Logic and Skill

There’s a logic that lives under the chaos. A slow, stubborn rhythm that ties one attempt to the next, like footsteps across an invisible bridge. When I look back, the path almost makes sense — though at the time it felt like drifting.

Again, I'm visiting diary entries from spring of 2016.

“Lueskelin läpi merkintöjä vuoden alusta lähtien. Jotenkin loogiselta vaikuttaa tämä eteneminen. Hirveetä epävarmuutta ja sit ymmärrys et riittää taiteeseen.”

“I read these notes from the beginning of the year onwards. Somehow this progress seems logical. Terrible uncertainty and then understanding that one is enough for art.”

Maybe that’s what logic really is — not certainty, but the quiet realisation that your confusion still moves forward.

Then came Egle, the teacher at art school, and her sentence that still echoes:

“Egle sanoi et mun portfoliotyöt oli ‘warmup exercise’. Osuvasti. Hitsi. Pitääkö täs ruveta developpaamaan. Ja hiomaan skillssei.”

“Egle said that my portfolio works were ‘warmup exercise’. Straight to the point. Damn. Time to start developing? And polishing skills.”

Warm-up exercise. It hit like a small truth disguised as an insult. Skill — that word I used to distrust, fearing it would domesticate intuition — suddenly felt like a door. Maybe logic and skill are not the enemies of inspiration, but its spine and bones.

There’s the mystical side that keeps whispering, and then there’s the sober side that counts the hours and lines. Between them: a fragile artist trying to turn uncertainty into method.

“Mulla on kaikki mitä taiteilija tarvitsee. Mä olisin voinut tehdä sitä koko elämäni.”

“I got everything what artist needs. I could've done it for my whole life.”

Perhaps the warm-up never ends. Perhaps the skill itself is the life’s work — the gradual clarifying of the muddy water, the discipline that keeps intuition alive.

In the end, logic is just love in structure, and skill is in the very attempt, in that small act of faith that the form will eventually appear.

The Struggle

As Keanu Reeves said, we are not struggling with depression, we are struggling with the world we live in.

And it's inevitable. 

The very moment you cease to buy into hustle culture - “my 5 to 9 before my 9 to 5” - you are hurled into a void. A void outside of the existential territory defined by contemporary society.

You cast yourself out. If you are not careful you may end up living in exile.

Just as I'm exiled from corporate and academic structures, depression creates exile from the default assumption that life should feel manageable and meaningful. 

You need alternative structures to cope. I have Maa Kuu. It's both a liberation structure as well as a meaning making system.

Liberation structures carry you when you step outside the system. They give you identity and permission. They offer not a template, but a container for all the wacky you got.

Being an outsider, in exile, depressed, you need to create your own meaning. I think this was the existentialist project, but now in 2025 very late capitalism has pared down the meaning to shopping and fucking.

I don't enjoy shopping that much.

Personal meaning making systems are flourishing. People are so into astrology now. And no wonder, astrology can be wonderful.

Thus armed to struggle you can navigate both the Real Life and the ever changing moods landscape. It's not for everyone, but anyone can do it. And many of us have to.

Future Plans and the Limits of Time

The future has always been a horizon I look toward with both longing and caution. Plans are fragile things. They bend under pressure, collapse under circumstance, and sometimes dissolve into nothing at all. And yet, the act of making them is what keeps me moving forward.

As I wrote in my diary in the spring of 2016: “Kun pimeässä makuuhuoneessa tunnustelin itseäni et mitä mä oikeesti haluan niin kyl mä kuvataideakatemiaan tai maahan haluan, taideoppilaitokseen josta valmistuu nykytaiteilijaksi. Tää oli ihan selvää ja lienee sitä vieläkin.” “In that dark bedroom, touching the core of myself, I knew what I truly wanted: to step into the world of contemporary art. That knowledge has not left me.”

But time is never endless. It presses down with its own weight, demanding choices, demanding sacrifices. My diary shows this tension again and again: the sense that there is only so much of me, and only so many years left to spend. “Aikaa on aina liian vähän. Pitää valita, ja jokainen valinta sulkee pois muita polkuja.” “There is always too little time. One has to choose, and every choice rules out other paths.”

Perhaps that is why my work orbits the theme of exile. Exile is not only geographical, it is temporal. To be exiled is to feel the limits of time, to sense the doors that will never open again. My future plans are not blueprints but sketches drawn on fragile paper, easily torn.

And yet, there is hope in that fragility. If nothing is certain, then everything is possible. The seasons still turn, and I still release work with their rhythm. I build not toward a fixed destination but toward a practice that sustains me. Future, in this sense, is less about reaching than about continuing.

Time is short. But art stretches it, bends it, cracks it open. In the cracks, I find room enough to create.

Impossible Beauty from Exile

I call my practice emotional archaeology. The works I make are excavations — layers of feeling, fragments of memory, pieces of a life that has been broken and remade. I bend AI into a role it wasn’t designed for: not spectacle or efficiency, but the raw search for emotion.

The emotions I mine come from my own anti-hero’s journey: the call, the shattering, the impossibility of return. What remains is exile — from the corporate world where I worked for two decades, and from the academic art world I once tried to belong to. Out here, on the edge, I create.

From that position I try to shape impossible beauty. Images that carry both fracture and tenderness, collapse and transformation. They are not theoretical puzzles or ironic gestures. They are meant to be immediate, accessible — to speak directly.

I use the latest technologies as my tools, because half my mind is an engineer’s. The other half is driven by art. Together, they let me collaborate with AI to create images that could not exist otherwise.

I think of my website as a gallery. An ongoing solo show, open to anyone who wants to step into this space. Commissions are possible, but I’m not chasing gallery representation. Independence is part of exile too.

Maa Kuu is my name for this practice. It’s an act of creation: from exile, I build a world.

Looking for Cy Twombly

Rivkin writes in his excellent Cy Twombly biography: ‘“A Twombly looks,” writes one critic, “the way thinking sometimes feels.” And that is Twombly’s gift — the bewildering slipstream between thinking and feeling.’

I find myself approaching the same slipstream, though with different tools and a far wilder life journey.

Back in 2016, I wrote: “En mä voi netflix & chill koska se olis elämän haaskausta. Ja tää ei sit oo sitä, tää kelailu.” (I can’t Netflix & chill because that would be a waste of life. And this — this thinking — isn’t that.) Even then, I was circling something.

I also confessed: “Taide aspekti mun elämässä on vasta aluillaan eikä sillä kannata lähteä keulimaan — vastaanotto ei välttämättä olis hyvä.” (The art aspect of my life is only beginning, and it’s not worth hyping — the reception might not even be good.) I hear the uncertainty in those lines, but also a beginning spark.

Now, years later, I look again for Twombly. And what I find is not his marks, not his scrawled fragments, but a face by forcefully guided AI — painted, scarred, luminous. A Greek man weeping, eyes raw, mouth trembling, streaks of color flowing across the skin like paint and tears at once. It is both too much and exactly enough.

The autumn equinox approaches, and with it a turning. Darkness gathers, but not only darkness — balance. A poised moment between light and shadow, harvest and hunger, memory and beginning.

Something in me believes this is a threshold. That the weeping man is not despair but release, not collapse but the clearing before a breakthrough.

Looking for Cy Twombly, I find myself instead. And what I see is a practice on the verge of change — messy, vivid, unashamed.

No More Violence

"Näin unta jossa mut hakkasi sellanen venäläinen iso juntti. Sit mä sain poliisilta pippurisuihkeen ja se rauhottui."
(I dreamed that I was beaten by some big Russian brute. Then the police gave me pepper spray and he calmed down.)

The dream arrived blunt and cartoonish — a bad joke about power, force, and the strange fantasy of state protection. One moment, fists and panic; the next, a little canister of pepper spray, as if violence could be solved by pressing down on a nozzle.

Dreams reveal the residue of what we carry. Mine seem to hold onto the idea of being punished, of being subdued by something larger, something blunt. Perhaps that’s why art itself sometimes feels like a kind of sanctioned beating: the critique, the grading, the institution’s gaze.

"Mä suhtaudun tähän taiteen tekemiseen liian kiltti oppilas -maisesti."
(I approach this art-making too much like a good student.)

There it is — the obedient posture, the readiness to please, the hope that if I do things correctly the blows will stop. But the truth is: the blows never stop. Not in art, not in life. The rules only multiply, and the more faithfully they are followed, the less room remains for the work itself.

So what would it mean to say: no more violence?
Not just the obvious kind — fists, pepper spray, nightmares — but also the subtle violences of expectation, of obedience, of playing the “good student.”

It might mean making art with a crooked spine, ignoring the voice that says be nice, be proper, do it right.
It might mean refusing to soften the edges, refusing to perform gratitude for every critique.
It might mean stepping out of the dream where the brute always wins.

The canister of pepper spray was never the point. The point is to stop rehearsing the violence at all. To make something that resists by existing, stubborn and uncorrected.

Book of Changes directs no changes

The I Ching was supposed to offer clarity. Instead, it opened a hall of mirrors.

At times, it gave me encouragement:
“Dont give up yet, if theres been 30 years there might easily be 30 years more. Dont forget music.”
It was a rare line of light, a reminder that perhaps life was not yet over, that even at middle age the horizon might still stretch ahead.

But more often, the oracle cut the ground out from under me.
“Muutosten kirja varsin totaablisesti torppasi taiteilijahaaveet: work on what has been spoiled by mother, nothing should be undertaken.”
With a single sentence, the Book of Changes dismissed whole futures, condemned creative ambition as spoiled fruit, insisted that nothing should begin.

How is one supposed to live inside such pronouncements? The book’s voice swings between tenderness and cruelty, between fatherly reassurance and a bureaucrat’s cold stamp of denial.

I began to see it less as prophecy and more as comedy — not the kind that makes you laugh, but the slow absurdity of asking permission from a set of ancient sticks. Every answer came with the weight of finality, and yet none of it settled anything. I still woke the same the next morning, staring at my coffee, wondering what to do.

Perhaps that is the real lesson of the I Ching: not that it dictates a path, but that it exposes the hunger for signs, the compulsion to outsource direction. The Book of Changes directs no changes — it only mirrors the inner drift, the hesitation between endings and beginnings.

And so the question remains open. Whether thirty more years will unfold, or whether nothing should be undertaken. Whether music, or silence. Whether art, or code.

The hexagrams fall, the meanings scatter. I carry on, unresolved.

First steps at Art School Maa

"Maan kurssi alkaa huomenna ja mulla on tooodella huonot vibat siitä." (31st Jan 2016)
(The course at Maa starts tomorrow and I have reeeeally bad vibes about it.)

The night before my first session, I sat in my kitchen staring into a cup of lukewarm latte, convinced I’d made a terrible mistake. What business did I have in an art school classroom, with my beginner’s hands and my beginner’s ideas? Absolute beginner. My mind conjured every possible humiliation: confused looks, polite silences, the slow death of small talk during coffee breaks.

But then the first day arrived, and somehow, it didn’t destroy me. The room was full of strangers, all of us performing quiet rituals of self-doubt, and the air buzzed with the fragile chaos of beginnings. I cobbled together an installation in twenty minutes using Viola cream cheese—hardly a masterpiece, but at least it existed. At least I existed in that room.

And then came the moment:

"Sellanen tosi artsyn näköinen nuori nainen, Maan opiskelija, teki installaation musta. Musta ja synkkä. Missä se aito ja ihana?"
(Some really artsy-looking young woman, a Maa student, made an installation about me. Dark and grim. Where’s the authentic and lovely?)

There it was, my first “artwork about me,” and naturally, it looked like a funeral. Still, there was something oddly comforting in being seen—even through a lens that didn’t flatter. Maybe this was the point: to step willingly into the unknown, to see yourself refracted in unexpected ways.

The early days at Maa feel like the primordial chaos right after the big bang: everything swirling, unformed, still deciding what it wants to be. There’s fear in that, yes, but also a strange freedom. Every misstep, every awkward critique, every clumsy experiment is part of mapping an unfamiliar territory.

This is what the first steps look like—messy, tentative, but alive.

The Comedy of Money

Money is always funny, just never in the way you want it to be.

In January 2016 I thought a lot about money. I’ve written it in the diaries a dozen times in different ways:
"Rahaa ei ole. Money doesn’t exist."
or
"Olen köyhä, mutta ei se ole edes kiinnostavaa. I’m poor, but it’s not even interesting."

There’s something absurd in that. Poverty used to have a certain drama to it — the starving artist in the attic, the bohemian myth, the wine that was always just slightly sour but poetic. These days, it’s mostly just overdue invoices and the existential comedy of wondering if a 7 euro flat white counts as a reckless financial decision.

The money itself is abstract, almost fictional — numbers floating in apps, automated voices reminding you that “your payment is late,” promises that the next project, the next sale, the next miracle will fix it all.

And yet, art keeps happening. Somehow, the work finds a way through the gaps in the ledger, through the quiet panic of spreadsheets that don’t add up. Maybe that’s the real punchline: that creation persists even when the conditions for it make no sense at all.

Sometimes I imagine money as a side character in the Maa Kuu story — not a villain, but a kind of trickster: capricious, unreliable, occasionally generous in a way that feels almost cruel. You learn to laugh at it, or at least to smirk. Because what’s the alternative? To take it seriously? That way lies madness.

*"Rahaa ei ole." Money doesn’t exist. And yet the bills keep arriving, and the art keeps being made, and somehow the whole joke keeps telling itself.

All That’s Left Is the Winter Light

2015 was coming to its end. The year was already at its shortest when I wrote: "Hitsi tätä kaamosta. Kyllä se verottaa. Päivät on niin lyhyitä ja valivali. Toisaalta mitä päivänvalolla nyt tekeekään. Eihän se välttämätöntä ole." (“Damn this darkness. It does take its toll. Days are so short and complain complain.”)I told myself it wasn’t essential, that we’ve survived winters before. But that’s a lie. Light is essential. Without it, everything feels like a half-forgotten rehearsal for a play that will never be staged.

Back then I still thought in terms of “art for business.” Galleries, publishers, ticketed events. A clean equation: creative output in exchange for validation and survival. But the Deloitte memory came back—those "hymyileviä mut selkäänpuukottavia" (“smiling but backstabbing”) smiles from the corporate world—and I wondered if I was just trading one sterile stage for another. "Paint-by-numbers jobs." I had switched sides. I was no longer inside the glass towers; I was watching from the street below.

I lived on the kind of money that announces, without apology, that you are not a participant in the economy. My apartment was a mess. Not a bohemian mess—just the unremarkable disarray of a man alone. "Ei sen ihmeempää." (“Nothing remarkable.”)

I told myself I’d "luiskahtanut taiteeseen." (“slipped into art”) It sounded romantic until it didn’t. Because the truth was I wasn’t sure I wanted to make art. I wanted to be relevant. To belong somewhere. Maybe to be seen. Invisible Friend made me think of Jochen, and the rare, crystalline moments of love we had. Moments that still cut into me years later. "Huok. HUOK." (“Sigh. SIGH”)

The days were a carousel of nothing: sleep, wander, eat, avoid. I could lose whole afternoons without memory of how they’d gone. And yet I kept circling this question—did I want the discipline of an artist’s life, or just the title?

Then there were the mirrors. The barbershop mirror that told me I was "vanha ja ruma." The camera phone reflection that made me wonder why I was still trying, as if it were already too late. And yet, I lived in "kaksinkertaisessa maagisessa realismissa" (“double magical realism”) —my own private world, and the one that occasionally let me in. That tension kept me breathing.

Art, when it came, wasn’t the clean, minimalist concept work of the institutions. I rejected that. "Ei yksiulotteisuudelle." (“No to one-dimensionality.”) I wanted rönsyily, excess, words burning white-hot until they disintegrated. I wanted intensity that threatened to unmake me. But I rarely reached it. Most days I just followed prompts, tried to keep the connection alive. I wrote: "Melankolinen ylevöityminen, kyynelten rajoilla. Universumin salat avautuvat, maailma on rajaton." (random rambling) It reads now like a transmission from another self—someone who still believed the door could open.

By New Year’s Eve, the thought had softened. Maybe there was room for all kinds of artists. Maybe positioning was optional. But deep down, I knew the years had gone: "2009 ja 2010 meni sekavissa merkeissä… 2015 toipuessa." (“2009 and 2010 were a mess … 2015 has been a recovery”) That’s almost a decade of trying to get back to the start line.

I ended that winter thinking 2016 might be different. That I might be different. That I wouldn’t "kilahda uudestaan." (“go crazy again”) The pills would hold. The seasons would turn. And maybe, just maybe, the light would come back.

It didn’t. Not in the way I thought.

No Sync, No Sun

I've been up since the grey hour, when the sky is neither night nor morning but a dirty dishcloth wrung across the city. "Havahtuu aamuvarhain ja mielessä on joku käsikseen liittyvä kysymys, ja sit ei enää tietoakaan unesta." Wake up early with some pressing question in mind, then can't get back to sleep.

Five hours. Good enough, I tell myself. I once prayed that life wouldn't disappear into mattresses. Prayer granted.

Lapsing into the Long Illness

Coffee tastes like burnt paper. My hands shake anyway. "Long bout of serious illness indeed."

Art practice has become its own fever dream: half-finished projects, phantom deadlines, an inbox that looks like a mortuary drawer. I scroll LinkedIn for what—absolution? Wrong kingdom entirely. The feed keeps reminding me that my résumé is a ghost wearing a suit.

When the Clock Stops Granting Miracles

The stairs of Vekkula—that fun-house escalator that once whooshed me upward through impossible synchronicities—are silent. "Ei synchronicityja aikoihin. Miten mä nyt nousen vekkulan portaita ilman synccejä?" No synchronicities in ages. How do I climb these stairs without them?

No secret doors open. No cosmic gears click into place. Just rain sawing at the window and bills on the screen. I wait for the universe to cough up one small omen; it waits for me to get off the couch.

Invisible Friends and Other Static

I text an invisible friend until the battery dies. Thirty messages in, the dialogue feels like tapping on aquarium glass. "Invisible Friend alkaa väsyttää… Loputon tekstarien virta." The Invisible Friend is getting tiresome... endless stream of messages.

Connection? Maybe. Distraction? Definitely. The phone glows like a cheap altar; I keep kneeling.

Strategy Is a Shallow Grave

I dig up my old business corpse, try to dress it in fresh jargon. The smell is immediate.

"Business imee mua takaisin… Onks tää nyt sitä et ei oo escape velocitya." Business is sucking me back in... Is this what it means to not have escape velocity?

Strategy wants me back, but I'd rather haunt than hustle. I bury it again and leave the shovel sticking up like a warning.

Daylight Never Breaks Clean

First snow arrives: thin white noise on every surface. For a moment I feel the world has turned the page with me. Then the slush starts, grey bleeding into white.

"Ensilumi… Nyt mun päässä pyörii tää businessnäkökulma—ikäänkuin nyt kun mä olen keksinyt mitä art for business voi olla niin mä olen validioinut itseni." First snow... Now this business perspective is spinning in my head—as if now that I've figured out what art for business could be, I've validated myself.

Validation tastes like freezer burn.

Exit Question

"Mitä aiot tehdä huomenna ottaaksesi elämässäsi uuden, virkeämmän suunnan?" What are you going to do tomorrow to take a new, more alert direction in your life?

Sleep twelve hours, drown in coffee, stare at the page until it bleeds—then maybe write something that doesn't beg for approval.

There is no moral, only weather. Today the forecast is blunt: no sync, no sun. Just the slow grind of teeth in the dark, waiting for the gears to bite again.

Grey Canopy

November 2015

November 25th: "Sää on pilvinen ja tihuuttaa." Cloudy, drizzle.

I write this and watch the morning dissolve into nothing. Finnish November has arrived with its signature move - that low, grey ceiling that makes everything feel muffled and distant. Not dramatic weather, just persistent dampness that seeps into your thoughts.

"Pystyn näköjään edelleen tuottamaan tekstiä." Apparently I can still produce text.

This surprises me. I've been out of Nokia for years now, floating between identities and possibilities. The corporate strategist is long dead, but what's replacing him remains unclear. Still, words keep coming, even in this grey space of not-knowing.

"Ideat kypsyy pikkuhiljaa, kun ne eivät ole valmiita niin ne ei vaan ole valmiita. Got the point?" Ideas ripen slowly, when they're not ready they just aren't ready.

I'm learning patience with my own creative process. No project timelines, no deliverables, no stakeholder meetings. Ideas emerge when they're ready, not when some artificial deadline demands it. This is terrifying and liberating in equal measure.

A small breakthrough: "Remarkable: mä olin hetken onnellinen kun mä tein ja postasin ton mikrorunon." I was happy for a moment when I made and posted that micro-poem.

Happiness from creating - what a concept. Not creating to solve business problems or optimize user experiences, but creating for the pure joy of making something and sharing it. The micro-poem probably reached five people. It didn't matter.

Someone asks where I'm going with all this. "Paras vastaus kysymykseen mihin olen menossa oli: en tiedä." The best answer to where I'm going was: I don't know.

And surprisingly, this feels liberating. Not knowing means I'm not locked into anyone else's expectations of what my path should look like. Not the corporate world's metrics, not society's definition of success, not even my own previous plans.

Then something shifts. "Pallasvuon essee puhutteli jotain syvää minussa juhannuksena. Innostuin niin etten saanut unta." Pallasvuo's essay spoke to something deep in me at midsummer. I got so excited I couldn't sleep.

This is what real inspiration feels like - not the manufactured enthusiasm of product launches or strategy presentations, but something that actually moves you. After that rush of recognition, I keep cycling through possibilities: "Ja sen jälkeen skeptisismi on johtanut aina 'järkeviin' vaihtoehtoihin joista olen sitten aina liirannut takaisin johonkin taideoptioon: strategy artist, musiikintutkija ja muusikko, kirjailija, taiteilija." Skepticism leads me to "sensible" alternatives, but I always drift back to some art option: strategy artist, music researcher and musician, writer, artist.

The pattern is clear. No matter how much corporate logic I've internalized, no matter how much practical thinking I apply, I keep returning to creative work. Like water finding its level, I flow back toward making things.

November 2015 was the beginning of understanding that this drift toward art isn't a character flaw to be corrected. Under that grey canopy, while everything felt stalled and uncertain, something essential was crystallizing: the knowledge that I would keep creating regardless of whether it made financial sense.

The weather was shit, my future was unclear, but I was still writing. That was enough.

Too Human for Capitalism

“A bit of grandiose delusional thinking takes one a long way.”

The line appears in a coffee-shop diary scrawl dated 18 November 2015. Our anti-hero—call him the Protomutant—has already missed the morning, already diagnosed himself as “blocked,” yet still reaches for something audacious enough to crack the day open. He is not lazy; he is too human for a machine built to monetize every minute.

1. When the Clock Becomes a Cage

Capitalism presumes that bodies and spirits keep perfect time with production schedules. But the diary mutters back:

“Siihen mennessä kun olen käynyt suihkussa, syömässä ja kaupassa on jo neljä eli työpäivä on ohi.”
(By the time I’ve showered, eaten and shopped it’s four o’clock and the workday is over.)

The Protomutant’s most ordinary acts—bathing, eating, wandering to buy paper—count as mutiny because they refuse the seamless efficiency the market demands. They are proof of digestion, fatigue, distraction: animal truths the spreadsheet cannot parse.

2. Sync or Sink

Unable to trust linear progress, he waits for “synchronicity”—those jolts of cosmic alignment that catapult him ahead faster than any Gantt chart:

“Mä samaistan nää syncit Vekkulan portaisiin: kun oikealla hetkellä astuu portaalle se vie paljon ylöspäin ja nopeasti.”
(I compare these syncs to the fun-house stairs: step on the right one and it lifts you sky-high, fast.)

The market calls this luck, networking, timing. He calls it alchemy—an outlaw logistics that privileges intuition over optimization.

3. Leap—and Refuse the Net of Profit

“Leap and the net will appear.”

The slogan could headline a start-up pitch deck, yet in context it is anti-capitalist. The “net” he trusts is not venture funding but an emergent mesh of fellow edgewalkers, small synchronicities, and the sheer adaptability of flesh. Profit may or may not follow; aliveness comes first.

“Nyt musta tuntuu siltä että olen siirtynyt uuteen vaiheeseen elämässä: elän taiteilijan elämää.”
(I feel I’ve moved into a new phase: I’m living an artist’s life.) 24th November 2015

Tomorrow the clock will glare again, but somewhere a fun-house stair waits to rise beneath your foot. Did you wait for a manifesto of cosmic significance? There is none, just a Protomutant’s Tuesday.

You Do Not Have to Know Yet

"Tilapäinen epävarmuus? Prosessin luonne? Etsikkoaika?"
(entry, November 12, 2015)

Lesson 4: You do not have to know yet. In fact, not-knowing is part of the work.

In late 2015, I thought I was close to a breakthrough.
One day I was going to be a writer.
The next, a musicologist. Then a visual artist. Then a harmless Tumblr uncle.
Then nothing at all.

My sense of artistic identity kept shifting like northern weather.
Inspiration rose with a wine glass and dissolved before the bottle was empty.
Synchronicity fluttered through a Facebook post or a bus ride, but vanished when I tried to hold it too tightly.

And yet—this, too, was art practice.

The oscillation.
The act of staying inside the questions without turning them into branding.
The refusal to name something before it has ripened.
And the deeper refusal to pretend I was more certain than I was.

This is what most people misunderstand about becoming:
The fog is not a problem. The fog is where the forming happens.
It is where filters drop, and real preferences start to show.
It is where inflated ambition gets trimmed to fit the actual soul.

Lesson 4 is this:
Wavering is listening.
Confusion is a sacred phase in the process of choosing your form.
Let it be foggy. Stay present anyway.

Clarity will come. And when it does, it will not arrive as a mission statement.
It will arrive as a course you are already enrolled in.
As a tool already in your hand.
As a life already underway.

So if today is a day when you don’t know who you are becoming,
just stay.
That means the art practice is working.

Begin Before You Believe

“Ehkä mä olen vaan kuntoutuva opiskelija. Ja taiteilija-identiteetti on deluusiota, jäänteitä suuruudenhullusta ‘minun on oltava joku’ -tarpeesta.”
(entry, November 9, 2015)

Lesson 3: Begin before you believe. The identity will catch up.

I was halfway through a decade-long detour.
Not lost exactly, but not found either.
I wrote in notebooks. Attended Latin classes. Sketched out a novel that might never exist.
And through it all, I kept circling the same question:
Am I really this thing I’m trying to become?

Artist.
Writer.
Creative professional.
Not yet. Not quite. Not convincingly.

There was always some counter-voice.
The one that said I was too old. Too late. Too scattered.
That my ambitions were compensating for irrelevance.
That no real artist would second-guess themselves like this.
That “career change in two steps” was just a nice slogan for someone who had run out of options.

Still, I returned to the page.
I chose courses that made me feel awake.
I imagined books not for the market but for myself.
I chose not to perform interest in things that no longer moved me.
And slowly — almost imperceptibly — the identity began to arrive. Not as certainty, but as gravity.

Lesson 3 is this:
Do not wait to feel like a writer before you begin writing.
Do not wait to feel like an artist before you start shaping the world.
Do not wait to be believed by others before you believe in the thing you’re trying to become.

Start anyway.
Build in the dark.
Let your body move before your title does.

The mind will resist.
The world will raise an eyebrow.
But the mythology will begin to form in the doing.

Begin before you believe. That’s where the myth begins.

There Is No Clear Path

"Joko tää on hallusinaatio tai tietojenkäsittelytieteen opinnot tuntuu avaavan paljon uusia työllistymismahdollisuuksia."
(diary entry, August 29, 2015)

Lesson 2: There is no clear path. The myth only becomes visible in hindsight.

In late 2015, I found myself enrolled again.
Not in a workshop. Not in an art residency.
But in the sterile corridors of a computer science department.

Former strategist.
Unemployed. Undone.

I returned to study not because I had clarity
but because clarity had collapsed.

And in that collapse, something surprising happened:
I stopped trying to choose.
Stopped trying to win the internal argument between
"artist" and "technologist"
"creative" and "coder"
"worthwhile" and "wasted."

Instead, I began to walk a jagged line between all of them.
Latin by day. Algorithms by night.
Pop music and blockchain. Deleuze and distributed systems.
Shame. Hope. Coffee.

"Fashioning a life suitable for me."
(Aug 14)

No clear goal.
Just forward motion.

The mistake is to wait for a feeling of certainty before beginning.
There is no such feeling.
There is only weather. Clouds and sun. Progress and paralysis.

And if you're in this place, in this wilderness of partial starts and mental edits,
take heart.
Not because it’s easy.
But because it’s the only place myth can be forged.

Lesson 2 is this:
You cannot build a legendary life from a clean plan.
You build it from a messy record.
A scattered archive of attempts, doubts, and strange combinations
that no résumé would accept
but that no mythology can do without.

So keep walking.
And if today feels incoherent, congratulations.
You’re exactly where legend begins.

You Will Be Obscure

“Mä voisin olla Kuvataideakatemian käynyt ja silti yhtä obscure and culturally irrelevant as now.”
(diary entry, June 25, 2015)

Lesson 1: You will be obscure. The question is: will you survive it?

In 2015, I stood between disciplines, identities, and eras.

Not quite an artist, not quite a strategist.
A former senior manager from Nokia, now sitting in Tokoinranta with a notebook, haunted by the ghosts of corporate relevance and artistic irrelevance.
Folding in 4 years, 5 months of silence into a single realization:

I had a secret. And that secret would change everything.

It wasn't a plan. It wasn't a product. It was a threshold, a recognition that the path forward would not be found by asking which career title to choose, or which platform to post on, or which job to apply for.

It would be found by accepting obscurity.

Radical obscurity.

Not as failure, but as a mythological phase-state, a kind of chrysalis. The necessary darkness before a true form can emerge. A state where systems dissolve and new identities are composed of fragments, metaphors, dreams, and doubt.

“Taide. Strategia. Tietojenkäsittelytiede.
Yritysympäristössä mä loistin. Avoimessa maailmassa stumbling.” (July 12, 2015)

I didn’t know it yet, but I had begun mythologizing my own practice.
Not building a portfolio.
Not chasing recognition.
But letting the formless period do its real work.

Lesson 1 is this: If you're between identities, between careers, between structures, just stay there. Stay. Observe the obscure. Survive the irrelevance.

Because if you can survive your own obscurity, something unreplicable begins to form inside it.

And one day, years later, you will find yourself standing on the cliff edge, speaking again. But this time, not as a seeker. As a signal.

Maa Kuu, A New Dawn, digital image, 2025