Pixelache Helsinki contributes to CreaTures Festival at Real Fábrica de Artillería, Sevilla, Spain, 29.06-2.7.2022, following a 6 month process in the context of CreaTures Laboratory research activity. See more info below.
Pixelache Helsinki is a Finland-based creative association on emerging creative practices with almost 20 years of activity in 2022. Throughout the last decade, starting as a Festival of Electronic Arts & Subcultures, the association has been running a trans-disciplinary platform for emerging art, design, research, technology and activism that involved a dynamic local community and an annual festival experimenting with a rotating directorial model. The association’s rich history and activities in the field of transformational creative practice are the core focus of Pixelache's experimental production (ExP) within the context of the CreaTures research project. We set out in the hope of answering: How do we keep going?
We sought to explore how the association has developed and sustained its festival organisational practice. By engaging with organisational meta-data, the production office as a tangible memory device, and the production of two audiozines, we gathered perspectives from active members reflecting upon how the organisation has changed via objects and narratives. Due to the persons who attended the Audiozine (gathering materials) workshop, the temporal focus of the process proved to be between Festivals 2013-2019. While the festivals explored Do-it-with-others cultural network practices & open curatorial models, de-centralisation, and engaging local urban activism issues in Helsinki, long-term production staff left, many new association members joined. From 2015 onward, each festival took energy, but also made space for new actions, slowly adjusting the profile towards post-media and performative events.
Listen to the Audiozines Decentralization, burn-out & hijack and 'Community of practices', look at visual documentation of process, or read a detailed report of process via http://www.pixelache.ac/projects/creatures
ITEM 1: Audiozine: Decentralization, burn-out and hijack
This audiozine pastes together conversation around ET grilling, open camp model, festival activity in 2013-2015, decentralization within the association, changing production teams, burn out, and the semi-serious 'positive hijacking' taking Pixelache forwards. Featured objects in the office include liquid smoke, a fabric scheduling device, a megaphone, and a hacked exercise bike.
ITEM 2: Audiozine: Communities of practice
This audiozine pastes together conversation around organisational labour, friendships and motivation, changing disciplines within Pixelache with the recent years, festival 2019, safer space ambitions, things left behind, and a need to collectively imagine future desires. Featured objects include our internal 'pixel' currency for association work, a 3D printer, a bed-side artwork and safe space guidelines.
ITEM 3: Collection of photographs
These photographs show the process of engagement in making the audiozines in Spring 2022. We speculated that Pixelache production office in Suvilahti Cultural complex, Helsinki, was a interface device itself, container for objects with various usages at different times. It has hardly been used during the pandemic times. We hoped to trigger memories through the objects related with Pixelache office, allowing for a more playful approach to the idea of archive, with objects as traces surrounded by different stories and subjective ways to recall the past. We can reflect and question if there is any objectivity in archives, data or statistics.
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Production credits:
Voices: Antti Ahonen, Anastasia Artemeva, Agnieszka Pokrywka, Steve Maher, Irina Mutt, Saša Nemec, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Vishnu Vardhani Rajan.
Production Team: Andrew Gryf Paterson, Irina Mutt, Simugan Sivanesan, Antti Ahonen
Workshop planning & facilitation: Irina Mutt, Sumugan Sivanesan, Andrew Gryf Paterson
Audio recording: Sumugan Sivanesan.
Audio edit and post-production: Sumugan Sivanesan, Irina Mutt, Andrew Gryf Paterson
Background organisiation research & metadata: Andrew Gryf Paterson, Irina Mutt
Photographs: Antti Ahonen, Andrew Gryf Paterson
Project lead/initiator and report: Andrew Gryf Paterson
Support team/financial admin: Mathilde Palenius
Tehnical support/web admin: John Fail
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Funding & support:
This project was commissioned as a 6 month medium-length experimental production in the laboratory programme of CreaTures – Creative Practices for Transformational Futures: http://creatures-eu.org
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 87075.
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Contact: andrew [-at-] pixelache.ac, irina.mutt [-at-] pixelache.ac, sumugan [-at-] pixelache.ac