News/posts

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...

One of the most genuinely interesting things I have ever been part of is getting some renewed attention thanks to filmmaker Rachael Morrison, whose documentary on Joybubbles has started a Kickstarter campaign to raise funds needed to finish the film. If you donate $35 you'll get a reissued copy of my zine, Used To #1, which Dan Goldberg and I published in 1998.

Joybubbles is...

Friday was the main day of Kompass, which I felt was a modest event, organised around an afternoon un-conference format. Unfortunately, the turnout was much lower than I had hoped - we had ten people who remained from Thursday night, and only one ethnic Estonian. This isn't necessarily an impediment to productivity - a smaller group means a more intimate experience and can often be better...

Last night was the opening night of Kompass, a small unconference-based event organised by myself and Kaspars Lielgalvis (Totaldobze Art Centre, Riga). Kompass is designed to unite Estonian and Latvian culture organisers, artists, urbanists, and activists into a networking and brainstorming event, built around the topic of 'public space'. The Kompass project has been an ongoing series...

Earlier this month I spent a few days in Sheffield, a city which I had visited only twice before and never for such a lengthy stay. I was participating in the Open Sourcing Festivals project, a Pixel network venture that seeks to open up the process of creating education-based cultural festivals. The idea is we will create a 'festival toolkit', all leading up to a festival in Sheffield...

Yesterday, I wrote an open letter to the incoming Estonian culture minister, and against my better judgement I shared it on Facebook. What resulted was not surprising - a plethora of ‘likes’ from friends, and it was shared by about ten other people to wider audiences.

What disappointed me was that I wrote the piece not to actually communicate with the culture minister (I’m...