tech-no-madic meditations

Beginning with art
Art is an accumulation of ways of going and ways of doing. Art is the configuring of energy flows in a lot more than ten thousand ways in order that they become part of a transmitting dance, a dialectic movement of energy between beings. Those configurations are mediations positioned between two beings: they are carriers of energy from one to an Other and back again. The movement of these mediated or packaged energies is the essence of creativity. Creativity is not a peak experience, it is continuous and powerfully cyclic. Blocking energies is anti-creative and ultimately a blocked state may not be maintained when confronting the natural movement and flow of energy. Blocks appear to be placed by a manifestation of consciousness which disregards (or has learned to disregard) ambient and raw chaotic energy movements.

Leaving Newton behind
There is no reason for us to slog through a life that is subjected to materialistic 17th century attitudes and mechanistic points-of-view. Mechanistic (Newtonian) physics is an observational model, complete and self-contained under very limited conditions. Its applied pinnacle is the Age of Industry. That age represents the peak of exploitative systemization and ideation of rational thought.

It spun off a process of objectification and subjectification that has left us with the ills of property and object ownership and the ensuing concept that these artificially defined parameter-sets can actually be possessed. We should have left that position behind decades ago, had we paid even marginal attention to Einstein, the concepts of quantum physics, and the general suspicion by many except western intellectuals that life is energy in motion and is precious in every moment. It is time to move on into the present of quantum physics, or at least into a realm of models and points-of-view that agree with several thousand years of well-developed Chinese philosophy — models grounded in the expression “all is energy,” and energy is life (and maybe even spirit). And that the illusory profusion of objects filling our sensual inputs are merely transitory configurations of energy. Energy cannot be owned, it may only be allowed or denied transmission across our temporal event horizon. Forget the accumulation of objects both abstract and real, instead, focus on the momentary revolution of energized dialogue in every human contact no matter how distant and removed.

Art-as-communication-as-art: Dialogues
Creativity is …

More details about art and performance
Actions accumulate whether or not there is consciousness, or even self-consciousness. This accumulation of actions, of energized movement, is movement-as-performance-as-art. It is a concept that faces the same mechanistic reception that art-as-communication does. The accumulated actions of life defy or defile documentary ritual. Partly because the observed is shifted by the observer. Changed. Partly because the document is not the act itself and any reduction of the fullness of life is bound to fail the test of presence. Why accept the same mechanistic rites that are de rigeur for embalming those historical objects that are the cumulative dead flotsam of the art world? Just act, do, be, perform. There is art and then there are art institutions, histories, structures, hierarchies, and a huge refuse heap of materialized things.

Thank god for Fluxus!
Or at least all the individuals who dialectically intersected under that cloud and were dampened by a rain of vital ideas and doings. Together, their interlocked pathways are a substantial manifestation of movement (not a tired art historical movement, either!) Anarchic doings that accurately reflected on and embodied and even was life itself. But Fluxus was only special because it came from life and at least momentarily pierced the fog of materialism that the art world cloaks itself in. Viewed from outside the rarefied confines of that fog, Fluxus is nothing special, or is everything special, because it is just life. Period. It is the echoing energies of transitory path-crossings. Dialectic confrontations and collaborations that were powerful enough to induce wonder at serious temporal and physical distances.

Some nomads
A nomad does not leave traces in the matrix of visual signs and objects. The nomad does leave many traces in the essential — in essences – impressions applied passively onto living energy systems. The Butterfly Effect. Swirling through the in-between, the bardo of becoming, the bardo of leaving. That measureless gap between two states-of-being. But somehow never actually arriving. The home of the nomad is a space immediately behind the apprehending eye. Life for this nomad is a series of brief meetings, encounters with the other. And the other looks on the encounter with the nomad as a brush with the ethereal, the void. With any close look into the eyes of the nomad, the other sees home, an inaccessible home that is gone when the gaze ends. The nomad is at home always, the nomad performs at home.

Here and now. Be here now. Was there then. And in between there is pure awareness of how one arrives and how one leaves.

(Pseudo)nomads
In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle alight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.

The sky-scraper stands shadowing the physical self as the ultimate manifestation of the material Age of Industry. Turning around from this retrospective, eyes still dilating in the deepening shadow that stretches across the shrinking self, there, Babel-towering over head is the edifice of the Information Age. That shape-shifting edifice is Life-Style. It has no common social locus but rather embodies the fantastic and distributed presence of hierarchic global networks. There is a definite place for (pseudo)nomads in this structure. They are the promoters and producers and simultaneously, the perfected consumers. The techno-fetishists, oiled and gleaming skins with secret odors of plastic and metal, hair blazing in a variety of artificial colors, clothing sleek and clean, with alchemical accoutrements of chrome, molybdenum, vanadium, and titanium. They sit at terminals, eyes reflecting the ever-changing scenes. They are pose-able props in places of transit, they drive late model vehicles, they move through airports, hotels, underground shopping malls, and parking garages at all the same harmonic high speed – the speed of the Kalyuga, the last age of the Hindi time cycle, when the complete seduction of fantasy is due to take over all human endeavor. It could be that they used to be called the imperialist vanguard, back when the name was self-applied, back when Life-Style was more centralized, more focused on and applied to the edifice of physical empire. But conditions have revolved, memory is digital and discontinuous, and now the center is everywhere, the perimeter is ringed by the delocalized and networked center. The vanguard becomes the Other, apparently, never the Self.

A Closer Look at the Edifice of Life-Style
It embodies the entire projected reach of globalization, consumer fetish, and the materialization every whim and fantasy. It projects a uniformity of being and a homophobia towards the Other more virulent than any previous oppressive ideology – woven into the warped threads of sexism, racism — to the extreme that the Other must become the same or become nothing at all. It is omnipresent and changes its skin every day. Its appearance and being are only skin deep, yet it stretches to envelope the soul. Faustus. Its reach is infinitely small because the human self is constricted, compacted and appended to a materialistic world-view of intellectual and physical property and ownership. Life-Style then needs only to expand into small space of the abandoned self. Skin deep. Soul flown, it is easy.

The Nomad embodies Home
Home is constructed and defined by dominant world-views. In the space of speed, flows, and constant energy flux, home cannot be accepted as a specified geometric (Cartesian) place, it may exist only as an internal state-of-being. This factor, combined with the everywhere of Life-Style, leaves the nomad with little choice. In the End, the nomad, the true nomad, the Other who once moved along an abstract range of physical pathways is forced to move within, hiding the home behind shaded eyes that reflect the edifice, but do not absorb it. Moving, moving, moving.

A tech-no-mad briefly tells his story
The son of Amurikan mobility, born to ride the Alaska Highway, the longest continuous strip of gravel road in existence at the time, south from the 50th state, the largest, to the lower 48 states of the Union. Where transcontinental military-industrial ribbons wrapped up the world as it was know at the time.

Been to all 50 states at one time or another.

Then suddenly end up in Iceland. “For the love of a woman,” though the dubiousness of that glib rejoinder did not foresee the end as it was. Iceland, where direct transfusions of infected Viking lamb blood forced the abandonment of the car to travel through the air and by boat. No more rubber tire whining, now only the wail of ozone-holed charged particles rubbing across the sleek metal skin a couple centimeters from the face, and the throbbing diesel vibes of archipelago-foraging shopping malls. Baltic rim. The sea that is getting shallower by the day, relieved of the load of kilometers-thick glacier icing, retreating: and granting extreme tribes from the south and east settling rights five thousand years ago today.

Been building global networks by whatever tenuous means of mediation available at the time. From the mysteries of placing small packages of paper in the post box to packet-switching technologies. The dance began, tenuously, but building strength not in volume but in sincerity and sustainability.

Anyway, five years of mostly Viking haunts. Squinting in the low-angle light-shining-bright-off-water. Blue eyes filtering the ozone-holed ultraviolet. Desperate to be in more southern latitudes where the sun is a vertical totem at least some of the time. Living out of a suitcase. Kitchen is an Opinel vegetable knife and an old metal film can of dried jalapeño pepper skin and seeds.

Fluxus energies brought me to a performance in a small semi-basement room that was the locus of Al Hansen’s Ultimate Akademie in Köln, one day in May 1996. “naming” was a spontaneous three-hour remembering of 365 days of movement from 21 June 1995 to 21 June 1996. Where, with whom, and when.