****~ (4/5)

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Sometimes a piece of art seems pointless until you read the artist’s intention. At other times, it is so much better if you don’t. The latter is the case with “New Swedes”.

The piece is a collection of modified dolls mounted on a wall on individual red shelves. The idea is simple. Each doll has had its head screwed off and replaced by one belonging to a different doll. We get a dancing señorita with a cowboy’s head, a bulldog with a little girl’s head, a fat naked woman’s body with a baby doll head, and so on and so forth. Each item is a piece of art on its own, and can be read in a unique way, and each of them challenges both of the two representations combined. This throws into focus the methods of character design and popular symbolism which are used to project a certain idea. Mocking the forms in which we are served the ideas of prettiness, hypermasculinity, sexuality, monstrousness, heroism and innocence breaks down the message and reveals the alphabet. I love it. The idea may be simple, but it’s effective, fun and speaks in a direct, visual level straight into our media-encrusted brains.

And what was the artist’s explanation? What was the intention of the piece? It’s meant to be – or explained to be – a representation of immigrant populations in Sweden, the idea of combining two cultures to make something new. How boring. How simplistic. And what an odd implication – as if being an immigrant in a new country is anything like screwing off your head and replacing it with another one, or that immigrants are then freaks made up of an equal distribution of two essences.

So, I forgot about the tag card and went on to stare at each doll in turn, and I left the museum feeling thrilled. A highly recommended piece. Just ignore the card.

“New Swedes” is currently on display in Kiasma, the Helsinki Museum of Modern Art.

**½~~ (2.5/5)

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I love Internet services with an unhealthy love, so I was excited to receive my Google Wave preview invite last weekend. I wasn’t entirely sure what the core idea behind it was when I put my name on the invite request list, or, well, what the point of it was, and I was eager to find out.

Forget the complicated Google Wave introduction on Wave.Google.com. Ignore the long video. It’s just making a simple thing seem complicated. Google Wave is just a browser-run messaging application with some extended capabilities and a sad lack of cross-platform-compatibility.

Can it be used like an email service? Yes, I suppose it can, because it’s possible to compose a long message with attachments and images before you “share” it with anyone. Sharing is the same as sending it, but called sharing because the account receiving it will have access to all previous entries in the same “wave” (chat). If that person is online, though, the follow-up becomes very much like an IM conversation, as they see what you’re typing as you type it and can reply at any moment.

Google suggests the service can be useful in brainstorming sessions and online meetings. I can’t help but think that project planning would work out better if the comments could be grouped, like separating comments made to specific comments in the wave, rather than have all the comments listed in linear order under the original message. Without that, I don’t see how using Wave for online meetings is substantially different from using a chatroom.

At the moment the service has only two widgets/extensions, one of which, the Map extension, looks promising. Being able to send routes and locations through the wave without using a different service is certainly a tempting prospect. Now if it only worked! It seems the extension is currently just a preview or an ad, because I have found no way to actually use it.

While the service is currently rather pointless, it’s promising. With the addition of a wider choice of widgets and customisable options, this might become something interesting, and with the hype that it’s already collecting, it might well be the next Twitter. After all, who thought anyone would really be interested in having several 160-word updates on other people’s lives every day?

Edit: Forgot to mention that it is at the moment impossible to delete waves entirely. They can only be trashed or unfollowed, meaning Google will hang on to them for now.