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COMING SOON (HOPEFULLY): PERFECT LIVES

posted 23 March, 2024



Hi.
Been awhile, huh? 

I mean, wow, talk about neglect; the last public post on this website was
December 2020. Well, I've been busy. Actually, since before that; in May 2020, I
started working on the next "big" project of mine: Perfect Lives.

The short version is that I bought an old, rotting former train station in the
Estonian countryside, and started renovating it, with the idea to open as a
public platform (and also for my own practice).

And it's taken a bit longer than I had planned. But it's close.


THE BASICS

This is the former train station of Tori, Estonia, which is oddly not actually
located in the town of Tori but in another village 3km away. This building is
about 100 years old, and was one of two houses built for the railway workers to
live in. The original station burned down at some point (probably during the
war?) and the building that I am now calling 'Perfect Lives' functioned as the
station up until the '90s, when post-Soviet privatisation took place. That was
the last time anyone was actually living in it, and as a result there was a
tremendous amount of work that had to be done just to make it minimally
habitable. And there's still a long way to go.

As of December, the ground floor of the house is more or less functional, which
still leaves the second floor and above to deal with (the roof is an absolute
disaster). But it's time to get some activities started here, assuming I can
find anybody who wants to come and make some. But what exactly do I want to do?


THE PITCH

There's an open call for collaborators up at call.perfectlives.eu. Take a look
at that before you read any further.


SOME MORE BACKGROUND

If you know me and my work, you'll know that from 2010-2018 I was mostly busy
operating various cultural platforms (Ptarmigan, Temporary, Kuusi Palaa, and the
2015 Pixelache Festival). Since the collapse of Kuusi Palaa in summer 2018, I
have been laying low, working on a few low-key personal creative projects, and
then since 2020, planning Perfect Lives. (And mostly taking on an enormous
amount of freelance work in the private sector to finance the renovations).

A lot has changed in this time, both with me personally and in the world. The
pandemic, for one thing; how quickly we want to forget it, but it definitely
reorientated my own attitudes towards cultural assembly, and not necessarily in
a bad way. But the biggest change that I've undergone since the collapse of
Kuusi Palaa has been my increased interest in tech and Internet criticism, which
I hope to make the centre of my own creative practice. Which is to say it's
somewhat of a shift away from art and aesthetics towards topics of cultural
studies, political economy, and activism. 

I should say that at the moment, this is only theoretically at the centre of my
own creative practice. I have not yet engaged with it in any public form,
instead spending my time reading, gathering ideas, and strategising as to how to
marry this focus with my past work (which was: designing experimental platforms
and building participatory cultural experiences).

I'm proud to call myself a Luddite, or Neo-Luddite, which is a growing movement
that references the Luddites of the 19th century but with the proper
understanding of what they were –– not a conservative, knee-jerk reaction
against technology as the term is commonly used today, but a class-consciousness
movement that questioned the power and governance structures that were eroding
their already precarious lives.

I'm excited to attempt a platform that will have many of the aims that the
Biathlon system had in operation at Temporary and Kuusi Palaa, such as finding
diverse participants and challenging the traditional roles and assignments of
culture events –– but orientated around this topic, which is not necessarily a
narrow or limiting focus. Personally, I want to design open 'classes' that
actually teach tech skills such as coding and systems administration –– but with
a heavy dose of philosophy and critical thinking behind them. At Perfect Lives,
my dream is that we can learn together how to code, but when we install a npm
package, we will analyse the power structures behind the package, from the
corporate platforms that produce and host it, to the hidden physical
infrastructure of servers and cables.

But that's just one idea of mine; I also still want to do weird, experimental,
and fun things. And I don't want Perfect Lives to be just my ideas or my place
at all –– I desperately want to find other people to build it with. People who
will bring their own ideas and energy.


CHALLENGES

This isn't going to be easy. I have always worked as an events-based artist, and
operating my own platforms was just a way to make that easy. But that's cause I
worked in cities. If I had an idea for an event or workshop, no matter how
bizarre, I could just throw it on the calendar and see who turned up.

Here, well, there is nobody around. This is not the kind of place you can
casually attend an event at. In-person activities are going to be limited
probably to some more intense week-long 'camp' type activities in the summer,
and even then, there is not that much space for sleeping, etc. The
aforementioned idea of critical courses as a sort of alternative 'school' (plus
reading groups, or any of the other cumulative participation projects I always
dreamed of doing at Temporary and never quite managed), will require some sort
of hybrid online telepresence situation. So this is a way of working that I am
not experienced in, and to be honest, not generally that excited by.

I also don't know who is likely to actually come and make this happen with me. I
know I don't want to do it alone, but I struggled in past projects to find
collaborators who actually would take their own agency and lead projects. I have
recognised many of my own shortcomings in communicating this, and will
definitely be more clear about roles and boundaries. (For example: I own the
house. You can't knock down any walls, or paint it yellow, etc.)

It's also very important to me to stay 'grassroots', which is a somewhat
annoying term, but by which I mean not becoming a formal institution, or chasing
funding. I have felt increasingly alienated from what I call 'application-based
culture', where funding and application cycles dominate the artistic production
process, and become a mental prison for the practitioner. I'm not naming any one
scene in particular, cough HELSINKI cough, but it can be frustrating, especially
when it leads to culture practitioners altering what they want to do in hopes of
hitting the hot funding buttons. At this point I have been happy to be able to
support myself and the construction of the Perfect Lives project through my own
freelance work, but I recognise that not everyone is able or willing to do
this. 

A volunteer-based platform is not good either; these tend to exploit, drain, and
burn out talented people. But I've currently just posted an open call asking
complete strangers to come to a half-liveable house in the middle of nowhere to
build a project together with me for no pay. This is shitty and hypocritical of
me perhaps, but it's equally bad to have people coming for short-term visits to
build their CVs and collect an artist stipend before moving on to their next
stop (I know what that's like; I used to host residencies, and it wasn't always
like this –– wonderful and talented and dedicated people passed through
Ptarmigan –– but it definitely was in some cases). What I dream of establishing
at Perfect Lives is not a volunteer-based establishment, but a full-blown
cooperative: one in which our own income-generating activities, together or
individually, can be somewhat pooled and used for truly independent productions.

To be very honest here, I'm most scared about how much momentum I may have lost
over the past few years. Not mentally or critically –– I feel sharper than
ever before. But I have drifted away from my past networks a good bit after
three years in isolation, smashing plaster and ripping up floorboards –– and
even before that, when I became disillusioned with the attention economy of
social media and how it's decimated the inspiring, intimate ties that culture
activities used to build. Some of this is just me getting older, sure. But I
also genuinely have no idea how to find people to join this effort.


TWO IDEAS: ONE PRACTICAL, ONE A FANTASY

The previous post on this personal website of mine was made in December 2020,
announcing that I was starting an Onlyfans account, which was a half-joke that I
ended up taking way too seriously, as I spent 2021 making increasingly lengthy
essay videos for that platform. Instead of adult content, I wrote and performed
videos of roughly an hour long each, on various topics including nostalgia, art
and politics, apocalypse, and invisibility. I'm actually rather proud of them
(not technically, they're all just shot on my old phone) and have recently
started making them again (after taking nearly 2 years off).  

But since it stopped being funny to me to use Onlyfans (and they closed my
account for inactivity anyway), I've decided that it would be better to
self-host them, but still behind a minimal paywall (for reasons too long to
justify here). So, I plan to start writing what will essentially be a
self-hosted version of Patreon, which I'll put up as open source, with the
explicit intention of promoting cooperatives of content creators –– instead of
giving Substack or Patreon or Onlyfans or Bandcamp a cut of your profits, you'll
be able to host it yourself, and keep more of the proceeds. I haven't started
writing it yet, and I'm not sure that it will scale – but this is exactly the
type of project I would like to host at Perfect Lives. It's software, yes, but
it could also have in-person events and experiences built around it, and
actually be something useful to people in the world at large. 

A central absurd contradiction that is at the heart of my worldview as a Luddite
is that yes, the Internet is absolutely terrible, but it doesn't have to be. For
the most part, there are no oppressive overlords that are forcing us to use
these terrible platforms and extractive services such as Facebook, Instagram,
Twitter, etc. There are a zillion open source alternatives with similar (or
better) functionality, yet: everyone voluntarily chooses to use the shitty ones.
The only reason the Internet is terrible is because of human psychology and
behaviour. Which, yes, platform capitalism preys on and exploits with its
dopamine-hitting LIKES and followers, etc. But we are capable of refusing this.

'Refusal', a term I started thinking about when I made a video essay in 2021
called 'The art of refusal' (from a musical context, mostly), is something that
I keep coming back to. It's something important, I think. Expect more in this
direction.

Anyway, "self-hosted open source Pateron-clone that probably nobody will use" is
a practical idea, and a summer project for me. I need to wrap this up now, so
now I'll go wildly speculative here, and state that my real longshot
fantasy here is to attract people to the area in general. If nothing else, I
want Perfect Lives to be the planting of a flag. Freaks, Luddites, leftists, and
other weirdos –– come and join!

This house isn't big enough for more than a few people, but this part of Estonia
is beautiful, and there's lots of cheap property for sale in the region. I was
only able to do this because of the generosity of the person I bought it from,
who allowed me to live next door while starting renovations. I would happily pay
this favour forward. If Perfect Lives interests you, and you want to buy a house
in the next village or just few km away (and you're not a psycho etc.), then
I'll happily do all I can to help. At the very least, you can borrow my chainsaw
and use the wi-fi here.

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PREVIOUS POSTS...


FIVE REASONS WHY I CREATED AN ONLYFANS ACCOUNT

posted 11 December, 2020 00:07

If you would like to spend $4.99 per month to see me post biweekly video essays
about music and other things on my mind, please go to onlyfans.com/icewhistle
and subscribe to my Onlyfans. $1 of that goes to Onlyfans; $1 I will donate to
the Democratic Socialists of America; the other $3 will go towards maybe buying
myself a tripod or some better gear.

This video trailer will explain why I am breaking character and trying this out.
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posted 26 January, 2020 21:17

I'm pleased to announce the release of a three volume book series, Seventeen
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pages, and ordering information can be found on the Scarlatti Tilt website.

Please contact me if you have any questions.



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LATEST TWEET:

@stuart_macrae Wow that’s a blast from the past. I have fond memories of that
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photo: 'Block That Chain' worklab, Graz, October 2019. It's way more fun than it
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This episode of the Serious Introspection audio podcast talks with several
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photo: the host + the guest, sometime in 2004 or 2005.

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There's some cliché about old dogs and new tricks that I always mangle, but
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