News/posts

We're back for a second season of Serious Introspection, which will now take place on Wednesdays, a bit later. The show is planned to start roughly at 21:00, but may occasionally run a bit earlier or later depending on the Mad House programme on each particular night. We start next week and run until 13 April, but with no shows on 17.2 or 9.3. The full schedule can be seen on the...

Here's the last episode of Serious Introspection, which was by far the best one (from my perspective, at least). We had a large and hungry audience and great guests and a real spirit of absurdity. Guests were Nikos Doulous and some of the Mad House working group (Heidi Backström, Mirva Pulkkinen and Annika Tudeer); also included were statistical analysis, Minor Threat karaoke, and...

Here is this week's episode, with Tero Nauha, Milla Koistinen, Salka Gudmundsdóttir and impromptu guest Tuukka Asplund. We passed out feedback forms to the audience, and you can fill this out online here. Even if you have never attended a live episode and only watched these, we appreciate your feedback!

We were without a sound man for the third consecutive week but did not have...

Episode six brought together Jaakko Blomberg of Yhteismaa and Ossi Koskelainen, Ilpo Heikkinen & Emmi Venna of the Post-MJ Era Institute of Consciousness. We discussed legacy, openness, social boundaries, memories, divorce, and shark costumes. I unsuccessfully tried to get rid of a Gertrude Stein book, played Michael Jackson trivia, and saw St. Elmo's Fire spitting ions in the ether.

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It's the TECHNICAL DIFFICULTIES episode! With our trusted sound man in Estonia we had to figure it out ourselves, mainly, 'where do they store the microphones?' and thus we started a half-hour late, and I was agitated throughout. It's also the AMERICA episode! With guests Megan Snowe (USA), Ernest Truely (USA), Matthew Goulish (USA) and myself and Justin as always. Special...

Here's the hastily edited video from this week's episode of Serious Introspection with John W. Fail, which was a good one - featuring Hanne Ivars, Synes Elischka and Harriina Räinä as well as hype man Justin Tyler Tate. We talked about Bruce Conner films, interactivity in art, and how to make fake blood. And we played a game based on my life. There was a camera...

Here is episode 3, from last week at Ihana Baari. Guests were Kristinsson & Fredriksson, and we attempted a subjective 'trivia' game which flopped due to low audience participation. Thanks to Justin Tyler Tate as always for being a great hype man, and to Lotta Blomberg for taking care of the videographing and editing.

Tonight is episode 4, featuring Hanne Ivars (talking about her...

Here's (season 1,) episode 2 of Serious Introspection with John W. Fail, my weekly live/talk show at Mad House Helsinki. This week I talked with Annika Tudeer, Andrew Paterson, and Kimmo Modig. It was a significantly more lively show than last time, and I felt way better about it. I apologise for the audio being terrible - it makes this quite hard to listen to, but next week we...

I am hosting a weekly live/talk show called Serious Introspection with John W. Fail on Tuesdays until the end of November. The show takes place at the Ihana Bar as part of Mad House Helsinki's second season.

Each week I will bring up some friends and other random people, and interview people who are going to be performing at Mad House in the coming week. I hope to create something...

Yesterday, John Grzinich, Sari TM Kivinen and myself led a workshop called DIS/Orientations on Harakka Island, Helsinki. This was part of the La-Bas 'Concept of Performance' Biennale, a 5-day investigation of performance and sound art. This was our first shot at trying something extremely experimental and improvisational on the theme of orientation and disorientation. For a few hours,...

It's really, really cold here right now. Here being Tallinn, Estonia, where as I write it's currently -22 C (-7.6 F) and it "feels like" -33 C (-27.4 F) with the wind chill. I'm sitting here in Slothrop's trying to stay alive, for the feeble electric heating can't keep up with the brutality of an Estonian winter. Thank you, medieval architecture!

But that's...

As mentioned in the previous post, Part Oy has offered Helsinki Public School a shipping container to use for classes + events to be housed at the new Kalasatama development.
 


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There will be 9 containers arranged about halfway up the western side of the harbour (where #4 is marked on the map).  Besides us, there will be Dodo, two theatre groups, Kuvataideakatamia, ...

Summer is almost here, and summer will (almost certainly) bring us a large empty shipping container, "permanently" landlocked in the Kalasatama harbour.  This is part of an initiative between the city and Part which will be an ongoing 25-year project to revitalise Kalasatama.  We're looking forward to using the container as a classroom for most Public School events this summer, and...

The Public School Helsinki has been getting a bit of coverage lately.  Here's two recent articles:
 

• Voima [Finnish language]
• Ny Tid [Swedish language]

Any Helsinki people who are interested in getting involved -- please do!  At the moment the committee is open to anyone and you can sign up via the CoActivate project.

I will end this post with this amusing photo of Tero and...

 
 


Lots of catching up to do here!  This is my biannual attempt to post more, documenting some of the things I've seen and some of the projects I've been involved with. 

So here's a few reports from Pixelache 2010 in Helsinki, which happened last weekend.

The highlight of the whole festival, for me, was the Vivoarts Workshop led by Adam Zaretsky.