the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…
over at the Pakhuis de Zwijger offices, a too-short meeting with some of the staff, to explore research methodologies that extend into art-making. one hour simply is not enough to generate dialogue — it is good only for talking about issues at people. not with people. the network develops at the speed of life. later, dialogues spring up out of the initial meeting context, with vigor — accentuating the problematic one-hour theory. dialogues which are the point and an expression of (my) methodology per se.
also met the current keyworx development crew, Lodewijk & Jokke. to see the whole new Open Source paradigm, including the web-based patcher. looking forward to alpha and beta testing!
trying to get more job applications in, but time is so packed with meetings, there is only peripheral possibility. but the UNSW/COFA one is in and good. at least the interview process will be in hand whilst in Sydney.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other — fatal — moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feedback loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walk man: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard
is it worth it in the end?