circuit at The Center of the Universe
My god, finally ran through the entire video production sequence in FinalCut Pro / QuickTime, etc., to get a simple sketch piece to the blog. It’s not optimal as the original footage is from an old iPhone versus a newer iPad Pro and such, but … First time in a couple years, it’s always such a hassle to start with raw video, an idea, and squeeze that through an endless series of constant externally-imposed permutations on editing platforms and exporting formats/codecs/resolutions that are currently acceptable to most browsers and servers. Especially when memory is compromised! gah!
This, a circuit (aka, cycle) around the center of the universe, something I ritually perform on each visit. I have used the circuit/cycle concept to ascribe the presence of place and presence within that place. It dates back to the very early piece “memories of three infinite half-spaces” filmed at the site of a huge jökulhlaup in Iceland in 1997.
The audio is a simple ambient track recorded from the base of a telephone pole near the center, droning on in the -20F winter night chill of the Valley.
Day 3 – Hawk Moon Ridge
Up at 0500 to continue the discipline of yoga on the patio before the bugs make it uncomfortable. It’s perfect in the waxing Light well before dawn. Body is stiff and resisting flexibility, but it will take time after two months on the road. Luna hangs out nearby, and although dog’s expressions have been proven to be largely in the mind of their owners, she has a quizzical look. When I start off with some “Om’s” for some reason she goes charging off barking as though she’s cornered some game. This is even more comic as she usually never barks. Otherwise, I can think of nothing better to be doing in such a place than to allow the body to regain some flowing order with a practice on the patio. 0500 tomorrow again!
I set up a bird bath with rain water barrels (repurposed garbage bins that I set out under the gutter drains mostly just to rinse them of a strong whiff!), and immediately birds begin to come. Have to optimize the inside of the bath with some wood and stones to stand on to give them options on washing and drinking. As I watch this morning from the cluttered kitchen working area that I set up immediately after Collin and Marisa depart, I see a pair of doves moving through the trees, and suddenly a red-tail (hawk) comes jetting through, pursuing one of the doves. I think it was one of the fledglings from this year. Last evening on the regular circuit walk with Luna, I got within 20 meters of a sizable red-tail roosting in a dead tree near the highest point of the ridge. He wasn’t happy with my presence and said so before sailing off down the canyon.
“Red at night, sailors deLight; in the morning, sailors take warning.” We’ll see if this works in a place where the only sailing would be down the river in a raft. Looks like some monsoon moisture is in the air, but only what afternoon brings will determine the verity of this Coriolis-driven sea-borne correlation.
Dinner with Bob and Burdette ‘next door’ — they’ve got some computer problems that I hope I can help them with, so it’s a good excuse to drop in on them.
coupling
Thinking back: Walnut Cafe South in the Table Mesa Center, meet Chris for one of our weekly Boulder breakfast get-togethers.
Subject of resonance comes up. and the term coupling which I did not include in the dissertation discussion on resonance. Coupling is where two circuits designed to resonate actually transmit electromagnetic energy from one (the transmitting coil) to the other (receiving coil). This is used to do wireless power transmission. The two coils have to be in relatively close proximity otherwise there is significant power loss:
By designing electromagnetic resonators that suffer minimal loss due to radiation and absorption and have a near field with mid-range extent (namely a few times the resonator size), mid-range efficient wireless energy-transfer is possible. The reason is that, if two such resonant circuits tuned to the same frequency are within a fraction of a wavelength, their near fields (consisting of ‘evanescent waves’) couple by means of evanescent wave coupling. Oscillating waves develop between the inductors, which can allow the energy to transfer from one object to the other within times much shorter than all loss times, which were designed to be long, and thus with the maximum possible energy-transfer efficiency. Since the resonant wavelength is much larger than the resonators, the field can circumvent extraneous objects in the vicinity and thus this mid-range energy-transfer scheme does not require line-of-sight. By utilizing the magnetic field to achieve the coupling, this method can be safe, since magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms.
(written in Wikipedia-English!)
Is there any way to explore if this occurs on some scale between organisms? Transmitters, receivers? Coupling? Would seem to be an obvious model for interactivity between any organisms — the question being what is the nature of the embodied resonant circuits? Can an organism or a part of one be modeled ‘properly’ as such a circuit? Or is it too complex — the electromagnetic ‘field’ of a body as a mass of overlapping radiations and flows — such that there is no comprehensible order? Nah, of course there is a ‘sensible’ order — that may be expressed as the general sensuality of ‘presence’ that a living organism exudes. (This presence signified by the dynamic of interaction that any single organism exhibits with other organisms — as defined by evolutionarily-developed interdependence.) For example predator/prey interactions would suggest that there are highly developed coupling mechanisms such that the predator can identify with a high degree of precision a potential prey.
entropy and complexity
He reexamined the braid of olive-drab wires. Even now, even at this extremity of his affliction, he believed he could sit down with pencil and paper and reinvent the principles of basic circuitry. He was certain, for the moment, of his ability to do this; but the task of puzzling out a parallel circuit was far more daunting than the task, say, of driving to a discount store and waiting in line. The mental task required an inductive rediscovery of basic precepts; it required a rewiring of his own cerebral circuitry. It was truly marvelous that such a thing was even thinkable—that a forgetful old man alone in his basement with his shotgun and his sugar cookie and his big blue chair could spontaneously regenerate organic circuitry complex enough to understand electricity—but the energy that this reversal of entropy would cost him vastly exceeded the energy available to him in the form of his sugar cookie. Maybe if he ate a whole box of sugar cookies all at once, he could relearn parallel circuitry and make sense of the peculiar three-wire braiding of these infernal lights. But oh, my God, a person got so tired. — Jonathan Franzen, “The Corrections”
two circuits
essay-grading software
Brian Holmes, who runs “Continental Drift” responded to that article on AI grading of college essays as follows:
> The software uses artificial intelligence to grade student essays and short
> written answers, freeing professors for other tasks.
Such as:
a. raw domination
b. rank servitude
c. outright revolution
[Note: You can only tick one of the boxes…]
LOL Brian! (with significant sighing on the side) — just finished a class this morning talking with my students about this very issue … (c) will occur at the interstice of the human encounter of Self with Other, so that it is indeed available instantly, all around, in the classroom, in faculty meetings, on the street. Reminding the students of this (and helping them establish a lived praxis based on the vitality of those encounters) is my choice, so that suggests changing (c) to ‘facilitating open encounter and engagement’…
The only future I can see beyond submission to the economic destinies of robotization and outsourcing is some kind of political organization, my friends. To be sure, the 60s, reinterpreted and repurposed by neoliberal ideology, trained us all against any kind of hierarchy whatsoever. We are so “free” that power is walking all over us. The capitalist democracies have gone down the very path predicted by Weberian sociology: complete rationalization for accumulation’s sake. The university is now envisioned as a largely automated service provider for the human-capital needs of corporations. That’s endgame, because without a public institution for critical perception, analysis and deliberation, the only social steering mechanism is the imperative to accumulate, accumulate, accumulate, until the last ton of coal is effectively burnt and we’re all reduced to a cinder. Isn’t that kinda obvious now? What’s the next step?
At this point I am quite pessimistic that the evolutionary drive to guarantee propagation of the species, a drive inseparable from life itself, and which includes the need for consuming any and all energy necessary for survival-to-reproduce, can be short-circuited by any altruistic or even pragmatic socio-political (community, nation-state, supra-national) agendas, ever. The social concept of ‘use less’ (promulgated mostly by the ever-unsatiated über-consumers of the developed world) cannot trump evolutionary hard-wiring. I believe we will do exactly as you say at the end of your paragraph.
That question of what to do next, now, is perhaps moot. The question of what to do, after, will present itself in the immediacy of the moment. The situation we as a species have made is not of such extremity to preclude that life in other forms will not continue, and our species will likely exist in greatly reduced numbers. This may simply provide the planet with other opportunities to re-evolve after (solar-sourced) energy has again been accumulated to a level and form that allows for another burst of life progression.
This will clearly not happen in the short term of (our) human life-times.
Saturday, 20 April, 1963
Picked up Paul Bradbury on the way to PSC, arriving there at 0900. Ken Olsen was there with the second rack and its contents — 3 power amplifiers (Knight) and a Knight amplifier for the Mayflower Pulpit as well as a circuit-breaker panel, a monitor speaker, panel with inputs at the rear, and a monitoring switching panel. He had to leave at 1030, so, after pulling in and connecting the M-20, he and Dave N. worked on the new gear. I couldn’t get the M-20 to work, so finally brought it and its power supply downstairs, where it worked; I finally located the trouble in the WECo mixer belonging to WEZE. We got a station man in, and he finally decided the cables were incorrectly wired (between the wall panel and the mixer). He took one cable with him to the station for rewiring. We couldn’t get the S-C amplifier to operate, so, hooked up the Altec 342 and used it as the preamp. We used the Knight as the power amp for the SS Room at the morning service; there were about 45 there; the Sanctuary was packed w/ persons on the stairs on 21 April.
Saturday, 19 January, 1963
Rain
Went in to PSC, arriving at 0930. Paul already in hand. We started on the pulpit wiring and cleaning, the latter to eliminate the dirt and dust that we have had to put up with every time we have gone under the pulpit. We must have removed 20 lb. of dust, in addition to a large amount of boards, carpeting, wire, and a 10″ air duct! We put all of it in the trash room near the front door on the sidewalk level.
When we started to check out the new mike circuits we found a constant deflection of the WE VU meter when the M-20 attenuator was reduced, i.e., turned to a higher dial pointer reading. This turned out to be a loose wire, apparently grounding on the output of the Stromberg-Carlson amplifier. We then looked into the M-20 and found it still inoperative after 2 hrs work. It was then 8 PM and we were too tired to do much more!
LCH quite unhappy at my non-appearance for dinner.
Sunday, 13 January, 1963
Rain – 32˚F
Freezing rain in PM.
Took family to SS & church. The Altec mike in the AM didn’t do very well; we checked the Z of the WE preamp at WEZE & were told it is 150/250 ohms, the impedance top the mike was on when we got it. We also had some trouble with the S-C amplifier and the balcony & hearing-aid circuits; Mrs. Stiff Sr. was unhappy, and we had some feedback.
Went back in early, taking DCH; I couldn’t find the trouble so put back the old tubes in the S-C. When Dave came in he pointed out that the WE preamp owned by WEZE was a low Z input 50 ohm, so we changed the 685A over with a profound increase in quality and congregation pick-up. Paul was listening at home and reported the transmission quite good. For the first time one could hear the congregation actually singing the words of the songs. The Altec M20 makes it possible to pick up the organ and adjust it to any level.
Made arrangements with Paul & Dave to work at PSC on 19 January. Also spoke w/ John Zvara re: taking out the duct in the Radio Room.
Odum’s analog ecosystem circuits
The difficulties of managing nature and man can be stated in circuit terms. Let us first fantasy [sic] the nightmare of an electronics technician. After a week of exhausting tedium, soldering circuits and completing a large network of wires connecting thousands of tubes, transformers, and transistors, he goes to bed with the feeling of a design completed. Then with the veil of the dream the parts begin to breathe. Next he sees them grow and divide, making new parts. Then the wires become invisible. The new and old parts disconnect themselves and move into new patterns, reconnecting their inputs and outputs, replacing worn members, and together generating functions and forms not known before. What was neat and known becomes unknown. Soon the new system with its vast capabilities is growing, self-producing, and self-sustaining, drawing all the available electric power. Our hero awakens when he pulls the switch removing the energy source. To some visionary engineers the nightmare may seem a preview of a machine world. Our ecosystem, however, is already the nightmare. — Howard Odum, 1971
Richard Freeman
Shane reminds me that Richard is giving a talk after the usual Sunday afternoon mysore session at the studio over on 21st Street. It’s cold (record low temps) outside, and steamy inside.
But great to finally meet him, he’s a wonderful extemporaneous speaker, and his meta-process definitely resonated with my own sensibilities on the way to go with teaching. His knowledge-base of Sanskrit and yogic teachings provides him with a wide and very deep territory to explore, and he dances around it all with a wry and humane sense of humor. The same essence that I attempt within any of my teaching, though I lack the depth of a single systematic view and that muddies the water to some degree. At most one can only do that circuitous dance around the Void, laughing and pointing at it through the clouds and letting righteous fear fall away into the absurdity of it all.
He speaks of the soft-palate and its role in resonantly apprehending external energy sources (as in ‘awe,’ think of the palate’s role in vocalizing that phoneme…).
We have a conversation after class. I told him how much I appreciated his CD series on yoga practices and breathing. I used them as a base for my own praxis when I can’t get to a class.
Strangely only one or two people approach him after his talk. I don’t know if this is a respect thing, or some protocol that I missed, or that he intimidates his students, or what. But he was very forth-coming responding to some of my comments about resonance between exterior energy flows and internal flows. Good vibe!
Bandhas are the internal energy valves or gates, which when activated allow the energy to flow through the bodily vessel activating the dormant potential of embodied spirit. Another way of stating this is that the stagnant rigidity of a chronic spiritual disconnect can be disrupted through bandhas, pranayama, and pratyhara quickly providing the pathway for flow — the ongoing ever-present spiritual reconnect of the great expanse of being. Although, commonly denoted as locks, bandhas act as such only in so far that they prevent the outward flow (dissipation) of the energy. However, a better translation would be valves, gates, or doorways, because they direct the internal energy flow to irrigate the nadis, open to continuous flow, activate the energy body, and align it with all-creativity.
Etc…
Saturday, 29 September, 1962
Clearing
Worked on heater for Willys all day, getting it all done but a thorough checking out.
A number of young girls from the church came out for a party. NJH seems tired.
James Bennet, a colored chap, has been refused admittance to Univ. of Miss by the Governor; 700 US Marshalls & Miss. National Guard are on hand, as the US Circuit Court of Appeals has exhausted its powers.
the circuit of the day
after the heavy washboards on the road ascending the rest of Rocky Creek, descending Trail Creek, and then along Taylor Park over to the Cottonwood Pass road, I am determined to get a newer truck with 4×4 drive and suspension. made it to the Divide at Cottonwood and finally get out of the truck. head out along the Continental Divide northeast towards Turner Peak, then turn west into South Texas Creek basin, above tree-line. have to work hard to avoid snow fields, cliffs, and bogs, and though this is an extremely dry year, it’s still early in the season at 12,000-plus feet. the weather is threatening with some corn snow and rain, it’s cold! meanwhile, the flowers that are already open early in the mountain spring attract the eye, as does the line dividing heaven and earth.
gRAYins
Gradus:
*as comb: *
to thinking:
VIBRATION:
AND THE TOOTH:
THE SUN:
THE MOON:
LIEF CIRCUITS:
GAMMON:
PUNCTUATIONS:
SHADES:
the foot:
the spoke:
the person of the star:
coron-axial:
flour:
font:
ripple-nipple:
(the temple on the mound):
*sinus:*
*wavelet:*
rimmir:
atmosphere:
rib: marrow:
sistered:
stemmed:
galactic sauces:
****/~o*
Day 4 – another shortish circuit
two circuits
three circuits/cycles
Day 3 – a short circuit
wanted to check if a round-about way to get to the top of the bench was possible via heading to Mitten Park, and ascending the end of the bench there. nope, not without some serious bouldering or even technical climbing. got up pretty far, but the as the rocks are severely distressed at the fault itself, everything gets unstable. I quit where the trees stopped growing! good day for just looking around at everything along with a little initial off-road cardio. the cryptobiotic soil is always something to visually decode along with the lichen and other symbiotic expressions.
Day 2 – a short circuit
a short circuit to recall the textures and to reacquaint the senses, the body, with the essences of place — sky, rock, earth, plants, former occupants, etc: the basics. starting with a quick overview of Echo Park from the southern wall, then following that complexly eroding wall along to Pool Creek, then across to the west to some nice petroglyphs.
recalling Varela
…[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it[‘s] roots [are] in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
– Francisco Varela, Cosmos Web Forum letter 12e (1998?)
yup.
What people are contemplating on their word-processor screens is the operation of their own brains. It is not entrails that we try to interpret these days, nor even hearts or facial expressions; it is, quite simply, the brain. We want to expose to view its billions of connections and watch it operating like a video-game. All this cerebral, electronic snobbery is hugely affected – far from being the sign of a superior knowledge of humanity, it is merely the mark of a simplified theory, since the human being is here reduced to the terminal excrescence of his or her spinal chord. But we should not worry too much about this: it is all much less scientific, less functional than is ordinarily thought. All that fascinates us is the spectacle of the brain and its workings. What we are wanting here is to see our thoughts unfolding before us – and this itself is a superstition.
Hence, the academic grappling with his computer, ceaselessly correcting, reworking, and complexifying, turning the exercise into a kind of interminable psychoanalysis, memorizing everything in an effort to escape the final outcome, to delay the day of reckoning of death, and that other—fatal—moment of reckoning that is writing, by forming an endless feed-back loop with the machine. This is a marvelous instrument of exoteric magic. In fact all these interactions come down in the end to endless exchanges with a machine. Just look at the child sitting in front of his computer at school; do you think he has been made interactive, opened up to the world? Child and machine have merely been joined together in an integrated circuit. As for the intellectual, he has at last found the equivalent of what the teenager gets from his stereo and his walkman: a spectacular desublimation of thought, his concepts as images on a screen. — Jean Baudrillard
Baudrillard, J., 2000. America, London, England: Verso.
media consumes
(social) media consumes energy: batteries. battery life. chargers. radiation. signal strength. plugs, circuit breakers, wires, cables. server farms. power stations. hydrocarbons. life-time, life-energy.
clouds, freedom, connectivity, (sky, freedom, detachment) …
Tuesday, 31 January, 1961
Continued to work on “Proposal”, getting most of it into typing.
Sat in a Simplex Group mtg. where Joe H. and I reported on our trip to the TAG board. I also reported on our committee work, saying a) that at our last mtg I thought we had gotten at least tentative agreement on one of the principle parameters, Time; b) that I am trying to get out a draft of a tentative Committee Report for discussion purposes. The discussion provided by members of the other Committee indicates that they are no further along. JFN requested that the reports be in his hands on 10 February.
Evening: Decided to leave out the reference to the FAA simulation going on at NAFEC in the letter to Sen. Monroney.
Interchanged the two 6CA7 tubes in the Dynakit; both are okay, so my trouble is in the input circuits. It looks as if a 25 amp coupling condenser has leaked.
JLV took me to the bank at noon; I opened a savings account with $250.
road :: amplifier / the difference?
The amplifier/road difference would sound something like this:
I defined the amplifier as a concept which exists at many different scales and in both ‘natural’ and human-dominated systems (though that particular dialectic is a problematic one). It is a system which concentrates (and by default attenuates) energy flows. It is a defined set of pathways for that energy to flow along. (a life-form is an amplifier!)
(As an example, fundamental physical laws, such as the set of principles—gravitational attraction, strong/weak nuclear forces, EM radiation, thermodynamics, etc.—’govern’ the process of stellar evolution and ‘supply’ the ‘protocols’ for the ‘expression’ of Light energy (radiation) in a highly specific and concentrated form (compared to the availability of that same energy in any random location in the universe).
In essence, humans are simply harnessing these physical laws to form their own pathways of energy flow. Indeed we can do nothing else, as these laws govern the entire observed and implied universe. So the difference between the amplifier and the protocols that ‘define’ it may only be question of articulation — that is, those physical laws, in human terms, simply exist (for us to discover and articulate over time). The protocols arise as humans initiate articulations of the extant energy flows within which we simply are. So the protocol is, again, merely, a human (socio-linguistic) reduction of observed and extant phenomena. We cannot do anything counter to those phenomena that those laws are ascribed to. However, using these reductive protocols/formula, we set up a wide variety of sub-systems which, cumulatively, are our techno-social systems — complex systems of re-routed energies. As soon as energy is re-routed, you have an amplifier situation because you consequently have a concentration/attenuation of flows. An amplifier is perhaps merely the condition of the existence of a concentration of energies. (this does get into the question of the role of, for example, gravity as a ‘protocol’ which drives the coalescing of energized matter in the universe — or is gravity actually increasing the entropy of that matter?)
change
The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.
The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam. more “change”
final tour
Collin and Marisa are up and off early to Grand Junction, so I make a circuit of their land, stopping to wallow in some sincere jealousy regarding the yurt and how well they have managed to bring such a situation into being. it takes a real and dedicated long-term focus to gather the resources to make such ordered and rejuvenating configurations rise, Mongolian yurt-like, out of the chaos of the world.
CLUI: Day Twelve — Silver Island Mountains
Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.
A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces many textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.
Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).
Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know—the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.
(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).
keywording, filing
such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space. listing everything or nothing or SIPs (Statistically Improbable Phrases). maybe the SIPs would be the best phenomena, as it is a tangible mapping of non-standard word usage … mapping out new conceptual spaces. kind of like those emails from a few years back, spewed out by random text generators (or a thousand drunken monkeys reading the confetti of paper-shredded copies of Naked Lunch and pausing at spontaneously proscribed intervals to jot notes on where precisely those confetti-signs sent their proto-humanoid minds.
Ich bin mit meinem Dasein zufrieden(?)
oder
Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. — Samuel Butler
heavy shuffling through the digital archive and web links to assemble something meaningful via zotero. heavy work, reading reading reading. some semi-classics to remind, and enjoy the luxury of reading to gain or revivify knowledge. Kittler, Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Vygotsky, Thought and Language; McLuhan, Understanding Media, along with reviewing the already substantial library/bibliography assembled on my hard drive from the last 20 years of info-filtering in the media-sphere. dragging copies of all that into Zotero, slowly, along with hundreds of bookmarked sources, and then the keywording begins, starting the cycle. plenty of SIPs there.
such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space, etc…
Zotero, an open-source project, by-the-way, a victor today when a Circuit Court judge throws out a law-suit coming from Thomson-Reuters, makers of EndNote, the monopoly research/thesis writing/citation tool out there in academia.
thesis proposal :: Background
Background for Research
While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.
Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. more “thesis proposal :: Background”
thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts
Concerning Particular Methodologies
Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.
Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
more “thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts”
bajada dreams
Up early. Zero Fahrenheit. Low clouds. Solo in the campground. Spilled water freezes immediately. Ranger passes through, we chat for a bit. Brewing tea while ravens flock back and forth in the pines. A long slow wander through the Douglas fir and fore-dune scrub, up the dunes a bit, and back. silent. low chill breeze. cold, cold, cold.
Have lunch at the bajada in the sun, listening.
Stop at the visitors center on the way out and happen to meet the woman who would have been my boss had I nailed that position as educational liaison a few years back. Very nice instance.
Then to the Center, of course, for a circuit or so.
Then onto the Gunbarrel north-bound. Dinner with Rick and Sally in Golden, then on up to Boulder. Chris and Scharmin and the kids prepping for their Hawaii jaunt. Sage a bit more gray in the muzzle, like some of us.
The Regime of Amplification: A Primer
[ED: This text is essentially an extremely preliminary draft—written in Berlin, Germany in 2007-08—of my dissertation The Regime of Amplification.]
I decided to release this text in advance of any hard-copy publication, with another chapter nearing its final stages, and several intermediate chapters forming more concretely. The following is the original ‘final’ text, although there will be a significantly improved one in the years to come.
This speculative essay addresses the process of amplification which expresses itself at a wide range of scales and affects and which models a fundamental aspect of all human presence. It opens with a brief description of a prototypical amplifier, then frames life as the coherent self-organizing expression of energy embedded in a universal field of energy flows. It examines simple biological models of amplification and suggests possible reasons for amplification processes to exist. Narrowing its focus, it looks first at the human species, then the body, and then the collective social system as an operative field of amplification. It subsequently explores the Regime of Amplification as a general manifestation of the prototypical TSS (techno-social system) — a system whose goal is to maintain the viability of localized sub-sets of the species in the face of competition as well as continuous and universal change. Two specific examples — the radio and the military — are presented to simply illustrate the principles suggested. The conclusion reiterates the affects of techno-social amplification on individual be-ing as well as on the entire continuum of relation that the individual is a part of. It suggests some fundamental pathways of action which have an immediate detrimental affect on the hierarchic flows of the Regime.
This essay is built on the subject of one chapter in a book-in-progress titled “Energy of Being :: Dialogue of Creativity” which explores in greater depth many of the issues that are danced only Lightly around here.
KEY TERMS
TSS (techno-social system), Regime of Amplification, energy, amplification, attenuation, flow, continuum of relation, life-energy, life-time, evolutionary development, natural selection, self-organizing, radio, military systems, resonance, social energy bank, life-time=energy=life; attention=life-energy=life-time, feed-forward system, biochemical amplification, concentration, rarefaction, command-and-control … (to be continued)
more “The Regime of Amplification: A Primer”
ultraintelligence?
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. — Irving Good
aside from inventing a pretty damn smart off switch.
urban renewal is happening in Berlin. on another circuit walk, this time further to the East, I can stand in one spot and see a dozen construction cranes. they are all working on domestic housing units — mostly low, three story maximum, like row houses, condos. filling up vacant lots which were once filled with warehouses. most of the red brick warehouses are gone, and the lots are scraped clear, down to the golden beige sand that underlies the whole city. the top few feet are always full of detritus — porcelain, shattered bricks, glass, and mortar. somewhere I read that in the process of doing random construction in Germany, they also frequently discover WWII munitions accompanied by an occasional detonation and casualties. yikes! I am amazed by the intensity with which the city is still transforming itself.
GPS
so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:
The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.
Wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance? When one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. Though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. How can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? The web of dependencies is both wide and deep. Can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? Can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? Or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. There is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon, hardly. That baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. Beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. Even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.
The dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this (GPS-based) selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. A dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. It consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.
How can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? It is a relative issue. Clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to the protocols of that system. It is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. Social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. From covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. It is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the self in relation to the system.
Iceland pops into mind again, as I was implementing a ‘new media’ and photo program at the National Art Academy in R’vík in the early-mid-90s, where, with a user-base of under 30K people, Iceland demanded a translated OS from Apple *and* Microsoft. Terms were collectively translated or ‘determined’ by public discussion — I had instances like that happen in my classes, where, teaching in English, and mentioning a technical photographic term, the class would erupt in an animated conversation in Icelandic as to the correct translation of the term. Their cultural autonomy lay (lies) in a collective collaborative resistance to the imposition of ‘out-land-ish’ protocols.
In the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct (likely) created by a subset of the military-industrial complex. But trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. This is where the self engages the other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of ‘what’s out there’. Trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other is critical in setting a metric of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. Sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway that trust must follow to be realized. What is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous others. What does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?
every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.
more on this in future rants…
Waag
the view from the living room. the Waag Society has one set of offices in the building to the right, on Nieuwmarkt, it’s the oldest secular structure in Amsterdam. this complex includes the Teatrum Anatomicum the best-known space to public dissections…
circuit :: edge :: cave
polar/solar crossing #1
the last day, more lunches, meetings, panels, and sessions. of multiple form, but with threads of connection throughout. that’s the core thread, or simply the core: people. the structure of most of the collective events is the usual podium-stage-screen-VIP-amplification (who was chosen for social and real amplification?). I am only interested in the granular micro individual un-amplified events.
Steve provides this nice image from a small polar/solar path crossing in Caesar Chavez Park in downtown San Jose.
the SoundCulture presentation with Ed Osbourne, Shawn Decker, and Nigel Helyer … where the organization SoundCulture aims to be a trans-disciplinary, trans-regional, pro-actively critical platform for sound art …
sound is field-like … fluidity … formlessness … nomadic and transient … sonic everywhere (related to Light … because it is another manifestation of field energy)
sound in spaces … how to solve (or use) spatial pervasiveness of sound …
sound is one of the first inter-media areas, linking multiple practices and media
sound is vibration and relies on material
sound as environment — sustainability & architecture
sound and music — hearing and technologies, but what about music and sound difference …
comments:
overlooked as field; eye is master, ear is slave; architecture going backwards; plus sound-specific work isn’t always that way … music — the 500-pound gorilla in the room; electroacoustic; sound vs composition, etc. I commented on the possible parallels in the development of photography-as-art-form and the subsequent isolation it faced as materially-defined art form, and then a gradual realization as the digital began to make headway into its domain that photography was just another way to put a 2-D mark on paper.
finally catch up with Tapio as well, for a bit of conversation time.
head home before the SOFA street party really gets underway. don’t have the energy to keep on with it. carrying a bunch of equipment is an anchor. so, after filming some of the Latino concert action in the convention center with Amanda and Sophea, I head back to the car and the commute up 680 to Livermore.
Partial Description of the World
I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.
The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. more “Partial Description of the World”
[spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
John Hopkins hopkins at isnm.de
Fri Aug 19 00:19:37 CEST 2005
Previous message: [spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
Next message: [spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?
some meandering thoughts on institution (pardon if the quoting is not working right!):
>>A pattern that reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and media art?”
>>Possibly, and if so, to whose benefit? What were institutions hoping to gain from this
>>expansion in the first place, and did they? Might they have become unwillfully blinkered,
>>self-perpetuating autarkies? Would it be blasphemous to imagine that institutions run
>>by and for humans are endowed with life-spans, and that one generation of institutions/ more “[spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?”
The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks
A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor’s note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 that set life on another trajectory.]
1.0 Statement of Problem
1.1 Introductory note
Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. more “The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks”
Damasio speaks
Genes provide for one brain component with precise structure, and for another component in which the precise structure is to be determined. But the to-be-determined structure can be achieved only under the influence of three elements: (1) the precise structure; (2) individual activity and circumstances (in which the final say comes from the human and physical environment as well as from chance); and (3) self-organizing pressures arising from the sheer complexity of the system. The unpredictable profile of experiences of each individual does have a say in the circuit design, both directly and indirectly, via the reaction it sets off in the innate circuitries, and the consequences that such reactions have in the overall process of circuit shaping. — Antonio Damasio
many inputs. but need to get back out into the wild-ness for a time. there is a new moon, though, and by the time I get out, it will be well on the way to full, which though it is magical to be in the silver brilliance of nights, I prefer the full darkness and moving about by starLight alone.
considering the next step on the doctoral front. to begin assigning topics and assembling chapters.
(no)music arena
Get online early to prep everything, stream at 1400 local time. As per usual, a single glitch pops up when I begin the live transmission, something that I have not experienced before: this is also a typical characteristic of the glitch. This time, my outgoing audio stream had a scratchy noise overlaying it. When I start the actual performance, laboite suggested a few fixes (restart the encoder – MacAmp on a separate G4, or reboot the system), which I did, along with swapping and testing cables and on. All during the time that the performance is running. Sweating. The stream ended up going down twice, but laboite kept me calm (this by no means the only technical glitch in the 24-hour program!). The end result was simply having the noise over the actual work which some listeners on the IRC channel liked. I didn’t, but so it goes. I have a hunch that it was an aliasing function between playing mp3 files and then encoding that (albeit an analog output through a mixer to the encoding machine) output to a mp3 shoutcast stream. I could hear that the G4 output was messy, but the output from the mixer was clean. Or, there was something wrong with the USB audio input device, or the audio circuits on the G4 (not outside possibility, as my own G4 has some issues with that), or, or … endless possibilities. That finished, I wandered over to TEKS to meet Espen, and ended up talking with Trine at the Contemporary Art space where an exhibition paralleling TMM is taking place. Then back home to catch up on logistic arrangements (buying four different transport tickets for the coming month).
looking around Suomenlinna (home)
Here. Around the island in the cold, though fortunately calm, airs. A cycle/circuit freezes hands in the short moments of unsheathed revelation. The ice on the harbor is only a couple feet thick so that the ferry doesn’t have too much trouble making way. Full moon hangs. Cruise ship in blue ice leaves carbon trails in blue air below white moon. I’m leaving the island for something.
self-portrait at the Center of the Universe
Twenty-two years since the first visit. Spring Break. Bit of a rough night, to be sure…
mapping transitions
almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.
enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?
actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…
swarming
taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…
anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.
reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?
Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave
caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.
back to the center
(re)turning from the snow
into the desert
Technicolor yawns
back in Estonia after a rough catamaran ride across the Baltic. in the open sea, waves were cresting 3-4 meters. not being a seafaring-type-dude, this was a bit intense. most people in the boat were “yawning in Technicolor” as it were … the stewardesses handing out plastic bags constantly. didn’t upset my stomach, but it was disorienting and even caused an occasional white-knuckle grab of the armrests when cresting a wave and going for the trough. the swells were almost broadsides, and although it seemed that the ship had an effective stabilization system, there were a few moments where I was wondering how cold the water was if the need to swim suddenly arose. meet Ivika at the Academy lobby, along with Shawn, a Canadian electro-acoustic musician and Polar Circuiter. the Media Lab here is still undergoing construction, but appears to be a viable organism. my lecture for this evening starts at 1600.
done with one group contact here. the usual eclectic array of intelligent, sentient beings.