posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

about eight dialogues

sotto voce: to Carmin Karasic:

As a participant but also as a networking artist I can totally concur with your observations and recommendations about the PORT experience… Of course, the issue of exclusivity I have already pointed out a number of times on the listserv — something that should always be kept in mind — how accessible the works are to different users (given that only 10% of the world’s population has telephones… uh…).

I find the preparation and planning issue critical — all too many online projects that I have been invited to participate in or at least check out end up as confused and/or non-operational non-events hobbled by poor preparation, untested technical parameters, and related problems. PORT, thanks to good support seemed less prone than many projects to this kind of failure…

My invited participants in eight dialogues can attest that I was bugging them for weeks about testing out IRC connections prior to each dialogue, but I think it paid off in seven out of the eight events going smoothly and only one failure/permutation as a result of a major backbone failure on the national grid…

In retrospect, I thought I should have prepared weekly statements and reminders like Rick did to prime the listserv and others for the event…

I would like to have seen more of the events myself, but my working hours cut into most of them (although at work I had set up an WinNT machine with most of the gadgets needed to view), it is a pity that some of them couldn’t have been “recorded” in their entirety and replayed, impossible with the combination of mediums…

But, there is no doubt that this has been a fruitful exhibition, and I am especially appreciative of the technical support, the facilitative prowess of Remo and Robbin, and, of course, interacting with some/all of you on the listserv (I, for one, would definitely like to be on all of your announcement lists for future projects!). Thanks to all!

 

Well, it is finished, at least in form. My highest hope would be fulfilled if this project somehow spins off the inspiration to others to at least attempt the arduous task of dialogue with an Other. Other-wise, we have no hope for the future, do we? If we cannot speak from the heart to the Other…

I would sincerely like to thank the eight Others who were so generous to join in on this project, and especially for their patience in negotiating the sometimes tedious technical details. I would also like to thank the organizers of the PORT exhibition, Remo Campopiano and Robbin Murphy for their tireless dedication and energy in making this project and the entire PORT exhibition possible…

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Dialogue 3

The third Dialogue for PORT MIT, this one with Leslee Broersma, was supposed to have taken place today. Technical difficulties precluded it from happening in the form that I had planned.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

stupid bowl

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

eight dialogues starts

The intro IRC test session was interesting. Willa showed up on her lunch break, Robbin, one of the PORT curators dropped in, and Terhi, from Helsinki appeared. There were some minor technical hiccups, but generally thing worked out. Josephine had some trouble, but it ended up that she was on the wrong network, and so couldn’t find us.

 

I stay indoors all day. Why is it that I don’t want to go out. I should. But IceLand has made me completely abhor being cold. Now, if it was 75F or hotter, I would be out. Shirt off, hat on. Sun screen on my poor over-exposed nose. But it is chilly out, and I can’t make myself go out. Whatever. I had dreams again last night, but they are lost in the brilliance of the sun rising up over Mingus Mountain across the valley. It is especially bright because of all the snow. Flagstaff, to the north got up to 40 inches of snow and is still held in that slow powdery embrace. Now I watch the Simpsons. What am I doing this for? My back is trashed sitting in the lab, I don’t have a good chair in there, and I think that is the main problem with my back. And so it goes. Fragments from public television:

His body is strong, and he loves it
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones
 

Adrianne posts me this excerpt of a review she has written about Blast for January’s Intelligent Agent — it includes:

_John Hopkins_, photographer and writer, proves an active theorist/theory activist as an artist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented – creating an empty space between one participant and the other which, in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art.
 

I am grateful that she takes the time and energy to not only support my work, but to actively frame it in within the context of her prodigious and ongoing experience in the arts.

 
posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

rules & hints

Slogging through things here. Spent the afternoon down at the LANKaster On-line office. Swimming, too. Cold now, only 8˚F last night without wind chill. Scotty comes by to make an estimate on finishing the wallboard in the kitchen so I can paint it. He was highly recommended by Jim and Janet and seems to do good work. He’ll come back to do the work tomorrow so I can get to the painting on Thursday. The kitchen should look pretty good between the paint and the stripped floor. My folks will be happy to get it done as they are having trouble dealing with all the rearranging required to do the work. The Christmas tree is up. I didn’t really help with that. I am not much of a Christmas/holiday person. I very much rather have a quiet time with friends rather than family. Of course, being totally broke doesn’t help. What with the incredible pressure to CONSUME at Christmas. I decided I would make a big Christmas breakfast for all the relatives as my present. Alyssa passed on this:

Some Rules And Hints For Students:

Rule 1 Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
Rule 2 General Duties as a Student: Pull everything out of your teacher. Pull everything out of your fellow students.
Rule 3 Consider everything an experiment.
Rule 4 Be Self-Disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
Rule 5 Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only MAKE or DO.
Rule 6 The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It is the people who do all the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
Rule 7 You can fool the fans … but you can’t fool the players.
Rule 8 Do not try to create and analyze at the same time. They are different processes.
Rule 9 Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
Rule 10 We are breaking all the rules, even our own rules and how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for “x” qualities.

Hints:

Always be around.
Come or go to everything.
Always go to classes.
Read everything you can get your hands on.
Look at films carefully and often.
SAVE EVERYTHING (It may come in handy later).
— John Cage

 
[ed: a much-removed remix of this, based on *my* praxis.]


No time for a web site, folks, gotta go read everything, save everything, and go to everything… I sent out invitations to a number of networking friends to join me with the PORT project dialogues. It will be tough to pull this project off, given the instability of my access and technology level, and also that most of the participants I have invited are neither experienced in this level of technology, nor do they have regular access. It will be interesting.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

to be grokked

Well. I did make a foray into the high desert wilderness near Sycamore Canyon a couple days ago. Not far, however. Too much virtuality has left me stunned. Too much driving especially, that oh-so-virtual reality where, like with digital media, we are insulated by the silicon dioxide / amorphous silica, that of windows rather than IC chips … I figured once, some years ago, that I have spent about 500 24-hour days in a car, traveling about 50 mph, since I arrived in this in-car-nation, so to speak (ohhh, now there’s a pun for you…). But as it is ingrained in my existence, I must say that I do enjoy cruising across/through the western landscape in a vehicle. The unrolling vistas, the feelings of Power, more “to be grokked”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

eight dialogues call/proposal

The forum in which this new art operates is not the materially stable pictorial space of painting nor the Euclidean space of sculptural form; it is the electronic virtual space of telematics where signs are afloat, where interactivity destroys the contemplative notion of beholder or connoisseur to replace it by the experiential notion of user or participant. The aesthetics of telecommunications operates the necessary move from pictorial representation to communicational experience. — Eduardo Kac
12.02.1996

Hallo friends:

This is a broadcast message to enLighten you about a project of mine that was selected for inclusion in an online/gallery exhibition which will take place on the Internet and within the confines of the List Art Center Gallery at MIT in Boston between January 29 and March 29. (FYI, the public site for the whole project — https://artnetweb.com/artnetweb/port/index.html)

At the moment I am interested in gathering eight of you as participants (significant *Others*) in one of these dialogues via the internet technology “IRC”, the infamous chat lines… Where we can have a two hour (or so) text-based dialogue remotely via our keyboards…

Each of the eight dialogues will be taking place (as scheduled at the moment) one a week between 2-4 pm EST (New York Time) on a Wednesday afternoon for the duration of the show… For those of you who are not familiar with IRC technology, if you have internet/WWW access, then you can run an IRC host on your local machine. There are even some Browser-based chat locations that can be used with no extra software — just Netscape or Explorer… Anyway, I hope to hear from eight of you (or more! — probably should have some alternates…) Again, these dialogues are not thematic or otherwise “directed”, they are *just* dialogues… more “eight dialogues call/proposal”