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.
Leafing through Shambala Sun at my Buddhist doctor’s office, there’s George, yet again, in a >long interview article exploring his Buddhist pathway. Brought to mind one of his very early stories, “A Lack of Order in the Floating Object Room” — the way the fullness of reality appears as a chaotic whirl of disconnected events-as-objects that are moving without rule:
Here is a wonderful metaphor I sometimes use with my students. Imagine you’re on a cruise ship in heavy seas. You’re the only person who’s stable, and everybody else is moving around in a crazy way. You decide to have mercy on them, and that’s pretty good, right?
But I think a better model is to imagine you’re on a cruise ship, and the surface is made of ice, and you’re carrying six trays, and you’re wearing roller skates, and you’re drunk. And so is everybody else.
So nobody’s the boss and the situation is unstable. There’s no fixed point. When I think of life that way, it sums up the proper level of mercy and tolerance. We really don’t know what’s going on, so our feeling of sympathy or empathy is related to our mutual lostness. Everybody’s lost at once.
I would definitely agree. It brings a bit of a shiver, but also relief tinged with an iota of suspicion that this might be a conspiracy foisted on those-who-know-little by those-who-know-too-much. And, really, it’s not just everybody, it’s everything! The cosmos operates the same across all scales and places, with only the anisotropic distribution of energized matter (dark and Light!) creating difference. This would suggest that there are “knowings” that, if rooted in understanding this, would act as Archimedes opined: “Πα βω και χαριστιωνι ταν γαν κινησω πασαν.” / “Give me a place to stand and with a lever I will move the whole world.”
53. The more confused a person is–confused people are called blockheads–the more he can make of himself by diligent study of the self. On the other hand, orderly minds must strive to become true scholars–thorough encyclopedists. At first the confused ones must struggle with massive obstacles–they gain insight slowly. They learn to work laboriously–but then they are lords and masters forever. The orderly person swiftly gains insight–but also loses it swiftly. He soon reaches the second stage–but usually stops there. The last steps are laborious for him, and he can rarely succeed in placing himself in the position of a beginner again once he has attained a certain degree of mastery.
Confusion points to excess of strength and capacity–but deficient equilibrium; precision points to good equilibrium, but meager capacity and strength.
That is why the confused person is so progressive–so perfectible–and why on the other hand the orderly one comes to a halt so early as a Philistine.
To be orderly and precise alone is not to be clear. Through working on himself the confused person arrives at that heavenly transparency–at that self-illumination–which the orderly person so seldom attains.
True genius combined these extremes. It shares swiftness with the last and fullness with the first.
Novalis, 1997. Philosophical writings, Albany, N.Y: State University of New York Press. pp. 31-2
hmm, well, another election. or so. Boulder voting 71% for Barack, and legalized pot. Amendment 64.
having fun with my students, they are struggling and coming up with what they can, the bar is high, the class can be harsh on presentation crits…
anyway, researching some Virtual Reality papers to pass on:
The modern notion of space is a compound metaphor that embodies all our concepts and experiences of separation, distinction, articulation, isolation, delimitation, division, differentiation and identity. The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and un-relatedness. It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space. This metaphor of space is our modern mechanism for avoiding the experience of oneness, of the chaos, of the ultimate state of unity to which the mystic seers and philosophers of all ages have referred.
Jones, R.S., 1982. Physics as metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
if creativity cannot be taught, cannot be ‘made’ to happen, how best to approach the assumption that it can be fostered or stimulated within situations?
one answer to this is a consideration of the meta-structure of flows that characterize a particular situation. I have talked about meta-structures elsewhere. to begin with, each instance itself is only ‘separated’ from everything else through a process of abstracted defining. separation is an abstraction, a reduction of the actuality of holistic, immersed, and connected being and presence. so, best not to consider separation, distinction, and particularities. rather, retain a sensibility to all possible flows, or flow in general. easy to say, despite the (English) language being wholly insufficient to deal with such concepts. (Csikszentmihalyi is pretty good at making a natural language argument for flow, though he comes from a completely different direction than me, the conclusions are similar, will explore that when I shuffle through some of the references…)
When approaching the edge of a protocol-driven projection of power, the first thing noted is that the edge is in flux, constantly. Depending on the metric flow of the power, and the metric flow(s) of the countervailing chaos, the edge will shift at any temporal and spatial scale. The juxtaposition of controlled and un-controlled situations represents a more-or-less steep gradient from directed to random (or directed to countervailing directed) flows. A good example to consider is the two polarized and hegemonic forces of the Cold War compared to highly ordered (Imperial) military systems being projected into poorly organized social systems.
The edges of hegemonic Cold War projections of power were often located in social spaces of great chaos. But these points-of-contact generally did not impinge on the monumental and rigid structures (enabling ideological rigidity) at the core of Empire. Empire shielded itself with layers of decreasingly ordered spaces. The borders as projected closest to the two primary centers of power were defined by rigidly controlled edges across which there were few incursions or expressions of chaos. Natural borders represent a special case of intervening ‘natural’ chaotic systems which provide a temporary or long-term barrier to impingement. However, a power nexus has to deal with that chaotic border itself to maintain reasonable order there for its own population.
The space containing a vacuum of power is quickly filled whenever there is a localized energy source of a great enough magnitude to fill that space. It is more slowly filled when there is no localized concentrations of power. Again, the maintenance of an ‘edge’ is really about the maintenance of a gradient of order with a certain steepness.
An Imperial power will be more strongly be drawn into vacuums merely by the steep gradient between its highly organized (military) system and that vacuum.
The protocols of nation-statehood (currently) define geographic boundaries of power projections. However, it is clear that these boundaries and the protocols themselves are constantly in flux and themselves are finally defined by balances of power-projection on both sides. (Consider a con-federation versus a republic.) The border on chaos is a border that is under the greatest threat of alteration (because of that steep gradient mentioned previously).
What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.
The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”
Some final words on the residency period:
Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).
Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”
Apocalyptic. Huge wind storm, driving wind upwards from the playa to the black clouds collected over the ranges. Wind. Then, much later in the evening, the air becomes heavy on the lungs, and a fine powdered dust hangs in the more still air, like a fog, but dust, powdered mountains, air-borne terrain. It is dark, lightning and thunder shuffles in the background, unseen, muffled behind the curtain of dislocated earth hanging in the air. Eyes sting, nose waters, pressure heavy on the lungs, body recalls the Great Sydney Dust Storm of ’09, sleep is disturbed so the reading of Augustus continues, more on that later.
Many other events and actions go un-commented-upon, so far. And there are more sounds to upload, along with numerous time-lapse sequences. These seem most apropos to the time here. Watching the weather — back to the “window weather’ concept.
Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.
Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.
As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism
What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.
… back to the road …
The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!
The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.
The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.
nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…
Sending out a +/-90-minute stream for shu lea cheang’s “moving forests” performance/action at transmediale:
(01:37:00, stereo audio, 234 mb)
noise, confusion, interruptions, chaos … I’m at home on Kochhansstr., Berlin Ost, the performance is around Mitte, and at Moabit.
with the hectic schedule of my hosts, I am able to help out by doing errands and babysitting during the day. meeting Frau Pries, Fritz’s day-care mama, who talks to me as though I understand German fluently. not a bad thing, though I still can’t follow things 100% by any stretch. I do learn she has two brothers who lived in the US — one in Boston, the other in San Diego who recently passed away, dropping dead after getting out of a taxi at a hotel in Chicago. and via a Bluetooth-downloaded email on the share list, a completely different channel for information, apparently huge fires in San Diego as well. more information on that will come when DT supposedly will get the internet installed on Thursday here at the house. we’ll see. unstable infrastructures. compared to stable ones? or simply ones that are more or less unstable. shaking foundations.
back to Frau Pries, yes, juggling the needs of six children under two years old. funny to watch the Brownian motion of a roomful of them. well, partially Brownian, partially magnetic attractors and repellers, part complex harmonic motion, part chaos. the emergent aspect being a social system of chance, whatever that is…
midday stroll to the local butcher’s shop. hot lunch with brats & taters for the Polish guys, Peter, Jan, and Andre, who are doing all the heavy finishing work on the new house. this along with a case of beer every other day, and a bottle of whiskey on Saturdays.
and then, first looking down, ahmmm, then looking back. Bremen finished, passing away on the train, now the work of helping Christian and Steffi with this big move. tough situation. when energy expressions rely on stability and known situations, up comes more-or-less chaos. how to optimize assistance?
on an ICE train, always a wonder how a country manages to field such functional chunks of technology. how great it would be in the US with such a system. what would it really cost? given that there was such an infrastructure at one time, that the right-of-ways are at least partially in place still. but the will of people to invest in de-privatized impulses is weak at best. not understanding that privatization brings a chaos of fragmented infrastructures which, driven by a profit/shareholder motive, rarely invest in long-term improvements (to benefit the people who they ‘serve’). so the US has an infrastructure which crumbles — especially now with the constant drain of power from this stupid war. which no-one except the psychologically unbalanced and stupid president, his feckless handlers, and his clueless followers want. the result is a morally and fiscally impoverished nation.
Francis Bacon doesn’t seem to be so interesting — highly over-rated. though he did recognize that
Knowledge is power — Ipsa Scientia Potestas Est
but anyway, he doesn’t provide any liberate witticisms on recovery. recovery is a slow process. obviously. to regain a state of order after a chaotic intervention into the body-system assumes a significant input of energy back into the system. seeking order. recovery is seeking order. but the pathway never seems so clear. there are many possible ways. the ingestion of certain substances is necessary, but which ones in which order and what quantity when. rest mandatory, but when does rest and horizontality begin to hinder regaining the activity of life which is primarily vertical? exercise, the operation of the physical meat space is key, though it too can take legion permutations depending on life-philosophy. body-awareness is heightened, to the excruciating boredom of those folks who have to listen to mumbled ruminations about body processes and deviations that are often, as they say, “more information than I needed to know.” the grail of order, bringing perfect form back to the meat-space is always set to fail merely by the intervention of the same time factor that is necessary for recovery to begin with. time brings decay and aging. so, recovery will always be an accession to a lesser goal or state than one would care to accept. diminished capacity. the question becomes, what to let go of and what to fight for…
Illustration of a Julia Set by Scott Hotton. Dynamical Systems Theory (a branch of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex systems by employing differential and difference equations) is another limited framework for modeling complex systems. More accurate than linear and non-linear models, but none-the-less reductionist. (Well, talk about restating the obvious when it comes to anything mathematical, as the concept itself is a reduced language for expressing natural phenomena — I don’t subscribe to the early Greek concept where mathematics does not represent but is a universal and perfect thing unto itself). While human-generated system solutions (say, engineering problems such as placing satellites into orbit) are solved through classic computational modeling with linear systems, natural systems like the brain need something more.
Chaotic systems are especially sensitive to initial conditions. initial conditions are necessary for any reductive system analysis because in the abstraction process of reduction, the system is extracted and disconnected from the continuum of life. Good for mathematical (computational) modeling. But when defining a real-world problem, how feasible is it to define initial conditions at all? Is there a way to not define initial conditions?
the last night on the island. darkness drifting after some late afternoon storms, with hail even. time. to go. gathering things into the usual one suitcase, one travel bag, one day-pack. realizing that I might never be back here, because other things might happen. anything can happen, anytime. on the phone around Scandinavia (taking maximum advantage of the telecom possibilities). so many items to consider, with workshops popping up in Norway, Lithuania, Denmark, and Iceland during just a short period in the fall. keeps the blood moving and the mind alert. always that way. coming three things at once.
with the three-month residency behind now, reflections? nope. life passing, life passing, life passing. concern about this makes for time burnt without even the rising smoke of holy incense. only floating in the drift of human development. is the historicity of change merely the gained perspective of time spent in this incarnation? the perception of the increasingly predictable in genesis, but largely chaotic in application, range of human interventions that destroy life rather than nurture it? and the Buddhist who is not attached to all of it.
okay, giving up for now. closing connections, unplugging cables, powering down, packing the last bits and pieces.
network problems rear ugly heads in the morning. again, the phenomena of the Finnish hi-tech hype, and the reality of the situation. unstable connections, bad connections.
arrive the night before Valentine’s Day in Kiel following the first European workshop of the Second Nomadic Phase. if things proceed like this all the time, there is no going back to the core of Empire, in retro vision, it is too corrupt. is this too simplistic a diagnosis? maybe, but the energy flow patterns in that set of structures is … oh hell, can’t describe it, it’s just a bunch of abstracted words.
anyway, Christian brings Steffi flowers last night. Valentine’s Day. I bring some Lübecker marzipan.
yeah, reflecting back on the two weeks, I had forgotten how powerful dialogues can be when there are engaged individuals at both ends. the system in Boulder exerts such a high degree of psychic pressure on the students (and faculty) that the conditions for humane dialogue are almost impossible to achieve. they need some breathing space of chaos — or some a root ground that feeds any contingency of flow. if the degree of insistent social flow-framework is too rigid, then there is no possibility of inspiring breath. and there is suffocation. embedded in the situation at ISNM is, for now, a degree of chaos that is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is at least available.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. — Karl Jung, hanging in Frieder and Susi’s kitchen
back and forth, running from the end of the seminar to the taxi to the train. would have been better to allow more time. but, as is usual for opening situations, the follow-up is the sustaining move. cleaning house. ordering life, waiting for the next cataclysm. the next disaster, the next infrastructure failure and slip into chaos. or transcendence.
over and out. there from Sredniy Prospekt 25, near the Metro Vasilevstrovskaya, on Vasilyevsky Island not far from the central campus of St. Petersburg University. the last evening of the lecture. walking around the city this morning, the KunstCamera of Peter the Great. what an individual he was. doing everything, insatiable appetite for life. building material monuments to Empire. now it is post-empire. infrastructure only just barely maintaining the massive and ubiquitous monuments, streets, palaces, museums, and cathedrals. what comes after Empire? is that decay the inevitable result when the inflow of energy sources dries up, when command and control weakens, when chaos descends bit by bit?
back to Kiel briefly. eating a bag of M&M’s in the train. crossing through Wittenberge in the former East, there is still a complete awareness of the divided society here. derelict buildings everywhere in the East, wild undergrowth, a bit of chaos. my English is suffering — so many spelling mistakes as I write, I can hardly deal with it. retyping things constantly, back-spacing, returning to a crime-scene and fixing the evidence, this text exists in many forms that are changed sometimes months, sometimes years later. in flux. Theresa and Wolfgang will leave tomorrow for Trondheim for the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Art that Theresa has curated.
note from Anthony:
REMARKABLE
trANSPOSITION
FROM SANTA BARBARA
THROUGH SUPERLATIVE ANGELES FOREST
REARRIVING AT MOHAVE KELSO DUNES
here this northern sky
sinks a sliding drop
surprise
a gliding sustain
stretches in suspension
firedrip gamos meteor gift
Zorak graciously fetches me from the train, direct to the Forum, and then I go out shopping when Jennifer calls me about the Content Coordination situation with cafe9.net. it seems to be degenerating as a result of both Heikki and I stepping away. I am really thinking I need to write a parody of European cultural cooperation. it is such a joke. but the idea of writing a narrative account of it seems a waste of time. rather try to continue digging further into the network. later in the evening, I make a garlic-pasta (ail del’olio?), a favorite recipe of mine. easy to prepare, and unless folks don’t like garlic at all, it goes over well, with some Romano cheese, a good salad dressing, some vino tinto. late evening. some strange drinks, and so on …
Well, after hacking for 28 hours in 36, I am beat now … I was surviving on Rilke on the long (and delayed) flight over from NYC to Helsinki. And I was happy to recall this one favorite from the magnificent collection translated by Stephen Mitchell…
We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all its power. Otherwise the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could a smile run through the placid hips and thighs to that dark center where procreation flared. Otherwise this stone would seem defaced beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders and would not glisten like a wild beast’s fur: would not, from all the borders of itself, burst like a star: for here is no place that does not see you. You must change your life. — Rainer Maria Rilke
So it goes, I always say. Marvelous translation, and incredible, the crescendo it reaches, the roiling descriptive power, the shifting focus and awareness. I know this torso. I photographed it in a museum in Kässel some years back, and it figured in the Apocalyptic Dream work as one of the centerpiece icons. Then I stumble on this translation just a few years ago. Shaking. I am staying in one of the oldest reconstructed buildings on Suomenlinna, the old fortress island. It was a quarters for Russian or Swedish officers — which or both I don’t know as I haven’t really examined the history of the place. The entire island is on the short list of World Heritage Sites, and, indeed, it is an incredible place, I’ve seen nothing like it in all my imperial travels … The walls of the building I am in are over a meter thick, and it has huge windows that overlook part of the bastion and the dry dock that is full of old wooden boats. Other windows look out onto the courtyard where there is a monument to one of the Swedish monarchs. There are massive ceramic tile furnaces in each room, standing 12 feet high with gleaming white columns to each side. I have been struggling intensively to make a comeback from the recent removal of my main website from the server I was using in Iceland. I have no idea what happened, but whatever the case, I have to reconstruct my site as best I can very soon … I am getting more and more attention for the breadth and personal outlook of the site, but … Now the whole thing is gone except for this travelog work and some fragments. I only have access to three free Megabytes on this server, so I can’t reconstruct everything on it anyway. I wish I had one cheap/free server somewhere with ten or twenty megs on it … Wait a minute, I am having a deja vu at the moment. Sitting here at 01:22 in the morning, on the island, after two hard days work. Typing these very words. I had a dream about this. Somewhere, sometime ago. The feeling of trying to do things but not being able to eliminate the CHAOS from life. And almost wanting to succumb to it. Well, it isn’t really chaos, it is just the conditions of living itself, nothing that can or should be eliminated from living, for it is life itself. I cannot allow the failure of these machines, of my techniques deter me from a full enjoyment and engagement in life.
Life is what’s happening when you’re busy making other plans … — John Lennon
Funny, poignant? and True! He speaks and sings true things often, in spirit.
