Happy Christmas everyone

An exhibition of my photography from New Zealand entitled, Long White Cloud , will be shown in the gallery of Media Centre LUME at the School of Art & Design of Aalto University between 11th and 22nd January 2010 (Monday-Friday only, 9-19.00). The address is Hämeentie 135C, 00560 Helsinki.

Pimp my Kiwi! Why not?

I was following the (non-) developments in the case of Apple vs the EFF on the issue of the legality of jailbreaking the iPhone.
I've often found that analogies with cars, transport, roads and other transport infrastructure are a good way of helping to understand issues of computers, software and information technology.
In the case of Jailbreaking the analogy is pretty much the same as if you buy a new car and then decide that you are not 100% happy with it. So, you go out and find things that you think improve your car, make it prettier, or uglier, faster, or slower, safer, or less safe. You can do as little as hang a scented plastic pine tree from the rear view mirror or as major as a pimping job that leaves the original car unrecognizable and only fit for the drag track.
But the bottom line is that you bought a car from a car manufacturer and that manufacturer can have no control or legal rights about what you do to that car as soon as you've paid and driven off the dealership (unless you sign a purchase contract that specifically denies this right aka Rolls Royce and the Beatles).
And, because you can do that it means that a hell of a lot of people also have jobs in industries related to cars; designing, manufacturing, distributing and selling all the myriad of additions and 'improvements' that you can make to your car. You don't have to go back to the original car dealership to buy them (and letting them take a % of the business). It's totally an issue of what you, as the consumer, want to do with your money.
And as to the use of the car after your additions and improvement, well there are a load of laws and regulations about cars and what you can or can't do to them if you want to drive on the roads of any country. These laws are not manufacturer specific, they are specific to the type of vehicle and take into account the typical use of that vehicle. So we have different laws for motorcycles, cars, buses and trucks. So you generally would avoid doing anything to your car that would make it overtly dangerous, illegal and un-roadworthy. But the lawmakers have decided, based on rather sound evidence, experience and insight, on what you can or can't do so that you won't be a danger or nuisance to anyone else on the road or off of it.
Now let's translate this into the realm of jailbreaking. It's quite easy. It's obvious that making jailbreaking illegal is nonsense and totally against the rights of consumers to use their preferences and money as they want. But I wonder whether the work has been done yet on the legal side to legislate what really would be a 'dangerous' or 'antisocial' piece of independent software for an iPhone or other Smart phone, like anything you might find out there in the non-Apple Store repositories. In my opinion such threatening apps are going to be similar to those in the PC sphere, viruses, worms and any app that is enabled to disrupt the mobile networks and their users. I'd say that is pretty easy stuff to legislate about and most of the work is done already and it only needs mobile smart phones to be seen as computing devices like a PC (which is, after all, what they are).

Although I am great fan of Apple, and consider it to be one of the best digital Design companies in the world I'm afraid I cannot accept the way that they have attempted to limit the possibilities of honest consumers to, basically, buy their great technology and then do anything they want to with it. I hope the courts are of the same opinion and really hope that everyone can support Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in their efforts.

Preparing for the last Kiwi adventures

Autumn has come to New Zealand and it's definitely time to start planning my last adventures here before the long haul back to Finland. The last days have been filled with transitional activities; organising the last interviews and meetings for my research, cleaning the house for the landlady so she can show new prospective tenants round, trying to sell the Toyota 'arse rocket' and even posting off a 20 kgs box packed with my camping gear. More boxes will follow as I'm allergic to excess baggage charges and they are really strict here in Wellington, as I've experienced twice already.

Just now everyone in Finland is celebrating Vappu, that May Day eve madness that usually ends up as a hangover on the morning of 1st. Not for me this year! My Vappu was spent in the sauna down at the Urban Retreat in Tory Street and wound up with one bottle of Belgian Kriek Boon cherry beer in front of the TV. The most uneventful Vappu of the last 25 years, that's for sure.

I will be interested to read what Kiwi blogger Matt Kennedy-Good makes of his first Vappu. Matt has been living in Helsinki since late last year and has been posting once a week to the New Zealand Herald's web site. See http://blogs.nzherald.co.nz/blog/kiwi-abroad/ Reading his posts brought back memories of my first years in Finland well over 25 years ago, learning to skate, ski and ice fish amongst other shared experiences. It has to be said that Helsinki and Finland have changed a hell of a lot since, yours truly, a young English photography graduate, arrived on August 31st 1982 with a 10 month State post-grad scholarship at TaiK. Since then...half my life so far.



I've been lucky enough to get a Finnish Arts Council grant to make an exhibition from the photography work I've done here, sometime later in 2009. In fact that's the only additional support I've had because all my applications for research grants connected with my intentions here were unsuccessful. So I've been concentrating on the photography a lot and am happy to notice that me and the camera are now much better companions that when I arrived here in January. There's still a few things I'd like to shoot. Wellington and architecture has been an ongoing topic but I'm really keen to see even a little bit of the South Island's mountains with snow cover.

Next week I will make my final adventure to the South, visiting Dunedin and Christchurch on official research business and then, weather and transportation permitting I'll spend the weekend on the Southern Alps, hopefully around Arthur's Pass or thereabouts. Flights to and from the South proved incredibly cheap with Virgin's Pacific Blue.


Here in Victoria University there is a lot of mid-term activity now and students are handing in course work and its being presented and evaluated on a more or less daily basis throughout the building. It's nice that the course work is always presented publically and I've noticed that staff colleagues and the Dean of School show up to see what's been done. The picture here is of Mikko, our student from Helsinki here on exchange, presenting his interactive 'sound object' project a few days ago to Simon (right) the Dean.

42 days and counting...

Autumn has arrived here in New Zealand and I notice that I'm increasingly thinking about returning to Finland. 42 days and counting by my reckoning. During the last 2 months there's been little time for blogging activity in the way that I managed in January and February. That can also be read as an effect of me getting off my butt more and moving around this amazing land. I've also found it more sociable to use Facebook and Twitter (or both combined) to tell briefly what I've been doing and where I've been.

I have now amassed thousands upon thousands of images which are already archived on 1TB disks but which also need lots of editing. And soon I need some more disks it seems. I've got funding from the Finnish Art Council to make on exhibition this year so that's my artistic aim no.1 for the time being. The most rewarding part of the sabbatical has been, for me, to get back into working as a photographer. That has been both a creative and technical challenge as so much has changed since I was an active photographic artist in the late 80s and early 1990s. I always joked in recent years that I was master of Photoshop version 1.0.7. Digi photo pioneers will understand the joke, and the challenge I've had to catch up.

My research subject, which, described roughly, was location based media services in New Zealand has also been quite a challenge. But at least I've been learning why state of the art mobile media services are not yet developed here. Similarly the whole Broadband development here seems to still be years behind many other Western countries. The new New Zealand government has pledged to make huge improvements but, then again, so did the government before them. My meeting with experts and officials will continue till the end of May.

TK (my wife for those that don't know) was here and left back for Finland again last week :-( So it's back to lonely bachelor life again, this time in an increasingly chilly house on the side of Mount Vic. Last night I rummaged through the cupboard in the bedroom and uncovered an electric blanket. Cold and lonely....and suffering from a bad back. Miserable me.

Looking towards mass media for escape, comfort and uplifting experiences I braved the wind last night and went to see Slumdog Millionaire at last. OK, everyone has already seen that ages ago, I know. It is a great film and it brought back personal memories of the Mumbai slums from my visit there in 2007. And I was wondering whether the same notion can be applied to the country, India, and this film. They say that India defies definition and, typically, 'that whatever you say about India, the opposite is also true'. I was thinking that maybe this is really saying that, in a nation where there really are just so many people, so many more and so tightly packed into those major sprawling centres that, really, everything happens, can happen and will happen. But, as we know and fear, it's usually the bad and sad things that happen. I really thought that Jamal should have failed on the last question. The ending was just so Hollywood, getting the cash AND the girl.

Returning home and with nothing decent on TV I was somehow sucked into the euphoria surrounding the relatively recent appearance of unemployed 47-year old Scottish spinster, Susan Boyle singing a song from Les Miserables on Britain's Got Talent; heart warming with 5 stars.

This morning, re-chilled, when I checked the viewing stats on YouTube again it seems that her performance is about to become the most viewed audiovisual performance in Internet history to date. I still haven't seen a picture of her cat, Pebbles, but surely that will come. Only 10 days after her 'jaw dropping' vocal performance Susan Boyle and her story is extremely well documented in Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Boyle. I also noted that some people are advertising to non-British residents that they are 'setting up' ways for them to vote for Susan Boyle in the next rounds of Britain's Got Talent. It's all quite fascinating in terms of Media business: Global media companies doing 'nationally-based' business (revenue on nationally restricted voting mechanisms) with TV but distributing those shows globally later (strengthening their brand and supporting record sales) now being challenged by the power of Internet-based social media for immediate access to the shows (non-restricted viewing) and also the possibility to influence the outcome of the competitions (non-restricted voting possibilities). If I were a TV executive I might start employing people to calculate different business models because...over 100 million people on the Internet around the world, in less than 2 weeks, wanting to view and support a 47 year old, unknown Scottish woman in a talent show might have some implications!?