Welcome to the third space

This week we finally managed to open Camp Hastur (slight return) in Tornio. After hard weeks of renovation and planning, the shop is open for public. Except that it's not really a shop. =)

Messing around with the commercial space here doing events and things the time was ripe for a non-commercial effort, a be-in if you'd like. On thursday, we lugged a part of the vinyl collection and the 1970's pioneer stereo to the office, got some beer and sat down to open the joint. Apart from the usual cast of characters revolving around Hastur, we didn't have any idea who might come in.

Slowly people started flowing in and after a few hours the room was full of students from the local art school who'd come to see the space and the paintings. How very comfortable. Hasturvision (our advertisement use telly) had some problems with the connectors, no matter, lively conversation and being happened. I went out to get some more beer and found these two ladies drinking out on the street in the cold. Asked them to join in and after a lengthy explanation of the nature of our event/space, the came along. And turned out they were art students as well. Might have known. =)

Well the party happened, we got a nice group of people, most of them I've never met before who had heard about our space on the radio or from a friend. It was very nice that people found camp hastur, we were well pleased.

On friday, I set off to spend the night there keeping the doors open and wondering what would happen. The town was really quiet, I noticed not too many people walk the streets there later in the night, the bar district is a bit further away and gets all the night time traffic. Some people passed by but were hesitant to come in. Outside, I bumped to this lady who was taking photographs and invited her in. Turned out that she's involved in a community project to bring life into this town through communal art/whatnot projects. Nice!

We had a long chat about the town, it's people, the art-scene and our space. The lady pointed out that Camp Hastur is what you'd call 'a third place', a freeform communication space. Some really interesting questions were brought up in the conversation. Tornio has never had this kind of space and we're curious about the response.

During the party I noticed that some people were hesitant to stay, asking 'is it really ok for us to hang out in here?'. I think the key question is justification. In a bar/coffee shop setting, one buys the justification of being there by buying a drink or whatever. At camp hastur we're bringing up the possibility to have your own exhibition or an event. I sort of woke up to the fact that some might feel that this approach might feel like you have to have an art show in order to hang out at the camp. Anyways it's much easier to buy a cup of coffee than to build an art show. And where does it leave the people who are interested in car-tuning or hunting?

I guess that the point is sharing. Sharing your energy and inspiration is the justification to hang out. Sharing a beer or coffee. Sharing a moment. That's it. And you can share by just dropping by and saying hello.

On our side of the 'fence', hours when nobody comes over to say hello are boring and wasted in commenting on friend's baby pictures on facebook. People in Tornio, let us not go bored, come and say hello.

Camp Hastur opening times and things are on the facebook Camp Hastur page , please keep an eye on the space, comment and share!

Over and out
Sami
Hastur

hanging the singboard

tricky

the signboard just won't hang straight

something looted from the summer camp

Paintings by Mika Hyvärinen

observe the square shelf for ladies handbags =)

Camp Hastur continued

A bit of a break with blogging here, totally swamped with work again. The past weeks we have been coding various things to help the next playtest. Bring out yer admin panels! Bring out your Ramer-Douglas-Peucker algorithms! Bring out yer dead! And the like.

Due to popular demand we decided to find a way to continue having our Camp Hastur here in Tornio. The kulttuurivoimala project to build a collaborative space for creative people got stuck in the wheels of a giant machine and it looked like us creative folks were left with meetings at random coffee shops and dusty school attics like last year. Also Hastur needs an office space for uninterrupted daytime coding.

So last monday I went to talk to Mr. Wille the local photographer about our space conundrum. Wille has this small shop space next to his own and we came up with an Arrangement. The space was previously used by some dude who presented himself as a temp-staff company office businessman. The dude had left the town with a stack of unpaid bills and the space full of recycle-shop junk (we even found a stove there). Rolling tobacco leftovers everywhere, the occasional hypothermic needles behind the sofa.. Must have been a speedy exit for Mr Gonzales.

The place had big holes in the walls that needed to be filled up. Before Mr Speedy, the space was used for a hairdressers and there was all kinds of pipework that had been dismantled leaving big holes. After one day at the office I talked with Wille again to secure the arrangement+ that we will refer to as the New Arrangement. According to the New Arrangement, Wille supplies for paints and things and we renovate. And so we got a-renovating.

the Official Office slash Gallery logo!

The past four days have been a blur of painting and messing around with fillers and things. And coding while waiting for something to dry. Late last night we finished with the walls and that means today is for stripping all the tape and cleaning up. Too bad it started raining heavily, i'd really like to get rid of all the junk furniture inside the space but it's not going to happen today.

The usual cast of characters came over to help out in one way or another, people offering furniture and light fixtures and 70's audio equipment, I feel many really want to participate in building and running the space. One of our friends is building his exhibition at camp hastur next week and we're getting ready for the Grand Opening thats going to be, well, grand =)

No pictures yet but I'll post some next week. It's all about the creativity and the spaces in between!

sami
hastur

Nerdcrafting With JP - This is the Ent

Our designer JP has been busy creating this lovely nerdcrafting video about building your army of Ents! Check it out peeps.

Why I love the parallella project

This week we've been coding the build for our next closed alpha test. Squashing bugs on the droid client, making serverside interestingness and little interfaces to easily manage testers and their groups. The droidside has got some nice power profiling and other things we need to know from our users.

Gps based games can be heavy on the battery if not done right so we're trying to find a sweet spot of power consumption versus reliability. Luckily, the power profiling info on android devices is standard over the platform which means we haven't managed to get anything but zeroes on every single tested device. Hooray! Needs a bit of tweaking then.

So our player handset alpha needs more work, maybe during the weekend we'll get the test version together plus a few tools to analyze the output. The player manual is done so when we have a reliable build, we're ready for another bigger multiplayer test.

For my personal distraction, I have been keeping an eye on the Parallella project. The Gen1 boards are almost ready to ship to kickstarter backers it seems. There are some really clever people on the forum and it's really interesting to follow what they're up to. Andreas Olofsson and the rest of the Adapteva staff are actively participating and navigating the conversation in a nice manner. Nerd rage occurs but doesn't escalate, even N00BS are being dealt with kindness. The forum is one of the best I've followed.

Because of my atari ST demoscene backround, I'm interested of projects that give the epiphany chip a proper trashing. This guy called Notzed is tinkering with Viola-Jones facial recognition algorithm and making really nice progress. Every clock cycle counts here. The strict memory restrictions of the chip and parallelism makes the coder think carefully about what he has to do, I like that. I hope Parallella will trigger an assembly revival among programmers, assembly can be so much fun, you should try it sometime.

So the lesson learned for me is having a great forum totally contributes to the project's success. Cannot wait to get my hands on the board and some free time to mess around with it.

Hmm. Begeistert, the Haiku-Os developer gathering happening next week. Would love to be there but doesn't look likely this year either. Uh oh.

Back to programming!

Sami
Hastur

Helped to build a play set the other day

are those lazers?

another interesting location found playing hoodo

Hasturockin'

We came out somewhat alive!

This years Hasturock came about very nice indeed! We set to plan a very low key garage event with two lights and a projector but that's not how the thing turned out. Luckily! Merja sketched a proper lightning plan at lightning speed and we got the local school and now-defunkt-theater (Tornio town only has money to burn on activities that might produce pro-skiers and pro-ice hockey players) to lend us two truckloads of lights and equipment.

Friday was spent cleaning the venue and pulling 1 kilometer of cables. The fuses of the old building couldn't handle the load at all but out clever technicians solved every party-stopping problem with their industrial-grade tools. Cannot say too much here but VR (finnish railways) runs good current. Totally saved by our techs here =)

The ghetto projection screen was build from these abandoned polystyrene sheets that were lying about the venue plus some vegetable protection sheet thrown in for good measure. The 6 meter wide construction was then attached to the ceiling with the help of fishing line, tape and about 8 broken drumsticks. Totally saved by mr Massa who popped by on his way to a film shoot in Rovaniemi.

Friday night was rough, covered in dust and totally knackered but we got the lights and the screens on and ready for saturday.

Saturday morning there was more tweaking of lights, setting up the stage and finding the perfect location for the kinect used for Z-vector visuals. Slowly the bands came in with all their gear and we saw it best to go home to eat cabbage casserole, it's never a good idea to stick around when there's a soundcheck going on.

Doors opened at six and people started flooding in. I mean, we got one person. Things were really picking up! Our bands loved the venue. The people who came loved the venue. Gradually we got a nice crowd who couldn't believe there was an event going on at a relatively distant location in Tornio. Party happened!

Too much to write here, I'll save all the future celebrity scoop for my controversial memoirs but we crawled back to Camp Hastur at 6 am feeling slightly wobbly. Everybody had their fill of excitement, old friends were met and new friends were made, half eaten hamburgers were warmed up in oven and empty bottles collected.

Today we posted a lot of pictures and things on the facebook page, take a look if you wish. Sound tech slash bassplayer Olli managed to crystallize the essence of Hasturock, the warm and funny do-it-yourself spirit made the day.

Back to the old grindstone with hoodownr, there's a player test to arrange and a gazillion other things to do, another busy week with no partying. Our droid programmer threatened that there will be a new build to test. Gotta keep walking!

yours exhaustedly,
sami
hastur

making artist passes

trischloss brand cream!

shellfish graveyard

tornion syntymättömät ministerit

trischloss setting up

another live saved by ollis madskills!

team rovaniemi

roadcrew dog Veera

our lovely VJ Johanna!