Kimmo Modig: Cool stories

6.

Why do I need to make everything like this? Why can't I just write a play, offline, and then deliver it? Do I really think that my process is interesting for other people, for you? 

Truth is, I'm lost. I'm doing things out of context. There was this open call by a new Finnish production house. They were looking for performances, workshops, second-hand sales events, whatever. Just anything that would be good to do in their premises in Helsinki. What striked me about the open call was this: they wanted to know your target audience. 

This is, of course, typical to our times. I just ate, my body craves movement, I found it hard to process this thought any further. So instead of an analysis, I'll just tell you why I found this question intriguing.

As I said, I do things out of context, but I only fully realized this after looking at that open call. But saying "I don't have an audience" reminds of people who say "there are no classes anymore". Because it's not like I'm performing to just anyone. If you would do a sociological study on my audience, I'm sure you'd notice a lot of similarities within the group, in terms of income, education, identity, just broadly speaking. '

In my previous posts, I've been trying to understand what an artist actually does. From my experiences, I've learned that as an artist I should reach out for new audiences. Doing stuff for my peers and friends is outdated, elistic, lazy, and even morally questionable. If you get funded to do your stuff, you should be able to talk to a larger set of people. But what if people who do that just have a larger group of friends? If there a statistical point..., I mean, if you have enough friends following your stuff, they will tell about it to their friends and so on, and that this snowball effect needs certain amount of mass for the ball to start rolling? 

I don't have any idea what I'm talking now.

The fact still remains. My audience is staggeringly small. It might also be bigger than I think. Every now and then I'm surprised by someone telling me how they've checked out my videos from Youtube, or heard of my works. I mean sure, in Helsinki that makes sense, that the word goes around, so it's not that surprising. And I've been doing my stuff long enough and gained some exposure for my activities. I do not mean to say I'm an underdog, I really aren't. 

I'm more or less deeply rooted in the Finnish art scene, after working with in a way or another with a host of its institutions. Still, as I said, it doesn't really mean this or that. They are the places we work in, associate with, and end up in. An EDM track is playing in my headphones, a northern Spring of 2014 is happening in front of me behind the window, and I'm doing the work, the work we all do, and the beat goes on & the drops are getting more epic.

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Earlier today, I had a discussion about future careers. What do next, that is. I feel like I know now what can be done in the Finnish art world(s). I could start to aim for a more international career. So far it's been a thing or two here and there, plus collaborations with individual artists & short work/hustle trips to European cities. As a so-called international artist, I'm something like 17-27 years old. As a Finnish artist, I guess I'm 28-38.

It doesn't matter, of course, I'm just stating this as a fact, since I'm trying to figure out whether this was it, and now it's time to either change or advance. 

Bussiness world seems alluring. Money, people who might be surprisingly open-minded, sizeable projects. Naturally, it's always somewhat up to yourself what you make out of it. Do you play by the rules, etc. Sometimes it's not your decision, you can't help it. Luck plays a staggering part in our lives. So far I've been crazy lucky. But relying on that seems short-sighted.

Ah, fuck, I don't know. 

I'll repeat the questions from the beginning of this text. 
    
    "Why do I need to make everything like this? Why can't     I just write a play, offline, and then deliver it? Do     I really think that my process is interesting for     other people, for you?"

I do this because I believe in this. I can't just write a play because I'm interested in the given situation. I think my process, any process for that matter, can be interesting. Also, it's even more bizarre to try to guess whether something I do is interesting to other people, than to not think about it.

My problems in a nutshell: I have an uneasy relationship with audience, I don't know where this is going, I don't believe in the labor of art. The latter has been all the rage for past few years in the discourse revolving around art-making in the 21st century. (I'm writing this in offline mode, so I won't provide you with any links, as I'd have to search for them, didn't have anything ready.)

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I'm imagining someone reading through all of my posts and commenting how it seems unlikely that I've wrote these posts in an hour, because there are very few misspellings (that's one!) and that some of the posts seem much more cohesive and collected than others. Well (don't you just love it when you're arguing with semi-imaginary people in yr head), and I'll start this with a "Well,", these are the works of an artist and as such they are extremely unreliable. That is not to say I am or am not unreliable as a human being. There's no "I" in "artist" oh wait yes there is. 

OK here's some dialogue.

a. without House music i've probably offed myself
b. does offing means killing oneself and why did u write house music with a capital h while having everything else in lowercase
a. god fuck you listen to this track it's amazing i need to post this somewhere anywhere now, i mean music doesn't exist if you don't share it
b. what about lonely people or people who don't know how to make friends, or people who don't feel safe getting out, or people who simply need to stay out of public, or people who are in a super shitty situation and making friends is just not possible for them atm and the only relief mechanism they have is the 10 songs on their phone?
a. what about that, this is me saying how i feel about things
b. so you think you can enjoy your priviledged music consumer position while not trampling other people's possibilities to do stuff, identify themselves, create a role for themselves in the consuming of music
a. fuckfuckfuck i love modern house music, i mean take a good listen to these cut-up vocal snippets bouncing around the track, merging with the erratic hi-hats, getting softened by classy organ stabs coming in at threes (we call them "trioli" in Finnish i don't know how to translate that look it up baby boy), then the kick drum somehow hidden and in your face at the same, thank you dear Sennheiser company for creating these amazing open-ended headphones, model HD 555, thank you whoever provided me with the means to buy these, and yes while i was talking shit the cut-up vocal track came up with a vengeance, meaning the extra dry, melancholic but straight-up functional guitar riff, completely washed out of its heavy metal macho connotations, hand in hand with eerie synth line octave lower and another octave higher, save the reverbs for those ones, keep the guitar dry as hell. And now we're in the middle of 6-minute meant-for-djs track, the song takes a steep turn into more upbeat territories, the commanding female vocals singing about "all the lonely nights I spend alone...you're always gone [a touch of delay]", then the word "gone" set to loop on the ones, snappy hand claps on the twos making sure you get it, I can't stop shaking my head in a way that's a parts learned from commercials and culture, parts my own body identifying with the ancient affects, like how music always returns and borrows from deep fundamental gestures that can be found everywhere in the nature, bounce bounce bounce, meanwhile the sine wave bass has swam in i don't know when god it's beautiful, oh 6:33 now it's gone, fuck the track is nearing it's end, we're hearing the 32 bars of the stripped beat, which are meant for the DJ to use for mixing the track smoothly into another track then another track, there was a DJ here in Tallinn from UK who had trouble with beat-matching and we the dancers had to hear those last bars clashing with synchopated-feeling beat from the next track, anyway 60 minutes is up I'm feeling fucking amazing 

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This is the track a is referring to: