Silence of the Urbex

December 18, 2020

A few months ago I asked a bunch of people to produce or give me an example of how they saw this world right at this moment. Some replied, and the next few weeks, their offerings will be posted in an ongoing series.

The 6th one is by Niels Fabæk. If you like this, do engage and leave a comment. We’d love to hear from you.

This contribution mainly plays out as a gallery. In 2021 I am planning articles on concert photography - Niels will be one of the contributors.

This post is curated by Zaar Riisberg - the artist sent an entire folder of really good shit. We could have posted more. Make sure to catch Niels Fabæk’s concert photography here in the spring of ‘21.

So, what else is fucking new?

June 02, 2019

Well, we have turned About into a sort of splash page which, hopefully, will make for easier navigation for first time visitors. We are looking into self upload on the square space platform, to make it easier for a contributor to autonomously manage their output, making for a more active site, but still curated and debated - this must never become something akin to photo sharing sites - I am pretty sure we all would prefer obscurity to a scenario like that.

But we/I are not funded by anyone or have sources of income. We are basically two contributors at the moment, a number that needs to increase - but we also need to branch out, maybe with a youtube channel. I have personally been slow to do things, but that aspect is nearing an end, as I will put most of my personal shit up on AB and nowhere else.

So we are considering funding, but we do not feel confident that we have enough of a concept yet to start using Patreon for example, or even try and find some start up money. Our branding is reluctant, and it always will be - in short, we do not even want people living on the surface of life to follow the site or contribute.

We want a paradigm shift in how you consume art, popular culture and the like. Do not just scratch the surface, break it instead, stick your arm in and yank something out - anything - be it black, dark and nasty or indeed white, lofty and positive. Real art is not easy, it is fucking hard - it breaks you and kills you only to build you up again, it flies in the face of corruption and never aids it - you want proof? Take Salvador Dali, the only thing that exonerates this fascist asshole (he was a prick of a human being), is his incredible art. Ezra Pound, HP Lovecraft etc - the list is long of people that partially did not know any better, or were just bad apples. That will never keep me from reading them on my terms, or marvel at their output. Such is the power of art.

/Zaar Riisberg

Lasse Fischer // Window Pains

February 25, 2019

Come closer, squish your face against the windowpane, and let me trace the pale outline of your cheek with my finger.

Doesn’t it feel safe?
It does for me.

And when you remove your face from the glass you leave behind a greasy stain, and I can continue fingering your outline for hours on end until you return.
Sometimes I pace around my room in the dark while I frantically, and with a harsh jerking of the neck, look at the window to check it every time I pass.

It glows with a cool blue light, and it is filled with outlines of the faces, the faces I caress.
Whenever I lie on my side in the bed, with my legs tugged up under me, resting my head on my stretched out arm, and my hand in a ninety degree angle, I do not surrender willingly to sleep.
I keep my eyes on the glass.

I lie in fear of blinking.
I lie in fear of absence of the light.

When I finally close my eyes there is nothing but an unending parade of rooms.
The faces do not press themselves up against the windows in here, in here I am alone, and I have no outlines to trace. I am separated from the light and the glass by the lids in front of my eyes.

Bathed in sweat I awake.

I keep my mouth open, ready to scream, but nothing ever comes out. My breathing is too shallow to create the explosion, so instead I chew on the air, like a fish lying on shore. Trying to make sure that the mechanics aren’t broken I feel for the rising motion of my chest, resting my hands on my ribs. The sensation of touch confirms that the function is maintained.

The blue window attracts more faces.
Their breaths fog op the glass.

‘Something is not right. Something seems off.’ The thought is fleeting, and even though the feeling lingers longer than the thought it too soon dissolves over the faces in the blue light. I take my hands off my increasingly protruding ribs and press them against the light making two stark silhouettes of something human on top something less than that.

There is something between the face and my hands, something that draws my finger to the cheek every time. It pulls on my elbow, it commands my sinew, and it makes my brain fire its neurons. I slip my tongue over my lips and spread saliva on the dried skin, feeling the rough edges as the organ goes from one end of the orifice to the other.

Nothing else lies outside my room and the surface of the window.
I continue living, forever haunted by the thought that the blue light one day might fade and disappear.

Artballistics Editorial // We are more than Photography

February 17, 2019

We are about process, art, critique. Critique is needed to create better. We are about video as well as stills, about canvas as well as technique. We hold each other to a higher standard, while we seek to appeal to not only a few. The focus of Artballistics is the ‘worthwhile’, the opposite of thumbing, as it were. Just like sex, art and creation get better and more immersive the more you focus on it.

I have asked some people to participate that bewildered tell me they are not photographers. It was never the intention of AB to be exclusionist in that way, which Eskild Krogh’s contributions show. You have to think of AB as a reaction to ‘the new old world’. We were entering an age of science, arts and reason when it, quite literally, blew up in our faces because we forgot to educate the broad masses - oh, and oops, did not eliminate poverty.

We have entered an age of stupidity and greed instead - the age of the CEO, corporate shells and a system that only sees you as a consumer. To combat that we need charm, art, humor, satire, wit and guile. We need to eliminate the noise and focus.

New stuff includes 2 new blogs coming up and stuff from Rubenstein and Sabine.

Zaar Riisberg // You Live, You Learn - going back to Flickr and other concessions

December 08, 2018

I am not at all deterred when it comes to keep doing Artballistics.com - namely, because I think there is a need for this stuff. There is a need to oppose modern art for its shallowness, and there is a need to continually evoke the kid from The Emperor’s New Clothes and follow his example.

But ‘how’ is still something I debate with myself. Hard lining it, and saying that it has to be original work all the way, is not working. I understand, that I am at the center of this, but I am nearing the end of one of the worst journeys of my life. I know what I have to do here on AB, I know what I should do commercially and artistically AND personally. But I do not have a leg to stand on, a pot to piss in or a famous window to throw it out of - and I refuse to be boxed in. If the trip gets too comfortable, I am still the kind of person that will punch the self eject button during a calm flight - the storm is just more interesting, and turbulence makes for a fun ride. Yeah, the ground is hard when you crash into it. Fuck the ground. Leap.

I still want contributors and suggestions, but I should probably ‘tap’ people and ask for contributions from people that I find interesting, and I have been entertaining the idea of changing my IG to an account for AB, because it would make more sense for me to go back to Flickr, because what I need more than anything else, is an ‘organiser’, so customers can easily browse my stuff when given a non public link - until I get a hidden, digital catalog made.

I do want to brand AB, and we have ideas for weekly content. But me, and the people I count on, have heavy real life issues to deal with. For me, I should make the change that my personal website and AB is where I express my self and my views and nowhere else. It is a no brainer, really. But anyone that knows me for real (that would be my mother, basically), knows that I am exceedingly thorough, and though I do not shy away from conflict, I am always pre meditating in the shadows, before I leap at your throat, and I seldom, very seldom do anything in affect.

I wrote a piece on Facebook a while back, that I am posting here. I have a few other classic posts that I will move here, I invite the other contributors to do the same, and I will thin the categories and make the site more poignant going forward. Or wait, until you see that I really will follow through. I understand, if some people liken me with crying wolf on AB. All I can say, is that this project was born out of the storm of my life, and I will never fucking let it go, even if it is only me and a few others.

Lasse Fischer // Shades of Armenian Grey // Part III

March 30, 2018

Day two
They had trapped us in a room with soft zigzag carpets and a ceiling impossible far away from the floor. They made us stand in a circle - Wait; there was something before the carpets and circles. Outside the snow made its way from the heavens down onto the mountainside, layering the black rock with a soft white powder. Being surrounded by walls surrounded by mountains made a nice frame for the hangovers I had to endure.

I woke up dizzy and crawled down the polished marble steps, down to the pool were an elderly Armenian gentleman opened the locked door leading into the pool area despite him not understanding a word I was saying. We shook hands and nodded. The pool was empty, and after gasping my way through a few lanes of angst provoking lack of oxygen I laid on my back floating in the water, staring at the ceiling. My brain gently bobbing up and down within its cranial juice, following the rhythm of the blue liquid in the pool, as it recovered from the pomegranate marinade. Something loosened up inside of me and my body rose an inch in the water. Was one of the components of freedom distance? The water carried me and my thought to the edge of the pool. I stayed there floating long after I had a shower, put on my clothes, and went to eat breakfast. The sensation of hovering above ground, using my body in different physics, followed me like a shadow. I tried washing it away in the shower, but to no avail, it stayed attached to my feet. On my way to my room a glittering luggage transporter drove me outside the hotel doors, where I was confronted with the mountains. It seemed like they had bent the land around them to their will, and I understood why the soil and the trees bowed their heads and backed out of the way for these juggernauts of geography. They had a power over their surroundings, an unspoken agreement with the world that they persevered, watching over the earth, as the rest of reality rose and fell. In the depths of my situation, the wet and shiny eyes of the day after drinking, I too could sense the immense back catalogue of thoughts that had been projected onto their silent and stoic bodies, as I bent my neck, searching for the end of the massive wall of rock. My stomach grumbled. I had neglected to eat all morning, and to see to it that my vessel would carry me through a day of the never ending discipline of team building.

Returning to the subject of carpets. They made us stand in a circle. The shoes of the participants were all pointed to the middle of the zigzag carpet. A young smartly dressed guy talked about an exercise in teambuilding. I had always hated the idea of networking and being social, making contacts, because the words left somewhat of a metallic taste in my mouth. Maybe I should stop biting down so hard when they emerged. My eyes followed instead the lines on the floor, and I fell in to the light brown crevices between the black and blue stripes. When I came back up I was making a tower out of spaghetti, tape, and a magenta colored string. We skewered a marshmallow on top of the construction and came third in the competition. I sighed, and yesterday’s vapors filled the conference room. We applauded ourselves. A room filled with masturbatory youth workers. I jerked along with the others. Reflective store fronts and structured beams started rising from the zigzag carpet. They had followed me into this hotel in the middle of nowhere. They manifested themselves in the room between the participants. I took a step back as one sprang up from beneath my feet. I felt myself growing irritated. There was apparently no complete escape as long as people sought it out, this feeling of things being hollowed out. A string tugged at my wallet.

Day three
Cream gave me shit for my writing. She thought it could be funnier. It was fun for me though. The situation, the sweaty hands, the smell of feet, the insecure glances and the whole setup was somewhat ridicules. Hold that thought a second; we have to do an energizer game. After being turned into a chicken, a penguin, a human, and lastly a wise human I returned to the notion of
being more fun.