Vandana Shiva at the Disowning Life conference, dOCUMENTA(13)

Vandana Shiva, Seed Freedom
"Seeds are life. Owning seeds is ownership of life." 


In Kassel I had the pleasure of seeing the environmental activist, eco feminist and physicist  Vandana Shiva giving her lecture on Seed Freedom. Companies like Monsanto is genetically modifying seeds to to resist chemichals used as pesticides. Then they claim patents on these modified seeds as being intellectual property. With this monopoly they force the farmers in India and other poor countries to buy their seeds for high prices. When the harvest is bad the farmers are left with debts and with no possibility to pay. 75% of the world seeds are in this way owned by the companies.

"Farmers must breed diversity, not uniformity", VS
This is what appeals to me in my work. By genetically modyfying seeds your are practically  streamlining life and reducing it's individuality. All modified seeds are highly unstable and dependant of specific conditions and specific chemichals you have to use in combination with the seeds to make them produce well. "We have seeds that are 1000 years old. That is stability. ", VS

Of course you can look at this from a wider perspective. Same things are happening in most other spheres of life, where economy, consumption, production and uniformity are counteracting decentralisation, small scale production, individuality and diversity. What comes next? Will the Golems of the world be allowed to exist in the future?

I'm also posting a french documentary (dubbed to english) on this subject. Mostly because I haven't had time to see it myself, and having it on my blog makes me know where to find it.

Kader Attia in dOCUMENTA(13)

Details from Kader Attias piece -  The Repair From Occident To Extra-Occidental Cultures, 2012. The images show wooden sculptures of wounded, deformed and 'repaired' soldiers of world war 1. The piece also contained a video, which among other things, showed ceramic pots, broken and 'repaired by sewing pieces together. Interesting features that might be usable in my game.

Sorry about the quality of the images. They are photographed with my iPhone. 

Loveletters at dOCUMENTA(13)

Right now I'm in Kassel during the last week of dOCUMENTA(13). I'm invited to participate in Nature addicts Fund traveling academy. In the first days I've heard speeches spanning from queer bulldogs to microbiological life in the oceans. I have also seen some of the art, but not all, yet. Tomorrow we will be guided in some the works by three of the participating dOCUMENTA artists.

Artist and theorist David Link has made a replica of the hardware of Manchester University Computer, MUC, running a program from 1953,1954 generating mysterious lovletters. Noone seems to know who wrote this program or why.

Darling dear
          My heart hopes for your thirst. My impatient eagerness passionately yearns for your apetite. My desire attracts your sympathetic longing. You are my seductive sympathy. My precious wish.

 Yours Curiously
MUC

The Golem: Israel's Nuclear Arsenal and the Road to Armageddon

Another conspiracy theorist, Michael Collins Piper, has written book where he refers to the Israeli Nuclear arsenal as the Golem of today. One of the original stories say that the Golem is created to protect the jews from their enemies, so yeah, he must have been glad when he got that idea. Piper is noted for his anti-semitic ideas and has also been called a holocaust denier, so of course he's a loony too. A real one this time. Nice book cover though. I read about the book here.

The Golem Spotify Playlist

I'm posting a spotify playlist. Don't know what it's got to do with Golem, but I can at least say it's inspirational, and something I'm listening to right now when I'm making my game. Maybe it's not easy listening, some of it is noisy disted rock, some live recordings and some are electronica. It's a mixture of old alternative and new Pitchfork, Hipster music. It starts of with Major Lazer, Planningtorock, and Peaking lights and goes on with Baroness, White hills and an old liverecording with Joy Division. There is also Ariel Pink's haunted graffity, Edward Sharpe & the magnetic zeros, Micachu & the shapes  (great band names by the way), Caribou and Anna Calvi. Enjoy!

http://open.spotify.com/user/len130/playlist/6mbeRUZfa8Yitw9k0XGMqg

Down syndrome has been invented by people who are too lazy to...

Funny, when I first read it I believed the blogpost was for real. I guess nothing suprises me about the big country in the west, which seems to contain every radical political view and religious believe there is. I should of course have been suspicious when it was written by the alias - Cranky old man. People who actually think like this probably don't have such self-irony.

Cranky old man

"Down syndrome has been invented by people who are too lazy to study, too lazy to work and even too lazy to wipe their own butts. By acting like complete idiots they avoid scrutiny and get passed all checks in our system to receive free care and free money without ever having to do anything to actually deserve all that. Parents who are too lazy to properly raise their children teach their children to behave like drooling idiots so they no longer have to fulfill their parental duties."
"Increased rates of autism is thus a will of God, because He wants to see how good the parents are in guiding their children to Jesus. If you want the test to end or become less intensive, all you can do is to spank your kids diligently."
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=68675

Landover Baptist Church is a fictional church in the fictional town of Freehold, Iowa. The whole website and the Forum with over 34000 members is a satire of fundamentalist Chritianity in USA.
Cranky old mans blogpost 10 reasons why god is hating Sweden, headed with a danish flag, is also extremely funny.
http://www.landoverbaptist.net/showthread.php?t=44379

I wonder though if some of the members of the Forum, like I did, believe it's for real. There are some critical voices in there who has been labeled - Confirmed enemies of god, Banned from landover, Aeternal damnation assured. So I guess I have it coming too.

Working on woodchopper animation

Working on a woodchopper animation based on a Muybridgeplate.