TOKAMAK program
A residency program for
cooperative action, collaboration & critique.
Hosted on Suomenlinna Island by Helsinki International Artists’ Exchange Program
TOKAMAK 2011
DAY 1 / TUESDAY / 19.VII.2011
“It is just an experiment” — Emily (introducing TOKAMAK)
“You can get to know that these people exist if you go through the rubbish” — Sasha (during his presentation of work)
“Don’t you think that Internet is only interesting as a pornography container” — Emily (during Sasha’s presentation of work)
Nandipha Mntambo’s work called “Emabutfo” (Cowhide, resin, polyester mesh, waxed cord, 24 figures, each approx 120 x 60 x 20cm, 2009) installed in Kiasma
DAY 2 / WEDNESDAY / 20.VII.2011
“All that I have heard today reminds me of raping cases in Kaisaniemen puisto (the park of Kaisaniemi, Helsinki)” — Arto
Polyteknicheskaya, another suburb of St.Petersburg, was colonized by aliens in the 1850s. The aliens have created a fusion-based energy reactor in the ‘white tulip’ tower on the ‘garden Benois’, they use this power to manufacture robot spawn which gestate in the lakes ‘booblik’ (Russian for a donate) and ‘round’. when mature, this spawn takes up residence in the khruchevki (soviet flat buildings) of the 55th kvartal. We don’t know what they’re for or if they’re good or evil. — Megan as recorded by Emily
“All the talks of raping today make me feel bad. I want everything to be beautiful” — Anya (Anya’s portrait by Megan Snowe)
“I want us to play a board game using a model we’ve built. Players are pink teddy bear, future man and pressed up torso. We will roll dice twice to get a number of a page from the book. And then roll dice once more to get a number of a line. Then we will read the line and try to incorporate it with the landscape of a model” — Sasha, while suggesting an approach to a model
DAY 3 / THURSDAY / 21.VII.2011
“Creator (Artist) + Subject + Process (Medium) = Product (an Artwork)” — Megan, introducing the project
“Intention + Situation + Display Conditions = Product<-Audience” — Sasha
“Do you want us to use symbol, icon or index? For instance, we picture a feather in a wind symbolizing Sasha, or bruise on someone’s face as his index?” — Emily
“Last month I didn’t do any thinking. I didn’t think about anything, actually” — Anya, giving a feedback
“It was a tough choice but I’ve decided to draw a coffee-maker” — Zeo
“Pre-experimental psychology is bullshit. It was created when people could write whatever they wanted to” — Olga
“I do not like to look like a doll on the portraits. I want something simple, taken outside. I would wearing cloth of the natural colors and almost disappear within the environment. And it shouldn’t be staged, but spontaneous - I would be pictured on the side of the frame while thinking myself. 3/4 of my face would be seen. It would look as I am a art of nature. I am a human” - Tanja, talking of her perfect portrait for Olga’s video
“All I know about him is his work and his manners. I felt a little bit ashamed making my assumptions about him.” — Emily about her experience of writing down Dima’s portrait
“What I’ve realized today is the thing that fascinates me the most is obviously me <…> Your choice of subject matters is about 99% of your work.” — Emily
DAY 3 / THURSDAY / 21.VII.2011
it’s easier for me to connect with people when it’s more like a game and there are no expectations - Megan
I do not talk to strangers neither on- nor offline. I can’t appreciate online dating as anything else but a sexual practice — Emily
situation 1: scamper
s= substitute
c=?
a=
m=
p=
e=
r=
there’s an artist and….
you have an online environment, you have
art as medium,
you have video
and the website.
the situation today is that we have to find a substitute for these things.
so for online the substitute could be the real world
arto substitutes video for painting.
megan substitutes art for retail
olga substitutes you have an online environment, you have (REALITY)
art as medium, (COMMUINICATION)
you have video (SEX)
and the website. (PLACE)
the situation today is that we have to find a substitute for these things.
you have an online environment, you have — subject
art as medium, — process
you have video — product
and the website.— product
the situation today is that we have to find a substitute for these things.
emily change the medium from art to journalism
dima wants clarification—you must tell us the rules of the game
sasha says you have to suggest a goal for this project: to explain online dating to people who don’t use it. to create a blueprint for a utopian society of perfect friendship and great sex using the now imperfect tool of online ‘dating’.
sasha asks us to define goals for the project—(sasha, paste in, you have them)
As written by Emily
Tatyana Palyga
Russia Project proposal My idea is to make each participant of the program photograph something that they could say the following about: 1. “This is me” 2. “This is what I want to be” 3. “This is what I want to feel like” 4. “This is what I will never be” 5. “This is what I want to look at” 6. “This is what I don’t even want to know about” 7. “This is absolutely and totally not me” 8. “This is what I know” 9. “This is the Truth” A camera used doesn’t matter at all – it can be digital camera, film camera or even mobile phone camera. As for me I will photograph portraits of each participant while they thinking of their task, imagining things they can photograph, or doing the task. As a result it should become a book or a zin with portraits of the participants and their own small stories telling about their self-identification and subjectivation.
Yana Klichuck
Russia
“Eye of Suomenlinna”
I want to organize a 1day tv channel called “Eye of Sumenlinna”. I want to publish on YouTube series of programmes about the island made by 10 artists. For me this island has always been a strange place like a beautiful hermit’s land.
I want to make a project about everyday life on Suomenlinna. Investigate and create the social, urban, natural images of this place.
Group activity:
I want each artists to choose tv programme he or she would like to make for “Eye of Suomenlinna”.
All people have to be devided into pairs: reporter and cameraman. First part of the day cameraman will help reporter, and second part of the day they will switch over.
Preliminary schedule:
10.00-12.00 shooting programme A
12.00-13.00 editing programme A
14.00-16.00 shooting programme B
16.00-17.00 editing programme B
17.00-19.00 final editing, titles, broadcasting
List of possible programmes
(management assistance is required):
1. Cooking show (it will be the person whose turn it is to cook dinner, but I am going to ask to make dinner only with products bought in Market Square (Kauppatori) near ferry station to Suomenlinna)
2. Theme reportage:
a) Getting from Russia to Finland (please use the exposition of Customs museum on Sumenlinna)
b) Glass or ceramic workshop (based on ceramic/glass studio on Suomenlinna)
с) Series of short interviews with strangers (please talk to people in Suomenlinna Hostel)
etc. Please propose your own theme according your essential experience of Suomenlinna.
During the working day I will help reporters with uploading materials and editing (if needed) and also host an “open studio” where everybody on Suomenlinna can come and for 1 minute say to the channel audience everything they want.
Also I will try my best to organize the process.
Anya Maysuk
Russia
Project Overview
I would like to propose a project of portraits with beauty spots. Each beauty spot at certain place of a face has its own meaning (see in more detail at http://www.searchlores.org/realicra/moscheta.htm) . I would like to reconstruct an old tradition of talking with face signs.
Typically, an art work is a subject of different interpretations. It is initially intended to be interpreted in many ways. I would like to eliminate this variety and to create a clear message within a single image using beauty spots.
Group Activity
During a day I would like to make portraits of each of participants. I am going to distribute the list of beauty spots’ meanings so that everybody could choose a message for a partner. I would like to unify the background (white wall) and take neutral clothes (white t-shirt) as presented below.
Zeolite Fuhrman
USA
website: zeolitefuhrman.com
Project Overview
I’ve decided to put together a photo series that implicitly questions the value of packing a ton of information and theory into something as simple as a portrait. I’m going to try to do this by making the series overtly communicate its purpose.
I am still planning to take a photo of each participant holding a mirror in front of his or her face. I will gather all the photos together into a zine, or a small photobook. Each page will have a declarative statement written on it.
Group Activity
WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING:
Each of you will choose a location on the island. You can be inside or outside. Hold a mirror in front of your face, and I’ll take a few photos of you and whatever is reflected in the mirror.
I may take a couple of group shots - tbd.
WHAT I WILL BE DOING:
Putting all the mirror-portraits together into a book, and adding text to each page. Things like:
We are here.
We acknowledge that ‘here’ is a relative term partly determined by location.
We are not you.
We want to discuss the relationship between the subject and the viewer.
We are narcissistic.
We wonder what you are thinking.
We are posing.
We are trying to prevent you from reducing our identity to a static set of facial features.
We fear eye contact.
We do not think you get it.
We wish we could do better.
etc.
DISCLAIMERS:
1 I’m treating your portrait as a photo of a subject whose identity is SOLELY determined by your surroundings. If you don’t like the idea of having a blanket ‘we’ statement applied to a photo of you, just let me know, and I’ll leave the text out on your page, or take a photo of only the mirror, or something.
2 This is just a step in a new direction. Something new that I am trying.
Katya Kanke
Russia
Project Overview
I want to suggest an experimental project about identity of a group of artists in society and a person in a group of artists
Group Activity
f we have two rooms: in the first one, which is the room for the group of working artists, where we could get together and start to create a mutual object which will express “Who we are”, we can speak with each other and discuss important and small things together (the form of work will depend on what kind of artists will be there, for example, we could use video, photography, interview, painting…etc.) In half an hour (for example) a first person will go into the second room, where we will place all the things necessary for work. For half an hour he will make everything he wants to make, everything to show “who he is” in our group, and in half an hour he comes back to the group saying no word about what he has done in the second (secret) room. The second artist will go to the second room for half an hour and then the third, fourth etc.
In the end we will have one object about identity of the group of artists (who may be together by chance) - the result of cooperation work . And in the second room we will have something, that we should afterwards link with the object from the first room. We сould compare both projects in the end
Olga Jitlina and Dmitry Vorobyev
Russia
Project Overview
The model of an ideal city is offering widest rank of possibilities for realizations of different life strategies simultaneously. From this perspective, into a contemporary megapolis should be added more and more different modes of living not as separate neighborhoods, but like vegetables into a salad
One of the most curious tensions in lifestyles is a tendency to dematerialization – the ideal type of such person would need no personal things, nor private house. By now he or she could work distantly keeping data on web-servers, moving fast from one point to another, sleeping in hotels. From personal belongings he or she might have just a laptop, a cell phone and a pair of additional underclothing. This person is a wealthy upperclass bum who takes in mind that he or she can buy anything that he or she needs, use and waste it anytime. However nowadays the luxury of not having anything can be afforded just by the most rich and the most poor people
From our perspective, the structure giving opportunity to live almost without private property inside the functioning system might be one of the most important directions of city development
The structure composed by the separate elements for the fulfillment of basic human needs – a net of free kitchens, showers, sleeping modules, sockets, free wifi zones and etc. dissolved in a city -could be thought as more human, cozy, city-home. It`s inhabitants might not be strictly dependant on it`s particular places or neighborhoods. In the long perspective the domestication of the city might lead to the forming of the new way living and change of the character of interpersonal relationships based on common property
Group Activity
During our stay in TOKAMAK program we`d like to try to think about the typology and evolution of the modules for the The Bump Structure, try to make diagrams, mapping based on the other artists experiences, practices, interviews with them, group discussions and selforganized field trips. Also we would be interested in proposing to the other participants to discuss and try to follow some made up together rules of communality
Arto Inkerö
Finland
PROJECT OVERVIEW
All of us will bury ourselves and create a memorial for ourselves. The memorial is a sign for the grave and can be anything. Burying doesn’t necessarily mean digging a hole in the ground, I want you to freely translate burial as “hiding” under or in something.
This project is dealing with vanishing / dissappearing / not existing. Meaning of “grave” is chosen to symbolise it.
I am interested in what you feel about this process of burying and the material that this project gives me to fully understand and to create a final statement. I feel I don’t want to overanalyse this since I don’t want to create false beliefs in me about this project. This is also why we have the discussion time in the evening, when we will maybe watch the material and share our thoughts and I will share possible conclusions of the project.
RESULT/FINAL PROJECT
I want the finished project to be video/s or still shots of video/s and also to include the memorial to each separate work. Either as an installation or as a photo. There will also be a graphical map showing the locations of the graves. I will name the works after our names.
YOUR PART IN THE PROJECT is to think what your grave will be? This project is personal in a way that doesn’t try to define you as a person but leaves space for your thoughts and artistic opinions.What sort of a memorial will you create to yourself if should you do one? I would like everyone to do this.I am open to all of your opinions and views and I think one can make this very differently than the others.Your part is also to join in the conversation and share your feelings about this project and suggestions.
Please note that the timetable means, that on that time, you must be ready in the courtyard of our residency!Also think in advance: we don’t have much time in the morning.i will go alone with each of you to bury you and I will take the footage outside of your grave.
09:00 PROJECT REPRESENTATION
10:00 THINKING AND PLANNING (MAYBE SHOWING EXAMPLES)
11:00 TATYANA PALYGA
12:00 ANYA MAYSUK
13:00 ZEOLITE FUHRMAN
14:00 OLGA JITLINA
15:00 DMITRY VOROBYEV
16:00 SASHA KAZANSTEV
17:00 EMILY NEWMAN
18:00 MEGAN SNOWE
19:00 EATING
20:00 WATCHING MATERIAL; VIDEO & DIGITAL PHOTO DISCUSSION TIME
There’s also one person outside of Suomenlinna and this residency to join in this project.He will do it after we have done our part here.
Sasha Kazantsev
Russia/Finland
website: sashakazantsev.com
facebook: sasha.kazantsev
Project Overview
THE BODY PRINCIPAL
Online
The Body Principal is an alternative to traditional online dating. Instead of offering an account and searching engine the website will just has an option of posting an instant snapshot from the webcam provided by name and link to social-network account.*
*1 snapshot per day is allowed; no editing/removing is possible once post was confirmed
**i got domain bodyprincipal.com which soon will provide the first live-concept model
Film
The Body Principalis a short movie dealing with self-defining and self-identification of a person in a modern world, that splits in between “real” life and not less real “online” activities.
Inspiration
- People of Finland who are lonely in real life and actively present online
- Research by Günter J. Hitsch called “What Makes You Click – Mate Preferences in Online Dating”. This work stated a straight connection between the data in user’s account on the dating webpage and certain decisions people make
- Personal Experience of online dating. Never successful
- Personal Experience of having all the relationships starting online
- Russian folk fairy tales
- Cheap ladies’ romance books
- “Mr. Lonely” by Harmony Korine
- “The Body Principal: The Exercise Program for Life ” by Victoria Principal (Finnish Edition)
Background Assumptions
- At some point everyone can find himself lonely
- The work is a part of a bigger project I am working on, which has to do with recycling of not just rubbish but all the worn out life phenomenas: bad commercial, overused characters, cliché etc.
- Creating the website that doesn’t allow you to concentrate on building another version of your own personality, but rather offers you to take a look at the stream of people outside your causality who are also longing for communication
- Absence of another personal account means absence of data-pollution
- Using existing accounts in social network and webcam is meant to shift process of communication to another stage of being open and present staying online
- I assume that online dating has not fully open it’s potential yet. It is still local, time taking and by now - moulded with stereotypes
TOKAMAK Group Activity
9:30 - 10:00 - Wake up and Breakfast
10:00 - 11:00 - I will talk more of dating and introduce a film-plan
11:00 - We take off to the city (one of participants may stay at the island, though). Everyone will get all the supplies from me and will be free to work alone or in groups (not more than 2, though).
Assuming that we may be around the city-centre around 11:30(45) I hope everyone to work there up until 16:00 (including half and hour lunch time). Or until done with provided materials.
We meet at the island at 17:00 and I hope to hear from everyone on the results.
Supplies and Activity
Each participant will get 99 quiz papers and same amount of “coffee tickets”. Also everyone gets a drawing board. Project statement will be also printed and provided.
I hope you to go outside and ask strangers to fill up i-am-quiz. After it’s done - you transfer the answer to your tag-board (which shall stay visible on you while your are on the mission) and go on to another person.
Everyone who willed to fill up the quiz gets a coffee ticket from you. This ticket is an invitation to come and talk to me in person later. To get a free cup of coffee a person shall contribute his photo+contacts to the website stream or get filmed for a movie (both is amazing).
A tag-board will serve for you to experience yourself what it is to live under someone else’s definition (even just for 2 minutes time).
Directions and detailed information for outsiders will be provided on my website.
Each of TOKAMAK participants is also welcome to contribute webcam snapshots for the website and take part in forming a movie.
Full text of an original project proposal can be yet found from here
Emily Newman
USA
website: emilynewmanart.tumblr.com
Project Overview
REFINED PROPOSAL 6/21
As part of my below described project about the St Petersburg suburb Polyteknicheskaya, I would like to work with the TOKAMAK group for one day, applying the mechanisms of your imaginations to a de-historicized, de-contextualized, de-humanized and de-oderized slice of the Polyteknicheskaya landscape—the “Sad’ Benois”.
I will present you with schemes and large-scale print outs of sketches I have made of a cluster of real landmarks in their exact vicinity to one-another but without detail. The sketches should give a sense of how the area appears spatially and volumetrically but will be void of connotative atmospheric or geographic, linguistic or social signs (maybe!). I will try not to say too much about the area.
I will then ask you to divide into groups of two or three and complete a task that I will discuss with each group. The task will be one of these (or if you have a better idea, something new):
1) Imagine that this cluster of structures is a stage set, block out a production of a fairytale, pantomime or play here. You may take my suggestions of what to stage (The Three Little Pigs, Evgeni Onegin, The Kallevalla, etc etc.) or choose something of your own. You may indicate scale changes.
2) Imagine that you are a psychoanalyst and your patient describes a dream that takes place in this landscape. What’s the dream? What’s your interpretation? Alternately, you have a dream about this place and describe it to your analyst, what’s his interpretation?
3) This landscape is the background for a new video game that you have designed. Describe what goes on.
4) You are the developer who designed this architectural complex as a cohesive whole—what’s it for? What happens here? Someone wants to tear it down, why should it be saved?
5) There is a competition to re-vitalize this area, each building is currently empty and needs a new purpose, the best proposal receives full funding. What’s your idea? Who is your panel?
(Using colored pens and pencils, post-it notes etc. you may write on your print-out, take extra notes, record a real-time description of actions, video scenarios etc etc.)
All of these projects will be presented to the whole group, with questions and discussion, and I will, at this point, not resist divulging historical, anecdotal and supplementary visual materials pertaining to the area should it be of interest to the group and relevant to the discussion.
The purpose of this exercise is to mine the symbolic potential of the landscape in dynamic reaction with the imaginations of a spectrum of people who are to varying degrees aware and oblivious of this part of the world in terms of actual physical experience and distant preconceptions.
It is my idea that this bite of landscape exists in a limbo state in terms of both time and space—it is falling down and rising up—it is waste ground and it is also a protected landmark—it is central and it is also too far away—it is a pleasant place to be and it is also an awful place to be— it has been there forever and it could be gone tomorrow—-i would like to feed it through your minds in order to better see it myself.
This day of work will be incorporated into my final artwork when I return to my studio and build a model of the Sad’ Benois as a stand-alone miniature stage set. I will then dramatize your scenarios in as visually a sympathetic manner to your vision as I can, using overlayed animation, dramatic lighting, music, smoke machines, wind (+++) and/or possibly some evocation of figures (trying to stay away from puppets if possible).
MORE GENERAL BACKGROUND ON THE PROJECT—
DON’T LOVE HERE— CONSTRUCTING (A RELATIONSHIP WITH) POLYTEKNICHESKAYA
In the summer of 2009 I left St Petersburg, then my home of 5 years, and 5 months on a residency on the island of Suomenlinna. When I returned I had lost my flat in the center and quickly scrambled together a living situation a friend’s spare apartment—in the neighborhood of Polyteknicheskaya. I was desperate or I would never have agreed to live outside of the center—I had never even heard of Polyteknicheskaya and couldn’t even commit the word to memory.
Friends had told me to expect nazis, pollution, noise; I envisioned depressing block-housing and busy, dirty roads that would be impossible to cross. It didn’t help that even Zhenya, my friend and landlady, advertised by saying “maybe it’s depressing but I like it” and “if you hate it you can leave whenever you want”.
When I arrived, it basically looked and felt as I had imagined, (or rather, it looked snowy, and my imagination supplied the rest). My flat was in a 5 story ‘khruchevka’ over a supermarket, there was facist and redskin graffiti around, but I had a miniature birch forest in the courtyard outside my window and the scene was actually very cosy by lamplight. As spring slowly emerged, I began to warm to the area, some of the monumental 1970s architecture attached to the Polytek was hilarious and touching and it was very pleasant to wind my way through the internal courtyards behind the supermarket that lead to Zhenya’s flat…actually it was sort of idyllic. As summer approached the courtyards bloomed into unexpected explosions of pixie-like gorgeousness (masking elements of structural decay and organic decomposition that had characterized the scene before. Finally, the massive, terrifying frozen expanse that had to be crossed to make the final leap to Zhenya’s courtyard revealed itself to be a wonderful man-made swimming lake with a fantastic constructivist-esque life-guard station and undulating sandy beach. During the heatwave I stopped going into the center all together and spent most of my time filming lovers by the ‘basejka’ (the lake mentioned above) and looking for ways to dig deeper into Polyteknicheskaya.
I think now that I experienced some sort of exaggerated and lasting spring fever there and my emotions were directed towards the neighbourhood—since then I’ve been fervently looking for ways to ‘represent’ Polyteknicheskaya to myself and to others in order to understand what the neighbourhood is, and possibly, to get over it.
My tactic so far has been multi-pronged. I have settled on approaching the area from three angles:
1) Karl and Emily: A romance to identify with—a film and interactive workshop with local children about legendary star-crossed century lovers of the Basejka.
2) Laboratory for metaphoric fusion: Tokamak building workshop and symposium.
3) A place from a space: Exercises in staging dramatic and real-life scenarios around the “dacha benois”.
Group Activity
At the tokamak residency (yes, named for the tokamak above), I plan to use my day as a brain-storming and experimental laboratory where I will present the group with materials I have devised to represent the area and ask the group to construct impressions and interpretations. This sounds vague. I will refine the plan in the coming weeks as I prepare materials to bring to the island..
Megan Snowe
USA
Project Overview
a possible creative process formula…
FORMULA: CREATOR + SUBJECT + PROCESS => PRODUCT
We will be making images (in any medium: drawing, photo, writing, video etc.) of
1. each other (people in the Tokamak Program) who we do not know so well
2. a place along the route from the ferry to the residency space
3. a thing/object.
We will make 3 images of each subject:
1. we will make an image without looking at the subject (person, place, thing), from memory
2. we will make an image looking at the subject, but not looking at the paper/video camera/camera lens
3. we will make an image of the subject from a photograph (allowing for more time and precision, but still avoiding the direct gaze to both subject and image).
It is meant as both a method of introduction, a production exercise (it is easy for us to get entirely wrapped up in critique and discussion) and, though I’m still working to put my finger on it exactly, an exhibit of degrees/methods of familiarity, while avoiding direct contact and a more traditional way of making a representation of a subject.
Images can be as literal or abstract as you wish.
Morning:
Meet + discuss the project
Assign people, choose places, name things
Make images of people (while all in the same place)
Lunch
Make other images individually
Dinner
Present and discuss results and experience.
What did you learn about your subject? Do you see your subject in new ways? How do your peers react to your representation/what, if anything, new do they see in this representation? Connections/relationships to subject matter?
