P2P: April 2012

12 April 2012

Hyperaapinen

the night has it. we haven't sat around the same table in four months. tonight we do, and it's one we've sat around a few times per year in the past four. most of the furniture of the four room apartment is gone, moved to a flat in the city center. there is just a couple of months of the rent agreement left with the kitchen equipped, the table in place.

the discussion circles around new lands to be conquered, by them. not only will the table be left behind, so will helsinki, finland, europe - whatever. the canary islands form into a topic, and I remember all the hundreds of kilometers driven around three of them.

“it's all very rural. the tourist towns have sucked most of the people from the inland, and the ones who stayed are left to live a life very secluded. the roads were bad - though that was fifteen years ago, and one of the cars we rented was a jeep... did you know know you can hitchhike onto boats, like, container ships? fuck the tourist towns, you can go around the harbors and hitch a ride to madagascar.”

from the loot room, meaning the room filled with stuff that can be freely carried out, one finds old demo collections from the early nineties, a book with drinking songs for the people studying to become engineers, and, hyperaapinen - a product of the hypermedia laboratory in tampere, released in 1993. requiring just 8mb of ram, we run it on dos.

what can minds do but blow in a twenty year old three-d-environment: a house to move inside with several rooms opening up behind the entrance hall, in the corner of which a silver robot tells you “I am bug the robot. you shall have no other robots before me.”

walking through the house, we see the crazy multimedia content produced by a group of academic nerds. like, an educational role-playing game where one is a young reporter in tampere. round after round we keep on getting fired for drinking punch in a bar called “hirmuinen känni [formidable state of drunkenness],” calling the police with a cellphone asking “mitä jeppe [what's up copper],” and walking for kilometers to reach nowhere, the strain of which is expressed in a boring screen image and a counter that runs the seconds for a very long time...

back at hyperaapinen itself we end up in a room with a radio that plays only station 666. inside another, on a table sits a computer with a flat screen. while most of us had no conception of flat screens in the early nineties f-land, in reality plasma technology was invented already in 1964 illinois.

the only explanation that covers the phenomenon of them being known in tampere twenty years ago, and, well, covers hyperaapinen too in its totality, lie in something a friend of mine currently living there said to me, some days ago: “tampere is a spiritual city.”