nonTVTVstation history
Selections of bits and pieces, as I remember it – a kind of Diary
Bjorn Norberg Curator at nonTVTVstation between 2001-2005
What in a few years became nonTVTVstation had it’s origin in a number of projects initiated by the artists group Beeoff as early as in 1996. In the beginning they didn’t make any difference between their own artist group and the broadcast activities they were producing. In the beginning of 2001 I was invited to curate the program.
There were certain frames or a specific format for the nonTVTVstation, one month long live projects 24/7 was there already from the beginning. The idea was there from the very start and got reinforced by one of the financiers and collaborator, the telecom company TeliaSonera, which wanted a 24/7 stream for enabling different technical tests and developments. Also there were artistic reasons, mainly ideas from video art about using time and real-time as an important parameter. These ideas were however developed fully much later.
At this time the studio were situated at Safirgränd in the close suburbs of Stockholm. It was brand new, equipped with an own Internet fibre connection giving the, at that time an incredible “speed” of 1 gbit/s connection, both up- and downstream. We were literarily connected to the Telecom Company’s own back bone structure.
The studio was situated somewhat outside Stockholm and so was the whole activity. Splintermind and the nonTVTVstation worked beside every structure and context but at the same time collaborated with regional museums in Sweden, which received and screened the live-broadcasts. The knowledge about contemporary art among these museums, whatever they might claim, was very low and the knowledge about media art extremely low. They received the projects that nonTVTVstation produced with a blend of curiosity, disbelief, fear and astonishment. There are so many anecdotes about clashes we generated, but there isn’t space enough for them right here.
Back in 2001 Splintermind hosted a bit of genuine knowledge in streaming technology, enthusiasm; a great deal of technology, some good ideas but there was a lack of close knowledge about curating art projects. Some other reasons to bring in a further employee were to strengthen project coordinating and the fund raising part. I – Björn Norberg was hired.
So far all money had poured in from TeliaSonera in co-operation projects and several sponsoring projects to cut costs. To some extent, money from the collaboration between Splintermind and the regional museums was financing the operation as well.
This was however by far not enough, especially since the TeliaSonera money seemed to be an ending source due to the heavy slump in the economy. The projects and the financing were ended and all they contributed with was the Internet connection and some technical assistance. Bjorn needed to get other financing sources. We would soon start up an EU Culture 2000 project and then another and also a couple of projects within the Nordic Council, which became necessary initiatives financially, which coincided the will to work on a more extended international arena.
The frames that Mikael Scherdin previously had set up for the nonTVTVstation, regarding time and space, was initially tricky both for me as a curator and the artists I invited but would eventually towards the end become an important strength. It gave it an edge and specific sign and an interesting touch, which made a great difference between nonTVTVstation and other new media art initiatives of that time. The weakest part in the construction was the technology since it was during the whole nonTVTVstation life-time under development (not just in the studio, but also at TeliaSonera and several of other co-operation partners) and not very reliable. But that is another story.
Several times in the beginning of my work I had to explain, and sometimes even excuse in some way, the frames and the technology but this changed over time and towards the end of the life-time of the nonTVTVstation met more curiosity and respect rather than irritating questions marks.
The first artists to be invited to the nonTVTVstation in the spring of 2001, were Tore Nilsson and Steven Dixon, whom were both teaching at the Royal University College of Fine Arts in Stockholm. I learned to know Dixon through the Professor Johan Widén who previously was a teacher at a course at the University College of Arts, Crafts and Design during 1999. Dixon and Nilsson would come back for several projects within the nonTVTVstation and later on also at the Randomstudio. Their first piece was Channelling and as far as I remembered the idea came up one day when Dixon switched on the TV set, at home, and for some reason got the picture from one program but the sound belonged to something completely different. The clash between the two different sources was funny and he and Tore started to develop an idea were sound from one channel was mixed in real-time with the image from another. The piece was commissioned by Splintermind (and also “collected” along with a few other pieces) we had it running several times during the years to come. It became one of the classics.
In the spring of 2001 we had a first of a number of engagements at the Culture Centre in center of Stockholm. We took part in an exhibition titled Unholy Alliances, where a number of projects that previously had received funding from the Foundation for Knowledge and Competence (in a specific IT & Art Funding) which combined art and research in different ways were collected. Our collaborator TeliaSonera and their subsidiary Skanova, provided us with a dedicated fiber to the exhibition where a number of works of Beeoff were shown and a new live-art-piece Square by Beeoff was streamed as well. This piece consisted of a live camera pointed out to the Sergel plaza outside the center and its feed was used as an input for a software program triggered by the motions at the plaza to compose real-time based music and live half abstract vides simultaneously.
In May we had an experiment with electro-acoustic music together with the Swedish duo BOP. They would be back for another experiment some time later including inter-actives.
In the summer of 2001 we started a collaboration with curators and artists Nils Claesson and Karin Hansson and their exhibition Money at the Culture Centre in Stockholm (Kulturhuset) which lead us to broadcast Elin Wikström’s What does the number say?, where she was counting money in her apartment in Gothenburg for almost two months.
Mikael Scherdin had right before I started the job as the curator been in Finland and there he managed to initiate a collaboration with the Museum of Contemporary Art – Kiasma. We also had discussions with Atelier Nord in Norway and with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde to form a Nordic Museum Network. This was the very beginning of the international network we managed to build up. In the end of the summer of 2001 the Beeoff group started a project they called Domestic Mail which I felt was a change in their methods and most important it meant that Martin Thulin more or less left the group which became Tomas Linell, Olle Huge and Mikael Scherdin instead. This new constellation was more slimmed and they were all taking certain specific tasks within the artist group. Mikael often initiated projects and conceptual ideas, Tomas developed the idea technically and Olle experimented both on form and took care of logistics. During the years Beeoff produced several pieces, but the piece Domestic Mail initiated a new constellation rather than to be a significant piece.
Then we invited Karin Hansson and Åsa Andersson and they came up with the idea of Chasing Demons where they put up numerous CCTV cameras all over the Splintermind studio, turned the to black and white and added the score from Hitchcock’s Psycho. Mikael had met Andersson earlier and asked her to make a piece but and she asked Hansson to join her for the project. I though the piece was really nice but it felt a little bit strange to be surveyed by cameras all day knowing that a quiet large audience was able to see all the time. On top of that we usually had the music on, just so we knew that the piece was running alright. Still I know the score well…
At this time, in the autumn of 2001 I was invited to give a key note at the Danish conference CULT2001 in Copenhagen. This became a very important travel. At one of the dinners during the conference I had a chance to speak with a curator giving me the advice to contact Marianne Bech, director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde. Later that autumn I would meet with Marianne and the curator of the Museum, Morten Söndergaard. A long collaboration started.
In September, in fact it was the 11th which makes the day quiet hard to forget, we met with all the participating Swedish regional museums to start up another year of collaboration around the nonTVTVstation. This autumn we made a couple of travels to Kiasma in Helsinki.
During the year of 2000 we started up broadcasts to the Finnish museum but in 2001 they had the enormous ARS01 exhibition and the broadcasts were down for a while. We, of course, wanted to continue in 2002 and an EU application opened that particular door. Together with Atelier Nord and MOCA in Roskilde I wrote an application called Exchange² with Splintermind as the project coordinator. At the time I often felt it was hard for the artists that came with proposals for nonTVTVstation to explain the specific format. Often they would come along with an idea that they just wouldn’t compromise with and always they would question why we were working over such long time an especially why we focused on real-time. I decided to change my way of working and felt it would be better to follow the artists during the whole process, from the introduction of the nonTVTVstation format, to an idea and further on to production and the finished piece. The Exchange project was an artist in residence project where we invited two artists from each Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland, matched them together two and two and let them work together. This became a very tricky way to work and gave a lot of tears, fights and some brilliant work and friends for life. The project started with Emi Maeda and HC Gilje’s Storm in January 2002.
But the Exchange² projects were still just plans in the autumn of 2001 when Dixon and Nilsson came back for a follow-up with their Channelling 2, where they added a speak recognition software reading the audio and translating it into texts. This gave another momentum where the text gave the most bizarre comments to the images. Dixon/Nilsson managed the whole thing on their own very much, so it would still take some time before anyone at Splintermind actually took a large and active part of the production.
In December 2000 the Beeoff group started a new project around fears of technology called Pseudophobia. They collaborated with Mattias Petersson, who was studying at the Royal University College of Music in Stockholm. The project would be developed in a number of different parts where different members of the group were in charge to produce their own version. Two versions were developed Pseudophobia 1 & 2 (Mikael Scherdin No:1 and Olle Huge No:2), but the third version led to a complete other piece “Spiel” together with Helena Lopac, and Martin Thulin finally left the group.
The Pseudophobia project ran into 2002 and was interrupted with Love Nordberg’s The MTV, where a television set showing live MTV was filmed by a number of cameras. I got in contact with Love Nordberg through his professor Olof Glemme whom I curated an exhibition for earlier. Nordberg was at the time making his last term at the university college of art, craft and design, Konstfack, in Stockholm. When the Pseudophobia project was ended, Palle Torsson produced a piece with his Text Voyeur. Torsson did have some good connections with media and it resulted in some minutes of air on the Swedish National Television. At the time we were invited to the National Museum of Science in Stockholm, both to screen the nonTVTVstation, and to take part in a panel debate during the annual Museum week.
Things were going quiet well and started to run smoothly. We got a new collaboration with Modern Museum on initiative from the newly appointed director – Lars Nittve, in Stockholm were we broadcast from the exhibition at the temporary location of the museum (closed for re-renovation) to the central railway station in Stockholm. The installation was called Beeoff Featuring…. with Annika Gunnarsson as the Project Leader. Beeoff distorted live-video-images of the audience at the museum and every second week, when they changed exhibition they produced another “Fetauring” of another artist’s piece. This work would later lead to a six month long screening of nonTVTVstation at the museum and was launched in the autumn of 2002.
But first in the spring of 2002, we had BOP making an interactive installation at the regional museum of Gävle in Sweden. BOP was a duo, Thomas Bjelkeborn and Paul Pignon, both of them active in Fylkingen and the electro acoustic music scene in Sweden and Bjelkeborn had moved to Gävle where I met him for the first time. We had an idea of involving the regional museums in the production trying to engage local artists. The main problem was to find artists with the competence to pull larger productions with quality. Bjelkeborn and Pignon were a rare guarantee for quality among regional artists. The museum in Gävle had for that time a quiet sufficient broadband connection and had no problems in receiving the nonTVTVstation, but to broadcast from the museum was another cup of tea. Here we learned about up- and down- stream the hard way. The installation worked quiet well at the museum but it was impossible to broadcast it live from the museum to the Internet and other museums.
Steven Dixon and Tore Nilsson came back for a last performance with Let me count the ways, an inter-active piece where you could choose between crushing and repairing a gingerbread man. Thousands of choices were made during the period and the most of them were to crush the cake. Kiasma were now showing nonTVTVstation again after the Ars’01 exhibition. At this time, the Kiasma started to take better care of the presentation of the nonTVTVstation after some embarrassing incidents.
In Helsinki we had met with some people from the Finnish artist organization Katastro.fi and one of them, Juha Huuskonen, was invited to produce a piece in June. This was the first international collaboration we had and was the beginning of a long term collaboration with Huuskonen who ran and runs a large number of innovative projects. His project the Moment of Long Now was made for the nonTVTVstation initially but has since then been screened at a numerous venues.
During the summers we always invited someone to make longer installations that we also knew would mean very little assistance just so we could have some time off. Anonymous & Anonymous, a combination of different artists, made an installation were they used Bloomberg-TV as an input for a quiet complicated video feedback installation. One really hot summer day David Neumann and Rickard Juhlin from Magasin 3 The Stockholm Art Hall, came by the studio and seemed to like the installation a lot. They tried to figure out who the artists behind it were and guessed that at least Michael von Hausswolff was involved. We won’t reveal the name of the artists, but Neumann and Juhlin were wrong.
From the autumn nonTVTVstation is shown at the temporary location of the Modern Museum during their renovation. The first piece was Jens Salanders Monolog were he combined prerecorded film and soundtrack with a live feed from Kiasma. This piece was a warming up for the museum which seemed a little bit confused with the whole idea until they understood, or maybe finally started to believe, that the live images really were live images. I knew Salander from my years in Gävle and he was one of the few prominent artists of the town and had had a great career starting up with a good gallery and an exhibition together with Ann-Sofie Sidén before he moved to the small town and out of the context.
If the start with Monolog confused the staff, and maybe even the audience, at The Swedish Museum of Modern Art - Moderna, Ilona Huss Walin’s What if I was a rat? had a more direct impact. With four rats living in a two square meter perfect scale-model of a fully furnitured apartment for ordinary people, it created a lot of amazing effects and since this was also the time for the start of reality shows like e.g. Big Brother, it really became a smash hit and even made an article published in El País, the Spanish No.1 Newspaper. Moderna had chosen to show the nonTVTVstation on a plasma screen in the restaurant. This was totally against our advice since we felt it could lead to some complications. And they would come. The first incident was with the rats where the manager of the restaurant showed to have a great phobia for rats. This however was more a problem for her than for us. I met Walin through my colleague Olle Huge who was curating the video art division of Uppsala International Shortfilm Festival and had Walin as one of the participating artists. I thought she made quiet odd things and I was impressed by her hard work with any task and to find an idea that would suit the context. I think the curatorial work with What if… was the most time consuming I made through the nonTVTVstation years but it gave result. But I had never given Walin the time if I hadn’t felt that it was worth it and if Walin hadn’t had so many good ideas she wanted to discuss. One of the most creative curatorial situations I have ever been into.
Peter Hagdahl’s Simulated social model was less upsetting, at least visually. He hided a camera somewhere in Stockholm which registered motion in the traffic and this was used as an input to a beautiful 3D-animation which started to move according to the input. The second news paper in Sweden, Svenska Dagbladet, wrote a large article about the piece and Peter Hagdahl. Hagdahl was for a long time member of the Splintermind board and it was natural to ask him for a project when we needed an extra attractive artist, being screened at two modern museums, Kiasma and Moderna, simultaneously, for the first time.
Beeoff also made a very large studio installation called Atarashi Yume. D and when it was running we had a meeting with people from Kiasma and Atelier Nord on a visit starting the one year long EU- Project Exchange², which would start in the beginning of 2003. Perttu Rastas the curator of Kiasma was very excited about the installation and we started to discuss ideas about “real-time” and finally it was decided that we should produce a real-time exhibition at Kiasma. This would then be start for the Get Real! exhibition in late 2004 at Kiasma and then in 2005 at the MOCA in Roskilde.
Storm by Finnish artist Emi Maeda and Norwegian HC Gilje was the first piece within the Exchange² project. Gilje wasn’t too happy in the beginning with the idea of matching him with one, for him unknown, artist. He would rather work with one of the noise artists he was used to but accepted Emi Maeda. Their collaboration was made by correspondence mainly but unfortunately when Maeda came to Stockholm she became ill and had to be sent to hospital. The contact with Maeda originally came through Juha Huuskonen and Atelier Nord in Norway introduced us to Gilje. A little bit nervous start of the project and we learned that the artists rather lived a shorter time in a hotel than at a hostel for one month. They received quiet a good salary and also they also had the facilities of cooking and the studio could therefore serve as a Studio and a reasonable living place as well.
In between the specific projects within the Exchange² project I wanted the Beeoff team to make some pieces produced in house to be able to save some money. And in fact, there was a great interest from Beeoff to make some new pieces.
The second Exchange² project was Ja/Nej by Danish sound artist Jacob Kirkegaard, recommended by MOCA Roskilde and Norwegian Ellen Röed recommended by Atleier Nord. They were two very different artists; Ellen liked a political touch for the piece that Jacob was uninterested of that touch. However both of them where interested in letting an outdoor source give the input to the piece and an anemometer was chosen which gave input to the sound and to a meter switching between the words “yes” and “no”. This was during the American invasion of Iraq and even if it wasn’t said right out everybody of course interpreted a political aspect and ethical questions of the war in the piece.
Gunilla Leander from Sweden and Danish artist Rosan Bosch were the third couple out in the Exchange² project and their piece Man Hunt received a lot of attention with an article in the Swedish tabloid Expressen and even a review in the International Art Magazine – Flash Art. The piece was a number of recordings of “typical male sounds” creating a virtual man. I found Leander’s web site and got interested in her projects which are all of a very high quality and has attempts that you seldom meet in Sweden. Bosch was recommended by MOCA Roskilde but I knew her works since an exhibition at the City Museum of Copenhagen which was very original.
Tomas Linell was engaged for the performance of a quiet nice “video still life” called Glass Rondo before the last Exchange² project was started, Anonymous & Anonymous and Samuli Alapuranen’s, On the trail of small things. This time Anonymous & Anonymous, was consisting of a different set of artists than the first constellation but more than that I won’t reveal who: They used a microscope and a video camera and Alapuranen added a very melodically soundtrack on top of that. Alapuranen was recommended by Juha Huuskonen and I would invite him to some other projects later. He is an excellent video maker and also produces some very fine melodic electronica.
Juha Huuskonen, invited the Beeoff team to join the PixelAche tour in the USA and Canada performing at several venues in NYC and in Montreal. Here they would meet with, among others, Benjamin Weil which would turn out to be a very important contact for the future. On the trip, Andreas Tilliander also was a member and together they planned a new art project that would be called Par Avion, a quiet mysitic piece with a soundtrack of Tilliander attached to it.
The Exchange project was over, a very important experience and our step into the international scene was made. After that impressive line-up of artists we had gained and astonishing international approach. Much of that thanks to the initial collaboration with Kiasma and their kind and nice push forward with sharing important international contacts. Furthermore NIFCA, MOCA in Roskilde and new the new partners of Ethics TV in Venice and Furtherfield in London also topped the international network.
Economically Splintermind was a limited success. The only funding from some kind of national source came from a very fragile constellation arranged around the regional museums in Sweden by the Swedish National Council for Cultural Affairs. The funding from EU, in fact, on the contrary plunged the Splintermind organization into further financial problem, due to the fact that only a part of the funding is gained up-front and the rest is received a lot later. This meant serious trouble in the autumn when there simply was no money. However we continued the transmissions and invited Nils Edvardsson for the production of a piece. I saw him on an exhibition at the paint factory, Färgfabriken, art center in Stockholm where he showed the Sperm Phase Detector, That exhibition only lasted for one week, and for the nonTVTVstation I asked for almost five weeks. Edvardsson needed to provide a sample of sperms in a small cup and a detector for the sperms motions to be translated into sounds. They needed to be replaced every second day to keep the installation – literarily a live.
We made a number of trips to Helsinki for meetings with Kiasma and at one of those trips I heard about two brothers calling themselves the Pink Twins. I googled them and found some videos on pixoff.net, which showed a radical use of other’s material combined with music with an aggressive attack. I invited them for a project and one of the brothers came over to install Let it Beep which was the beginning of a long term collaboration between me and the twins.
Further we came in contact with NIFCA through Juha Huuskonen and Olle Huge was sent over for a jury work for their New Media Artist in Residence program which Huuskonen was in charge of. Olle came back with some suggestions and together we agreed on an artist, I can’t remember who but it was a British one. However there weren’t too many to choose between, only five had applied. NIFCA was quiet stubborn that we should change our choice to Marius Watz but I was afraid he would be a little bit too much an art director for the nonTVTVstation project but Drawing Machine ended up to have several interesting points besides of the fact it was very different from what we had made before. I would later often come back to his piece for different reasons.
Mikael Scherdin had met the curator at Fylkingen, Eva Broberg, and thought she had many good ideas. We decided to ask her to curate some form of a performance festival with four different performances during four weeks. The project became WEEK and it was really problematic to have an external curator involved since the frames of nonTVTV was something completely new for both the artists and Broberg. She was however the nicest of persons and had a great knowledge of the Swedish performance scene. We showed Andreas Hammar, Nordic Dumplings, Malin Anrell and Karl Tuikkanen. I was at the moment planning the start of a new collaboration with NIFCA that would be lauched with a kick off at the art museum of Reykjavik during a Nordic Ministry meeting. NIFCA asked us to make something extra and promised extra money that never showed up and there were the worst co-ordination I ever been into from the Reykjavik people (not the museum but the guy leading the ministry meeting who could call me one a Sunday morning for telephone meetings but never answered emails, calls or SMS:s) and I had to go to Reykjavik in the middle of the project. Only first class tickets left… On top of that Olle was now artist in residence at SAT in Montreal and no one really took care about anything in Stockholm. Easily I was making 80 hours a week but it was impossible to be at all places I was asked to. We were running a second EU project with nodes in Italy, Denmark, Finland, UK and Sweden (six nodes in Sweden) and all of them asked for help and Reykjavik and we had exhibitions coming up at Eyebeam in New York, La Villette in Paris, two exhibitions at Kiasma in Helsinki and all of them should find funding, and I was going to have my second child while the wheels were speeding up more than ever. Then NIFCA started to be a real pain in the ass asking for details and more details, complaining about high travel costs(!) and, why we couldn’t get Greenland involved and on our high salaries which was ridiculous since we were underpaid they just didn’t realize that we counted in the high social costs in Sweden in the salaries… Only one person at NIFCA, Marita Muukkonen, was someone that could help us. The rest of them almost managed to destroy the whole project.
Olle Huge was in Canada at SAT for four months and together with Mikael Scherdin he made the Inflict project which consisted of a one month long performance of Mikael combined with videos Huge made at SAT. It showed we were ready for some greater productions.
The Iceland project became very problematic since the Icelandic people asked us to make something outdoors. But this was meant to be made in March and the weather in Reykjavik is definitively nothing you can rely on. Immediately in Reykjavik I understood that the project leader of the ministry meeting wasn’t competent at all and I decided to look up some other contacts I got from Marita Muukkonen. One of them said I should look up a place called Klink & Bank and take contact with Nina Magnusdottir who ran the place. Bulls eye. This was the place. Said and done I arranged with Beeoff and the Swedish Electronica constellation AVCENTRALEN for performances and also at a club that the less talented project leader suggested we should make something. The club became a disaster but Klink & Bank was of course a hit.
For the museum in Reykjavik we produced The Sofa by Egill Saebjörnsson. It became a smash hit. 40.000 visitors came during the month but the museum wasn’t happy at all. It seemed they didn’t like that large audience. I had come in contact with Saebjörnsson when I took over the curating of Uppsala Shortfilmfestival after Olle Huge and I received a tape from Saebjörnsson with a large number of really good animations.
I had a daughter while the Beeoff guys were in Reykjavik together with AV-CENTRALEN and made one exhibition some performances and produced one performance by Icelandic Love Corporation and the Saebjörnsson installation, this with anti-help, none budget and very little planning. Was everybody satisfied? Well, we thought it was great, Saebjörnsson and ILC had a good time, the museum thought they had too many visitors and NIFCA complained about nearly everything as I remember.
However we had accepted another two artists in residencies, Julie Andreyev and Björn Aho. NICA was very anxious to involve at least one Canadian artist since they were building up the connections with the Canadian Council for the Arts. The best artists among the applications were the Canadians Michelle Teran and Julie Andreyev and the Finnish artist Björn Aho. I had been invited to join the jury work but my schedule was tto tight to manage. However the jury wouldn’t do the job and they asked us to decide who we wanted but had listed the applicants. Teran got the top points but her suggestion for the project was that we should produce something for her for the ISEA2004 which wasn’t very realistic since we were already shortlisted for ISEA with an own project. I wasn’t too happy with Andreyev either since she had been working very much outdoors and nonTVTVstation was more some sort of a TV-studio production. Aho was my first choice but got very low points from the jury, maybe because he was more a traditional artist working with sculpture, painting and video. After some discussions Andreyev was chosen for the first project and she came by with two technicians installing the 4wheel drift which wasn’t a disaster but really didn’t fit the nonTVTVstation format. As a street based work it was fantastic but became locked in in the nonTVTV format were Andreyev chose to work with MAX/MSP after recording her car drifts. The patch she and her assistances sketched up was probably a little bit too complicated which made the piece crash after only some hours of running time. Also the whole sense of driving was lost in the nonTVTV format.
Suddenly in the spring of 2004 TeliaSonera announced, after internal power-fights, between different fractions to seize our co-operation contract. Asking the project leaders and the managers of the department we were working with, said it wouldn’t be a problem, just some internal problems, leave it to us, they wouldn’t do you any harm. But one morning, the connection was suddenly broken. Asking what was going on, the answer this time was “well, your troubles are minor, we have some more serious one to take care of first”. End of discussion. However we managed to go to the very top of the company and they gave us a new three year contract. These troubles unfortunately delayed the 5 composers project where I had invited five Swedish composers for a project similar to the WEEK curated by Eva Broberg. When the connections worked again we had engaged the Thailand artist Sarawut Chutiwonpeti to produce a piece. After that we could continue with the 5 composers where I had invited Mattias Petersson, previously collaborated with the Beeoff on the Pseudophobia projects, Lise-Lott Norelius and Ida Lovén - never worked with them before, but they had made several pieces for Fylkingen – two Stockholm based composers, legendary Sten Hanson and the Gothenburg composer Daniel Skoglund who’s performance I had noted some years earlier. The project was, as well as the WEEK project, a little bit too hectic and had to be made in the middle of the summer.
Towards the end of the summer the speed was even higher. Olle came back from SAT and Eyebeam in New York to help us with installations at Kiasma, the ISEA 2004 exhibition and then the La Villette exhibition in Paris. Me and Olle went over to install the Tentacle at Kiasma and then he went to Paris with the other one. Everything worked out as it was supposed to, but it was a lot of hard work and the preparations for it was extremely detailed and complex.
When the Tentacle project was over, a project including advanced Internet broadcasting between Paris, Helsinki and Stockholm (we were actually making as much research as art) it was time for Björn Aho and his piece Comments. I asked some students from the Royal University College to work as Aho’s assistants and two of them was then involved in the show. At the somae time I was planning the biggest event Splintermind ever got into – the Get Real! exhibition which was a large exhibition produced by Splintermind in collaboration with MOCA Roskilde, Kiasma and Reykjjavik Art Museum. In fact the latter ones didn’t contribute with much, so it was more a Splintermind/Roskilde project. It was tremendous much work but fun. After Aho’s project we broadcast some works from Get Real! at Kiasma. We are now in the end of the year 2004 and I had a strocg feeling that everything was going towards a disaster. We had a lot of project funding but nothing was secured for 2005 and when we didn’t receive any funding from EU and the Nordic money was definitively over (from the beginning it was said to be a three year project) it was suddenly up to the Swedish council of culture affairs to get us the money they had promised. I had never relied on them because you simply shouldn’t rely on them. And I was right. Suddenly we realized that there were not going to be any money for 2005 and practically I stopped working with the nonTVTVstation about new year 2005. I was on a maturity leave from mid November, but still curating the shows and it was decided we should stop the business after the next two already contracted artists Alberto Frigo and Drott Johan Löfgren.
I met the Italian artist Frigo through Arijana Kajfes who I had engaged for the Get Real! show and he explained his rather odd project where he was documenting every item he used with his right hand. It ended up in a large installation at the University College of Arts and Craft in Stockholm from where we broadcast the project. Frigo would then be quiet famous for it showing it at Ars Electroica in 2006.
Drott Johan Löfgren was an artist I had had my eyes on for quiet a long time and was quiet happy to end nonTVTVstation with. Löfgren have an idea of combining the most academic, modernistic and traditional painting with advanced technology and the result is just fantastic.
I had to cancel three upcoming projects. One by Michelle Teran, which was shown on Ars Electronica later same year, one new piece by Steven Dixon and broadcasts from Get Real! in Roskilde. We were at the end of an intense story.
nonTVTVstation and randomstudio [archives 2000-2005]
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