posted

Sunday, 20 July 1969

Command Module from Lunar Module in lunar orbit prior to lunar descent, 20 July 1969

Well, I get to make my own 50-years-on entry here: A Sunday evening, late. We were at church in the morning and evening as usual — no shred of memory, what was the texture of that part of the day? Internal anticipation also does not register, except in the present anticipation perhaps mapped over a few remaining neural structures from that prior moment. Currently watching and listening to the marvelous ‘multi-media’ presentation at https://apolloinrealtime.org/11/. What a fantastic use of contemporary media power combined with the enormous documentary effort that went into the original event. NASA really deserves big kudos for their PR sense over the years! (Although it needs to be noted that in the biggest picture, this was the culmination of a military-industrial-academic exercise equaled only to the Manhattan Project, driven in part by the prodigious personal ambition of Werner von Braun.)

Hard to comprehend the difference in technologies, compared to now. I’ve been to the Air & Space Museum in DC many times, and seen the interiors of some of the Apollo vehicles — the big analog flip-switches the most memorable items. It does remain an incredible expression of human presence on the planet despite all the harsh flows that have come from that same presence.

The whole family went next door to the Jones’ house, they had a color teevee, to watch the then-landed Eagle crew step out and onto the moon. I recall taking some black-and-white film shots of the television screen, they are extant somewhere in the archive. Half a century gone by, where are we now?

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Paragraphs on Computer Art, Past and Present by Prof. (emer.) Dr. Frieder Nake

[Ed: My old friend Frieder’s meditations on computer art are foundational as per his inimitable style of thought and expression. I am honored to present this text here on the tech-no-mad blog, though the blog platform itself is suffering computability problems of its own, my apologies! See also Frieder’s precise and quite humorous presentation on the history of computer art at eyeo in 2014.]

Revised version (2011) of a paper of the same title that appeared in: Nick Lambert, Jeremy Gardiner, Francesca Franco (eds.): CAT 2010. Ideas before their time. Connecting the past and present in computer art. London: British Computer Society 2010. p. 55-63. Appears here by permission of the author.
Sol LeWitt published his “Paragraphs on Conceptual Art” in Artforum, June 1967. It became an influential theoretical text on art of the twentieth century. It played the role of a manifesto even though it appeared when its topic – concept over matter – had already existed for about a decade. Digital (or algorithmic) art had had its first exhibitions in 1965. It seems it never produced a manifesto, with the exception, perhaps, of Max Bense’s “Projects of generative aesthetics” (1965, in German). Since computer art is a brother of conceptual art, it is justified in this late manifesto to borrow the style of the old title.

1 There are no images now without traces of digital art. Digital Art exists as computer art, algorithmic art, net art, web art, software art, interactive art, computational art, generative art, and more. When it made its first appearances, in Stuttgart and New York, the name “computer art” was thrown against art history and into the faces of art critics. It was a proud name and a bad one. “Algorithmic art” would have been the correct term. The superficial “computer art” disguised the revolutionary fact: the algorithmic principle had entered the world of art.

2 The algorithmic principle is the principle of computability. Whatever exists in the domain of computability exists insofar as it is computable. Alan Turing, Alonzo Church, and others had in the 1930s saved mathematics as the only discipline of the human mind that can say clearly what it says. Those heroes had clarified the concept of computability. They had thus created a new basis for mathematics. Soon after, the computer appeared as the machine to turn science into engineering. There had, of course, before been devices for mechanical calculation, but no computing automaton. more “Paragraphs on Computer Art, Past and Present by Prof. (emer.) Dr. Frieder Nake”

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

cryptic and incomplete 2016 review

I think 2016 started with the thought that it couldn’t be more challenging than 2015. If change is a challenge, 2016 definitely was that.

It started out slowly, ensconced in the modest house I bought in Prescott in 2014 that contained my full art-media-production studio and archive in Prescott, Arizona. As the art-scene in Prescott consists mostly of bronze cowboys, turquoise-and-silver jewelry, and paintings of blue-eyed Indian children, my work had to be virtual and remote: Patrick of framework:afield invites a piece for his internationally syndicated weekly program on field recording; Arts Birthday; AudioBlast; Reveil 2016; continuing contributions to aporee::maps; and, later, Radiophrenia (Glasgow). Portrait work continues but I haven’t really put any new landscape images online for awhile.

One local exception came when Tom, the director of the Natural History Institute invited me to do a public lecture and workshop on ‘acoustic ecology’ titled “A Natural History of Sound” in March.

April saw something of a (Plotner) family conclave for Al’s interment at the Antelope Hills cemetery. I was the sole representative from the Hopkins/MacKenzie side of the family. Good to see those folks again, might be awhile before the next family-type conclave.

I spent significant time the past couple years on a conceptual re-development of the Ecosa Institute‘s ‘regenerative design’ curriculum with a small group of folks along with volunteer work at the nascent Milagro Art Center. more “cryptic and incomplete 2016 review”

posted
  • place: online, Prescott, Arizona, and Nantes, France

AudioBlast Festival #4: le cri des neurones

AudioBlast Festival #4, le cri des neurones, online and Nantes, France, 28 February 2016

Electrical transmission running through our neural networks produce all kinds of stimulations and impulses within us every day. The Internet network can be taken as a comparison of the nervous system that conveys information between neurons, are not exactly the same type of information circulating the same way or to pass this information – Electrical vs. Digital : is put in relation to its copy.

Since its origins, cybernetics seeks to re-create its own reality, whether or not this is wanted, by taking it into account the question arises : how can we transform this approach?

The Shout as a proposal for a sound practice combines its own dematerialization and reinstatement of disruptive wave vibrations in a powerful sound system – Taken as a starting point we propose “The Shout” as a constitutive element of musicality and poetry, all nuances that may transcend technological reality !! Is it possible? Let us know !!

A one-hour live improv stream of material drawn from a sizable analog/digital archive: the multi-tracked material will be selected based on a criteria of neural resonance — during a lead-up to the performance, and during the improv performance itself. There will be various electric field disturbances, recorded in a variety of ways, along with the neural traces of memory, re-constituted from ancient electromagnetic 4-track and cassette tapes.

The controlled behavior of a magnetic dipole is the primary model for all material used to store information via electromagnetics — both tape and hard-drive — to relinquish control of the dipole moment is to spin into chaos and noise.

The Festival starts on Friday night 26 February and runs through Sunday 28 February.

neoscenes was again invited to jump into the festival for a one-hour live improv stream.

Stay tuned here for up-to-date information on catching the live improv stream. Mark the time — (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones).

Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Phoenix – 02:00 – 03:00 AM GMT-7 (MST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – New York – 4:00 – 05:00 AM GMT-5 (EST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – London – 09:00-10:00 AM (GMT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Nantes – 1000 – 1100 GMT+1 (CET)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Helsinki – 1100 – 1200 GMT+2 (EEST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Sydney – 8:00 – 9:00 PM GMT+10 (AEDT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Auckland – 10:00 – 11:00 PM GMT+12 (NZDT).

The Festival has their own output stream to tune in to. (or copy/paste https://apo33.org:8000/audioblast.ogg.m3u into VLC or other streaming player). Headphones recommended to capture the ethereal density of the stream!

If you can’t manage to stay awake, we will be archiving this stream for future listening.

posted
  • place: Copper Basin, Arizona

more on the archive

A bit overwhelming, faced with thousands of images and texts in analog form. How to go about it, especially as there is no possibility of waving hands and all get transformed to digital gems. Dross versus age, time, and energy. And the solitary process of culling, ordering, and such. The application of a system upon that which has no system, or has an unusable system for the future. More order where there is less, more simplicity where chaos has lent an indeterminate complexity. And many holes in knowing what is what. The flesh-and-blood memory storage devices have dissolved in flame. So those faces from 60, 70, 80 years ago are now unknown by name, though the far-ago visages are here re-membered in form.

Only so much life-time/life-energy is available for these tasks, this remembering. Time spent on looking backwards is time not spent in the moment looking around and participating in the immediacy of creative action. But an inertia is building to return to works on paper, in large format.

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the territory of ignorance

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

Holmes, J., 2015. The Case for Teaching Ignorance. The New York Times. Available at: https://nyti.ms/1KGCGLU [Accessed August 24, 2015].

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sliding scale versus spectral range

I often use the metaphor of “sliding scale” to indicate a situation that can be described as having two end points and a continuum of blended conditions between those two points. The image came about first when talking about the different social relations indicated by the two end points “network” and “hierarchy” — and how any particular social system can be characterized as sitting somewhere along the line between those two (theoretical!) end points. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the geometric linearity of such a metaphoric illustration, though, as is relies on a limited Cartesian model. And, indeed, in an open system there are no end points to any particular description system. So, does “spectrum” OR “spectral range” perform an adequate substitution?

To speak of or to “re-present” an open system is to close the system. Language and re-presentation is a process of reduction and modeling of reality (where reality is the open system). The question of the adequacy of representation is core in this Age of Data Mining. The challenge of rendering digital data into human-readable analog information that can be effectively interpreted will always be the limiting factor in any data-driven decision-making process.

Back to the spectrum question: it is foundational to identify the (multi)variables that are of interest or crucial to what is being examined. A spectral space allows for this, but also allows for degrees of complexity that are greater than can be sensibly interpreted. This is where intuition, not analysis, comes into play. Forget artificial intelligence (what has intelligence brought us, anyway?); forget fast-Fourier-transformations (except in the case that they are generated through meat-space neural cascades; better to use a manual quasi-Gaussian blur by squinting and whatever analog output you can manage)… argh; the question of interpretation of what the spectral model presents is another challenge altogether.

posted
  • place: Denver, Colorado

CPAC

After Jim points me to the call for Executive Director at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center, I hustle down that road a ways to see what potential lies thereupon. After all the experience in Europe with photographic organizations, there is the not-insignificant issue of technology- or technique-bound creativity. Photography is perhaps at its widest usage (diffusion) ever, between the revival of analog techniques and the ubiquitousness of digital imagery (350,000,000 images per day (in 2013) uploaded to FazeBuch: what the hell does that mean?).

Are either one of these wide areas diverging significantly from the idea that photography is a way to make a two-dimensional mark on paper or screen? And that such a mark stands as a representation of (a configuration of) reality? Of course neither of these questions are directives that need close off areas of inquiry and personal discovery. They should merely stand as a couple of the many starting points in the discussion. more “CPAC”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Entropy and the shaping of landscape by water

The south side of the house with the drainage coming from the neighbor’s yard is the site of experimentation with the principle of entropy applied to surface water flow. Creating more turbulence is a way of dissipating the energy of gravitationally-induced water flow. Small scale to larger scale, by interrupting the laminar flow of water across a system, the energy is effectively diffused back into the local environment in a way that is not as destructive (though as I write those words, it occurs to me that the absolute energy content of the water — as a falling mass, minus frictions and surface-tension coefficients — is a constant). It’s only a question of at what scale one chooses to work at to diffuse the energy — giant rocks, big waterfalls; smaller rocks, smaller waterfalls, tiny pebbles, tiny waterfalls. These versus smoothly finished surfaces that transmit the maximum amount of inertial energy to the folks downstream.

We have given an overview of some energetic and thermodynamic principles that have been applied to hydrology. We note there are currently two distinct analogies, though we suspect they should ultimately be related. The first principle states that a fluvial system may be considered as an engine driven by the supply of water at high elevation flowing to low elevation. In this sense elevation, or hydraulic head, is a direct analogue of temperature for a heat engine. Secondly, the configuration of a river network can be described by certain statistical properties, notably an entropy. The notion of minimum energy expenditure in the network should then correspond to the principle of minimum entropy production, where the prescribed boundary conditions do not allow for much flexibility. However, since much of the dissipation of energy in river networks is related to turbulence, Maximum Entropy Production should also be applicable, although the detailed application is not clear and needs further investigations.

If the thermodynamic background to the hydrological shaping of the landscape becomes sufficiently understood, practical applications may be developed. In particular, statistical properties of hydrologic networks may provide quantitative means of classifying networks and thereby understanding the geomorphological processes by which they formed. The relationship of the observed ‘maturity’ of a river system with the Gibbs’ parameter (i.e., network temperature) may be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.

Finally, we note that exploring the thermodynamic concepts of fluvial geomorphology also appear useful for shoreline processes. Their generality may make these ideas quite fruitful for investigating networks on other planetary bodies, where the specific mechanisms and working substances may be different from Earth, but the aggregate effects are similar.

Miyamoto, H., Lorenz, R.D. & Baker, V.R., 2005. Entropy and the Shaping of the Landscape by Water. In Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth, and Beyond. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

posted
  • place: Tempe, Arizona

The Energy of Archive: Re-membering the Cloud

[this paper was presented at the Balance/UnBalance Conference at Arizona State University in March where I also joined a panel with Mél Hogan, et al.]

We are living in a time where the wholesale storage of information exerts a dominant influence across the entire social system. The connection between this archive and both the stability and sustainability of the social system is direct. Few people are cognizant that it takes real(!) energy to drive “Big Data,” nor are they aware that such wide-scaled archiving (in “The Cloud”) directly affects the wider global environment.

This paper reflects on the fundamental energy (thermodynamic) conditions that apply to any ordered system. Order, as a temporal state — whether arising autopoetically or whether created intentionally within a wider structured system — functions as an information transfer or communication system and always requires an influx of energy to be maintained. The crucial issue embedded at the root of any archive relates directly to this necessity. Where does that energy come from, how is it secured, and what is the cost? As a near-ubiquitous feature of any social structure, the archive — as an ordered expression of information — is one such system. As there are apparently no violations of the Laws of Thermodynamics in the observed universe, is the fate of the archive the same as that of the cosmos: a slow heat-death? Obliquely invoking an interpretation of living (or general) systems theory, it is possible to 1) demarcate the trajectory of the archive (as (social) memory); 2) examine in the widest conceptual sense the cost of information storage and reproduction; and 3) predict the path that individual and collective knowledge takes into the future.

I will briefly introduce systems theory, as well as some principles of thermodynamics that will, as models, undergird the discussion. Relating energy, order, and information, I will tie these conceptions into the actuality of the contemporary archive by exploring the question: What does it mean to have a sustainable archive? As a creative media arts practitioner and, as a consequence, an analog and digital archivist, I will include in the discussion pertinent fragments of personal narrative that arise from that lived praxis.

Keywords: archive, thermodynamics, entropy, energy, information, systems, code, analog, digital, media arts, sustainability

[download full paper]

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Posthuman Prospects

The desire to find short cuts and to invent technical solutions is indicative of the impatience of the present age. The utilization of fossil fuels that led to the creation of industrialized societies benefited from the fact that such fuels had accrued their energy potential over millions of years:

All the fossil fuels, in energy terms, are stored sunlight heaped up over geologic time. . . No human being had to put a single day’s work or a single gallon of diesel fuel into growing the tree ferns of the Carboniferous period that turned into Pennsylvanian coal beds, nor did they have to raise the Jurassic sea life that became the oil fields of Texas. The second half of Nature’s energy subsidy took the form of extreme temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth. Over millions of years more, these transformed the remains of prehistoric living things into coal, oil, and natural gas and, in the process, concentrated the energy they originally contained into a tiny fraction of their original size.

These resources, if they had been developed in more sustainable ways, and used to serve more balanced societies, could have benefited us for many years to come, but we have squandered them with our impatience and greed. In an analogous way, we are highly impatient with the technologies that we wish to invent. We are unsatisfied with the intelligence that has been bequeathed to us through millions of years of evolution and we wish to create a copy of it, as soon as possible.

What has been lost is a certain sense of balance, and a knowledge of natural limitations. Ambitious innovation is certainly a virtue but when it relies upon the false premise of unlimited natural resources, or the belief that we can short cut evolution by recreating intelligence at will, it becomes the vice of hubris. Undoubtedly, we will face challenges in the future provoked by advanced technologies. And, equally certain, as we run out of natural resources, governments will increasingly ring fence such resources for themselves to continue with unsustainable military research programs. In this sense, Faye’s two tier system will come to pass although it is unlikely to operate in the interests of European man. Instead, there will be a return to more sustainable, more rural, societies that will have to learn once again what it means to live in accord with natural limitations, and that will be forced to become reacquainted with the slow passing of the seasons.

Pankhurst, C, 2014. Posthuman Prospects: Artificial Intelligence, Fifth Generation Warfare, & Archeofuturism, Counter-Currents Publishing blog, 23 May 23 2014, accessed 29.11.2014.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

dense artistic information

The artistic text, as we have ascertained, may be viewed as a specially organized mechanism which can contain an exceptionally high concentration of information. If we compare a sentence of colloquial speech with a poem, a set of paints with a picture, or a scale with a fugue, we immediately realize that the second element of each pair can contain, store, and convey a volume of information that is beyond the capacity of the first element.

Our conclusions are in full agreement with the fundamental idea of information theory which states that the volume of information in a message should be seen as the function of the number of possible alternative messages. The structure of an artistic text has a practically infinite number of boundaries which divide this text into segments that are equivalent in certain respects, and consequently may be regarded as alternatives. more “dense artistic information”

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

Of the Imperfection of Systems

On the tail of a disruptive hardware failure that takes several weeks to recover from. It’s still in progress, and external communications, words, are in short supply — or perhaps the means to express them is temporarily lost, along with an accumulation of visual and sonic material, new and from the archive, to be cleared, sheesh. The digital archive increases in size with the localized ability to mine the analog one.

The need to be initially organized in order to undertake a project is something of a hurdle, but doesn’t seem to negatively affect the outcomes. Once work starts to flow and a work process begins to form, things get pretty messy at the same time as being productive. This is the armature provided by a familiar praxis.

The settled two months on Hawk Moon Ridge blazed by far too fast, as per other residencies and such, they become stops on a longer pilgrimage of nomadic working. Anyway. Whatever. Where ever. How ever. Why?

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

educational solutions for declining systems, etc.

The Prosperous Way Down site, invoking and building on Howard Odum’s work, takes a look at education here.

Conservation of information, both genetic and learned, through teaching and archiving, is the first mission of universities. Included are the biodiversity of nature and the long range memory of society, which is the library. Scarce library money should not be diverted to short range needs. The internet appears to be the short range memory of society. As in the analogous processes of the human brain, short range information has to be sifted and selected for preservation, a university function. Planning for descent should take priority in universities, not only for itself, but for its role as the long range information storehouse for society. . . Not all the great quantity of information in our current climax pulse can be sustained in the down cycle. How do we organize and save what is most important? Perhaps this is a priority for long range greening committees . . .
more “educational solutions for declining systems, etc.”

posted
  • place: en route Berlin-Prenzelauerburg - Köln - Aachen, Germany

big synchronicity

Well, where to start this narrative? In the PhotoWorks Laboratory on 23rd Street in Chelsea in Manhattan in 1986? Or in Karla’s flat in Prenzlauerburg in 2013? I leave there earlier than I probably need to in order to get to the Hauptbahnhof in good time for my ICE connection to Köln, and it turns out to be a good choice. I first go to the wrong tram stop, then when I get on the right one, there is a total traffic tie-up as we approach the old wall. This is because of the presence of the (US) Presidential bubble and his cortege which results in a total ban on traffic entering the entire central government sector — much of Berlin-Mitte. There had been hints of looming presence for at least a week before — Blackhawks on drill overhead, warnings about route changes posted on public transport, and so on. As traffic is totally blocked by the time the tram gets to Mauerpark, shiite! I get off and get to the U-Bahn pretty quickly, and make it to the Hbf in good time — enough to make some audio recordings (Gleis 6), have a snack and look out south towards the government sector that is completely cordoned off, musing on that impenetrable bubble that surrounds the Imperial man and his entourage.

I get on the ICE train to Köln, car 32, seat 81 or so, looking forward to a relaxed and comfortable ride with an easy transfer in Köln to the Aachen train. It looks pretty empty. A petite woman comes to my row and takes the window seat. So I say to her “I’ll move up one row since the train looks pretty empty, that way we’ll both have more room” (am I being rude?). I move up one row, but shortly another woman comes along and I am in her seat to I move back to my original seat. I settle back in and turn to my seat mate and ask her if she is from Berlin, “No, I live in New York.” Oh really, what are you doing there? “I’m a photographer.” And as I am looking at her, I am stunned, “Dora, Dora Händel?” My lord, booking the seat next to me is my old colleague from (Kathy Kennedy‘s) PhotoWorks on 23rd Street in Chelsea from 1986. PhotoWorks was one of the top two commercial custom printing labs in the photo district back in those analog days. Dora took care of all contact printing (ferro-typed Kodak Azo, thank you!). We spent many an hour in the darkroom listening to Nina Haugen among other incendiary sonic background effects.

self-portrait with Dora on the ICE to Köln from Berlin, Germany, June 2013

We hadn’t seen each other in probably 20 years or so. How effing bizarre. The immediate question becomes: What to make of this synchronicity, coincidence, sign, event, etc, etc. Too incredibly random to comprehend from any statistical level.

Fortunately we have a couple hours to catch up before she gets off in Münster (or so?). I go on to Hamm where the train is shunted (the German rail network is still suffering from major delays resulting from the heavy flooding on the Elbe River). It’s the hottest day in an already hot German summer, and after one aborted attempt to get a connection onward, and some time on the stifling platform, passengers are finally (and, to be honest, pretty efficiently) re-routed to their different destinations. When I arrive in Aachen, I pick up a form at the DB travel office in the Hbf for applying for a partial refund based on the two-hour delay I experienced. The lady at the desk helps me fill it out.

posted
  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Friday, 03 May, 1963

Jim Uskavitch in to ask a few questions about the data record of the TRAP III. The minutes don’t contain his info so I phoned the HFw/ two questions to D. J. McCreery at Bendix Systems Div., Ann Arbor – 665/7766/507:

1) Does WSMR have analog data reduction facilities that will handle and put into IBM format the TRAP III analog records? He was 95% confident that they do, as the analog record is std.

2) What data is on the analog record and on no other? The attenuated and unattenuated IR scanner outputs and sweep frequency. These 12 analog channels contain:

  1. IR Spectrometer output PDM
  2. IR unatten IR output
  3. IR atten IR output
  4. IR Scanner Hor sweep freq
  5. IR Scanner Vert sweep freq FM record 12-1/2 ~/sec
  6. Direct record time in serial code
  7. IR Intensity signal from T-51 Tracker
  8. Vis Intensity signal from T-51 Tracker
  9. UV-Vis TV Tracker Az error off FM boresight
  10. UV-Vis TV Tracker El error
  11. 2 Clr TKr (TB T-51) Az Error FM record
  12. 2 Clr TKr (TB T-51) El Error FM record
  13. Spare
  14. Spare

1-6 (This is the only place these items recorded)

Operational shed of 24 June ok now.

Clear!
42˚F

Decided at 0130 this morning to hook an Altec custom line amplifier onto the WEZE/WECO mixer and drive the lower floors and perhaps the Sanctuary; this would free the SS Knight power amplifier to drive the Hearing Aids rather than buying a new one just for that service as discussed with Fred Lake earlier this week. He thinks he has the parts; the attenuating pad at each remote amplifier is made up of some standard resistors, so doesn’t cost much. We’ll put this in tomorrow AM.

Geo Pickering called to say that the lavalier didn’t add anything, and that the speaker yesterday spoke into the mike. The lavaliere mike must be set for a different Ω than what we have.

Our lawn in front looks like it might need mowing on Saturday. LCH put Turf Builder on it about two weeks ago.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

still sick

no tweets these days, (as I have recently jacked up the twit account, with mixed feelings, as a PR effort on this blog). at the same time that GoDaddy is still silent on the fix necessary for the SQL server driving this and my other 5 blog platforms. technology failures, strangely or not, do seem to correlate with physical breakdown. and of course, it’s Spring Break when I have a thousand things to do to prep for leaving in 5 weeks. faugh.

Julian Bigelow was frustrated that the serial, address-constrained, clock-driven architecture of computers became standard because it is so inefficient. He thought that templates (recognition devices) would work better than addresses. The machine he had built for von Neumann ran on sequences rather than a clock. In 1999 Bigelow told George Dyson, “Sequence is different from time. No time is there.” That’s why the digital world keeps accelerating in relation to our analog world, which is based on time, and why from the perspective of the computational world, our world keeps slowing down.

The acceleration is reflected in the self-replication of computers, Dyson noted: “By now five or six trillion transistors per second are being added to the digital universe, and they’re all connected.” Dyson is a kayak builder, emulating the wood-scarce Arctic natives to work with minimum frame inside a skin craft. But in the tropics, where there is a surplus of wood, natives make dugout canoes, formed by removing wood. “We’re now surrounded by so much information,” Dyson concluded, “we have to become dugout canoe builders. The buzzword of last year was ‘big data.’ Here’s my definition of the situation: Big data is what happened when the cost of storing information became less than the cost of throwing it away. — Stewart Brand

posted
  • place: Rochester, New York.

Wednesday, 23 January, 1963

Spent the day with W. E. White of the Physics Lab, and Sheldon Phillips, talking about densitomoters w/ digitizers. I was shown 3 sets of gear. One used EKCo Type 31 optics, for A/D an HP digitizing VM w/ card punch output, and an x-y plotter. Another used a Coleman A/D, a M/H XY plotter & 526 Punch. Several samples were obtained (cards & data). Apparently +/- .02 density is about as close as the limits of gear, film, & processing will permit.

Also explored two questions phone over by ELE: 1) What is the recommended location of the photo processing in relation to the base of the a/c?, and 2) can the processed film be shipped w/o deterioration? He wanted answers to these phoned to Capt. Black at BSD. On 1) No particular location; the latent image fades some on the first few minutes after processing. If the exposed film is stored according to the ASA standard, the changes are relatively small. On 2) The changes in density are quite small for processed film; changes in dimension can be serious if no marks are on each frame.

Snow
Cold

Car wouldn’t start, so got it pushed ($2.00). It was badly flooded. Then went to Sears and bought a new battery as the (+) terminal was broken out of the case on the old one.

Snowing all day with slippery roads.

Drove out to Hamlin Beach to see the Lake in a storm. The beach is gravel — and with many hills and what looked like a steep bank at the water’s edge.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

screening: Jeanne Liotta

Make a pilgrimage to Longmont to the Firehouse Arts Center to catch an evening screening of work by a CU Film Studies faculty-member Jeanne Liotta. I had met her the evening before at another university-sponsored cultural event. Alex had mentioned there was a reception/opening in the Rare Books Room of the Library, and, as a professional nomadic cultural participant (and observer), I thought I’d check it out. Turns out it was the effort of a Humanities class that had curated a small show of works from the collection of artist’s books that Lucy Lippard had given to the University. Strangely enough two of the pieces in the exhibition are from old friend/networker node, Paul Rutkovsky (aka. floridada). I talked to some of the student curators about Paul, Lucy, and about networking. I was lucky to have been doing my MFA at CU-Boulder when Lucy was in residence and received some of her teachings. Age brings the role of information carrier, holder of historical perspective and knowing, story-teller. No corner on wisdom, but at least some stories are related. I query the kids about what their thinking is about the use of photocopy machines as art tools. This is a very novel idea for them (given they only know the digital type of photocopy machines at most, not the old analog devices). Paper output is novel in itself. I don’t have much documentation online of some of the prior (ancien-régime!) photocopy-based projects I’ve run: just The Xerox Book that included mp3 files of the accompanying collaborative audio cassette mix, unfortunately there are no scans of the 300 actual pages … some day I’ll get to that corner of the archive & revive it in the digital zone.

At any rate, Jeanne’s work dances around cosmology, astronomy, and very much the syntax of the various filmic media she plays with — from Second Life pieces to found footage, analog and digital to Ray-o-gram-printed 35mm film stock. The sonic accompaniments well synergize with the visuals. I missed not seeing some of the analog film pieces in their original form (vs digital reproductions), as most of the pieces are (at least in part) deeply about what mediation they are conveyed upon. (Not that that aspect is meant to completely frame them materialistically: it’s only one order of correlation.) There are plenty of other resonant aspects and sources: the eclipse, the sky, the procession of stellar energies, the transposition of Light from various enigmatic sources onto halating film substrates: she always maintains an alchemical and, consequently, an experimental edge through her attention to immediate and spontaneous situation. This sensitivity is combined with an aware curiosity of phenomenon: yielding Light works that are simultaneously playful and yet connected to/suffused with an insistent and sometimes overwhelming gravity. Escaping the gravitational field of be-ing requires an empathy for the intense sadness that pervades our current times: this potential is achieved on occasion and reminded me of the intent of Bruce Elder’s magnum opus “The Book of All the Dead” and the constant struggle against the gravity of it all, in search of Light. It goes ever back to Simone Weil’s “Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity.”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

life is an informational phenomenon (abstract)

We extend the concept that life is an informational phenomenon, at every level of organisation, from molecules to the global ecological system. According to this thesis: (a) living is information processing, in which memory is maintained by both molecular states and ecological states as well as the more obvious nucleic acid coding; (b) this information processing has one overall function – to perpetuate itself; and (c) the processing method is filtration (cognition) of, and synthesis of, information at lower levels to appear at higher levels in complex systems (emergence). We show how information patterns, are united by the creation of mutual context, generating persistent consequences, to result in ‘functional information’. This constructive process forms arbitrarily large complexes of information, the combined effects of which include the functions of life. Molecules and simple organisms have already been measured in terms of functional information content; we show how quantification may extended to each level of organisation up to the ecological. In terms of a computer analogy, life is both the data and the program and its biochemical structure is the way the information is embodied. This idea supports the seamless integration of life at all scales with the physical universe.

Farnsworth, K.D., Nelson, J. & Gershenson, C., 2012. Living is information processing; from molecules to global systems. Available at: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1210.5908.pdf.

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Odum’s analog ecosystem circuits

The difficulties of managing nature and man can be stated in circuit terms. Let us first fantasy [sic] the nightmare of an electronics technician. After a week of exhausting tedium, soldering circuits and completing a large network of wires connecting thousands of tubes, transformers, and transistors, he goes to bed with the feeling of a design completed. Then with the veil of the dream the parts begin to breathe. Next he sees them grow and divide, making new parts. Then the wires become invisible. The new and old parts disconnect themselves and move into new patterns, reconnecting their inputs and outputs, replacing worn members, and together generating functions and forms not known before. What was neat and known becomes unknown. Soon the new system with its vast capabilities is growing, self-producing, and self-sustaining, drawing all the available electric power. Our hero awakens when he pulls the switch removing the energy source. To some visionary engineers the nightmare may seem a preview of a machine world. Our ecosystem, however, is already the nightmare. — Howard Odum, 1971

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  • place: en route White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico - El Paso, Texas - Los Angeles - San Francisco - Palo Alto, California

Tuesday, 11 September, 1962

Went over to LA in morning, arriving at L2 office about noon. Phoned CWU re: the 15-man-days of editing the analog/print-out material to check the formats for Sect. IIIE of the report.

Sat in the Raytheon TD mtg. in the afternoon. Jim Robertson spoke of the SFD tube development and the Sperry STX, both providing some promise of greater w/mc. At 5 PM we adjourned & went to Resnick’s office where Glasser spoke of a dart-like decay, a most ingenious conception that they are in the process of patenting.

Went up to SF, arriving at the President Hotel in Paly about 9 PM.

It would have been better to have stayed at the New Cardinal Hotel.

Clear

Went over to LA on morning arriving at L2 office about noon. JLV was at Lexington for the week. He has a broken ankle.

Went up to SF on UAL 774 getting to the President Hotel in Paly about 9 PM.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

analogic lies

Man is the only organism known to use both the analogic and the digital modes of communication. The significance of this is still very inadequately understood, but can hardly be overrated. On the one hand there can be no doubt that man communicates digitally. In fact, most, if not all, of his civilized achievement would be unthinkable without his having evolved digital language. This is particularly important for the sharing of information about objects and for the time-binding function of the transmission of knowledge. And yet there exists a vast area where we rely almost exclusively on analogic communication, often with very little change from the analogic inheritance handed down to us from our mammalian ancestors. This is the area of relationship. Based on Tinbergen (1953) and Lorenz (1952), as well as his own research, Bateson (1955) has shown that vocalizations, intention movements, and mood signs of animals are analogic communications by which they define the nature of their relationships, rather than making denotative statements about objects. Thus, to take one of his examples, when I open the refrigerator and the cat comes, rubs against my legs, and mews, this does not mean “I want milk” — as a human being would express it — but invokes a specific relationship, “Be mother to me,” because such behavior is only observed in kittens in relation to adult cats, and never between two grownup animals. Conversely, pet lovers often are convinced that their animals “understand” their speech. What the animal does understand, needless to say, is certainly not the meaning of the words, but the wealth of analogic communication that goes with speech. Indeed, wherever relationship is the central issue of communication, we find that digital language is almost meaningless. This is not only the case between animals and between man and animal, but in many other contingencies in human life, e.g., courtship, love, succor, combat, and, of course, in all dealings with very young children or severely disturbed mental patients. Children, fools, and animals have always been credited with particular intuition regarding the sincerity or insincerity of human attitudes, for it is easy to profess something verbally, but difficult to carry a lie into the realm of the analogic.

Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J.H. & Jackson, D.D., 1967. Some Tentative Axioms of Communication. In Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions. Los Angeles: Sage Publications.

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  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Tuesday, 28 August, 1962

Discussed the Sperry/Raytheon setup with AAG, wherein I mentioned the analogy with the det. electrical sizes of missiles and manned a/c, drawing on some of the ADC Radar Evaluation Program background. I emphasized the desirability of an experimental program that would permit correlation of δ as computed from the operational situation and that from the model range.

Rec’d a copy of 22L-7265 (13 August 62) by L. A. Globus & Eric Korngold on “Atmospheric Refraction & its Effect on Radar Measurements.” It has 2 figures, showing variation of index of refraction with altitude, taken from the ADC Radar Evaluation Program. I brought this to AAG’s attention.

Overcast – Sticky
RH – 90%

Too sticky to sleep.

Storm Alma moving up Atlantic Coast with 45 mph winds.

Had a long discussion with the NE Life Insurance Co., Mr. Podbros, who is still working on me to buy $15,000 Life to age 70.

Put a little gravel in the patio/garage door walkway but decided to stop in view of the rain. Did a little work on the forms for parking extension curbing.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

The American Scholar

The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.

Emerson, R.W., 1837. The American Scholar. Available at: https://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm [Accessed August 27, 2012].

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now the wait

Not that I’m holding my breath, as I am more in the Richard “I-don’t-give-a-fuck” Pryor mode at this point. Docs made it to the Head of School’s desk yesterday, on from there today. Out to examiners via snail-mail (argh, it is 2012, what’s with that?!). Jan really carried the ball in my physical absence from Oz, but the uni needs chastising (righteous prodding) for not mandating electronic submission as is standard elsewhere.

Adding portraits and other snippets: settled on the strategy of adding them to the current stream of postings, then after a week or two, demoting them to their proper chronological position. Daunting how many there are yet to add, along with other content.

Traffic has doubled in the last three months, and I hope this continues, although fresh content addition is still sucking up enormous amounts of time. There is no real limit in terms of what is available from the archive (video is just scratching the surface, and there is the whole analog archive in storage to be digitized! help!)

Heading West shortly for higher and more isolated regimes to wander and look and simply be for a time. to allow thought and thinking to settle, dis-band, and perhaps re-form in a new neuronal configuration. That’s always sure to happen when searching moonless skies for a spiral galaxy or two: Andromeda (M-31) for starters. So, need to sift through back-country gear to make sure with a 2-week hiatus from civilization that I’ll survive intact. The ancient vehicle is the biggest worry, but it should hold out for this adventure (fingers crossed).

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

cranking up the heat…

more nettime volleys, feels a bit easier to be pointed and precise, but the problem of establishing a set of base assumptions about reality still dogs the process — with the dominant Cartesian separation needing to be convincingly rejected for a more sane continuous and implicate cosmos…

Mark Stahlman writes in this thread:

So, give up your plans for “radical change of the system we live under” and *just* STOP living under that system (at least for the better half of your life)!

I respond sotto voce, etc:
more “cranking up the heat…”

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From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

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CLUI: Day Seventeen — Bonneville

sunset on the Bonneville Salt Flats, Utah, April 2010

There is a large (black) raven (Corvus corax) who is in residence in the Enola Gay Hangar. There are some major areas of the roof and sides of the hangar where the corrugated sheeting has (surely!)been blown off over the years, so the interior is exposed to the elements and to natural energies. This raven (or two) is in residence somewhere high in the iron girders. Much of each day, especially during morning and evening, the raven is seen flying very purposefully between the hangar and a spot some 200 meters east of the hangar where there are some low scrubby bushes and open ground. (S)he flies back and forth not far from the window that I look out from on occasion as I work when inside the residency unit. Movement out the window catches my attention and about half the time it is the raven making this low and very determinate transit between the hangar and this spot. Occasionally the movement will be from the ground squirrel couple who has taken up residence in the underbelly of the Airstream, and otherwise, the few lizards will do their peculiar dances across the gravelly yard when it is warm; and lately, a handful of very small birds will spend the early evening hours, before sunset, picking aphids off the salt brush bush growing in the yard. But it is the raven who is most compelling. Back and forth. Before I leave, I want to hang out in the watch-tower and simply observe the flight cycle. I reckon (s)he’s gathering sticks for a nest, but I haven’t clearly seen anything in his/her beak on the flights back to the hangar, so it’s a question: what’s ‘e doin’? Actually it could be a pair of them, they are know to find a partner and mate for life. Hmmm, novel idea…

The ground squirrel pair is another matter. They’re gaining access to the otherwise pretty solid and gapless lower framework of the Airstream via the fold-out step area below the front door. There are also areas for critters to enter via the electrical and water hookup doors. One of those has a broken latch, so I think I will tap and screw that one down semi-permanently as the vehicle isn’t going to be moved anytime soon.

Neal and I head out to the Bonneville Flats towards evening. I want to cycle and he has some filming to do. Amazing Light. I cycle for about an hour, going about 8-10 miles out and then back. Hard to tell, dimensions are reduced to time alone (and body metrics). About five miles out there is a cluster of vehicles, apparently a photo shoot happening. Cycling down the ‘main drag’ of the speed-test area is a singular experience. Speed becomes necessary to overcome the lack of Cartesian cues, no pathway. Got to get somewhere. Got to approach those little specks in the distance. Oh, those are cars, sure takes a long time to get closer. Hit some areas where the salt is wet and there are loose crystals which splatter all over me. It mostly appears like ice, so brain is thinking danger! slick!, but it is quite the opposite, sticky like climbing on limestone.

The accompanying images are suffering from more digital camera woes — dust on the CCD. Absolutely disgusting. I don’t have a proper removal kit, and this Nikon model doesn’t have one of the vibrating sensors that can dislodge that extremely irritating blobs that end up on the sensor despite me never taking the lens off. Yet another disappointment with this Nikon (D200) — for the price paid it is real garbage compared to the old analog F2as and even Nikkormats from the 1970’s. I never had dust-on-film problems like this, ever! Neal has a nice Canon SLR system from his university, along with a HD 3-CCD chip DV cam. I’m jealous.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

holding space and antinodes

Non-doing defines doing. Sitting in stillness invites people to move. Getting out of the way allows people to fill space with their passion. Letting go of expectations leaves room for responsibility to come forth. All of this is integrity. Every piece of doing requires the strong presence of non-doing to anchor it.

Stifling every impulse to intervene, to give directions and orders leaves space for others to design their lives. You can create a container and then stand by and watch it fill and teem with life. You don’t resist the natural movements of groups of people co-creating their futures. Instead you work on your own inability to be still, to want to own the outcomes, to want to invest your ego.

This is not your show. You are holding space, embodying space and being empty and full at the same time. If they thank you in the closing circle, you have not done enough. — The Tao of Holding Space, Chris Corrigan

and a side note on one of the seven marvelous students in the Ways of Listening course I taught this term at UTS. Ash undertook a fine project Antinode, you can check out the process-documentation blog that she set up. nothing like be-ing in the analog world! her experiences definitely fed back into the overall success of the class. auspicious start to teaching in Oz!

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Migrating Realities: done

Migrating Realities (pdf download)

Migrating Reality
ISBN 978-9955-834-01-4

Electronic and digital systems generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms into hybrid digital forms. Analog products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are remixed and fused into new data-sets.

The book is based on international conference and exhibition Migrating Reality which took place on April 4-5, 2008 in Galerie der Künste, Berlin, Germany, and on material submitted to the online magazine balsas.cc. As with the conference, the exhibition, and the on-line projects, the book is an overview of the migration topic from various perspectives, not excluding the use of a variety of languages. For example, we offer the reader an interview with Žilvinas Lilas “Bastymasis man būtų daug priimtinesnis žodis” conducted by Vytautas Michelkevičius in Lithuanian and the text “Kulturtransfer in der Frühen Neuzeit – eine andere Realität der Migration” by Philipp Zitzlsperger – an essay on migration from a historian’s perspective. The ideas presented textually in the book shift back and forth from essays and articles to projects and back to essays. The territories shift from social space to virtual space and eventually land us back in a realm of physical, political, economical, and historical reality.

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

welcome to the tech-no-mad space

You have stumbled upon the next forking evolution of the original neoscenes archive and network presence. In 2008 it subsumed the entire neoscenes travelog that began back in 1994, five years before the term blog existed. it rolled over to a frames-based site in 1999, and then to a php-based site in 2004, and now onto WordPress as of 2008. it is now extending the timeline with images, audio, and video from the analog neoscenes archive. what’s this 1958-1963 “50 years on” material? it is one dimension of the use of the (b)log as the accompaniment of the text of my PhD thesis which touches on many of the topics surfaced here combined with my creative media practice. there is an evolving about page which contains more background on the whole project. contact: jhopkins at tech-no-mad dot net.
******
NEW FROM THE ARCHIVE
adding IRC logfiles from various projects and events; performance documents like Changing the Course of Nature, Open Air Radio Barcelona, and DEAF03 – Interfacing / Radiotopia / Keyworx. also in the process of adding some of the thousands of scanned black&white negatives that cover a period of time from 1976 through 2000 when I quit wet darkroom work. (a few (84, 85, 86, 87, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95) of the 4000+ portraits that are slowly migrating to these pages). will be including many fragments like that over the next months to enrich the overall blog experience, so stay-tuned here for new announcements. of course, there are always new field recordings for the aporee maps project and the accretionary .50 calibre sacrifice series.

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

The Regime of Amplification: A Primer

[ED: This text is essentially an extremely preliminary draft—written in Berlin, Germany in 2007-08—of my dissertation The Regime of Amplification.]

I decided to release this text in advance of any hard-copy publication, with another chapter nearing its final stages, and several intermediate chapters forming more concretely. The following is the original ‘final’ text, although there will be a significantly improved one in the years to come.

This speculative essay addresses the process of amplification which expresses itself at a wide range of scales and affects and which models a fundamental aspect of all human presence. It opens with a brief description of a prototypical amplifier, then frames life as the coherent self-organizing expression of energy embedded in a universal field of energy flows. It examines simple biological models of amplification and suggests possible reasons for amplification processes to exist. Narrowing its focus, it looks first at the human species, then the body, and then the collective social system as an operative field of amplification. It subsequently explores the Regime of Amplification as a general manifestation of the prototypical TSS (techno-social system) — a system whose goal is to maintain the viability of localized sub-sets of the species in the face of competition as well as continuous and universal change. Two specific examples — the radio and the military — are presented to simply illustrate the principles suggested. The conclusion reiterates the affects of techno-social amplification on individual be-ing as well as on the entire continuum of relation that the individual is a part of. It suggests some fundamental pathways of action which have an immediate detrimental affect on the hierarchic flows of the Regime.

This essay is built on the subject of one chapter in a book-in-progress titled “Energy of Being :: Dialogue of Creativity” which explores in greater depth many of the issues that are danced only Lightly around here.

KEY TERMS

TSS (techno-social system), Regime of Amplification, energy, amplification, attenuation, flow, continuum of relation, life-energy, life-time, evolutionary development, natural selection, self-organizing, radio, military systems, resonance, social energy bank, life-time=energy=life; attention=life-energy=life-time, feed-forward system, biochemical amplification, concentration, rarefaction, command-and-control … (to be continued)
more “The Regime of Amplification: A Primer”

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

migrating realities

migrating realities, day one. get there early, as it’s important to put a hand in to help organizing. Mindaugas is working like crazy, so. apparently last evening, the electricity in the entire building went out (somebody stuck a screwdriver into a 440 volt line that was exposed. fortunately no injuries, gah damn, but one burnt screwdriver!) so, everything is behind. I continue to lend a hand. (pdf program)

>top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V. in Berlin and KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne are inviting to the conference and exhibition “Migrating Reality.” The event is generously supported by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the German-Baltic Year of Culture 2008 and takes place from Friday 4th to Sunday 6th of April 2008 in GdK – Galerie der Künste (Potsdamer Strasse 98, 2nd Yard, 10785 Berlin). More than thirty artists and theoreticians from Lithuania, Germany, the US, and France will discuss issues related to migration and digital media and also present their works.

“Migration is a very complex phenomenon, one which may be observed in very many spheres of life. The main goal of this event is to look at the various migration processes with a fresh and contemporary point-of-view” states the coordinator of the conference Mindaugas Gapševičius. more “migrating realities”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Ordering the Dataspace

I sketch this essay while flying along in the dark at 250+ km/hour in one of the spacious new saloon cars on the last Friday evening ICE (InterCity Express) train between Hamburg and Berlin. For the whole two hour trip, it is empty save for one other human sitting a couple rows ahead of me. I could have quit writing and gone forward to talk with him instead, but didn’t. This makes my humanity perhaps a bit suspect as I recall a phrase spoken to me by an Other in a similar situation in Norway once, “Come, we must not be as two animals, we must speak!” Instead I sit in front of a small colored screen and add words to an abstracted but ordered dataspace. Communications with a distant Other, you, while ignoring the one who was proximal. I write, inspired by comments Christian made earlier in the day. He suggested that I write more anecdotally about what I am doing, perhaps to make them easier to comprehend, more interesting, or simply as an exercise to clarify my own thoughts. This particular essay will not address the psychological background of the subject material. Throughout, I will suggest the idea that there is much more to write about — there always is, isn’t there? To step out of socially-engaged life and to focus attentions on a screen brings up a fundamental conflict between having a life, and having a life mediated by the screen, by the text. That’s what I am doing here in dynamic, active, stimulating Berlin for the next few months. To have a life mediated by the screen: to write, to be a writer. Here goes. more “Ordering the Dataspace”
posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

migrating reality

Miga asked if I would participate in these two projects, in the first as redactor, in the second as a presenter and as a performance artist. should be interesting. especially as it is occurring at the same time as the conference in Savannah. of necessity, I will appear in Savannah virtually, and in person here in Berlin. that’s the easiest option!

we meet down at the Galerie der Künste to scope out the situation.

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

The “Migrating Reality Project” organized between 04-05 April 2008 at the Galerie der Künste (Berlin), Potsdamer Str. 93, is a live platform to discuss the mixing and remixing of art forms and digital data flows within the context of the current worldwide reality of migration.

From 01 March in cooperation with the online ‘zine balsas.cc for media and technology we are initiating a focused look at the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth month it announces a new topic and as of now “Migrating Reality” is open for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and publishing of ideas online — the most important of which will be published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are looking for not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians. Please submit texts in English, German, and Lithuanian to balsas@vilma.cc. The rolling submission and publication period is from 01 March to 01 June.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Zilvinas Lilas, and John Hopkins

Migrating Reality

The conference and exhibition Migrating Reality is organised by >top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V. in Berlin and KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien in Köln. It is also generously supported by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the German-Baltic Year 2008.

The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen years, more than ten percent of Lithuania’s population has emigrated, among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and fused into new data sets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes inarticulate issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

vholoce

another Furtherfield review:

All phenomenon have the potential of being converted into infinite data-streams which become an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organize social behavior.

Vholoce is one project in a long line of projects which seeks to creatively engage the ubiquitous data-streams that are flooding our virtual world. The rising flood of data is useless without sensible display. Visual (and sonic) display of digital data is a fundamental contemporary issue. But what is sensible display? Using a data stream as a basically random source for visual display is one way to play with the stream. The syntax of visual display (possibly) becomes the site for expression by the creative producer. The data-stream source, the method of (and reason for) display, and the overall creative process need to be interrogated in order to find the basis for type of digital engagement.
more “vholoce”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Partial Description of the World

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. more “Partial Description of the World”

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

(no)music arena

(stereo audio, 176 mb)

Get online early to prep everything, stream at 1400 local time. As per usual, a single glitch pops up when I begin the live transmission, something that I have not experienced before: this is also a typical characteristic of the glitch. This time, my outgoing audio stream had a scratchy noise overlaying it. When I start the actual performance, laboite suggested a few fixes (restart the encoder – MacAmp on a separate G4, or reboot the system), which I did, along with swapping and testing cables and on. All during the time that the performance is running. Sweating. The stream ended up going down twice, but laboite kept me calm (this by no means the only technical glitch in the 24-hour program!). The end result was simply having the noise over the actual work which some listeners on the IRC channel liked. I didn’t, but so it goes. I have a hunch that it was an aliasing function between playing mp3 files and then encoding that (albeit an analog output through a mixer to the encoding machine) output to a mp3 shoutcast stream. I could hear that the G4 output was messy, but the output from the mixer was clean. Or, there was something wrong with the USB audio input device, or the audio circuits on the G4 (not outside possibility, as my own G4 has some issues with that), or, or … endless possibilities. That finished, I wandered over to TEKS to meet Espen, and ended up talking with Trine at the Contemporary Art space where an exhibition paralleling TMM is taking place. Then back home to catch up on logistic arrangements (buying four different transport tickets for the coming month).

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

pixelache over

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

proto definitions

The end of this year approaches. I jot down some definitions for class:

Proto definitions:

digital art — artifacts/performances enabled by a digital device

(computer)net art — art(ifacts?) on the net (what’s the net?) Internet? Any network?

web art — specific art(ifact?) for viewing on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that remote dataspace)

networking art — art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human/technological) networks; use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in). the network which is an extension of the socialized being

mediation — the act of standing between; a carrier; that which carries from one to the other. a bridge across/through the sensual world standing between the Self and the Other

media art — artifacts created via (traditional, analog) media devices

multimedia — more than one media

Keeping to several centers, not comatose in any of their distributed flows. Understand that now the up-springing source for the publicly “creative” work is something of a distortion created in the fabric of childhood (listen good parents) — that reverberates in the fractured pattern of shot-gun-fire in a rock canyon, each present de-formation of being expressed across the local social matrix is a hard surface that often will reflect and repel energy of any kind. The curling whine of ricochet as peeled-sheath bullet changes trajectory and spins to a sonic resonance within ear.

posted
  • place: online, Boulder, Colorado & Riga, Latvia

gaismaspils / castle of Light / telejam 04

screenshot: live neoscenes stream using VDMX, online, Boulder, Colorado & Riga, Latvia, 20 November ©2002 hopkins/neoscenes.
screenshot: live neoscenes stream using VDMX, online, Boulder, Colorado & Riga, Latvia, 20 November ©2002 hopkins/neoscenes.

A long ago and far away project at the cutting edge of collaborative international streaming between Boulder, CO, and Riga, Latvia, and points in between.

18-24 November 2002, Arhivs Gallery, Riga, Latvia

A real-time video-installation followed by series of live audiovisual data exchange performances in search of access to the repository of higher knowledge.

Video/sound artists and broadcasters (streaming media/icecast) are invited to salvage the Light from obscurity and participate in search process by joining telejamming sessions during the exhibition.

To participate and find out more, please contact voldemars@pxxxks.lv for any questions.

The installation concept is built around an ancient myth found in Latvian pagan culture, but its symbolic meaning can be found in many other cultures—be it the Golden Age, The Lost World, the Garden of Eden in ancient times and Christian belief, or The Lost Tree of Knowledge in Eastern Cultures.

In the Latvian mythology there is a widely known story about the Palace of Light — a repository of higher knowledge and wisdom, freedom and power of spirit and mind, which was drowned by darkness in depths of the Lake Burtnieki a long time ago.

By transforming the pagan mythology and industrial societies notion of the Palace of Light into the images of information society we arrive at the symbol which finds similarities with twenty-first century cultural icons like cyberspace, hyperspace, unlimited information space, dimension of thought, ideas, and information reality.

In the Latvian folklore we can find precise information about the way the drowned palace can be accessed: its name (or call it password) needs to be guessed, identified and separated from the rest of the information. Basically if we don’t question the convictions of Hellenistic thinkers about reality as the imperfect projection of the Idea, where new phenomenon and conceptions appear only when they are thought of (identified), it is necessary to find/capture this idea of the Palace of Light, which will serve as a universal key to the gate of the world of idea.

Today the information technologies have developed to such a level that it should be possible to find the ‘word’ (access code) of the Palace of Light. Even more, the search can be conducted in three basic levels of information: visual, sound, and text. In this case the access code search software will work like information processing virtuoso hackers, finding the right code from the hundreds of possible combinations.

About Telejam

A real-time audiovisual data performance (concert), simultaneously in real and virtual space. Many audio/visual streams are created and transmitted simultaneously by the artists in different geographical locations, and presented live via mix aesthetics. Since the summer of 2001 AmbienTV.net (London) and RIGASOUND (Riga) has conducted a series of real and virtual space situations within the Telejam lab. Telejam is real-time data sculpture in the information space.

Technically: in the exchange of data the internet and streaming media software (Realmedia, Icecast) are used as well as huge arsenal of digital, virtual, and analogue sound and video signal equipment, video/ audio mixers, effect processors, image processing software, etc.

The format of the situation and its experimental aesthetics allow artists to use and experiment with the net effects and techniques such as delay, loop, feedback, lo-rez, and signal distortion to create reflexive and summarizing audio-visual loop infinities.

links:

https://www.ambienttv.net/telejam/
https://rigasound.org
https://www.castleoflight.lv

[November 2002]

Damn Voldemars — I just sent this to the lev list, sorry — I hate when that happens! ;-)

I would love to join you folks with a video/audio live jam streamed from here in Colorado — what do I need to know? I have a phat Real Server to use for my stream, so I need no technical support. I can do a stream live mixed from VDMX VJ software with a separate audio stream…

Cheers,
John

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

mapping transitions

almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.

enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?

actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…

swarming

taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…

anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.

reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave

caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Kodachrome

such a tired way to go. and this text is so poor in the actuality of living, the stresses, (where is my sense of humor, no clown alive no more). Scandic living cooled all that right out of mind and soul. here in the heat. seeing everything new and clear. nothing to be spared. heat waves: vibrashuns. repainting the bathroom. work is meticulous with what is there. what is available. that’s also the result of living in a conservative environment too much. but it is a solid lesson — to create with what is there. nothing more or less clear than that. okay, because of the ultraviolet shift in Light at high latitudes, the wavelength of the cumulative radiation adsorbed is short, intense, and accurate. in the equatorial latitudes, the red, IR shift is long, wide, and soft, casting everything seen in voluptuous shimmers of distance between the wind devils racing across the dirt parking lot of the Yavapai horse racing track. between that and the moto-cross track where a race is laconically kicking up clouds of Light-tan dust that later traces the advance of the wind devil. all things are clear, whatever the wavelength, and where ever they fall on the ground, scattered by monsoon weather coming. desert monsoon.

but really, the things that could be added here, as I scan images from my Aunt Mary’s collection of mostly Kodachrome images from the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s of her life, as she saw it. creating an archive in digital form from analogue boxes of things. turning the color tracings and reducing that to patterns of magnetic polarity. that is energy. period. driving life and everything else forward.

posted
  • place: en route Berlin - Hamburg - Kiel, Germany

ignoring things

back to Kiel via Hamburg, on the train once again. having also once again not done much there at all except meet intensively with a small group of other humans and speaking, exchanging energies with them. ideas like forms of deep-praxis, life-changing practices, and ways of communicating my ideas in more visceral ways come up. and logistics, and that flow, analog and continuous, of life, forward, and the sensual information that feeds into that.

the music that I encoded at Wolfgang’s is quite electric/eclectic. like listening to KCRW radio. in Santa Monica. where eyes opened to other forms of thinking and being. about as experimental as you can get.

like having the students choose an energy source, and give weekly reports on it to the others. or, as arose in Kiel as well, that image of the two cans with a string between them. communications-at-a-distance.

hearing last night the depth of living under the weight of manifest fears in Bogota. how that goes deeply into re-arranging the body’s energy state. we may stand, consciously apart from the body, but eventually it comes back to connect with that removed consciousness. with a vengeance if it has been ignored too long. saying, DOn’t IGNORE THE LIMITATIONS OF SENSUAL PRESENCE, yep.

passing a massive antenna installation a bit the the north of the rail line. military, and probably extreme long wavelength array for submarine or global communications. a relic of the past? like the landstrasse lined with the Linden trees. and the fallow, wild fields. a higher level of wildness and disorder. than in the former West, still. nice.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

last rolls of Tri-x

staying up late, very late, finally developing film from the last two years. the HC110 developer only just came in at the local camera store. stressful for things to be so last-minute. but I think I will be back here before I have planned — though my plans are not so clear anyway. whether to re-join the private sector in the US, after so many rebuffs from the academic sector here, and with the explosion of Internet-related activities. hmmm. so the doctorate at UIAH may just have to wait.

now have to scan and prep images to retrospectively illustrate this narrative. pointless exercise? perhaps. 13 rolls of Tri-x built up from two years of movement. 440 silver tracings, give-or-take a handful. not many images for so many kilometers, but. there they are. one image for every 440 kilometers, or so.

posted
  • place: Maastricht, Netherlands

in Heaven

Land in Heaven after arriving in Maastricht. Rod meets me at the bus station. The ride over from Germany traverses a beautiful border region of rolling hills and farms, and bunkers … Rod tells me that the border around Maastricht—between Germany, Belgium, and Netherlands was determined by the landing points of cannonballs fired from the walls of the city. Heaven’s proprietor fires up a spliff right away, at 10:30 am, and we sit around jawing with John, another Maastricht/Brit friend of Rod’s, who has just come back from the sub-Continent. So it goes. Back at Rod’s, we catch up on five years of stuff. Tracking lots of audio works by Rod and other people. He has been very productive with his art work lately, making the jump from analog to digital production methods for one, and has been making CD’s that are always provocative and idiosyncratic in their conception.

posted

imprints

swimming this evening in a very crowded pool. still thinking of this whole issue of how I have used my personal energies to imprint my personality, my presence, on my environment. something very much outside the needs of survival, very much obsessive (in mostly small rather harmless ways), but accumulating a force that exclude an Other from occupying that same space. is it possible? domination of landscape — the title of a work done several years ago. a simple image, printed as a postcard and sent to an exhibition in Texas, somewhere. a fragment of a landscape, I think on the crest of Independence Pass? with two square fence-posts, a heavy chain draped between them. but this analog illustration seems to be acted out every time I enter a space. organizing it. it is a form of finding comfort — same way, in a working space, I have to straighten it up before getting to work. kitchens, work-spaces, and especially, computers! Ugh. what about not making ANY imprint at all? is it possible? it is on a sliding scale, so, if there is the possibility, walk Lightly!