the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::
traces pathways and actions encountered and undertaken
Ambient sound recording entails an active and concentrated listening while in stasis in the particular, enveloping location. Not a bad avocation. A full-bodied attention to sonic energies is often a suffusing balm amidst the chaotic swirl of (human) Life.
What a vortex it is: the overt seduction of the body. When facing dissolution, it is all that cradles any life, all that may be apprehended. All that holds the eye. All that is carried through neurons, filling mind with bright sparks: spinning carborundum on steel. The vortex draws the attention on.
The way out, the exit, is over there, beyond the risk of failure, beyond the passing satisfaction of bringing some thing to Life. Slipped into simplified be-ing. With a silence that only breaks for critique, eh? Critique? What’s that? Art, merely a display of excess energy, yet to be sublimated, annihilated by time.
Speaking to that potential child, gone; speaking among voices in the head; speaking to power and to glory; speaking of the juncture where life turned from the foreseen, and then seemed irretrievable, that life itself was almost gone. So, to encourage the lioness in her heart, reminding of the potential of any turn to the unknown. That her expressing to the world, in any form, is a path to healing. That she is no failure. Despite constant demeaning words applied to forming Self. Years of oppression calcified some facets of brightness. But the sheer intensity of her Light-full spirit prevails.
Slipping through a day, from dawn to late evening, time is a field of flows. Attention calls flow from its progress, delineating it temporarily as distinct and heterogeneous. Pass through attentiveness, and one arrives at the granular curtain of awareness. Seeing both detail and the full over-flow of being.
Fighting to maintain constant attention to lived life. Back to breathing?
An attempt to address the title of this blog entry. Entries arise from these titles. Titles self-generate from the textures of living. Entries are attempts to address the titles, to address the textures of life, to form a text: a reduction of life. A tautology of be-ing — writing about be-ing — a pleonastic embolism destined to disrupt attention, flow, and life itself. And yet these become normative to the social. Normative to the day of lived-life, pried from living body, in service to social presence, social acceptance, and social ‘success’. If only all the world were ignorant of Plato!
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.
The maxim of the Surveillance State is emitted by what is not, unfortunately, a Braindead Megaphone. The Megaphone has a brain that consists of the neural networks of all who pay attention to it, along with the processing power of the Information Society that those folks are tapped into. However, expansive State intelligence is tempered by complexity. A system that is self-monitoring creates a more-or-less dense feedback system. Any feedback sub-system affects the energy flows necessary to support the wider system it services. Within human social systems there seems to be certain degree of inherent paranoia (fear-of-death) that eventually provokes an evolution of these feedback systems, some of them more comprehensive than others (the Stasi and PRK come to mind as extreme examples, but then again, so do Google and Facebook).
Through their energy consumption extreme feedback systems overtake all but the most primitive functions of reproduction optimization (think: the weapon of rape as an expression of power and control and of the re-creation of ‘ones own’; or, state-sanctioned eugenics). The wholesale re-direction of State attention to surveillance signals the eventual end of a sustainable social system.
The maxim of the Surveillance State is an overt expression of the brutality (brutishness) of the norm, it hints at the precise locus of control (that is, within the Self … or not!).
Any expression falling outside this collectively sanctioned norm becomes an excuse, a rationale, a reason for the State to control the source of the expression.
And, by the way, the State is no single government — this is far too naive an image, one promulgated by those ignorantly focused on fearing a ‘takeover’ by the gub’ment — the State is the cumulative structure (path of flows) formed in the process of social evolution, the totality of wide-scale networks that act as binders of the social system as a whole — it is the full fabric of the social system that swaddles us and that we acquiesce to. It includes all the tools that are available to any, to all, for some to use.
de rien
not at all
pas du tout, de rien, jamais
piddling
insignifiant, futile, de rien
ekkert
nichts
This following a hand charade with Bella about going through doors, standing at an open door and not going out, heeling, and pointing the hand. Sunny doesn’t react to any of that, he listens only to direct and forceful commands, maybe a bit senile perhaps? And Bean is deaf but she reacts to a good number of hand signals when I can get her visual attention. Australian Sheepdogs. Smart, but not an Ozzie gene in’em.
Thoughts wander to other people who don’t seem to have a need to connect overtly. Covert connections of silence. It’s my problem. Not theirs. Remote contact. tele-presence is no life.
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…
He described the man who opened fire as quiet and unassuming.
“One almost didn’t see or notice him,” he said, according to Reuters.
Anything else need be noted? The necessity of being seen, of attention to maintain a balanced life is clear, and the consequences are extreme. But is attention from Reuters enough? It’s always too late.
Insipid: this posting over @ the New Yorker is just too friggin kind to the whole concept. Retro is so … empty …
Susan Sontag is not empty and to use her full words to do anything but obliterate the whole inane concept of instagram is a travesty.
It is a nostalgic time right now, and photographs actively promote nostalgia. Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. An ugly or grotesque subject may be moving because it has been dignified by the attention of the photographer. A beautiful subject can be the object of rueful feelings, because it has aged or decayed or no longer exists. All photographs are momento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. — Susan Sontag
One fundamental key to success in Travel is of course attentiveness. We call it «paying attention» in English & «prêter attention» in French (in Arabic, however, one gives attention) suggesting that we’re as stingy with our attentiveness as we are with our money. Quite often it seems that no one is «paying attention», that everyone is hoarding their consciousness—what? saving it for a rainy day?—and damping down the fires of awareness lest all available fuel be consumed in a single holocaust of unbearable knowing.
This model of consciousness seems suspiciously «Capitalist» however—as if indeed our attention were a limited resource, once spent forever irrecoverable. A usury of perception now appears: we demand interest on our payment-of-attention, as if it were a loan rather than an expense. Or as if our consciousness were threatened by an entropic «heat death», against which the best defense must consist of a dull mediocre trancestate of grudging half attention—a miserliness of psychic resources—a refusal to notice the unexpected or to savor the miraculousness of the ordinary: a lack of generosity.
But what if we treated our perceptions as gifts rather than payments? What if we gave our attention instead of paying it? According to the law of reciprocity, the gift is returned with a gift – there is no expenditure, no scarcity, no debt against Capital, no penury, no punishment for giving our attention away, and no end to the potentiality of attentiveness.
Our consciousness is not a commodity, nor is it a contractual agreement between the Cartesian ego and the abyss of Nothingness, nor is it simply a function of some meat machine with a limited warranty. True, eventually we wear out and break. In a certain sense the hoarding of our energies makes sense-we «save» ourselves for the truly important moments, the breakthroughs, the «peak experiences».
But if we picture ourselves as shallow coin purses—if we barricade the «doors of perception» like fearful peasants at the howling of Boreal wolves—if we never «pay attention»—how will we recognize the approach and advent of those precious moments, those openings?
Bey, H., Overcoming Tourism. Available at: https://hermetic.com/bey/tourism.html [Accessed February 15, 2012].
I find that I am able to attend voluntarily, now to one and now to the other system of lines; and that then this system remains visible alone for a certain time, whilst the other completely vanishes. This happens, for example, whenever I try to count the lines first of one and then of the other system. … But it is extremely hard to chain the attention down to one of the systems for long, unless we associate with our looking some distinct purpose which keeps the activity of the attention perpetually renewed. Such a one is counting the lines, comparing their intervals, or the like. An equilibrium of the attention, persistent for any length of time, is under no circumstances attainable. The natural tendency of attention when left to itself is to wander to ever new things; and so soon as the interest of its object is over, so soon as nothing new is to be noticed there, it passes, in spite of our will, to something else. If we wish to keep it upon one and the same object, we most seek constantly to find out something new about the latter, especially if other powerful impressions are attracting us away.
This is only restrictedly true. We move our eyes by our will; but one without training cannot so easily execute the intention of making them converge. At any moment, however, he can execute that of looking at a near object, in which act convergence is involved. Now just as little can we carry out our purpose to keep our attention steadily fixed on a certain object, when our interest in the object is exhausted and the purpose is inwardly formulated in this abstract way. But we can set ourselves new questions about the object, so that a new interest in it arises, and then the attention will remain riveted. The relation of attention to will is, then, less one of immediate than of mediate control. — Hermann von Helmholtz, “Psychologische Optiks,” as quoted in William James, “The Principles of Psychology, Volume 1”
What bugs me is that stupid little black dot in the picture …
It’s a good example of the affect of mediation on socially-generated practices of any sort [this came into mind when I saw a poster advertising a IEEE conference here in Sydney. The posted contained all the recognized and standardized functions of conferences anywhere on any subject. The cocktail evening cruises on the ________ (fill in the blank) river/harbor/lake. The hospitality suites in the _________ (fill in the blank) hotel. The keynotes by famous personages. The plenaries, the break-outs, the posters, workshops, and seminars. yadda, yadda. Don’t people get tired of this endless repetition of heavily coded social protocols?]
The following was downloaded from the UM (University of Minnesota) original Gopher online text retrieval system sometime in the winter of 1991-92. I think it’s the first document (extant) that I downloaded via that new networked document system — the direct precursor of the WWW. Coming around in a very long, very wide circle, from the roots of the digital coming-to-being in the last millennium, breathe deeply:
1. Sit on the forward third of a chair or cushion.
more “(How to Sit) Zazen”
Advertising :: Congregatio de Propaganda Fide
The root vertere, to turn; Sanskrit vartayati he turns; advertere, to turn towards. Drawing the attention (attendere, to wait for). To wait to be turned towards the object of desire. Give it your attention, your life-time, your life-energy. And you shall be free! Ignore it at your distinct mortal peril. As goes advertising, so goes capitalism. Sex for goods.
The force behind adoption of protocols. If advertising is the nice side, what is the obverse? Coercion (sensory input), propaganda (sensory input), persuasion (language-based), peer pressure (sensory input), norms (sensory input) …
But what about the time where attention is paid to it — versus the time spent in actually following its advice (or promise of reward) — the suspended times of non-being?
Golden High School graduation at Brooks Field on the School of Mines campus on what starts off as a dreary and chilly morning with uncharacteristic clouds sticking to the foothills. Holly is the Valedictorian. the weather clears up by the end when Montse and I head back to the house for final party preparations. I take the opportunity to get the whole Williamson Clan together for a group portrait.
fourteen hours later, celebrations finally end with a round of toasts for the graduate.
Dear Holly. What a pleasure to be here to celebrate this time with you! The teacher who spoke at graduation is precisely right that whenever two humans cross pathways they are both changed in ways that are not (always) immediately apparent. This is a powerful principle of life: when we realize and take to heart that this occurs, we may intensify the outcomes of these encounters through open, honest, and unfettered engagement. This engagement should be attentive, concentrated, and focused. Through this, any other human encountered becomes a collaborative partner in a dynamic creative process that is the essence of life. As is taught, the next person you encounter may be the Buddha, and thus, how you engage governs the potential for enLightenment. I wish you all the best in your near and far future; that the pathways you walk will be full of those transformative encounters; and that the transformations bring the breath-taking inspiration that makes life joyous. Life is a phenomena! You are phenomenal! At any point you have questions, answers, observations, or discoveries to share, I am happy to give you my attention. Thank you for being you! oxoxox jh
following a day en route. Prescott, Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri. meet Deb in Denver, then in Kansas City. driving from there eastbound, on that strip of hydrocarbon excreta, Interstate-70. eye-seventy. recalling the towns reeling backwards from that usual west-bound drive from Clarksburg, Maryland to Golden, Colorado, all those years ago. the 32-hour road trips. arrive at the house. Nick doing laundry, the kids in bed. dialogue continues. sleep in. and continue the dialogue that started yesterday with Deb. mirrors of situations reflect, catalyze, frame possible practices, pathways, ways to go.
The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it easier to define this ideal that to give practical instructions for bringing it about. — William James, Principles of Psychology
iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.
sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.
sotto voce (to brainstorms on the XO laptop deployment): And there is the entirely OTHER issue — that of autonomy. The techno-social system (in this example, the entire combined system that is providing the XO) deploys a device, it is not a simple movement of material items or even socio-cultural values (although that is the lever of most of the critique IMHO). It is also the tying in of that distant Other into that larger techno-social system — as soon as they begin using that device. The tying-in has a complex range of affects on the individual using the device. (Alluding to the attention issue, Howard) When that remote other begins to pay attention to the device (spending life-time which equals life-energy) they are removing that attention from a more local framework, and giving that attention/energy to the larger techno-social system. One consequence is that they become dependent on that system, another is that the system consumes that life energy in order to maintain itself (by the nature of a techno-social system). The distant Other is more-or-less bound into this relationship simply by using the device (independent of ideology or purpose!). The dependency expresses itself in an incremental loss in personal autonomy. If the device, now incorporated in the Other’s life, does not function, the Other is in immediate and critical dependency on that larger system. This fact alone is directly counter to the idea, for example, of locally relevant use of the device and goes a long way to suppress the construction of locally relevant learning ‘solutions’ as this deep nature of the device is very ‘corrupting’ (brings in all the values of that larger techno-social system)…
Prior to the introduction of such a device, there are greater possibilities (not necessarily happening, though, I will admit) of locally/individually relevant knowledge-building.
I am probably way too cynical at this point in life, based on experiential observation, though, to think that anything can ‘stop’ this globalized spread of the techno-social system. No political agenda has much power, no national government, no special-interest groups… it seems to be a bulldozer of humanity rolling ahead.
So, what to do? The only solution that I see is the reminding that all this system is built on the fundamental of granular f-2-f encounters of humans and we have to pay deep attention to the local Other first and foremost and definitely BEFORE engaging in the highly mediated techno-social dance of engaging the distant Other.
I apologize, I am sitting alone in a small flat in Berlin typing to you. I do not know my neighbors. I do not, in the moment, practice what I preach. We are already far down the road, soon (I see this in my students) we will forget where we came from. I will continue to remind them and myself. I’ll go meet a friend in a cafe in a couple hours…
that’ll be Brandon.
back in a classroom. talking about data – information – knowledge – intelligence – wisdom. signal-to-noise ratios. adaptability, chain-of-command, defined functions, trend analysis, long tail, lexis-nexus, The WELL, protocols and standards, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, social infrastructures, complexity, hierarchy, networks, order and disorder, economy of attention, business models, power, money, socially-defined exchange, globalization of culture, and so on. I am a teacher, I am only human.
in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.
comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?
it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.
how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.
I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.
the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.
in the days preceding the material frenzy that so characterizes the holiday in the consuming world, I ponder my own relation to the holiday. what could be nicer than receiving a gift? something usable in the course of survival or something completely use-less except for the aesthetic energy it slow-releases to the eye or ear over time. or something that touches on the architecture of the relationship of giver to receiver.
for me the highest gift in the sped-up road-warrior world of 21st century amurika would be the gift of attention. now, I’m not talking about the obsessively sought attention of media-to-star, the ego-centric attraction of appearances, of shiny and slick surfaces, of painted-over cardboard facades, of glimmering particles that exert the false-attraction of material desires. nor the gloming and needy self-centered-ness that requires vampiric sustenance.
but more the binary and reciprocated exchange of attentive presence where the floating self might turn full-faced to the other and in Light and in Gravity — making Light, making Gravity — the two beings take up temporary residence in each others field-of-attraction and field-of-reflection. this is the gift of life, lived life-time shared. attentively shared, focused, concentrated. a gift without value, except for the value of life-time passed. a commodity in limited supply for each, such as the Moirae decree. no higher value of gift except for the giving of life to save a life.
but what is the essence of this gift of attention? in the exchange, sharing of life-time, the self is open, and in that open-ness, adsorbs the be-ing of the other. in this, the self is changed, evolves, realizes the absolute character of other-ness, and what a precious gift it is — to provide the opportunity of change. and between this change, and the apprehension of difference, occurring in an unstable space of the not-knowing, creative spark flashes. and we become more than we previously were.
tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.
sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors — image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging – PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a Cartesian system. Mcluhan’s suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer’s time. so, scaling causes the development of a “whole new media”… new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then surveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics — based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. “as much data as we want.”
the parallel irc discussion (see below) leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm. but it works within the attention economy.
fortune cookie:
talk to Anthony on the phone, catching up with the poet hissef’, subject launches from Heidegger to Kennan (see following), to Paul Celan through to az’s own individual efforts at poetic production.
from a longer article at Transportation Alternatives. clearly another stab evidencing the general principle that every technological implementation costs something on a scale of alienation. the obverse of destruction of community. I place the destruction back at that granular level: where the particular techno-social implementation splits the Self from the Other by some means. the simplest example is the television, where the attention vector, a metric of the strength of personal connection, is generally directed towards the mediated/socialized flow, and away from, or at least perpendicular to the attention vector of the proximal Other. it would be better to watch the teevee via a macro lens as the media is reflected in the eye of the Other. or, of course, just turn it off and do the face-to-face.
all day today, hypersonic craft rip through the skies, squinting without sunglasses hardly finds any of them, they are distinguished only by their small size, invisibility, odd flight trajectories, and the sonic delay related to speed and altitude, that and the sheer volume. to be under attack from one of them would be fearsome even with a rational understanding of what was going on. it’s not common that they joy-ride around here, but neither is it unknown.
Decided last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms as well. So they are nowhere in sight in the morning. After a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some, ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. Later in the morning, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. It is disappointing that this workshop imploded. But I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days. What to do with students who cannot focus and instead want to party? A long walk might have been the answer, to keep them physically going — that might have helped to get them to sleep as well!
In the late afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. We were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students: a real shame.
(00:36:32, stereo audio, 70.1 mb)
It was a delight to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. Googling Silurian Devonian Beroun karst trilobite tells much about the potentials! Especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title “The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia.”
All told, the complete “Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême,” published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.
Late dinner with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. A view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too damn cold for walking around.
Milos and I , along with all of two students, a Czech and a German, catch the 1000 train to Beroun, up the Berounka River about 50 minutes. already this slacking show of the other 9 confirmed participants bodes ill. in the presentation yesterday, there are some glimmers of interest, but also, afterward, a student in the typical Goth black leather trench coat walks up, gets in my face, and aggressively demands what I will provide for him (later determined to be an Estonian), I turn him away when I try to briefly review the nature of an evolving distributed system, that it works only when everybody puts their attention in. he snorts and stalks off. thank god for that.
a few of the rest trickle in over the next 8 hours, but I do not want to start until I have the undivided attention of a more-or-less stable constellation of people. nothing more disturbing for concentrated focus than having to repeat the same thing over and over.
high water. seemed like Iceland there for a few days, gale rains straight from California, turning the yard of dark brown basalt soil to a soupy flow. rain barrel full many times over. dry washes overflowing (surprising neophyte Westerners), streets awash (pavement rapidly pounded to soaking pot-holes from cheap aggregate of soft volcanic ash from the cinder cones around San Francisco Peaks), then a day later, cloudless blue, and the normal total dryness in air, sky, and land. no end to the drought, though for the days of rain, those recent arrivals think it is now okay to plan ten new golf courses instead of two.
Dr. Donaldson performs a root canal on the four long roots of a molar, the one that was giving me so much trouble over the last eight months. low-grade infection had been irritating the nerves so this is the only way to go. his technique is incredibly focused and attentive: I spend the 90 minutes in the chair concentrating on my breathing and listening through bone to the sounds made by the different borers, rasps, probes, and sonic cleaners. wishing it would be possible to record. contact mike on forehead perhaps? have to have direct bone contact, though, no flesh. one could mount a small contact mike directly onto a tooth: noize!
back in town, just. a week that saw a movie modeled on a amusement park ride (with the same depth of plot), and a movie about a computer game (with about the same degree of meaningfulness).
and marketing is ALL. content seems to be only a minor detail in the fight to be SEEN, to be HEARD, by a mass. the economy of attention.
one last retreat to the highlands with Chris, Scharmin and the kids. getting high in the Rockies. while it is getting more and more crowded in the Front Range area, massively more than in 1976, it is still a phenomena, the full experience of getting above 10000 feet, the air, the Light, the sky, everything.
choosing pathways. a teachers way is a constant risk of sketching a path of collective character. Greg said something about herding cats in another context. seems appropriate, kinda. nah, teaching is much too serious to joke about. any human contact must be considered attentively.
but I am nervous internally about the execution of the learning situations here. they are socially much less robust than the previous teaching. a complex array of students. all coming on complex pathways. and the time does seem like simmering crisis perhaps.
tomorrow’s teaching will explore some terms, that the exchange of possibilities are not limited, and I express the meta position (explaining the phenomena of creating a protocol, a shared means for connecting). how that works. looking deeply at a practice of dialogue.
a few days before leaving. the content of this site is drained of all substance by a lack of concentration and attention. single parenting. and decision-making about certain futures. Colorado looms again. but this time, I think it is a more-or-less permanent settlement. after the 12 years of nomadic Europeanisms. pity I don’t have all those years documented here. surely there is a large archive. 3-400 rolls of 35mm black-and-white negatives, thousands of letters written and received, hundreds of audio tapes made, but not much else. content, but not in the form that can be shared in a way that jacks up public attention to the self.
Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty and ready to be penetrated by the object. It means holding in our minds, within reach of this thought, but on a lower level and not in contact with it, the diverse knowledge we have acquired which we are forced to make use of. Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything, but ready to receive in its naked truth the object which is to penetrate it. –Simone Weil
[ED: This brief essay, addressing concepts of learning within networks, appeared in acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858) is a follow-up to the introduction of the neoscenes occupation project that appeared in acoustic.space #2 (1999 ISSN 1407-2858).]
It is encouraging to note a growing awareness within the ECB, BIN, NICE, and other cultural networks regarding the critical importance of education. There is much work yet to be done, however. The present focus of attention within cultural organizations seems to be on fund-raising efforts and the associated (often short-term) practical challenges to survival. Of course, these are very important tasks for assembling viable systems, and, to be sure, issues of funding and political presence are critical to the existence of physically localized organizations. This brief essay is not meant to be a critique of the realities of existence! But at the same time, if cultural networks focus single-mindedly on fiscal and structural issues, there is a real danger that their long-term vitality may be jeopardized.
The open engagement of the local and remote communities in organic and transformative learning is a key for the long-term viability of a network. The stimulation of positive conditions for personal and collective growth should be a primary concern for network participants. Modernist education models are not at all adequate or even desirable when mapped into the flat social structure of a network. It is, in fact, the rise of global networks that offer us the opportunity to transform the entire contemporary nature of education and its relationship with learning. more “learning and networks”
Leonids over and gone, clouds here, and the only fireworks were online. met Kaisu for dinner before her exodus to Mexico City tomorrow. culture shift. the week of teaching ended with a small experimentation into Socratic methodologies with the small class I had at the Fine Arts Academy. it was interesting. clearly there were advantages in that kind of focused attention, but how to sustain the level? it is exhausting. I was quite tired after each day of teaching this week, of course, with the level and intensity of things happening in other sectors, maybe no wonder, but, well, I think I just go crash now. gotta send a months’ notification about giving up this flat, too, ANOTHER thing to do. heading back out on the road once again, for several months.
In some ways, lost the fight this week, and won the battle? Workshops, each has an internal and external dynamic. This one began concentrated and gradually dissipated. Students scheduling seemed to be the primary problem, there was always something else to be busy with. After a few days, I feel like being an entertainer, when the jokes run out, the audience splits. Competing for attention, okay, a childish notion to begin with, but when it applies to an educational situation where I am calling on the students to be participants rather than volumes of empty space passively waiting to be filled with knowledge — this seems to be the less desirable option for them. Far easier to be passive in education than active. Change is a brutal force that, in the end, ushers in death to the table of the living. But stasis is a death-in-life that denies the sensual realities of daily living. This dichotomy, death following life (following death following life) and death-in-life seems core to the process of revolution. Facing the bardo of becoming. Each and every day, letting the movement, the falling towards falling towards the mass of the world, acceleration. If the speed doesn’t change, time compresses. or Light strikes more directly into the soul.
Loki is counting down to his birthday on the 18th. all day he is telling anyone he meets how many days to his birthday. his mother has made birthdays a big occasion, as is the custom in her family. with my 40th closing in only a week later than Loki’s, I have nothing to say. my 21st, probably the last milestone, was an early dinner with a couple friends, not even a shot of whiskey! never have been one for birthdays — with the excuse and sentiment that to be the focus of attention at a family-oriented event was sure to bring ridicule or derision or something maybe a bit less destructive, but still an accumulation of energy that dogs the self and slows the trusted outering of the soul. reflecting that I have never really edited my writing here — in the gross sense of writing a passage and then just deleting it. never have written like that — editing is a process that I do not like to apply to my writing unless it is a formal process in which case I take the word-work very seriously — too seriously in the view of some. Loki and I go to the Urban Coyote salon to get our hair cut. both short. my long tail is cropped and bagged to join the collection of three or four others that have been chopped at various times in the last few years. should have done this early in the summer, as it leaves both of us with white skin unbaked by the sun. Alberto from Mexico is the cutter, and I don’t take the opportunity to practice my Spanish. a lady sitting under a huge hairdryer gushes about how wonderful a thing, getting my hair cut off — it is something that does titillate women, a man being shorn … short hair once again, after 2.5 years. so quick does time move, that I don’t feel that it makes a difference, nerves receiving the impulse of SHORT are overloaded. merely allows for less thought to tying it up and all. and I will be less shocking to many folks. I like the long hair intimidation factor — unfurling my “freak flag” always was enjoyable.
Somewhere over the North Atlantic or so. A feeling of stress. I recognize that the ego is driving my work and my existence at the moment, and has for the past years ever since I became aware of a difference between motivation, greed, selfishness, ego-centricity, altruism, speed, attention, concentration, giving, etc. Is it possible to harness this beast and bring it to be in service of productive living? Or do I have to destroy it and the self in order to come to some freedom of being? I know that it must be left behind, it is a shell, an artifact of the presence of the body, the incarnation of being … An illusory state of requisition and need that pollutes what is meant to be a transitory and pure experience of living in this world. It forefronts my existence. Keeping the few genuine qualities that I do possess out of balance and … (never finished)
The rich man’s way is in the City;
The righteous man’s way is in this Holy place;
Take Jah sun, and Jah moon, Jah rain, and Jah star, and forever erase your fantasy.
Destruction of the poor is in the poverty;
Destruction of the soul is vanity, yah.
Bob Marley, from Confrontation. I wake up with this song in my head. As well as a start on a new video. We were all working until after 0300 last night, and there was the beginnings of a synergy coming from the situation. This weekend will see the arrival of several new people, and the next week will bring 20 or so new faces which will heighten the electricity. I think about works for future reference, and in collaboration with others, I see two trends in my production as an artist/educator — those which involve formalist tendencies of attention to the characteristics of surface visual appearance and those that involve explorations of personal relations and interactions as grounded in dialogue. clear. but what of it now? it has been this way for a long time, but what to now do about it except continue?
I missed some days of entries for the usual reasons — to busy to get to the machine, although I was able to upload the first travel log pages down at the Slade Media Lab. And right after that, met with Susan Collins, the Head of the Slade’s Electronic Media program. We had a few rounds up in the Housman Room where the bartender, Eladio, is known for his generosity — whatever one buys ends up costing only 4 pounds sterling. A bargain, more or less, depending on what you decide to stock up on, a coupla’ pints o’stout, and a few bags of crisps, a fruit bowl, Snickers, whatever…
more “April Fools”
