Aapo Nikkanen in conversation with Perwana Nazif
Although Aapo Nikkanen is resistant to calling some of the found texts poetry in >be me - a collection of greentexts, his first book, launched at the Salon de Normandy, does read like it at times. Instead he describes the sourced text from 2010-15 of popular website 4chan as, per the introduction to his book, “anonymous short stories”. The short stories, purported to be true by the users who post them, range from rummaging through a friend’s iTunes library to find only one song playing by Linkin Park with 30,000 plays to stealing from a 7-11 in order to pay the total at checkout. More often than not, and unlike these 10-line stories, we see problematic language and stereotypes at play in various stories offering up the book as more of a study on the use of words on the (uncensored) internet and the ideation behind memes or crass humor operating on such problematic and often mysoginistic, racialized, and homophobic means. While in no way is this book advocating for censorship or against free speech, it does, for myself, at least, question the violent implications of such word and idea usage under the guise of humour that is then replicated and reproduced constantly via memes and re-posts and re-blogs and so on. Nikkanen’s works often take on a collaborative approach and are very community-oriented so it makes complete sense to me for his first book to be one a study of a particular Internet community of sorts that has essentially blown up and become notorious. Below you will find our chat on not only the book and its implications, but his larger practice and the ideation behind the Salon de Normandy as well—and I was very resistant to quoting his responses in greentext you will find!
https://www.instagram.com/aapoxaapo/
http://www.greentext.org/
Your practice often takes on a collaborative form and we can see that most especially with your work with the Community. How was the collective and art space founded and what is your role in it?
The Community was originally - and still is - essentially a group of friends. What we have in common is that the founders are Finnish but all of us have a very international background, which means that we’ve [been] studying, working and living abroad. For example in my case it means that I have three university degrees from three different countries and it’s [been] almost ten years since I have been living outside of Finland. All of us share similar paths of exploring the world and then meeting and becoming friends in Paris. We all come from different creative backgrounds, and The Community was founded not only because we wanted to do something together, but because we wanted to do something multidisciplinary and inclusive, which we felt was underrepresented in Paris at the time.
In our collective the roles are not set in stone, but as I have an artistic practice my strengths are on the creative side. My input ranges everywhere from ideating projects, curating, installation design and of course being involved in the artworks we create as a collective. But when needed, we have all shared the joy for things such as mopping the floor and going to get drinks for the events. When we have client work, which we regularly do in order to fund the exhibition program of The Community, I feel I’m very capable in creating concepts and helping the client to get their vision to the next level, as well as in installation-, space- and set-design, which I’ve done a lot of.
What was the motivation behind the Salon de Normandy?
As you might be aware we left our old space in Chateau d’Eau in 2018 in order to expand into a bigger space in 2019. Unfortunately we had a stroke of bad luck involving a zoning issue and water damage, which left us like a man at sea who hopes to move. We really wanted to do a new kind of event that looks like us, and the hotel contact came through a mutual friend who knew we were looking for a space. So it was a combination of will, coincidence and being a bit crazy.
>be me - a collection of greentexts is your first book and is a study not only on anonymity, but also on Internet speak particularly the language of 4chan in the abbreviations section. What sort of linguistic patterns did you notice and maybe even some larger shifts or trends in language today, on a general level and extending beyond 4chan?
I like that you used the expression “Internet speak”, I feel it’s a much better description than the word “language” for example. I see Internet speak as a way of communicating that makes language more suitable for smartphones and computers. In general I think the borders between on- and offline expressions are already gone, like I said, it’s more of a question of practicality, more about being faster when typing and then using online terms in general talk if they fit the mouth, like lol for example.
For me it’s more interesting to think things like the origins and evolution of expressions. I feel it’s really hard to [distinguish] which parts of the general language trends are born on- and offline, but online culture definitely makes expressions explode. Take for example the use of the word “literally”. For me it’s impossible to tell if the use of the word “literally” in every possible turn originated from online or offline, but what I can say for sure is that the very common reply in multitudes of platforms - “literally this” - which is often used to either emphasize previous comments or a sign of a meme, helped explode the use of the word in literally every occasion. I live in Paris, and it was very interesting to notice how the expression crossed the language barrier and became as common in French casual discussions as it had already become in English before.
In regards to >be me - a collection of greentexts, I feel it’s important to make a distinction between the greentexts presented in the book and the general Internet speak or slang. Whereas greentexts obviously use a lot of expressions born online, they have their own very particular structure, which differs greatly from the general language used online.
Would you call these found texts poetry?
No, although some of them are oddly poetic.
You refer to >be me - a collection of greentexts as the first “Internet-born literary genre”. Can you expound on this genre?
Yes, the greentexts have their own, very specific structure, which was born as the result of the collective intelligence of the users of 4chan. All the users of 4chan are anonymous, so basically what happened was that one day one of the users decided to tell a story in a strange statement kind of way, quoting his or her own life. So, this person used the quote function that colors the text green - hence called greentexts. By the way, the quote function is one of the very few functions the users have in 4chan, because it’s a super archaic forum - it looks the same as it did 15 years ago. Anyways, this way of telling a story became a meme inside the forums of 4chan, and it was quickly refined and expanded into what I see as its own literary genre. I base this claim on the facts that greentexting has a clear structure and set of unwritten rules. All the stories follow the rule of quoting oneself in an oddly poetic statement like internet slang. It’s hard to describe the style in a context of an interview, but if one reads the book, it becomes clear pretty fast.
What is the relation of the hanging patchwork you displayed at the Salon to the book, if any?
There’s no relation really. Although I studied at first as a painter, my artistic practice has always been going [in] a lot [of] directions, and then our journey with The Community has expanded it even further. I’ve always felt that the form should follow the idea or the inspiration, which is obviously a horrible thing career-wise, it’s not very marketable compared to one distinct medium and style. The patchwork is a direct result of our embroidery club called T.E.C., Tissue Evolution Club. It started as an open for all hand embroidery club, like an old ladies sewing club, totally hobbyist thing, with two of my friends Alex Kelvi and Zoé Renié Harris. None of us had any experience in hand embroidery but we felt drawn to it as a kind of a hobby activity to hang out, drink wine and do something together. And also [to make] our own clothes instead of buying them.
But as often happens, we got more and more into it and it started to expand to other areas of my practice as well. The patchwork that was shown in Hotel de Normandy was a commissioned piece that will remain in the hotel. As often with The Community, we wanted to use found materials, and we found all these crazy really old curtains that the hotel staff were going to throw away. I cut, hand dyed and sewed pieces of the curtains together into an abstract piece, which I hope can transmit the feeling of warmth and familiarity, but in a non-nostalgic way.
You’ve mentioned that you are also currently working on an audio-visual project with Finnish musician Aleksi Kipahti that is ultimately aiming to create a post-futurist narrative. What does a post-futurist narrative mean or what can it mean and implicate?
We are actually right now working on this project near Vigo, in Spain. We started with the idea of creating a post-futuristic narrative that follows the all-encompassing approaches taken by bands like Drexciya or Deltron 3030. Drexciya created a myth of an underwater country populated by the unborn children of pregnant African women thrown off of slave ships, and Deltron 3030 centers around the fight of a protagonist named Deltron Zero against huge corporations that rule the universe. What made these projects special for us is that the worlds that they created included everything from the very beginning. The images were not plastered on top after the music had been produced, but everything followed the same narrative from the very start. After we started to work on the project - which is called 2093 - we soon started to question the idea of creating fantasy narrative. We felt at this time of ecologic and economic turmoil, we need something that’s real. So that’s what we decided to do. 2093 is almost a philosophical or spiritual path, which can help in personal transformation. We hope it could help people towards authenticity, freedom and joy.
Futurist narratives are also heavily discussed and promoted in 4chan and I wonder if you happened upon this at all during your work for the book. You can find a large community of the alternative right on 4chan and particularly those who believe in a specific futurity with the “Take back our future!” slogan—rhetoric that idealizes pasts tainted with xenophobic and racist ideals. This fashwave movement involves retro aesthetics that desire apocalyptic death vis a vis art that looks like it belongs to Bladerunner. While this particular form of futurity takes on extremely problematic, fascist, and racist approaches to the future, there have also been in abundance various emancipatory and revolutionary futurist narratives in cultural dialogues today. Both types of narratives however have a specific manipulation of the temporal in either desiring the past in the future or imagining impossible pasts in order to reconfigure futures. What sorts of temporal limitations or manipulations are at play in the post-futurist narrative you are creating?
Very good question. First of all, I used to love a forum called politically incorrect on 4chan, which was THE place to find the most wacko conspiracy theories, to the limit that it was scary to realize that some of the people actually believed in them. There has always been some extreme right propaganda on that forum due to the fact that 4chan is anonymous and pretty much uncensored. However, during my research and collection of material for my book, I noticed a big change not only there, but on the other sites I used to collect material from. Suddenly some hard core right wing agitators started popping up, neo nazis basically, and they started to flood the forums and comment sections with their propaganda. For them it was a very effective move, because they took over parts of the internet. Many places online that used to be neutral are now right to extreme right. Politically incorrect-forum in 4chan is one of these places. The far right has been very inventive in their tactics, highjacking pepe the frog, creating the soyboy meme or fashwave that you mentioned are few examples of this. It is scary, and I feel that the left doesn’t take meme’s or trolling seriously enough, it’s not like all those teens and young adults just woke up one day and decided to wear MAGA-hats.
I’m not sure how much I want to reveal about 2093 at this point. Let’s say that we want to reclaim the narratives that are traditionally been used to target and take advantage of those going through challenging periods in their lives, and use them for good.
Interview Perwana Nazif
