoon. That's 2872 km away.
From the notebook: a memory of the shopping street
I made a trip to Ypykänlampi, a pond in a process of becoming a peatland. I walked mostly in the woods near by the nature park and some forest roads. Took a swim in the pond and then canoeing around it. There was a pike and a dead frog in a fish trap that seemed abandoned, so I let the pike go.
On the way i saw micro eco-systems with specific conditions, like the one around a small stream. The vegetation was very different from the surrounding forest. It was interesting to see how the edges of this particular micro-environment were merging with the surroundings, the change was gradual and there were no sharp cut. I thought for a moment cultures and how those are related to particular circumstances of the location and context, and the further we go from the conditions in which a culture has emerged in the first place the more we see it disappearing or merging into other cultures.
June 15
A drawing from the note book
June 16th
How does an anthill sound like? A lot of work. But seriously, it's a quite fascinating sound. Put your ear near to it. The information passes through smell in the ant colonies. If you look close, they always do that thing with their heads when coming a cross another ant. I heard a story that sometimes the bears dig and crawl themselves under the anthills to sleep over winter. It happens occasionally that an old bear dies while sleeping. It's a well known mystery, where the bears disappear when they die, since the bodies are rarely found. Anthills look different now, they might be graves of bears. Mustarinda is an old nick name of the bear.
Today is the exhibition opening party of Maa-laiset (Earthlings) II at Mustarinda. Artist and local people gather as well as the group of visitors from Helsinki arriving on a bus running on biogas. The bus continues to Sodankylä Midnight Sun Film Festival tomorrow morning. Talmud Beach plays a concert in the garage among two other bands, there is food, sauna and a big fire on the yard.
June 19
A perfect rainbow over the house, during the day-after-party. Sauna is warm again. Yesterday naked people were disappearing into the forest and then appearing again like they'd been swimming. There is a swamp near by where you can dip into clear water. I walk with my towel trough the woods to swim in the swamp. Walking bare feet in the forest and on the moss covered swamp is an experience I recommend. The evening sun is still up, epic.
June 18th
Green is waste. It’s the frequency of light, which the plants cannot use in photosynthesis. Chlorophyll, the organic molecule gives to the leaves their green color and is in the heart of the photochemical process in which the energy of sunlight is transformed into chemical energy stored by the plants. In the center of chlorophyll’s annular structure there is a magnesium atom, which gives the green color. Without it plants would be gray. Hemoglobin, which carries the oxygen in the blood for respiration in the cellular level, has a similar structure with chlorophyll, but instead of magnesium it has iron atom in the center. Without it blood would not be red.
Obviously, in seeing we receive and interpret information carried by light reflecting from the objects, besides the light emitting objects or events such as glow worms, lightning, stars, forest fire etc. The very light we see is the light, which is not absorbed by the object. In a way, the object’s refusal to absorb certain frequency of light defines its color. Green is exactly the color, which does not stick with the plants. It’s the useless frequency, which forms the base tone of the visual and aesthetic experience of moving in a forest.
I visited the observation tower in the morning. The trees were bathing in the mist and rain. The wind from the east was moving their crowns. The movement of the air was visible by the clouds passing trough the landscape. The light gray was surrounding all and changing the tone of the green depending on how far the trees were from me as a viewer. I went down to the ground and the wind was again almost absent – trees were standing still and grounded. Looking back up I could see how the treetops were still dancing in the wind.
June 19
Etymologically "resource" is something that rises again or recovers. The answer to the question of "renewable or not" is inscribed to the word. Fossil fuels are not resources in the human time scale. Those are "disposables" and that is also the kind of culture our use of fossil fuels has created. The necessity for the continuous growth in the economy we practice is a consequence of the form in which the amount of external energy consumed increases every year within the system. The use of fossil fuels has made this increase possible. Reading a book by Paavo Järvensivu: Rajattomasti rahaa niukkuudessa, which is about the changes we will need to through in the process towards post-fossil economy and society. Globally the internet is consuming approximately as much energy as flying. How that energy is produced and what kind of emissions are created does matter.
June 20
Nature should be avoided in such vague expressions as 'a lover of nature,' 'poems about nature.' Unless more specific statements follow, the reader cannot tell whether the poems have to do with natural scenery, rural life, the sunset, the untouched wilderness, or the habits of squirrels. [Strunk & White, "The Elements of Style," 3rd ed., 1979]
From the observation tower, almost midnight