In August 2008 HIAP began a workshop on art and language led by Karlotta Blöndal, artist, editor and founder of the Icelandic visual arts magazine Sjonauki. Guest lecturers included artists Teemu Mäki and Lena Seraphin. There were also visits to look at artists books, research,and to drink champagne for a euro a glass.

One of our key decisions as a group was to redigest a seminal text we had all previosuly consumed as students. In the process of deconstruction and reconstruction the artists also formed a shooting club with the purpose to penetrate the text according to Walter Benjamin's many references to shooting, ballistics and penetration, in the work we chose, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

We shot the text at Helsinki Shooting Club. Alarmingly, quite a few artists had previous experience of handling guns. I did not and after the event I am more scared of them now than I was before. We shot Rugger and Magnum hand guns. So, we must all justify our actions now.

To shoot a gun is to commit an act of violent destruction. Even with the best sights and target practice we could not predict how much we would obliterate. But in terms of the aesthetics of Futurism, it is hard to deny there is some attraction in the smells, sounds, feelings and actions of shooting. Gunpowder, the weight of the instrument, pride in accuracy, competition, technology, the purity of the marks made, the reaction of the body when the energy of each small explosion turns on the body and is absorbed.

Something has happened. Something new has been made.