glitchworks
to Björn Bjarnason
12 August 1995
To the Honorable Björn Bjarnason, Minister of Education and Culture
As I have noted that you have put up some home pages asking for input regarding education in Iceland, I am transmitting this formal letter to you via email. (I apologize for not writing in Icelandic, but I am not very good at it even though I have lived in Iceland for five years…)
I am writing this letter to urge your continued support of the Icelandic Academy of Art.
Following I will present some personal opinions concerning the future of the Academy as well as some concrete suggestions and proposals. These considerations are based in my experience in teaching at MHÍ for the past five years as well as numerous guest-teaching positions at other Universities and Academies in Scandinavia and the US. Currently I am serving as Chair of the US-Iceland Fulbright Educational Commission (until September 1995) and as (Founding) Director of the Electronic Media and Photography program at MHÍ. My opinions are not necessarily those of either MHÍ or the Fulbright Board.
I believe Iceland is at a crossroads where the choices, opportunities, and outcomes will be largely determined by how the issue of a national educational policy is developed. As the post of Minister of Education and Culture determines this policy, I believe it to be the most critical cabinet posting in the entire government.
It is important to the future of Iceland that attention be directed to the building-up of a competitive and well-considered program of education in the arts. The recent confirmation of intent as expressed by the Althingi and the government in support of the official formation of the Icelandic Academy must be followed up by concrete action concerning the financial, physical, and ideological future of the institution.
more “to Björn Bjarnason”
The Crazed Janitor
[ED: During a visit to his apartment/studio in Denver last month, I asked Jim if he would consent to showing this piece on neoscenes. His art oeuvre is always challenging, humorous, playful, and both linguistically and algorithmically sophisticated!]
The Crazed Janitor is a pangram, a sentence employing every letter of the alphabet. Pangrams are frequently used to display a specific typeface, in this case, one of my own design—Magic Squares. The letterforms are colored systematically by letter frequency usage, coloring consonants with a range of grays from black to white and assigning spectral colors to the vowels.
The T is colored black as it is the most frequently used consonant in the alphabet. White is assigned to the Z because it is the least frequently used consonant and all of the rest are assigned incremental values of gray between black and white according to their frequency of use. The vowels are assigned colors according to their respective wavelengths, thus Red (of the longest wavelength) is assigned to the E which is the most frequently used vowel. The remaining colors are assigned according to their respective wavelengths and usage, so that Violet (the shortest wavelength) is assigned to Y, the least frequently used vowel.
That the pangram might also represent a form of synesthesia, where some people see individual letters as specifically colored (not all black), is an unintended consequence of the composition.
any landscape …
Any landscape is so dense with evidence and so complex and cryptic that we can never be assured that we have read it all or read it aright. The landscape lies all around us, ever accessible and inexhaustible. Anyone can look, but we all need to see that it is at once a panorama, a composition, a palimpsest, a microcosm; that in every prospect there can be more and more that meets the eye.
Meinig, Donald W., and John Brinckerhoff Jackson, eds. The Interpretation of Ordinary Landscapes: Geographical Essays. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979.
Meinig’s allusion to holistic natural systems is quoted in an essay and exhibition on the historical “Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey”:
Huber, Thomas P. Hayden’s Landscapes Revisited: The Drawings of the Great Colorado Survey. Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2016.
James Miller‘s concept of “living systems” emphasizes that all such systems—from cells to landscapes to societies—share common scale-independent patterns of organization and processes as well as divergent features. As initially articulated in an editorial by Miller in 1956 in the then-new journal Behavorial Science:
Our present thinking-which may alter with time-is that a general theory will deal with structural and behavioral properties of systems. The diversity of systems is great. The molecule, the cell, the organ, the individual, the group, the society are all examples of systems. Besides differing in the level of organization, systems differ in many other crucial respects. They may he living, nonliving, or mixed; material or conceptual; and so forth.
Miller, James Grier. “Editorial.” Behavioral Science 1, no. 1 (January 17, 2007): 1–5. https://doi.org/10.1002/bs.3830010102.
In the context of landscapes, this approach aligns with systems thinking by focusing on how ecosystems, organisms, and human activities interact within larger networks, and are themselves comprised of smaller and smaller networks. A landscape may be seen as a living system with a complex of nested subsystems, where elements like nutrient cycles, energy flows, and information exchanges are interconnected. These interactions contribute to emergent properties and systemic behaviors, underscoring the need to consider the whole landscape when analyzing environmental changes and implementing management strategies. Augmenting or supplanting those more empirical methods, we believe that artistic, creative, imaginative, embodied, and other refined sensory-based processes can very effectively address and engage not only the astounding complexity, but the raw and inspiring beauty of these systems. Key to what may be a singular holistic ‘understanding’ of a landscape is focused and sustained observation that is aware of the scalar similarities and differences.
The original Hayden report from 1876:
Hayden, Ferdinand Vandeveer. “Annual Report of the United States Geological and Geographical Survey of the Territories: Embracing Colorado and Parts of Adjacent Territories; Being a Report of Progress of the Exploration for the Year 1874.” Washington, DC: US Geological Survey, 1876.
Hayden recognized the profound value of William Henry Holmes‘ drawings, though he did not formally recognize the other artists who produced documentary drawings on the expeditions, He reserved most of his praise for William Henry Jackson, the photographer who documented so expansively the landscapes of the American West setting the creative precedent for the likes of Ansel Adams, Richard Misrach, Robert Adams, Willy Sutton, and the many others who followed.
stalling, re-starting
Creative output sputters and stalls in the face of tapering life energy, with far too many menial tasks absorbing the dregs. Future creative engagement requires that I relinquish this living situation and move on, sooner than later. Sure, the maintenance, ordering, and re-wilding process may be understood as creative in a wide, cosmological sense: a performative action affecting the state of the macrocosm. The amount of time siphoned off into property upkeep, along with the demands of the ‘regular’ j-o-b has precipitated a high level of social isolation—something that I’m not used to, and something that’s not good. Driving the maintenance desperation is an acute and currently unavoidable fear-of-the-future. Sheesh. The ratio of my embodied energy level to the overall entropy of the situation is in the negative orders-of-magnitude level.
e–::E(s) ≥ 10-5
With no capital to exploit in this terminally oligarchic nation, aside from whatever I can physically manipulate.
There is a limit to what I can do to ‘catch up’ on years of zero wealth accumulation in the stead of transnational creative engagement (aka, bottom-feeding). Options are limited, but success depends more on the vitality of will—closely allied with physical stamina these days—along a simple fearlessness to make it happen. Fear is so diffuse—and previously not a factor—that surely it can be overcome (again) with focused human engagement.
Plans are developing. The first is leaving full-time work-for-pay despite compromising long-term viability. The second is to liquidate the property. Optimizing it for resale will require maybe six dedicated months, maximum, before moving on. The real estate market will be in better stead next year, barring civil conflict or another irruption of the Gaian system. Expatriation now the first choice. The extremities of Babylon’s current incarnation—hardly imagined by even the most cynical internal critic, well-known to those looking on from the outside—are a grinding black hole.
I arrived at this working/living situation having prioritized human connection over a stable and lucrative career (in the extractives industry where I started, or elsewhere). Unlike a lot of folks who follow a specific, planned trajectory, honing their talents in a particular field, gaining seniority and capital, I bounced around. Partly to maintain face-to-face contact with a widely dispersed human network, but also to sustain a flexibility that allowed for spontaneous participation in particular creative situations appearing along the way. Some, once trusted, have decided to label that as opportunism. I’ll deal with that hurtful critique in another posting. My general trajectory, though, despite that label, in other ways, was a mistake even with the rich array of participatory experiences it brought me into. Prioritizing stability, the known, the familiar rhythms of regular and predictable employment (and cash flow), ensuring (insuring!) future viability: this is the leitmotif of survival in the capitalist system, the rewards for a reliable prole. I prioritized change, instability, serendipity, spontaneity, and am paying the price of that. The time value of the abstracted instrument of social viability—money—requires long-term dependence and living-for-the-future. Well, the future has arrived: viability and life is emphatically transitory, there’s only one go-round. As Richard Pryor extolled: “I don’t give a FUCK!”
And what of Art? and Creativity?
whispered:
It all started a 17th of January, one million years ago.
a man took a dry sponge and dropped it into a bucket full of water.
who that man was is not important.
he is dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
as I was saying, at about 10 o’clock, a 17th of January. one million
years ago, a man sat alone by the side of a running stream.
he thought to himself :
where do streams run to, and why?
meaning why do they run.
or why do they run where they run.
that sort of thing.
personally, once I observed a baker at work.
then a blacksmith and a shoemaker.
at work.
and I noticed that the use of water was essential to their work.
but perhaps what I have noticed is not important.
normal voice:
anyway the 17th goes into the 18th
then the 19th then the 20th
the 21st the 22d the 23d the 24th the 25th the 26th the 27th
the 28th the 29th the 30th the
31st.
of January.
thus time goes by.
It all started a 17th of January, one million years ago.
a man took a dry sponge and dropped it into a bucket full of water.
who that man was is not important.
he is dead, but art is alive.
I mean, let’s keep names out of this.
as I was saying, at about 10 o’clock, a 17th of January. one million
years ago, a man sat alone by the side of a running stream.
he thought to himself :
where do streams run to, and why?
meaning why do they run.
or why do they run where they run.
that sort of thing.
personally, once I observed a baker at work.
then a blacksmith and a shoemaker.
at work.
and I noticed that the use of water was essential to their work.
but perhaps what I have noticed is not important.
normal voice:
anyway the 17th goes into the 18th
then the 19th then the 20th
the 21st the 22d the 23d the 24th the 25th the 26th the 27th
the 28th the 29th the 30th the
31st.
of January.
thus time goes by.
Robert Filliou‘s Whispered Art History (excerpt)
[ED: a decidedly gendered, old-school statement from a Fluxus founder … there are contemporary, open, and ongoing events that arose around this text, establishing 17 January as Art’s Birthday. I used to participate, but haven’t lately. The last major Fluxus-related happening was Fluxus Akademie discussion/lunch at Mary‘s in Rösrath in 2013. And in the incommunicado haze of the past few months, I discover Mary’s gone, back in March. Yet another remembrance to craft, reminding: no time to lose.]
Calmness accompanies the whole. Fear accompanies the part. Intuition goes beyond the figure-ground focus of conscious perception.
Prather, Hugh. Notes to Myself: My Struggle to Become a Person. New York, NY: Bantam Books, 1990.
Minna Tarkka 1960 – 2023
Saddened to receive news from Andrew that friend, colleague, artist, researcher, producer, and facilitator Minna Tarkka had passed, far too young, on 27 August after a very brief illness.
I arrived in Helsinki, Finland, gritty-eyed, after an early morning flight from Reykjavík, in late August, 1994, on the first of many visits, sojourns, gigs, workshops, and residencies. After dropping my luggage at my friend Visa’s print-making studio on Jääkärinkatu, I made my way to Arabianranta and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Taideteollinen korkeakoulu, or TAIK, now the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture), located then in the old Arabia porcelain factory on Hämeentie. I was in Helsinki for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and, later, for an international performance event (Fax You) at the Akademie Bookstore on Helsinki’s Night of the Arts with the Finnish artist, Visa Norros and others. ISEA was being hosted that year by the Media Lab at TAIK and directed by Minna Tarkka, a person who did things, who showed up, and who inspired others to show up and do things.
I first met Minna later that morning at the TAIK Arabianranta building on the 3rd Floor at the Media Lab—actually we collided in the hallway—auspicious and a bit embarrassing! She was dashing from Point A to Point B as Director during the very hectic symposium registration. After both of us proffered sheepish apologies and introduced ourselves, she took me around, introducing me to some of the media arts luminaries attending the symposium and to staff at the Lab. This was the first of many examples of her unsparing generosity. It was during the symposium that I fully entered her energized sphere of influence there in Finland, where we had a number of memorable dialogues around the ethics and creative possibilities of the rapidly expanding field of electronic media in which she was a thought pioneer. As Associate Professor at the Lab, she later facilitated my return in the spring of 1995 to teach a four-week course. And a few years following that, she was totally supportive of the course netculture that I developed and taught at the Lab in 2000-2001. Her parallel trans-disciplinary course, “Cultural Usability,” critically examined new media design that was inclusive of sociological, cultural, and technological perspectives. Years earlier in 1987, she was the founding Director of MUU, the ‘alternative’ arts organization that has since been a major international player in new media arts. And two years later, she was a founding member of AV-arkki yet another power-house media arts resource and artists’ association there in Finland.
In those earlier days of our acquaintance (and of the WWW itself), her research and art work around spatial metaphors in virtuality, the aesthetics of immersion, and the dynamics of interaction and consumption were of special interest to me, as she explored the fundamentals of human relation as mediated by this ‘new’ technology. She made some highly original and deep dives into the aesthetic and ethical dimensions in the design of spaces for interaction. And all the while, she worked as a facilitator of human encounter, organizing, producing, and participating in many subsequent events, culminating with the formation of another cultural NGO, m-cult in 2000. Right up to the present, m-Cult has exerted a strong influence on the international critical engagement of culture with technology, leading with a profound sense of humane social activism. Yet another influential expression of her energies.
I never made a portrait of her and there seem to be only a handful of poor digital traces. She was a bit shy and soft-spoken. I have a vague memory of the epic RinneRadio concert at ISEA and a huge crowd dancing away, Minna included. She knew how to have an expansive time! That she is gone is yet another loss to many of us who are still pacing about this stage. Minna you will be fondly remembered and deeply missed.
[ED: I will add any reflections and comments from others to this posting as they surface. I’ve been reaching out to friends and former colleagues from those former life-changing times.]
Mary Bauermeister 1934 – 2023
Incommunicado, distracted this whole calendar year by exhausting j-o-b tasks, along with endless, heavy, slow physical labor on the property, I completely missed Mary‘s passing in March. Her NYT obit gives some sense of her powerful creative trajectory and persona as an artist and a convener of artists.
Volker had told me late last year she was declining from cancer and that Simon had moved into the Forsbach house to look after her. But it was too much for him, and she was subsequently moved to a care facility. I had planned to spend some time with her back in March 2020 during my Covid-aborted Germany trip, and now, she’s gone. The last time then, were the days spent in 2013 at Forsbach, the highLight being the day-long Fluxus Akademie meeting that she convened, inviting me along with a number of German academics and artists in her orbit. Her energy was astounding: just shy of 80 y.o., she raced around the house preparing for both the meeting and in the kitchen, a sumptuous luncheon. Helping her as best I could, I almost had a heart attack myself when, at one point, as she ran back and forth from the kitchen to the meeting space, she tripped and fell up the stone steps between the rooms. Showing no injury, she brushed herself off and kept going at high-bustle speed: the indomitable dynamo that she was her entire life! “I provide” as she says below.
We first met in Aachen at the Avantiere* exhibition in 1990 that HaWeBe (Hans Werner Berretz) organized at the Aula Carolina. Mary had a sculptural installation “Zeit”; my installation was “der Apkalyptische Traum” that was wrapped around the massive stone columns of the ancient hall.
I was the oldest daughter. I had an older brother whom I loved very much and four younger sisters. So I was then the provider of the family. I always had to, that is, I wanted to. I thought that was wonderful. I actually provided very early on. Later my children almost resented me for that, because my love is always in providing. I am a human being. If someone tells me you don’t love me, don’t hug me, I provide, I like to provide for people, and my kind of love has to do with providing, not necessarily with cuddling and hugging. That I had to do without that for too long in my life. In order to take that importantly now, I then also learned to put away nicely ascetically. As a child, I saw colors around every object, moving colors. One would call that today aura, above all around living things, but also around stones. Stones were not dead for me. — Mary Bauermeister
That’s also where I first connected with Simon Stockhausen, her son. He performed a long improve electronica piece—an hommage to the works in the show—as his then girlfriend, Tina, pulled his synth rig around the space. I unfortunately hadn’t any access to a decent recording device at that juncture, having hopped down to Germany from Reykjavík just a few months after moving there from the US, footloose.
Over the times we crossed paths, I never did a portrait of Mary, it seemed too trivial a gesture in the face of her powerful life-energy (there’s her hearty laughter in my ear!), instead I shot a lot of interiors at her unique house (designed by Erich Schneider-Wessling) there in Rösrath which was, essentially, a working museum. Among countless other objets d’art, stones, crystals, and musical instruments was a set of absolutely huge Tibetan singing bowls. They amplified and resonated with her fundamental life-energy. The garden was also the site of numerous permanent installations including the largest singly terminated quartz crystal I’ve ever had the opportunity to hang around.
Thank you, Mary, for so freely sharing your prodigious creative energies with so many of us, and thank you for providing.
* Hans Werner introduces Mary and the rest of us starting around 00:15:30 in the video following a long introduction by a critic whose name I can’t recall. I shot this on a borrowed VHS machine that Léo managed to snag from his office. Ancient history!
blue drain
blue drain, Kodachrome sketches, March 1995, Iceland. ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes. 
blue drain, Kodachrome sketches, March 1995, Iceland. ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes. 
blue drain, Kodachrome sketches, March 1995, Iceland. ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes. 
blue drain, Kodachrome sketches, March 1995, Iceland. ©2021 hopkins/neoscenes.
A Psalm of Life
What The Heart Of The Young Man Said To The Psalmist.
Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.
Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.
Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,
Is our destined end or way;
But to act, that each to-morrow
Find us farther than to-day.
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
And our hearts, though stout and brave,
Still, like muffled drums, are beating
Funeral marches to the grave.
In the world’s broad field of battle,
In the bivouac of Life,
Be not like dumb, driven cattle!
Be a hero in the strife!
Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!
Let the dead Past bury its dead!
Act,— act in the living Present!
Heart within, and God o’erhead!
Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time;
Footprints, that perhaps another,
Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,
A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,
Seeing, shall take heart again.
Let us, then, be up and doing,
With a heart for any fate;
Still achieving, still pursuing,
Learn to labor and to wait.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in The Knickerbocker, Volume 12, #1, July 1838.
Application: Field_Notes – The Heavens
Application to the BioArt Society Field_Notes workshop:
A native of Alaska, Dr. Hopkins is an international media artist. He holds a creative practices PhD in media studies from University of Technology Sydney and La Trobe University; an MFA from CU-Boulder (where he studied film with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BS in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His trans-disciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative systems, distributed and community-based DIY processes, and developing empowered approaches to technology. His creative practice explores the role of energy in global techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter through performance, image and sound work, and writing. He has taught across more than twenty countries. He is currently working as an editor and information specialist at the Colorado Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. Traces of his praxis may be found at https://tech-no-mad.net/blog/.
(1) SECOND ORDER group – With a fundamental interest in the process of information and knowledge transfer, especially in the context of deepening public engagement in science, I find the idea of (critical) second-order observation compelling. In this Gaian moment, the creative engagement of art/sci (research) practices is of great importance. The precise processes by which they are informed and disseminated – through a synthesis of engaged human encounter and dialogue, intense and centered (even meditative) observation, along with the impact of empirical information sources — is an important object of inquiry. Previous workshops I’ve led have explored the meta-structures of participatory creative action and their relationship with energy/life.
(2) HAB group – My sound/camera-based work is not about product, but rather rooted directly in the meditative mind-state of the observer, being especially aware that the “observer changes that which is observed.” Watching the sky is a daily process for me.
I contribute in two ways: listening to the Other’s stories, and sharing stories from my own experience. I hold a philosophy that says in open exchange/dialogue between the Self and the Other, there is a powerful third energy source that arises which may subsequently be tapped into as a source for creative action. Having lived as an expatriate for most of my life, I have a deep sensitivity to cross/trans-cultural communication and collaboration. This I have demonstrated facilitating and participating in transdisciplinary workshops/residencies around the Baltic Region. That and my significant background in the science and environmental/geosciences specifically will add to the collective knowledge-base. I am an experienced field researcher, and traveler, and I bring a wide on-the-ground experience with Arctic, high-altitude, desert, and arid ecosystems. My personal creative arts/media praxis is multi-disciplinary and I enjoy engaging with other practitioners about the textures of their practices.
https://neoscenes.net/blog/category/project/clui-residency
In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation
Edinburgh Festival Day 17: A game of two halves
A brief article explaining the very cool art project that I participated in — “Outpost Biennale”. When I get a chance, I’ll add some documentary images of my contributions.
[From the Independent, 30 August 1994]
They cost nothing. They are the size of a credit card. And they threaten to subvert the art world. Iain Gale investigates.
Across Edinburgh, people are looking at works of art, engaging in a visual dialogue which taxes their faculties of appraisal and evaluation. But the focus of their attention is not the impressive collections in the city’s art galleries, but 24,000 works of art which cost almost nothing and are just the size of a credit card. Despite their size and apparent lack of value, however, they constitute the most fascinating and innovative art show of the whole Festival.
‘Outpost’ is a revolutionary concept which aims to extend our understanding of the processes that condition the way we look at art. Originally the brainchild of Clive Sall and Emma Davis of FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste), the project, now supported by Independent Public Arts, is centred around 240 artists, of varying degrees of celebrity and talent, each of whom has been asked to produce 100 copies of an original work of art in two halves. One half is distributed from dispensers at sites across the city. You simply take one and make of it what you will.
This is the essence of a project whose raison d’etre is the willingness of the public to make its own critical decisions about art. You become involved the moment you take a card, effectively becoming curator, critic and collector. Once you have accumulated a few cards, preferably from different venues, the next step is to take them to the Outpost stand in the Traverse theatre foyer where, for a price which varies from 10p to pounds 10 (all proceeds go to an Edinburgh Aids charity) you can collect a ‘signature’ card which reveals the identity of the artist. For a further pounds 4, you can buy a catalogue which also acts as a display album. Stick in your cards and you have the exhibition.
It is simple and effective, and raises interesting questions about the way we view art. The credit-card format, for example, might alert the viewer to an intention to subvert the traditional hierarchy of dealer, artist, museum. But Sall is emphatic that he and Davis are not ‘art terrorists’; ‘We simply want to circumvent institutions,’ he says. It’s a simple thesis: art galleries, public and commercial, present works in a way which by its nature implies greatness. If it’s on the wall, sanitised and sanctified, it must be good. Decontextualising begins with the venue. By locating the house- shaped dispensers not only at the National Gallery of Scotland and the Fruitmarket Gallery, but also at Burger King, Waverley station, a post office and a go-go pub, the organisers are indulging in a form of gentle subversion. In a gallery setting, the layman will suspend critical judgement to worship at the altar of high art. The first thing to do is find the name. But with Outpost, the artists’ names are not revealed, along with the second half of the diptych, until the art is paid for. With no authorship evident, viewers are coerced into making the effort to regain their often neglected critical faculties.
There is much to choose from. The works of art are ingenious in their diversity, from a sculpture created from a piece of string and evidence of the recent fad for chocolate in the word piece ‘lick me’ through a mildly obscene fax from Germany to simple, effective abstraction. Having decided, in the crush of Burger King or the serenity of an art gallery, whether or not to keep the first card, the viewer’s next decision is whether to pay the amount demanded for the second. So, after the aesthetic judgement comes that of value. A twist is that while some of the artists on show are students, others (a list is available), are known and exhibited names. Part of the interest comes from the excitement of gambling on your own taste. Once the collection is assembled, its display in the gallery of the book is at the viewer’s discretion.
Via this sequence, the viewers become curators in a process which, one hopes, will teach them something that they won’t find in a textbook. Of course, the pool of artists is finite and generally not traditionalist. So one could say that the organisers have already imposed their own critical criteria. Nevertheless, by the time the dispensers are empty and, with luck, all the signatures claimed, there could be some 500 more people in the city who understand what it is to be a curator or critic. If only it were really that simple.
Artworks will be dispensed until 2 Sept. An exhibition will be held of the work. Details from Independent Public Arts on 031-558-1950. An Outpost project will be part of the Venice Biennale in 1995.
secondary or primary?
Secondary or primary influences in the course of a day. As thoughts flush, septic, toxic, banal, indistinct.
Dis-ease plagues the surrounds. Time is the wait for embodied encroachment.
Later:
A fragment of pleasing life: Pleased to see calmness on her face, in her demeanor. Pleased to feel the resonance of her heart and life in her voice. Pleased that she is feeling well at the moment. Still drawn by that astonishing intelligence. It engenders endless delving into the nature of our lives. It gives me hope. Otherwise, these days I do not socialize.
Sooner:
Paycheck, taxes, investments, retirement, all terms that frame the life of artifice that follows money, follows a job along the capitalist way. Artifice, yes, art, no. Unless one holds close to mind that it is all performance art. If it wasn’t so replete with dis-spiriting human relation (hah, management!), foundering in that artifice, it might be redeemable. Redemption comes at a price, though.
Harpa sound installation
Willy’s artist talk
changing up the trajectory
und so. Lots’a mulling over these past months, and the conclusion is that moving forward I will spend as close to 100% of my time [outside of the regular CGS workday] in proceeding to get on with my creative work. This means an end to what has anyway been an impoverished social life of the last year. Time is slipping, and in order to accomplish something, anything, before the clock runs out, the days of nomadic shuffling around to engage with folks f2f are over, gone. Much life-time was spent in this pursuit over the years, but now, the archive calls, to be reassembled, reconfigured, simply maintained, fwiw: there is certainly no worth in it residing in boxes. Hundreds, thousands of vintage silver prints, slides, negatives, tapes moldering away in boxes. And I need to spend the time in getting works out, or something. The bulk of my creative production went into that personal network, and it seduced me into thinking it was a sustainable pathway. It was not. It brought me to the miserable situation that I am in now. I see this reflected in every postcard of mine that I run across. A piece of my life-time/energy spent in the desperate drive to remain connected. more “changing up the trajectory”
portrait, Homare
Homare telling stories
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”
six months in
[Already] ’cause time is going so fucking fast. Happened that I got a migraine the same day, so had to take my first day of sick leave. Uuh, important factoid? Nah. Glazed eyes, with four monitors at the desk, workin’ for ‘the man’ 8-5 (with a chunk of extra hours already accrued), M-F, many days a year. Woe is me (as in Dürer’s Apokalypse argh). Life-time simply melts away. And though this is Life, it never seems so. Life is elsewhere, except when fully immersed in a natural system (could that be my, or someone else’s navel? s’pose so). Better yet, simply immersed in sensing the sky devoid of skyworms, the land devoid of vehicles, houses, and foot-prints, devoid of pathways, suffused with chaos, no invisible armature holding it all together, flying free.
Work: comprised of back-end organization of the CGS data-space. The digital data-space has had no comprehensive oversight or consistent management since the advent of the digital office itself. Terabytes of data has accumulated without regard to searching, utilization, or archiving. Of course, all this takes resources which the CGS hasn’t had much of. I have taken several small portions of that data-space and am intensively re-organizing them as consistent, searchable, and public-facing resources. As the organization exists to provide information to the public, it is essential that it has a work flow that proceeds from the professional geoscience research directly into formats that augment the public role. So, a key question is how to make that translation from scientific data and information to public information and knowledge.
Colorado Geological Survey website; bookstore; the new blog I just implemented; Twitter feed @COGeolSurvey; and Facebook page. Nothing active on Instagram as there is already a dearth of usable visual material. I am well into taking the entire website, bookstore, and blog situation (more than 2000 pages of stuff – GIS data, maps, reports, forms, publications, information, images, and some videos) and melding that into a single WordPress site that will piggyback on an in-progress web re-tooling that Mines is doing concurrently. File naming conventions, directory structures, metadata strategies, editing of texts and visuals, whilst implementing and monitoring a wide range of analytics to get accurate information about the 1-to-2-thousand visitors a day that the site gets. And so on.
portrait, Jim
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”
je suis: a performance
Simon mentions that this performance piece was discussed around the dinner table at the Abranowicz-Raisfeld ski house, in Upstate NY the other weekend. Didn’t recall that I had actually mentioned it to anyone. Magga and I were on a three-month driving trip to France, Italy, Germany, and Denmark, and were in the French Alps for a time. The performance came together spontaneously during a picnic of baguettes, a variety of fromages fins, some wine, (c’est typique, touristique). I recall we were seated on rocks — a curious ‘elephant hide’ manifestation of dolomite — and were instantly plagued by hundreds of very large ants. Taking the rinds of some of the cheeses, I wrote on the rock in large lower-case cursive letters: je suis (I am). I did not document the process itself: the photos document the aftermath prior to our abandoning the site.
je suis was a spontaneous nod to Duchamp, to be-ing, to consuming, and to the beastly nature of nature.
Gelassenheit & Dada
Dada is the activated inverse operation of Gelassenheit: what could be more accurate a statement? Now, to completely destabilize it. Mr. Summers says, from Maastricht, “I bought a parachute for my orangutan today. And to celebrate the centenary of Dada I took a plastic sieve for a walk.” There you have it.
Robert Adrian X 1935 – 2015
TOWARD A DEFINITION OF RADIO ART
Radio art is the use of radio as a medium for art.
Radio happens in the place it is heard and not in the production studio.
Sound quality is secondary to conceptual originality.
Radio is almost always heard combined with other sounds – domestic, traffic, tv, phone calls, playing children etc.
Radio art is not sound art – nor is it music. Radio art is radio.
Sound art and music are not radio art just because they are broadcast on the radio.
Radio space is all the places where radio is heard.
Radio art is composed of sound objects experienced in radio space.
The radio of every listener determines the sound quality of a radio work.
Each listener hears their own final version of a work for radio combined with the ambient sound of their own space.
The radio artist knows that there is no way to control the experience of a radio work.
Radio art is not a combination of radio and art. Radio art is radio by artists.
Robert and I got into contact via the Eternal Network more than twenty years ago. He was a networker, and an inspiring telecommunications and radio artist: or as Ars Electronica writes “artist, leading-edge thinker, media art pioneer, telecommunications artist, painter and sculptor.” His partner, Heidi Grundmann, is the founder of KunstRadio on Austrian National Radio.
liberties of communication
There are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within actual daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another. But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them. I often think to myself what madness it would have been for van Gogh, and how destructive, if he had been forced to share the singularity of his vision with someone, to have someone join him in looking at his motifs before he had made his pictures out of them, these existences that justify him with all their being, that vouch for him, invoke his reality. He did seem to feel sometimes that he needed to do this in letters (although there, too, he’s usually talking of finished work), but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity get rid of each other for good.
Rilke, R.M. & Rilke, C., 2002. Letters on Cézanne, New York, NY: North Point Press.
one thousand hammer blows
(00:28:51, stereo audio, 69.2 mb)
Concrete is a major energy-intensive product that makes a significant contribution to total global energy usage. The house had a tremendous amount of poorly poured concrete in a variety of forms that I’ve been breaking up and putting in two large piles. Because of the energy issue, re-use of that concrete is a priority, but it first has to be turned into a form that is usable. This means breaking large pieces, some weighing up to thirty kilos (50-60 pounds). The initial removal was accomplished with a large steel pry-bar and a lot of “elbow-grease” as my father would say. The subsequent work of reducing the size is with a 3-pound hammer. To break the material into hand size requires, on average, one hammer blow for each reduced-size piece. To take care of all the material will take many tens of thousands of hammer blows. This piece is a meditation on that process; it is also an homage to The Book of One Thousand Buddhas, itself an homage to Buddhist prayer books more than a thousand years old.
Gone? What do you mean?
photography and witness
Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems too “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography — to generate documents and to create works of visual art — have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photography ought or ought not to do. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it exclaims, What a spectacle!
. . .
So far as photographs with the most solemn or heartrending subject matter are art — and this is what they become when they hang on walls, whatever the disclaimers — they partake of the fate of all wall-hung or floor-supported art displayed in public spaces. That is, they are stations along a — usually accompanied — stroll. . . . Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually, the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process.
Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others, 1st. Ed., New York, NY: Picador.
Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas: done
So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!
Those errors aside, Migrating Art Academies is a brilliant program, period.
Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100
Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.
Best,
Mindaugas
Displace
A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8
Download preview @
https://www.migaa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MigAA-Displace_preview.pdf
This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.
The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.
In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.
The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.
// Migrating Art Academies https://www.migaa.eu
// https://www.migaa.eu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/migaa
Stan’s lectures
Stan starts a lecture on George Méliès thus:
Now let me say it to you—simply as I can: the search for an art . . . . either in the making or the appreciation . . . . is the most terrifying adventure imaginable: it is a search always into unexplored regions; and it threatens the soul with terrible death at every turn; and it exhausts the mind utterly; and it leaves the body moving, moving endlessly through increasingly unfamiliar terrain: there is NO hope of return from the territory discovered by this adventuring; and there is NO hope of rescue from the impasse where such a search may leave one stranded.
Brakhage, S., 1972. The Brakhage lectures: Georges Méliès, David Wark Griffith, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Chicago: The GoodLion. Available for free at UbuWeb
I love the drama that was always wrapped up in a straight up sense of the absurd of what he was saying despite it being something of a truth — I can just hear his voice, and now can really regret that I never recorded any of his classes or our conversations back when (my spacious graduate-student office/studio was next door to his office/studio cubbyhole for a couple years — the very place he made many of his hand-painted films). I still have my class notes, and some of the letters we exchanged after I moved to Iceland. To be such a teacher, unafraid of anything except The Void that he faced down with bold fist-shaking.
VDMX – back to the future
After not doing any recent public visual-sonic improv performance work — actually since 2008 in Berlin at the Haus der Kunst — I decided to grab the updated version of VDMX. Although I’ve been a big promoter of the software from Vidvox for a dozen years, I slowed down using it back in 2008. But I saw they were having a $99 sale for starving artists, students, and others. So, what the hell, I emailed David Lublin who took over from Johnny DeKam at Vidvox, and got set up with the discount.
I included VDMX in the Digital Art course I taught at CU last year, but overall the students reacted with a modicum of revulsion, having to learn the platform (learning anything that wasn’t PhotoShop — the ‘definition’ of digital in many ‘new media’ programs in the 1990s!). That was a big disappointment! I wonder if any of them continued with it, or took anything away from that class. Doubtful, given the critiques.
While I will take on some responsibility for the lapse, the failure, I would also invoke the thoughts of William Deresiewicz in his article in the New Republic suggesting how warped things have gotten in the US Higher Education system.
Anyway, I’m proud of the fact that, early on in my teaching career I decided that if I ever burned out or was not able to inspire my students somehow (or if I even approached that state) — like so many folks I saw around working full-time in the system — that I would stop. It happened, and I did, but again, the burn-out wasn’t a product of some internal lack of imagination of what teaching could be, but more how bankrupt the system supporting learning had become. Too many administrators, too many drains on the integrity of the learning body, too much stress within the young people, and no way for any but the ‘elite’ research faculty members to make even a minimal living. Now, this conclusion of a teaching ‘career’ applies presently only to the US generally. If some alternative situation jumped into my awareness, I would carefully look it over for signs of life. And any European or other international gig I would definitely consider.
So, back to the art work.
That and beginning the editing process of the third Migrating Academies book with Mindaugas. He’s in Nida right now on the last of 17 workshops that he has facilitated for this project (since our last book). Amazing work!
Bueys at the Met
Meeting Anthony after many years, we spend a day wandering from the Upper West side across Central Park to the Met and back. The Met is, as always, full of people and incredible objects, though not too many people to make it disagreeable. We end up spending most our time in the Asian wing looking at calligraphy and looking for Night Shining White. Turns out that at least in the Asian wing, there is no permanent collection, but rather they are frequently changing the entire area. A bit of a disappointment, but there are so many other magnificent pieces there it’s impossible not to be inspired! This image of a Bueys installation in front of one of the Bodhisattvas (Avalokiteshvara) is one of the private jokes we imagine as we wander through…
Colorado Art Ranch residency
Paperwork is in for the Colorado Art Ranch residency in Hayden, Colorado, at the Nature Conservancy‘s Carpenter Ranch site. If anybody is qualified, it’s … well, finger’s crossed. The CLUI residency along with the Whanganui experience form a good segue into this one.
twoi: meet-to-delete
Julian Priest‘s TWOI project has a number of interesting dimensions: when I noticed that friends at Pixelache had jumped into participating, and, greatly respecting Julian’s work in general, I patched together a paper-shredding meet-to-delete that actually fit the bill quite well. It was, after all, staged on Satellite Court.
Prescott Arizona
07 May 2014
Time 14:30-1530 (UTC -7)
Location: -112.466932, 34.570271
1610 Satellite Court, Prescott, Arizona
051 30cm stack of my Uncle’s papers from more than seven years ago that Gladys (his sister-in-law) left in a pile to be shredded
052 Bank statements
053 Credit Card statements
054 Investment statements
055 Medical records
056 Other state secrets
057 12 year stack of 2700 gallons (US) fuel receipts from John’s recently sold Toyota Tacoma truck
Annick facilitated an event in Brussels:
Meet to Delete!
Bruxelles Event Report – Saturday April 26th 2014 – 17h00–21h00 local time – Galerie Up – Bruxelles
We had a lovely Meet to Delete event in Bruxelles at Galerie Up.
The Gallery is small 20 square meter space in the Saint-Gilles area of Bruxelles, launched and owned by Clarisse Bardiot.
On the left side of the Gallery we put a small round table with a shredder and a pot with colored pens. People could sit at the table — or stand by it -— to shred the documents they had brought or delete datas from their cell phones, in a symbolically intimate and focused act.
Next to the table, we had suspended a roll of paper onto which people could write their first name and the nature of the information they just deleted.
On the right side of the Gallery, we video-projected the orbital path of the satellite. A candle was lit in the opposite corner. A poster was displayed next to it, another one was on the door of the gallery and 3 others on the gallery window.
A 9 slide Power Point about the project was available on an iPad for people to browse.
Drinks and light snacks (chips, olives) were served.
At the end of the event, Clarisse and I took a picture of the roll of paper, then we shredded the roll and the posters, and we blew up the candle.
The meta data of the event that we shall keep are the picture of the roll and samples of shredded documents.
About 20 people attended the event, among them some children. Most of them came around the same time, which allowed for nice exchanges.
Many questions were asked about The Weight of Information satellite and the whole project.
What came out of the discussions was that we all delete stuff without necessarily thinking about it but when asked to do it consciously, and in a collective set up, it raises a different approach and feelings to the act of deleting data. Here some that were stated:
. Deleting data and information belongs to the private realm, doing it collectively is, in a certain manner, sharing some sort of privacy.
. Every one reported that they had to think about what they would delete.
. It is difficult to decide and choose what to delete [in the framework of the Meet to Delete event], it is giving a weight to something that has no —or no more— value, that we want to get rid of and in a kind of a paradox giving it, for this moment, a central place.
. The notion of loss was also mentioned.
. It takes time to delete, that is it takes our attention. There is a sort of paradox to isolate mentally oneself from the group to focus on the deleting process.
We had also many informal conversations, some related to social and political issues of (storing) digital data!
For me, the most lovely moment was when one of kid, after having understood what it was all about, deleted “2 files from his DS”.
It was a joyful and friendly event, extremely rewarding intellectually and in terms of human relations.
Thank you Julian for this beautiful project, Clarisse for having hosted it and Alexi for the caring support, everyone that came to Galerie Up and Zac for the idea of the Sprite satellites. This has allowed for a generous, sharing, poetic and light moment.
Annick
print archive
Glacial creeping, pre-global-warming, through the print archive, I mentally calculate how much effort it would (be/have been) to create a full index of all the works there. Similar to what I did, post-mortem, stripped down to underwear and sweating, for the hundreds of paintings in Kevin’s studio during those hot summer days in 2006. Exploring a dead friend’s oeuvre pulls one’s interior through a filter of “is this it?”, “is this all there is left?”, “what will I leave behind?”, and a more general “what the fuck am I doing?”
Existential? Yup. Dilemma? Yup. Crisis? Yup. Fuggit? You bet.
Material art works are experienced, in this case by the creator, as a burden. There is some spark when pulling archival storage boxes, opening them up, and recalling the original vibe of making, enjoying the surface of the paper, the rich and detailed tonalities, the complex challenge of the performance of printing (what I described to my students as dancing through a print), but all that fades whenever the box is closed and the spine is given the task of moving the portfolio against gravity. Artist and artwork cannot escape the unceasing earthward pull (“fight gravity” a once-owned tee-shirt proclaimed with rock-climbing brilliance). So this becomes the interrogative metric: How heavy is it? Followed by the musing: Why is it not Light? It’s made from Light, but perhaps Light’s tracing on the paper is the carnal, the hypostasis: is the Fall. Ach! For levity, arise!
kickstart :: on the verge
Printer scheduled to arrive on Tuesday. Along with a lot of paper. And ink. And I have yet to send out any pledge prints. Still mulling how to proceed so that everybody’s happy with their silver prints!
within the mean(s)
Comparison is a parasite endemic to the gut space of creativity (or is it?). In the creative moment churning presence is complete (or is it?). To compare is to step out of that moment. Attention moves to the recalled, the directed standard that comparison is predicated upon (Bateson’s ‘difference’). Centered creativity falters when full presence in the moment wavers. This is the crisis of the now, of the creative. Why this ablation of authentic process when clarity says that the creative needs no standard? It is enough that the available skills, such as they are in the moment: engage, and work proceeds. When life-energy turns to another process, the prior work is finished. It does not need to become, it simply exists in its own ground state in relation to the social system.
One might say that starting and ending points — those defining a ‘work’ — are arbitrary and subjective social abstractions.
Work is only the outgoing flow of life energies as we pass through this life. It is not that comparison is parasitic, it is life that is parasitic upon the reeling entropy of the cosmos…
Bern Porter’s Sciart Manifesto
Finite worlds of infinite reality and beauty revealed by the tools and discoveries of Science are ripe for aesthetic development.
1. Of light, besides the commonly employed natural and artificial, there is the polarized, the radiating chemical, mineral, and radioactive types along with x-ray, cosmic, and nuclear-particle beams with all related electro-optical phenomena.
2. Of other vibrations, there are the natural, the mechanical oscillatory, resonant, and supersonic sound, the entire frequency range of electrical and thermal waves.
more “Bern Porter’s Sciart Manifesto”
kickstart :: the backers
Following is a list of folks pledging to support the campaign: THANKS EVERYBODY!!!
Wendy Calvin (US), Anne Hopkins Watts (US), John Walker (US), Gary McFaddin (US), Shar Adams (AU), Erica Mitchell (US), Scharmin Dorostkar (US), Sally Williamson (US), Bridget Klauber (US), Loki Hopkins (US/IS), William Abranowicz (US), Marisa & Collin Fay (US), Nancy Haan (US), John Krolikowski (US), Chris Oglesby (US/TH), Amy DeLeva (US), EJ Meade (US), Randall Rabenhorst (US), Peter Kaczkowski (US), Annmaree Dupriez (AU), Andrew Jakubowicz (AU), Kaisu Koivisto (FI), William J. Wuest (US), Chris Walker (US), Orri Jonsson (US/IS), Jeff Stanat (US), Antoinette LaFarge (US), Joe Grenawalt (US), Gary Johnson (US), JC Graham (CA), Dede Fay (US), Mark Addison (US), Casey MacKenzie Johnson (US/UK), Pam Taylor (AU), Karen Wester Newton (US), Josephine Bosma (NL), Alexander Rishaug (NO), Monique Stauder (CH/CD), Nicholas Butler (US), Ian Kennedy (US), Valgerdur Hauksdottir (IS), John Cranford (US), Diana Pisani (US), Mark Werner (US), Dora Campbell (US), James Johnson (US), Conor King (US), Kate Glahn (US), Suzon Fuks (AU/BE), Lawren Richards (CA), Rayna Tedford (US), Jane Crayton (US), Mark McCoin (US), Grace Twain (US), Magnea Björg Jónsdóttir (IS), Hannes Brunner (CH/DE), Homare Ikeda (US), Rebecca Cummins (US), Jon Stein (US), Elsa Vieira (CZ/PT), Alex Klinger (US), Erik Fisher (US), and Mindaugas Gapsevicius (DE/LT)
kickstart :: the printer
Willy forwards a link to a big printer sale happening now at Pro Imaging Supplies in Phoenix. The sale dovetails with the research accumulated over the last couple months: an Epson 7890 or a 7900 are the best options. A conversation with the company owner, Ted Williams, yields more attractive info (papers & supplies are discounted as well). He posts a package of Epson and Hannemühle paper samples — the crucial choice for ink-jet printing. Research topics call for plowing through volumes of data online — the learning curve is ahead. Unlike wet photo printing where chemistry is a crucial issue, digital printing has a different set of variables to play with, along with the typical passel of geeks who obsess over how to get the most color gamut from the RIP software. I’ve long since moved beyond this search for the perfect representation of reality. Why people fool themselves about this issue, I don’t know. Photography is merely another way of putting a mark on paper. And marks on paper are legion. ‘Quality’ is essentially subjective.
in the Zone
Mari Keski-Korsu’s program: Case Pyhäjoki
See what happened at this powerful human coming-together of (em)power-full people, Case Pyhäjoki. Should’a been there. Instead, half a world away on the Uncompaghre Plateau keeping an eye on the sky, actually, two eyes (sometimes with artificial attenuation). Getting to show some old friends around this particular region. At least, I find this place fascinating — given the similarity to Echo Park in some structural senses. Four of us old engineering-school house-mates have a very fine hike yesterday to a WWII strategic minerals (mica) mine. Into that Pre-cambrian basement rock. Mica crystals still bursting out of the cavity wall: some crystal complexes many square feet in area with the strange laminate layered crystals that can be split down to absolutely transparent sheets as thin as any paper. The crystalline lattice bonds generating laminar sheets of strongly connected atoms with weak ties between adjacent layers. Occasionally interspersed with sprays of black tourmaline up to 2 cm in diameter and 10 cm long. And the pink feldspar and cloudy white quartz matrix, pegmatitic. Quite dramatic. It’s hot in the canyon, but there are heavy clumps of cloud that keep ebbing and flowing shadows that cool the ground. Down-canyon there is a layer of > 2 cm chips of (shattered) white quartz that has come from some industrial mining process of crushing and sizing the chunks of stuff from the blast-face of the mine. They definitely had a full-on industrial process going on. And, as a strategic mineral reserve, did they even have some security/military presence, that’s one question I would have for the historians. Among others.
It is a pleasant outing into this intense landscape, environment. With three other quite intense people. Each in a particular way. That’s what’s nice about Mari Keski-Korsu’s collaborative art/activist project also, the one that just took place at a nuclear development site on the upper-mid-western Baltic coast of Finland. She has a talent for bringing intense people around her. It’s a powerful and important talent! Wished I coulda made it. There were two of my US students who claimed interest in going but neither ended up even putting in applications — apparently none of them understood this way of getting funding to experiment with their own creative practices in juxtaposition to some equally curious others — although I tried my best to open their eyes to this process. The rest of the students were absolutely deaf to the idea/offer that they participate in collaborative projects throughout the spring semester. As well as being hostile to the process of collaboration in general. (Or were hostile to the person who put them in the position of having to face the issues of active collaboration and collaborative thinking, sheesh, off-putting!)
Case Pyhäjoki looks good, as I had no doubts it would after talking with Mari in May at Pixelache. Great work!
the dorsal turn
As readily as one accepts the status of artistic creation, as a paradigm for human production, in terms of a terrestrial afterlife — the desire to leave something behind — so might we insist that the artifact functions as archive and memory bank. And the same might be said of technological invention in general, for, as has often been pointed out, the word tekhne was used in Greek as much for what was produced as art as what was manufactured; it stands for the artisanal all the way from art to industry. Although the relation to memory and to archivation might not be immediately apparent in the case of a rudimentary tool, it can be understood that whatever is produced as nonorganic or “nonbiodegradable” remainder will necessarily constitute some form of memorial trace. And it is an obvious fact that artifactual technologies such as language, especially via writing, consist precisely in what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the exteriorization of memory, and that the contemporary technologies of information amount to a veritable “industrialization of memory.” If technology is a matter of exteriorization, of the human reaching outside itself (but, as was argued regarding corticalization and the upright stance, in a way that calls into question the integrity of any interiority), then it is also a matter of archivation: what is created outside the human remains as a matter of record and increasingly becomes the very record or archive, the artificial or exterior memory itself. The production of an artifact is the production of an archive; it means depositing in the present- in some “present” — an object, which, as it inserts and catalogs itself in the past, will become available for a future retrieval.
In reaching outside itself, the human therefore reaches both forward and back; in seeming to turn away from the past, it leaves the artificial that will have it forever referring back to that constructed past as the trace of its memory, as promise of artificial memory and promise or threat, eventually, of artificial intelligence. Memory might be called, after all, the first artificial intelligence, and it comes to be recognized explicitly as such once Freud discovers the unconscious like some self-produced biochip that controls (and derails), as if from behind, the conscious. The life of memory, its status as alive or dead, internal or external, real or artificial, draws the fault line along which the question of technology is still debated, from the desirability of “replacing” mental functions by machines (oral histories by writing, arithmetic by calculators, spelling by word processors, to begin with) all the way to nanoscientific cerebral implants and the manipulation of genetic memory systems.
Wills, D., 2008. Dorsality: thinking back through technology and politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Productivity and Existence
“A remarkable and charming man, your friend,” said the professor; “but what does he really do? I mean … in the intellectual sphere?”
“In the intellectual sphere…” I answered, “H’mm … in the intellectual sphere … he is simply there.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, his occupation is not, in fact, of a very intellectual nature, and one cannot really assert that he makes anything out of his leisure time.”
“But his thoughts?”
more “Productivity and Existence”
windowsill at Mary’s
Carl Canary
Frieder tells me that a student of his challenged him to deal with Twitter, so, starting a few months ago, he committed to making a Twitter account and sending one tweet a day for the following year. For some brilliant insights into informatiks, computing, human systems, digital art, algorithm, follow @CarlCanary!
exhibition opening talk
exhibition opening
conversation with Alexandra
Have an interesting Skpye conversation with Alexandra last evening after getting home from Nadja’s place (missed the damn bus, or, more correctly, was given the wrong info from the KVG website on the timing of the return bus ride — there were no buses running by the time I left. So, a long walk over the Holtenauer Straße Bridge that spans the Ostsee Kanal, and down FeldStraße to DüppelStraße.) At any rate, Alexandra seems quite sharp, though participatory/collaborative online situations present new territory for her. I’ll be keen to see what she produces during her residency regarding VisitorsStudio (especially after deploying it with my Advanced Digital Art students at CU-Boulder this past semester to a very poor reception). Alexandra wants to explore the idea of open-sourcing the platform and perhaps employing more current social networking paradigms in the overall interface design. We’ll see. Not sure that either of those aspects would have made the platform more compelling for my students, actually not sure anything would have compelled them to be less conservative and more creatively present and engaged. Cattle prod anyone? Nah, but whether it was the particular local/immediate context or whether it was evidence of a wider crisis in the US is not so clear. Probably a combination of the two. Whatever, it was disheartening to the extreme.
to the sea
Jenni gets some rendering going and then we stroll over to the World Festival that is packed with sun-seekers, then on over to Kiasma where the heavy Eija-Liisa Ahtila show is droning along: angstlich. A poignant video introduces the work of Jouku Lehtola following him as he is dying of cancer.
A late email to Mauri yesterday precipitates a crossing-of-path on the s/y Selina at the marina south of Kaivopuisto later in the day. I had always recalled Mauri’s speaking of his boat(s), so it is a materialization of the historic imaginary — in full color — neural networks in gear! Catching up with he and Pia whilst daughter Eeva works on a sketch for a new logo for the stern of the boat. We take a short spin out into the Baltic to test a new sail. This is the inaugural sailing for the season and the weather all day is splendid. I walk all the way back to Tapio’s just to enjoy the city ambiance unfolding on such a nice spring day. Finns are out in force, fully awake from the long winter doldrums. Evening/morning ends with a long stroll around Töölönlahti with Jenni. It feels like home, or so, another home, especially walking around Linnunlaulu. Strange life it is. Who could have seen these instances, all of them, cumulate, in the long-ago future that is the now?
