posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

to Björn Bjarnason

12 August 1995

To the Honorable Björn Bjarnason, Minister of Education and Culture

As I have noted that you have put up some home pages asking for input regarding education in Iceland, I am transmitting this formal letter to you via email. (I apologize for not writing in Icelandic, but I am not very good at it even though I have lived in Iceland for five years…)

I am writing this letter to urge your continued support of the Icelandic Academy of Art.

Following I will present some personal opinions concerning the future of the Academy as well as some concrete suggestions and proposals. These considerations are based in my experience in teaching at MHÍ for the past five years as well as numerous guest-teaching positions at other Universities and Academies in Scandinavia and the US. Currently I am serving as Chair of the US-Iceland Fulbright Educational Commission (until September 1995) and as (Founding) Director of the Electronic Media and Photography program at MHÍ. My opinions are not necessarily those of either MHÍ or the Fulbright Board.

I believe Iceland is at a crossroads where the choices, opportunities, and outcomes will be largely determined by how the issue of a national educational policy is developed. As the post of Minister of Education and Culture determines this policy, I believe it to be the most critical cabinet posting in the entire government.

It is important to the future of Iceland that attention be directed to the building-up of a competitive and well-considered program of education in the arts. The recent confirmation of intent as expressed by the Althingi and the government in support of the official formation of the Icelandic Academy must be followed up by concrete action concerning the financial, physical, and ideological future of the institution.
more “to Björn Bjarnason”

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

typical day’s contribution

As a participant in the aporee::maps project I receive a daily email listing/linking the past 24-hours-worth of field recording contributions to the project. I will often check these emails when I am still in bed, and select the longest recording of the day and let it ease me into the day. Here’s a sample from 15 February 2024. A link will bring up the aporee::maps google interface, with the particular location indicated by a pulsing red circle centered on the map. Selecting the dot will reveal a pop-up with further information about the recording, and there is a play button/bar in the upper right bar at the top of the map. Aside from simply scrolling around the (global!) map, radio aporee is another way of tapping into the project with a 24/7 stream of contributions and with built-in code that will preemptively mix in material proximal to whomever is listening.

All the recordings are simultaneously posted to https://archive.org, providing yet another way to explore this vast collection of sonic work. [all neoscenes recordings on aporee]

New sounds since 14.02.2024 12:00 Europe/Berlin time:
——————————————————————

Cafe, Aldeburgh, UK: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62936 — Cafe, Aldeburgh, UK (17:34min., by david.j.pitt@btinternet.com)

Wusterauer Anger, Kirchmöser Ost: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=60944 — garden ambience w/ bells, birds, train and airplane (10:00min., by radio aporee)

40 Bd Carnot, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62937 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Ambiance et chant avec des carnavaleux. (1:28min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

11 Bd Léon Marchal, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62938 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Rigodon final (13:45min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

Västerbron, 117 33 Stockholm, Sverige: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62939 — Under Västerbron (3:18min., by milton@jordansson.net)

11 Bd Léon Marchal, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62940 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Rigodon final – Pendant que les géants brûlent.. Hymne à Jean Bart et hommage à Copinard (8:47min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

7 Pl. Joseph Leprêtre, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62941 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Le lancé de harengs des fenêtres de l’Hôtel de Ville aux cris de “Liberez les Harengs !!!” (9:43min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

25 Rue Pasteur, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62942” rel=”noopener” target=”_blank”>https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62942 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Au cœur de la bande (5:19min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

25B Av. de Calais, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62943 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Départ du Carnaval (4:45min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

28 Rue Pierre Merlen, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62944 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) La bande… (2:23min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

55 Av. de Dunkerque, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62945 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Au cœur de la bande… (8:36min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

8 Bd François Lévêque, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62946 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Au cœur de la bande… (1:58min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

29 Bd Carnot, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62947 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Au cœur de la bande… (3:34min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

1 Av. du Calvaire, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62948 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Ambiance sur la plage avant la mise à feu des géants (5:23min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

2 Pl. Charles Valentin, 59153 Grand-Fort-Philippe, France: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62949 — Carnaval de Grand Fort Philippe (C.U. Dunkerque) Dernière pause avant le Rigodon. (3:04min., by Jean-François CAVRO)

Oppundavägen 18, 122 48 Enskede, Sverige: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62950 — bones (3:36min., by e3yes)

Nuti, Metsküla, 71302 Viljandi maakond, Estonia: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62953 — ice falling from trees (10:00min., by patrick tubin mcginley)

Thaurer Alm .204, 6065 Thaur, Österreich: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62951 — cow bells and motorway (6:09min., by hannes strobl)

8C7W+FX Thaur, Österreich: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62952 — water stream (3:01min., by hannes strobl)

Sound Walk, The Scallop, Aldeburgh, UK: https://aporee.org/maps/?loc=62954 — Sound Walk, The Scallop, Aldeburgh, UK (16:05min., by david.j.pitt@btinternet.com)

66313 sounds with a cumulative total length of 217d, 07h, 43m, 13s from 57950 locations.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Minna Tarkka 1960 – 2023

Saddened to receive news from Andrew that friend, colleague, artist, researcher, producer, and facilitator Minna Tarkka had passed, far too young, on 27 August after a very brief illness.

Researcher Minna Tarkka received the state award for media art in December 2017, Helsinki, Finland. Photo credit: Martti Kainulainen / Lehtikuva.
Researcher Minna Tarkka received the state award for media art in December 2017, Helsinki, Finland. Photo credit: Martti Kainulainen / Lehtikuva.

I arrived in Helsinki, Finland, gritty-eyed, after an early morning flight from Reykjavík, in late August, 1994, on the first of many visits, sojourns, gigs, workshops, and residencies. After dropping my luggage at my friend Visa’s print-making studio on Jääkärinkatu, I made my way to Arabianranta and the University of Art and Design Helsinki (Taideteollinen korkeakoulu, or TAIK, now the Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture), located then in the old Arabia porcelain factory on Hämeentie. I was in Helsinki for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) and, later, for an international performance event (Fax You) at the Akademie Bookstore on Helsinki’s Night of the Arts with the Finnish artist, Visa Norros and others. ISEA was being hosted that year by the Media Lab at TAIK and directed by Minna Tarkka, a person who did things, who showed up, and who inspired others to show up and do things.

I first met Minna later that morning at the TAIK Arabianranta building on the 3rd Floor at the Media Lab—actually we collided in the hallway—auspicious and a bit embarrassing! She was dashing from Point A to Point B as Director during the very hectic symposium registration. After both of us proffered sheepish apologies and introduced ourselves, she took me around, introducing me to some of the media arts luminaries attending the symposium and to staff at the Lab. This was the first of many examples of her unsparing generosity. It was during the symposium that I fully entered her energized sphere of influence there in Finland, where we had a number of memorable dialogues around the ethics and creative possibilities of the rapidly expanding field of electronic media in which she was a thought pioneer. As Associate Professor at the Lab, she later facilitated my return in the spring of 1995 to teach a four-week course. And a few years following that, she was totally supportive of the course netculture that I developed and taught at the Lab in 2000-2001. Her parallel trans-disciplinary course, “Cultural Usability,” critically examined new media design that was inclusive of sociological, cultural, and technological perspectives. Years earlier in 1987, she was the founding Director of MUU, the ‘alternative’ arts organization that has since been a major international player in new media arts. And two years later, she was a founding member of AV-arkki yet another power-house media arts resource and artists’ association there in Finland.

In those earlier days of our acquaintance (and of the WWW itself), her research and art work around spatial metaphors in virtuality, the aesthetics of immersion, and the dynamics of interaction and consumption were of special interest to me, as she explored the fundamentals of human relation as mediated by this ‘new’ technology. She made some highly original and deep dives into the aesthetic and ethical dimensions in the design of spaces for interaction. And all the while, she worked as a facilitator of human encounter, organizing, producing, and participating in many subsequent events, culminating with the formation of another cultural NGO, m-cult in 2000. Right up to the present, m-Cult has exerted a strong influence on the international critical engagement of culture with technology, leading with a profound sense of humane social activism. Yet another influential expression of her energies.

I never made a portrait of her and there seem to be only a handful of poor digital traces. She was a bit shy and soft-spoken. I have a vague memory of the epic RinneRadio concert at ISEA and a huge crowd dancing away, Minna included. She knew how to have an expansive time! That she is gone is yet another loss to many of us who are still pacing about this stage. Minna you will be fondly remembered and deeply missed.

[ED: I will add any reflections and comments from others to this posting as they surface. I’ve been reaching out to friends and former colleagues from those former life-changing times.]

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

work?

On another front:

When work-for-pay gets no appreciation, positive encouragement, engaged feedback; when personal meetings are replete with wide, open-mouthed yawning and off-topic noise; when there are no collaborative synergies, no facilitation of cooperation, what’s the point? The paycheck. That’s it. What a sad way of going. When management is absent: no thought to productively optimizing the particular talents of the employees, lifting everyone up in an engaged process. I admit, in the past decades, in most situations, I find that the people I chose to surround myself or collaborate with are proactive, positive, creative, and engaged. Here, the antithesis, everyone is so overtasked with multiple projects (in general) that collaboration is only an extra burden, and creativity is focused on how to keep nose above the flood of demands pulling from every side.

The CGS (Colorado Geological Survey) is barely holding on within its new context at the School of Mines. Knowing the Machiavellian politic of academia, I suspect that the organization will gradually be gutted. And, although it may not face a total demise, since there is a legislative mandate behind it, poor management will allow it to simply shrivel into an institutional husk. Prop 112, though, may deal the final blow. If it passes, oil and gas drilling activity will effectively cease in Colorado, and this means the Severance Tax receipts will go away, and that’s where 80% of the CGS budget comes from.

There is no creative spark built into its public face, and with a majority of employees skewed towards retirement, new ideas, processes, or innovations are frowned upon. Yet another human structure that does not reach its potential: on the same track as the wider empire-in-decline …

Days there are numbered, by choice, for several of the staff. Maybe not finger-and-toe digits, but numbered.

posted

Edinburgh Festival Day 17: A game of two halves

A brief article explaining the very cool art project that I participated in — “Outpost Biennale”. When I get a chance, I’ll add some documentary images of my contributions.

[From the Independent, 30 August 1994]

They cost nothing. They are the size of a credit card. And they threaten to subvert the art world. Iain Gale investigates.

Across Edinburgh, people are looking at works of art, engaging in a visual dialogue which taxes their faculties of appraisal and evaluation. But the focus of their attention is not the impressive collections in the city’s art galleries, but 24,000 works of art which cost almost nothing and are just the size of a credit card. Despite their size and apparent lack of value, however, they constitute the most fascinating and innovative art show of the whole Festival.

‘Outpost’ is a revolutionary concept which aims to extend our understanding of the processes that condition the way we look at art. Originally the brainchild of Clive Sall and Emma Davis of FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste), the project, now supported by Independent Public Arts, is centred around 240 artists, of varying degrees of celebrity and talent, each of whom has been asked to produce 100 copies of an original work of art in two halves. One half is distributed from dispensers at sites across the city. You simply take one and make of it what you will.

This is the essence of a project whose raison d’etre is the willingness of the public to make its own critical decisions about art. You become involved the moment you take a card, effectively becoming curator, critic and collector. Once you have accumulated a few cards, preferably from different venues, the next step is to take them to the Outpost stand in the Traverse theatre foyer where, for a price which varies from 10p to pounds 10 (all proceeds go to an Edinburgh Aids charity) you can collect a ‘signature’ card which reveals the identity of the artist. For a further pounds 4, you can buy a catalogue which also acts as a display album. Stick in your cards and you have the exhibition.

It is simple and effective, and raises interesting questions about the way we view art. The credit-card format, for example, might alert the viewer to an intention to subvert the traditional hierarchy of dealer, artist, museum. But Sall is emphatic that he and Davis are not ‘art terrorists’; ‘We simply want to circumvent institutions,’ he says. It’s a simple thesis: art galleries, public and commercial, present works in a way which by its nature implies greatness. If it’s on the wall, sanitised and sanctified, it must be good. Decontextualising begins with the venue. By locating the house- shaped dispensers not only at the National Gallery of Scotland and the Fruitmarket Gallery, but also at Burger King, Waverley station, a post office and a go-go pub, the organisers are indulging in a form of gentle subversion. In a gallery setting, the layman will suspend critical judgement to worship at the altar of high art. The first thing to do is find the name. But with Outpost, the artists’ names are not revealed, along with the second half of the diptych, until the art is paid for. With no authorship evident, viewers are coerced into making the effort to regain their often neglected critical faculties.

There is much to choose from. The works of art are ingenious in their diversity, from a sculpture created from a piece of string and evidence of the recent fad for chocolate in the word piece ‘lick me’ through a mildly obscene fax from Germany to simple, effective abstraction. Having decided, in the crush of Burger King or the serenity of an art gallery, whether or not to keep the first card, the viewer’s next decision is whether to pay the amount demanded for the second. So, after the aesthetic judgement comes that of value. A twist is that while some of the artists on show are students, others (a list is available), are known and exhibited names. Part of the interest comes from the excitement of gambling on your own taste. Once the collection is assembled, its display in the gallery of the book is at the viewer’s discretion.

Via this sequence, the viewers become curators in a process which, one hopes, will teach them something that they won’t find in a textbook. Of course, the pool of artists is finite and generally not traditionalist. So one could say that the organisers have already imposed their own critical criteria. Nevertheless, by the time the dispensers are empty and, with luck, all the signatures claimed, there could be some 500 more people in the city who understand what it is to be a curator or critic. If only it were really that simple.

Artworks will be dispensed until 2 Sept. An exhibition will be held of the work. Details from Independent Public Arts on 031-558-1950. An Outpost project will be part of the Venice Biennale in 1995.

posted

brico-histories

THIS PAD IS SCHEDULED FOR MIGRATION TO A NEW SERVER – PLEASE DON’T EDIT IT ANYMORE (Felipe, 19/03/2013)

NEW URL: https://pixelache.muistio.tieke.fi/bricolabs-conversations

People who we would Like to see in Dialogues for the Reader:

* Venzha/Ira – HONF
* Stephen
* Jaromil
* Patrice
* Bronac
* Rob
* Alejo Duque

* Who else?

THE CALL

Subject: The BricoReader wants You and You :: I and I

Dear Bricoleurs!

In preparation for the upcoming projects and the BricoReader that we are planning for Pixelache in Helsinki in May, we are asking that folks within the Bricolabs sphere of action generate some special conversations with each other. We believe the relevant knowledge-base available here among us is of great value to share (more) widely.

The conversations, dialogues, and/or interviews that you generate may include anything that you think is relevant: for example, what issues you think define the Pixelache theme Facing North/Facing South; what is (your) theoretical approach to open infrastructures and open communities; what is your practice to bring this theory to life; and so on. These textual conversations may not necessarily form an essay, but will provide us with an array of rich material to assemble the BricoReader from. These dialogues may also include material relating to what you find most interesting/powerful/engaging about the distributed bricolabs network, how it functions, and how it affects participants and the wider communities that it serves around the globe. We are also playing with a few sub-themes for the Brico-Pixelache presence: deep resonant networks; anti-disciplinary collaboration; subjective infrastructures – autonomy vs. connectivity; the reversal of polarities; and the smell of Bricolabs. These phrases might give you some things to think and talk about as well.

To participate in this process, we would like you to start by considering who you would like to start a conversation with. We would encourage every Bricoleur to participate and especially to perhaps reach out to an unfamiliar Brico on the mailing list — imagine the power of such a set of dialogues that will then be collected and bricolaged into the BricoReader! Once you’ve got a dialogue partner, please send us yours and their names so that we might begin planning and mapping out where we can go with the Reader. At this point, there are 182 (!!!) people on the mailing list: plenty of energizing possibilities. If you are not aware of all the people on the list, it is also possible to go to:

https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/brico

and after logging in at the bottom of that page you can see see a full list of subscribers (by email address). If you need help on this let us know.

We will also list partners on this piratepad (you can add your name(s) yourself as well):

https://piratepad.net/briconversations

In addition, if any of you can think of other interesting individuals or groups to engage with but who are not on the mailing list please feel free to invite them into the conversation.

The conversations can be initiated immediately, and certainly may be conducted in any way you like — of course a text output suits us best. We see these as email or perhaps other text-chat transcripts, whatever.

To help the editing process (and the busy editors!) along we propose a formal deadline of 21 March 2013 to give us time to review and collate things. We are looking forward to your energized expressions!

kiitos/thanks/gracias/danke/takk fyrir/hvala/bedankt/obrigado/terima kasih!!

Jerneja & John

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

recalcitrance

That many of Prescott’s cultural ‘actors’ harbor an intense internal recalcitrance against collaboration on common cultural and social goals was pointed out by ‘outsiders’ from Phoenix a couple months ago at the Milagro. Two of the founders of Local First Arizona, Kimber Lanning and Michael Monti, pointed out that Prescott had huge — but very under-achieved — potential as a destination for rich cultural experience. And the primary barrier to moving the needle on this issue was a lack of communication among and between different community micro-constituencies — something I have observed and commented upon to numerous people (who either agree, cringe, or are silently angered at such outsider criticism).

They need therapeutic facilitation regarding communications at the very minimum, along with a healthy dose of group encounter — with open dialogue! The silo-ing effect of different arts and cultural non-profits, educational situations, and cliques is quite profound. This is a problem of crisis proportions, at least as far as the local is concerned. It doesn’t matter a whit to outsiders as there is so little of wider cultural import — a problem that comes precisely because of this pervasive narrow view. What plagues Prescott falls under the rubric ‘provincialism’ but has a special twist in that those who fit the label of ‘liberals’ seem the most conservatively exclusionary. I explain part of this problem as arising because in the overwhelmingly conservative (Republican) community, progressive people seem to have been pushed into a defensive position. But this is not the full explanation.

At any rate, after giving it a good go the last couple years, I have given up on the organizations and people that amply illustrate this special entrenched close-mindedness. In the past, when I was based in Northern Europe, I was fortunate to work with a lot of very open-minded, smart, and creative people — yup, it spoiled me and I have high standards regarding innovative cultural enterprise.

Time to start mapping the departure from this cultural desert!

posted

sheet rock

Finished sheet-rocking the living room ceiling with help from Todd and one of those clever sheet-rock installing devices. It would have been a killer job doing it solo, so Todd’s experienced direction kept it to a single six-hour manageable task. Still have to do the skimming, painting, molding, and such before re-assembling the room (before getting house-guests in a couple weeks!).

Art as life as art.

Documentation leaves the floor.

posted
  • place: online and Prescott, Arizona - Berlin, Germany

eine sondersendung von radio aporee und colaboradio

Udo cranks up yet another collaborative streaming project linked to https://radio.aporee.org. So neoscenes joins in for the first time in a while — setting up the Nicecast stream and using the H4n to stream ambient quiet neighborhood sounds from The Mountain Club neighborhood.

1900 GMT+2 / 10 AM GMT-7 until tomorrow 1100 GMT+2 / today 11 PM GMT-7

It’s also going out on https://senderberlin.org and FM 88.4MHz (Berlin) / FM 90.7MHz (Potsdam).

TUNE IN!

radio aporee spezial

eine sondersendung von radio aporee und colaboradio

radio aporee

radio aporee continuously plays recordings from its global soundmap project. however, it’s a responsive stream of sound, a radio that listens, that may (or may not…) recognize and react to events, e.g. new sound uploads, listeners tuning in, mobile app activity, live sessions, phone calls etc. it’s an ongoing experiment and exploration of affective geographies and new practices related to sound/art and radio.

radio aporee ::: maps has started 2006, based on former artistic research on mapping, spatial conditions and the navigation between the real and the virtual. The idea being to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focuses solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. It contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places.

radio aporee 52° 29′ 66″ N, 13° 25′ 26″ E ::: maps https://aporee.org/maps/ ::: stream https://radio.aporee.org ::: miniatures for mobiles https://aporee.org/mfm/

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

conversation with Alexandra

Have an interesting Skpye conversation with Alexandra last evening after getting home from Nadja’s place (missed the damn bus, or, more correctly, was given the wrong info from the KVG website on the timing of the return bus ride — there were no buses running by the time I left. So, a long walk over the Holtenauer Straße Bridge that spans the Ostsee Kanal, and down FeldStraße to DüppelStraße.) At any rate, Alexandra seems quite sharp, though participatory/collaborative online situations present new territory for her. I’ll be keen to see what she produces during her residency regarding VisitorsStudio (especially after deploying it with my Advanced Digital Art students at CU-Boulder this past semester to a very poor reception). Alexandra wants to explore the idea of open-sourcing the platform and perhaps employing more current social networking paradigms in the overall interface design. We’ll see. Not sure that either of those aspects would have made the platform more compelling for my students, actually not sure anything would have compelled them to be less conservative and more creatively present and engaged. Cattle prod anyone? Nah, but whether it was the particular local/immediate context or whether it was evidence of a wider crisis in the US is not so clear. Probably a combination of the two. Whatever, it was disheartening to the extreme.

posted
  • place: Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland

quick notes

The N-1 event is curious — I wasn’t aware it was a pedagogic exercise to be acted out in front of (!) students at Arcada. This makes it a bit awkward with some of the invited people, though I simply jump in to the scene, aiming that for the students it would not be a business-as-usual pedagogic activity. That was hard to overcome in the lecture hall (suitably exquisite quality as is any Finnish public construct). So we oscillate in and out of the building, the lobby, outside, and so on, enjoying the cool sunshine. The students somewhat perplexed, but seemingly engaged or at least present.

Most of us live much of our lives in the ether. We have a mobile phone with us at all times with the result that we are always on and never truly alone. We have maps and geo-positioning on our phones so that we are always traceable and never truly lost. We tweet and update our Facebook status so that we often say what comes into our minds when it comes into our minds, and we are rarely truly reflective.

In all of this we are telling each other stories about what we are doing, and from this we curate stories about who we are. From all the shards and slivers that we scatter across the digiverse we are piecing together new kinds of identities – and these identities propel us in some directions and constrain us from moving in others.
more “quick notes”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

time for closing

Classes begin to wind down/wind up: finals this week. Ending dialogues and monologues.

At the moment, sitting in the final for the History and Theory of Digital Art. The final consists of a collaborative effort to modify the general class notes into the ultimate ‘cheat sheet’ for a final examination on the History and Theory of Digital Art. The collective notes accumulated through the efforts of a different pair of students each class session using a single google doc to take notes on. Among other issues, this obviated the HUGE distraction of ancillary web-surfing in class. And it provides an excellent exercise of collaborative knowledge-building (which should be the standard for learning facilitation at this point in time). The down side was the lack of coherent group synergy which stems from at least two factors — irregular attendance and me not enforcing the ‘dialogue’ assignments weekly (which is related to the attendance issue). Turns out that many of the dialogue situations were arbitrarily skipped by students, and so the effect that worked well in the consistency of the MiT class failed in the instance of this class. Inconsistent attendance is a primary sign of the lack of importance of the class, that it is not compelling, or that there are more pressing things than school to be engaged with.

It was self-determined how to distribute tasks on what/how to address the upgrade. The first hour was divvied up, one class day for each person to mod. Then the second hour is used for anyone to work on any part of the text. The balance of the class session is used to clean-up.

The result? Is it a proper cheat sheet? What is collaborative knowledge generation anyway?

Why did these two art classes proceed so poorly compared to similar ones that I taught a decade ago at CU. Are my standards or expectations too high? Not high enough? Especially in comparison to the “Meaning of Information Technology” group: night and day. I need to have smart and engaged students to establish and sustain an energized dialogue. The challenge of immature students, dis-engaged, dis-interested — divested from their own learning process by the structural violence of the system — may be lessened depending on their raw precocity, but in the end, they do need to step up and away from passive learning paradigms. The problems were definitely enmeshed in my own response to a broad lack of attentiveness — a reactionary trait of which I am guilty. My response is to simply pull away incrementally from what is normally a condition of open sharing.

As per usual, every class evolves its own characteristic vibe. Thank god the cumulative total vibe is in the positive. Else learning facilitation would be a non-starter.

A fundamental question: Is this a systemic thing, versus a localized immediate problem? That’s all I can do, ask the questions, and see about discovering actionable intelligence. And change conditions when possible, and relinquish control when necessary.

posted

Global Development profile

Prof. Ajume Wingo invited me to join in the Global Development Group that is being organized by Prof. Paul Chinowsky, Mortenson Professor of Sustainable Development, in the Mortenson Center in Engineering for Developing Communities Program. It looks to be an interesting program with about 40 senior faculty from across the university participating. Not sure how deeply I’ll be able to get involved given that I’m short-timing at CU at this point, but I noted that at one of the first meetings that brought a majority of the participants together, Paul ran with my suggestion to pair people off in such a way that the disciplinary boundaries are broken down. I used the dialogue assignment as an example — where time spent in face-to-face engagement goes a long way in the construction of a shared protocol that will bridge the oft-times exclusive disciplinary languages. It is my belief that these shared protocols are crucial to the success of a transdisciplinary collaboration and that the human networks they depend on are constructed only at the speed of life (as I have said elsewhere in this blog), not quicker.

John Hopkins (BSc, MFA, PhD) has worked for the last 25+ years as a nomadic media artist and autonomous learning facilitator across 25 countries and more than 60 cultural and academic learning institutions. His workshops explore issues of sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY, Open Source, and DIWO (Do-It-With-Others or community-based DIY) processes, and the appropriation of global IT networks as the site for autonomous creative activity: Temporary Autonomous Zones. Resonating with both David Bohm’s and Martin Buber’s ideas around the power of human encounter and dialogue, he facilitates experiential learning around collaborative engagement. His own media-arts research is a practice-based exploration into the effects of technological development on human encounter and relationship. His views on global development are informed as a former member of the Imperialist Vanguard (Big Oil), he now draws on the rigors and knowledge-base of that experience while leaving behind the fixed and fear-drenched assumptions about the Other that drives the core of the military-industrial-academic complex. A CU alumni, he is currently teaching on the “Meaning of Information Technology” in the ATLAS/TAM program along with several digital arts courses in A&AH. He maintains an extensive web presence at https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and https://neoscenes.net/ that documents his practice.

posted

The BricoReader wants You and You :: I and I

The call goes out to the brico network for the reader that Jerneja and I put together a few days ago.

Dear Bricoleurs!

In preparation for the upcoming projects and the BricoReader that we are planning for Pixelache in Helsinki in May, we are asking that folks within the Bricolabs sphere of action generate some special conversations with each other. We believe the relevant knowledge-base available here among us is of great value to share (more) widely.

The conversations, dialogues, and/or interviews that you generate may include anything that you think is relevant: for example, what issues you think define the Pixelache theme Facing North/Facing South; what is (your) theoretical approach to open infrastructures and open communities; what is your practice to bring this theory to life; and so on. These textual conversations may not necessarily form an essay, but will provide us with an array of rich material to assemble the BricoReader from. These dialogues may also include material relating to what you find most interesting/powerful/engaging about the distributed bricolabs network, how it functions, and how it affects participants and the wider communities that it serves around the globe. We are also playing with a few sub-themes for the Brico-Pixelache presence: deep resonant networks; anti-disciplinary collaboration; subjective infrastructures – autonomy vs. connectivity; the reversal of polarities; and the smell of Bricolabs. These phrases might give you some things to think and talk about as well.

To participate in this process, we would like you to start by considering who you would like to start a conversation with. We would encourage every Bricoleur to participate and especially to perhaps reach out to an unfamiliar Brico on the mailing list — imagine the power of such a set of dialogues that will then be collected and bricolaged into the BricoReader! Once you’ve got a dialogue partner, please send us yours & their names so that we might begin planning and mapping out where we can go with the Reader. At this point, there are 182 (!!!) people on the mailing list: plenty of energizing possibilities. If you are not aware of all the people on the list, it is also possible to go to:

https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/brico

and after logging in at the bottom of that page you can see see a full list of subscribers (by email address). If you need help on this let us know.

We will also list partners on this piratepad (you can add your name(s) yourself as well):

https://piratepad.net/briconversations

In addition, if any of you can think of other interesting individuals or groups to engage with but who are not on the mailing list please feel free to invite them into the conversation.

The conversations can be initiated immediately, and certainly may be conducted in any way you like — of course a text output suits us best. We see these as email or perhaps other text-chat transcripts, whatever.

To help the editing process (and the busy editors!) along we propose a formal deadline of 21 March 2013 to give us time to review and collate things. We are looking forward to your energized expressions!

kiitos/thanks/gracias/danke/takk fyrir/hvala/bedankt/obrigado/terima kasih!!

Jerneja & John

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

screening: Jeanne Liotta

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

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

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Trans-disciplinary Dialogue and Holistic Knowledge Generation

At its core, trans-disciplinary collaboration is chiefly a test of how to find the words, and within the words, the cumulative meanings that might span what is often a wide gulf in understandings. In general, the use of language in a transdisciplinary space is a particular challenge that, to a significant degree, determines the successful outcome of the attempt to bridge, fuse, or simply transcend disciplinary spaces altogether. Of course, beyond the words, there is the imperative for energized and embodied collaborative action, Freire’s ‘praxis'(1): change is the presumptive goal of the trans-disciplinary encounter. However, what I call the ‘meta-conditions’ of the human encounter are as or even more important than strictly linguistic exchanges. Meta-conditions deeply impress the qualities and potentialities of the human encounter that are the core of learning and change. In this White Paper I will reflect on these meta-conditions necessary to facilitate trans-disciplinary communication and collaboration. I will do this as a former engineer, a practicing ‘media’ artist, and in the context of 25 years of experience(2) teaching across art, design, engineering, and technology. The instance of my own current planning and facilitating of a (pre-existing) course I was invited to teach in the Fall of 2012 will function as an armature for the reflections. A former student of mine, Director of the TAM (Technology, Arts, and Media (3)) Program, that is hosted within the ATLAS Institute (Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society(4)), offered me one section of “The Meaning of Information Technology”(5) course at the University of Colorado – Boulder.(6) Among other threads, my reflections will touch on re-defining the term ‘technology’ in such a way that allows more powerful critical access to that often-self-obscured aspect of our social existence, regardless of disciplinary background. I will also make some critical observations about what I understand as the deep and problematic assumptions under-girding much of contemporary education.

—————–

1) Freire, P., 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.
2) https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/
3) https://tam.colorado.edu/
4) https://atlas.colorado.edu/
5) https://tam.colorado.edu/teaching.php (general program requirements for the course)
6) https://colorado.edu

posted

muito obrigado

Victoria (Co-ordinator of the Hackademia Festival) invites some of us bricoleurs to jump into an IRC discussion on technoshamanism connected to the technomagias festival in Maua in Rio de Janeiro State, Brazil. That was a nice language riffing challenge talking about the basics of reality (and juggling with google translate made it even more interesting!). I get more and more feeling that the Brazilians are doing very interesting things, and have been doing them since way before Freire started his radical practices in social encounter and bringing back energy from instead of going straight into the ‘State’ to being sourced in community. All the Brazilians I have had the pleasure to work with, teach, or otherwise cross paths with are fantastic thinkers, doers, and lovers of life!

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Statement of Multi-Cultural Experience and Practice

With 20 years of experience with students from more than 40 countries and with educational organizations in 25 countries, I have a deep appreciation of the issues involved in multi- or trans-cultural education. My own practice as an educator looks at multi-cultural learning from both a pragmatic and a positive point of view. Pragmatically, for example, all of my classes in the past years are composed of students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. This simple fact brings to the fore in every situation the difficulties of language, and the cultural expressions that are deeply formed by language. Most often working under second-language conditions, I have honed my sensitivities to the relative speeds of comprehension and expression that second-language imposes and to the contingencies of difference that surface. Because difference is such a core creative source, I make it a practice in my workshops that students engage each other so as to open the potential pathways for creative collaboration.

It is tremendously important that a learning/creative situation is relevant to each particular student and that they feel comfortable enough to evolve and take on an experience that reflects a personal, internal source. Teaching in up to 20 different linguistic and cultural situations each year I have developed an appreciation for what is possible, what each distinct viewpoint opens up in a collective learning experience, and how personally relevant work may be seen as an inspiring source for peers. This kind of movement through radically different domains requires me to have a flexibility to engage and facilitate under widely varying conditions. While this is a constant challenge, it is one that I seek out for its richness, liveliness, and the consequential open space that arises when learners, myself included, are faced with the unknown — both inside the Self and inside the Other that they face. Because a fundamental concept of my creative work as well as my seminars and workshops is the facilitation of distributed (that is, non-hierarchic) network systems, I specifically deal with this human-to-human dynamic both in the conceptual/theoretical content as well as the lived practices that I stimulate in the classroom.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

simultania contribution

My contribution to Erin Cooney‘s Simultania project, from ‘The Rocks’ in Sydney. 0300 local time… Okay, so I just set the alarm and did a slow pan of my room with my iPod nano in the 1850’s stone rowhouse there on the back side of The Rocks, in the shadow of the Sydney Harbor Bridge.

posted
  • place: Berlin-Friedrichshain, Germany

Room Tone: counter-clockwise

Working with architects from around the world, I sent them three recordings of my apartment in Berlin. Trying to capture the space in sound, the recordings document the ambient, material and dimensional conditions of the apartment. The architects were then given the task of making a physical model of the apartment by having the sounds as their only directing information. In this way, a process of translation and interpretation unfolds, incorporating an understanding, however factual or fantastical, of the auditory into the process of rendering a spatial form. Room Tone, Brandon LaBelle

As an extension of his project Room Tone, Brandon invited me to make an ambient recording that sonically explored the mapping of personal living spaces — in this case, my apartment in Friedrichshain. I titled it “counter-clockwise.”

(05:40, stereo audio, 13.6 mb)

posted
  • place: Livermore, California

t-shirts for sale

get one of these fantastic super-nice mikroPaliskunta reindeer t-shirts from the collaborative cultural project that Mari is working on. for women in sizes S – L and for men in sizes M – XXL. Colours: black-on-orange, orange-on-black, and orange-on-lime. raakaa ajoa means, liberally translated, raw driving … price only for you 10 euros (non-profit) plus postage. you can reach her at mkk ||at|| katastro ||dot|| fi.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : info

[ED: Relevant to the recent “pulling plugs” post, and whilst migrating some workshop documentation from the static neoscenes site to the blog, here are the deets for a one-week workshop I facilitated in Helsinki in 2007—squeezed in between another workshop in Sydney and lectures at several universities in San Diego, Santa Barbara, London, Amsterdam, and Kiel. Busy times. (An associated essay In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation was published in the festival publication (pdf download)).]

Welcome! Following is more detailed information on the workshop presented by John Hopkins and brought to you by the pixelache2007 festival and Artists’ Association MUU in Helsinki, Finland.

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Daily Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007, 1700 – 0200

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, culminating in the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE:

With an engaged and holistic approach to facilitation, the workshop is ideal for individuals working in any discipline; it is designed to draw in a wide range of students, from those working with ‘traditional’ art materials, independent artists working in new media OR old media; VJ’s and DJ’s; media, design, film, and art students; media art producers and directors; network technologists and designers; culinary, engineering, and IT students; collaborative software developers and users — all of these will gain a powerful perspective on their own creative practice. The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in online collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new level are also welcome.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own creative works, backgrounds, networks, and impulses into the situation to maximize the potentials of open peer-to-peer engagement. We will finish the workshop with a re-vitalized creative practice, a new understanding of collaborative dynamics, and a deeper understanding of a wide range of technologies available for creative networking.

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

TO APPLY:

!!!TOO LATE NOW, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THE WORKSHOP, EMAIL US
neopixel [at] pixelache.ac
THERE IS A WAITING LIST, YOU MAY YET STILL BE ABLE TO ATTEND!!!

THE DETAILS:

This workshop moves from concepts and theories of creative action to the actualities of a sustainable creative practice mediated by technological and human networks.Online collaborative visual/sonic activities and platforms succeed when facilitators/participants understand the dynamics of human network-building as well as the possible technologies involved. The politics of collaboration underlie much of the potential of technologically-mediated social interaction. We will address the complex social politics of technology and build a powerful model for the critical and creative engagement of media of all types.

There will be a substantial exploration of the subjects of:

  • – tactical media
  • – creativity
  • – social networking
  • – design of sustainable systems
  • – principles of human engagement
  • – networks vs hierarchic systems
  • – ad hoc networks
  • – human presence as mediated by technology
  • – social politics of technology
  • – technologies/skill sets engaged will include: audio and video production software & tools, VJ software, streaming media solutions, open-source platforms, protocols, physical computing, live performance platforms & tools, synchronous communications applications

The final day on the workshop will be a public/live/online event. It will be a multi-channel multi-screen collaborative happening with live/local and online/remote performance components coming together for several hours in a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. Workshop participants will not only develop content for the event, but will help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambience, and the remote coordination. A number of local artists will be invited to participate with sonic and visual inputs, along with remote streams coming from New York, Montreal, Sydney, Los Angeles, and other locations.

In the search for Architectures of Participation, the workshop:

  • – examines a wide range of issues beginning from a fundamental definition of technology through to absolutely contemporary technological developments that affect socio-political and cultural scenarios
  • – presents a highly-developed model for comprehending the complexities of human presence and creative action in the contemporary world
  • – facilitates deep dialogue on local social/cultural/technical issues along with other issues relevant to participants
  • – establishes a broad-ranging, inspiring, and critical context for engaging a wide variety of technologies
  • – provides a powerful context for self-development and development of collaborative activities by presenting and subsequently exercising fundamental skills and awareness
  • – provides a comfortable discursive space to explore a wide range of historical and contemporary developments of art and science
  • – maps out connections between creative processes and technological mediation
  • – develops a deeper praxis-based starting-point for participants, helping them identify their own creative sources and tendencies
  • – involves practice-based exercises to develop personal creative focus
  • – provides a supportive atmosphere for rapid collective knowledge-building and collaborative sharing

Bio for John Hopkins:

As an active network-builder with a background in engineering, hard science, and the arts, Hopkins practices a nomadic form of performative art and teaching that spans many countries and situations. He has taught workshops in more than 20 countries and 50 institutions across Europe and North America. Recent streaming performance nodes include Berlin, New York, Sydney, Helsinki, Riga, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Santa Barbara, Winnipeg, San Francisco, and, of course, online. He studied film with renown experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage in the late 1980’s. He was recently artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology in Helsinki, Finland. https://neoscenes.net

Brought to you by:

This workshop is a collaboration between: pixelache 2007, Artists’ Association MUU, and neoscenes.

posted
  • place: en route Bremen - Kiel, Germany

share:bremen

So, the market spirals down. while I travel. back to Kiel today, after a very late night at Martin’s where Anja teaches me:

Kopf hoch auch wenn der Hals dreckig ist.

(something like — keep your chin up when things are tough…)

The train is canceled, apparently there is a derailing between Bremen and Hamburg. After a wait in the Bremen Hauptbahnhof, catch a slow train to bus to slow train to Hamburg. Then on to Kiel in a train car packed full of 10-year-olds. Got some choice audio of that. Soon to be online, but not now, too many bush fires to put out.

(00:05:00, stereo audio, 10.3 mb)

(00:06:01, stereo audio, 12.5 mb)

And so, last night was also a share:bremen meeting with Jan, Jürgen, Thomas, and Martin. Stefan from my Uni-Bremen workshops manages to drop in for a visit as well. We discuss the possibilities and histories of share:bremen, thinking ahead with workshop plans, and other actions.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

amazon bonanza

crossing another path with sharedj people — Martin and Jürgen of the Bremen crew. turns out Jürgen participated in difusion 2002 using iVisit — he was doing some crazy things with the video image he was sending, and I remember that the students were really intrigued with his mysterious presence…

but the first time in a smoky German bar is too much for me. horrible environment. the Germans are on the verge of passing a law to cut off smoking in public places as have other European states have already passed — Norway, Ireland, Italy, France. it’s about time. head back to Frieder & Susi’s place.

wow, and I made all of $0.69 on Amazon referrals last month from my reading list of books and other media that has crossed my radar lately. I can retire now.

earlier, breakfast at Kuku, and a stop by the Kunsthalle, Frieder gets me in free (as Icelandic/Finnish artist union member) to look at the work of Annamaria and Marzio Sala. interesting, but not compelling. one video installation is absolutely juvenile and would not stand in a bachelors-level class. strange. hanging out in the permanent John Cage sonic installation work Essay.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : call for participation

Call for Workshop Applicants:

Remote Presence: Streaming Life

Presented by John Hopkins as part of the pixelache 2007 Architectures of Participation Festival and in collaboration with Artists’ Association MUU

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Daily Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007, 1700 – 0200

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, finishing with the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

The workshop is open to anyone from any discipline with an interest in collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new collaborative level are also welcome.

On Saturday, 31 March, the final day of the workshop will be a live & online event. Workshop participants will not only develop digital content for the event, but will also help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambiance, and the remote coordination.

For detailed information visit:

https://neoscenes.net/blog/82803-remote-presence-streaming-life-info

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from local and international applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

THE WORKSHOP IS FREE OF CHARGE.

Those interested will need to send:

NAME:

LOCATION:

EMAIL:

Along with your reasons for interest in workshop and a brief background (studies, creative work, and activities) to:

neopixel@pixelache.ac

DEADLINE for Applications 5 March 2007.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

((no))music

mes amis laboiteblanche and Carl.Y at (no)music are running their 10th 24-hour collaborative online sonic streaming project. I decided not to participate this time around for lack of technical infrastructure, but see there are some old faces like androvirus, Jon Eriksen, Bernhard Loibner, & Jerome Joy among 48 others — sure to be a long, interesting day! check it out!

(((NOMUSIC))) wishes to generate improbable duals and gatherings between pairs of participants during one hour at a time in a web audio performance. We make no storage because we think that Internet is a huge database which conveys already a great amount of dead information and we don?t want to pollute it further. We are thus in favor of instant access to a selective event. The mechanism of the programming is not automated; it is relayed manually for 24 hours without any interruption by laboiteblanche and Carl.Y., two real human routers who are at the service of continuous audio stream and who endure technical difficulties and give rapid formation on the technologies of streaming to all the participants.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Helsinki memory

happen to correspond with Claudia, Italian artist-friend from the Avantiere days in Aachen. I want to connect her up with Valgerdur and Niels who are down in Rome at the Scandic artist studio for a couple months. anyway, Claudia attached a couple snaps that Kaisu made when the three of us met in Helsinki a few years ago. don’t remember why we were at the train station — who was leaving for where. I had originally connected Claudia and Kaisu — and they went on to have some nice art collaborations in Italy and Finland. bridging, I call it. finding souls of certain energy, nothing more rewarding than connecting the dots of life and seeing the results.

posted
  • place: Beroun, Czech Republic

coal drift

second day of the workshop. hard to read the situation. everyone is in an unfamiliar environment. the ambiance in the place is calm. but hard to decode. we are strangers. landing from one planet to another. it is unusual for me to be sharing the direction of the workshop, or at least trying to. there is an internal process of deference, but that clearly is not collaboration, I need to retune myself. it is hard for me to find a balance because of this. on my part. waiting for the students to make the 0900 morning start request to appear after losing most of the first day to stragglers who arrived late into the evening. there is a lack of awareness of the meta-structural social dynamics that would facilitate a greater intensity. but this is the normal condition. intuitive actualization is possible, but going through the gymnastics of cognitive understanding first seems the only way to bring back the operational authenticity of that intuition. either that or just get drunk with them all night, see who is the last standing.

I think what we need is critical consciousness. Critical consciousness towards the entire construct of technology. Technology is not neutral, it’s not God-given, it doesn’t come from the burning bush, it doesn’t emerge from the world of antimatter. It’s something that human society makes. So all of human society is inscribed in the machine in this sense – and then the machine becomes a force to reinscribe something on society. And you can have the negative aspect of this, and you can be truly creative – why not. I’m absolutely not denying anyone’s creativity. All I’m asking for, for myself, is critical consciousness about technology. — Hakim Bey

posted
  • place: Catonsville, Maryland
  • enclosure: https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/20041120-2bradhop.21.15.mp3 25504404 audio/mpeg, https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/20041120-3bradhop.16.38.mp3 19976371 audio/mpeg, https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/20041120-bradhop.16.05.mp3 19322265 audio/mpeg

forces in equilibrium

Time slips into the next several steps, with nothing spare to make reflexive jottings here. Now in Catonsville, on a long-delayed visit with Steve, about to do a collab stream as part of his art@radio project which takes the form of a weekly streamed hour of sonic art works and a variety of other collaborative sonic streaming projects. It was previously airing on WMBC, the University of Maryland — Baltimore County student station, but with infrastructure improvements, Steve can now broadcast a stream from home via nicecast to a server maintained by the IRC

bed, Catonsville, Maryland, November 2004

posted
  • place: online, Boulder, Colorado, and Amsterdam, Netherlands

/an’a*tom’ic/ :: related to the structure of an organism

stream to /an'a*tom'ic/ at De Waag's Theatrum Anatomicum in Amsterdam, November 2003

To Whom it May Concern:

I am writing this letter to express my support of the /an’a*tom’ic/ initiative at De Waag Society Amsterdam and to confirm my intent to establish a collaborative relationship with the initiative over the coming months.

As an established artist and educator who is active across northern Europe in areas of new media, and especially in the area of networked performance and collaboration, I am well aware of the substantial work in this area done by the two principle artists who are the producers of the Anatomic initiative, Guy Van Belle and Sher Doruff. I had the opportunity to work with Guy already when I was the European Coordinator for the cafe9.net cultural networking project organized between the nine European Culture Capitals 2000.

The dimensions of our anticipated collaboration include preparatory and research work along with the execution of a variety of live/online “happenings.” I will be involving my extensive network of current and former students from across Europe and North America as well as my large personal/professional network of cultural activists and educators. As part of my visiting artist activities here at the University of Colorado, for an example, I am organizing the second major annual live/online event di-fusion which will take place in late April 2003 and will include more than 20 international groups as well as the /an’a*tom’ic/ crew.

This general area of art/technology research, while still on the cutting edge of experimentation, is rapidly becoming the focus of intense interest because of its power to occupy global network spaces in ways that return hierarchic geopolitical energies to human-scaled liveliness. Speaking personally, I believe that these kinds of trans-national projects are essential to an increase of understanding between peoples — actions which will decrease the possibilities of senseless war.

For further information about my work, please refer to:

https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/
and
https://art.colorado.edu/di-fusion

Cordially

John Hopkins
Senior Lecturer / Visiting Artist
University of Colorado – Boulder
Department of Art & Art History
Boulder, Colorado, USA

…..

/an’a*tom’ic/ in action

ANATOMIC: Related to the structure of an organism

Since February 2003 Waag Society organizes a weekly open studio at the Theatrum Anatomicum, hence the name /an’a*tom’ic/, inviting a wide range of young technological artists to collaboratively perform with various technologies online.

Within the /an’a*tom’ic/ program we plan to facilitate an exchange of knowledge, culture, and skills between artists and participating publics outside Western Europe and North America. Through discovery of scalable, communicative techniques utilizing distributed technologies, interactive broadband and multi-user collaborative environments, we are looking to build and enhance resources in a creative commons. Cultural diversity and difference stimulates the dynamic process of mediated communication and we hope to continue nourishing both online and offline intercommunity praxis by connecting on a world stage.

/an’a*tom’ic/ aims at growing the skills of the local participants through knowledge exchange and shared expertise in real-time, multi-user, multichannel environments such as Waag Society’s KeyWorx platform. Informal workshops, tutorials, presentations, performance events and explorations of applications and technologies including telekinetic devices, public and haptic interfaces and digital performative environments (Max/MSP/Jitter, pd, Isadora, PHP, Director) are supported by the hi-bandwidth Gigaport backbone.

The weekly labs are streamed to participating artists and organizations that upload their simultaneous activities. Emphasis is placed on learning the tools and language of interaction, distributed broadband media networks and performance practice that investigates these technologies. One challenge of the experiment lies in distributing this learning process to an extended community of participants and viewers in the upcoming phases of the project.

Current partner organizations:

Athens (GR) – Fournos; Manthos Santorineos
Boulder (US) – University of Colorado; John Hopkins
Brussels (BE) – f0am; Maja Kuzmanovich and Code 31; Gert Aersten
Manchester (UK) – Futuresonic; Drew Hemment
New York (US) – [Share] digital media lab; Eric Redlinger and Keiko Uenishi
Prague (CZ) – MediaArtLab Centrum Pro Soucasné Umení
Reykjavik (IS) – Haraldur Karlsson
Riga (LV) – RIXC; Rasa Smite and Voldemars
Sao Paolo (BR) – FILE – Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletronica; Paula Perissinotto
Sofia (BG) – Bulevart Association; Lyobov Kostova
Tblissi (GE) – maf_Media Art Farm
Tokyo (JP) – Tama Art University; Akihiro Kubota
Toronto (CA) – Interaccess, Kathleen Pierry

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VEC Audio CD 0002 Gedda Grip!

VEC Audio CD 0002 Gedda Grip!
VEC Audio CD 0002 Gedda Grip!

Participants in alphabetical order, Icelandic style:

Alan K. Lipton (USA); Andrzej Dudek Dürer (Poland); Antoni Miro (Spain); Ayah Okwabi (Ghana/Sweden); Diane Bertrand (Canada); Dmitry Bulatov (Russia); Evindur Erlendsson (Iceland); Jesse Glass Jnr. (USA/Japan); Joseph Semah (Israel/The Netherlands); Keiichi Nakamura (Japan); Kurt Johannessen (Norway); Lucien Suel (France); Mike Dyar (USA); Raul Marroquin (Colombia/The Netherlands); Ruud Beerens (The Netherlands); Sergey de Rocambole (Russia); W. Mark Sutherland (Canada). The program order was decided by drawing lots.

COVER ARTWORK: MARLIES MULDERS.

NUMBERS & NAMES: JON PATON & ALAN BYRNE

EDITOR: ROD SUMMERS/VEC

VEC AUDIO – CANTECLEERSTRAAT 40 – 6217 BX MAASTRICHT – THE NETHERLANDS

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  • place: Trondheim, Norway

Iteration Two: Research Plan for Doctoral Studies at UIAH/TAIK

AIMS

The aim of undertaking Doctoral Studies at TAIK/Media Lab is to reflect on two deeply intertwined parts of my life and praxis — the first, 13 years of teaching the creative use of technology-based tools to artists and university-level art students, and the second, near 15 years as a networking artist. This period of intensive engagement has, for several reasons, not allowed for substantial organized research although it has been an exceptionally rich period of experience, exploration, and exchange.

Art, at its social and human core, is an action centered on the exchange of creative energies as they are attenuated by an infinite number of mediative (material) carriers. The artist is that person who seeks to engage in a dialogue of energies with an Other. These two proto-definitions are the basis of my praxis. The experience and wisdom gained in that praxis will directly inform my research.

Creative activities at the confluence of art and communication (science and technology) are taking on an increasingly important role in cultural production. The territory mapped by these activities, especially their impact on rapidly changing social structures and systems, is an area generally not well understood. Occupying the dynamic field of that intersection, while focusing on specific threads of interest, is a primary task of the doctoral research plan. more “Iteration Two: Research Plan for Doctoral Studies at UIAH/TAIK”

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  • place: Trondheim, Norway

Iteration One: Research Plan for Doctoral Studies at UIAH/TAIK

BACKGROUND

It is first pertinent to precede the research plan with a brief overview of my rather eclectic background.

My own relationship with technology was deeply influenced by my father who worked in various capacities for the US government and MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory as a telecommunications expert, operations analyst, and engineer. It received a firm grounding during a rigorous applied education in Geophysical Engineering with a specialization in Potential Fields Methods (Time-Domain Electromagnetics, Gravity, and Magnetics) at the top school in the world for that particular specialty. An unsatisfactory career as an international explorationist for a multinational oil company ended with my decision to pursue photography, a long-time personal avocation. After becoming a Master Printer (in black&white photography) in NYC and working in several professional photographic positions there, I returned to school and studied, notably, with the experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage. It was during these studies, concluding with an MFA in Photography/Video/Film that I began teaching and spending a significant amount of time in Europe, where I was frequently exhibiting my photographic work in Germany and France. I subsequently relocated to Reykjavík, Iceland where I started up a modest Photography and New Media program for students at the Icelandic College of Art. Since 1995 I have been working as a nomadic artist and free-lance educator teaching a range of workshops in 12 countries that orbit around the issues of networked computing, technology, creativity, dialogue, and personal activism. more “Iteration One: Research Plan for Doctoral Studies at UIAH/TAIK”

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  • place: Köln, Germany

offline misery

Here it is, the Eve of Easter, and the bells are tolling from the Kölner Dom in the dark. Today was spent walking along the Rhine in Rodenkirchen trying to avoid being run down by the cyclists and watching the never-ending line of barges trudging up the Rhine and the ones slipping quickly downstream towards Amsterdam 672 kilometers away. Jonas Kári and I made some sand drawings with sticks that we traded back and forth. This evening passed while making a concerted attempt to get online, although the telephone plugs here are international standard, I think that the wiring sequence is different, so my modem couldn’t raise a dial tone. No one is home at dom so I can’t get any help, and I never did get Ira’s private telephone number here in Köln, and he is unlisted. The saga of trying to make it through the German system to get online continues to ring up failure after failure. Rather irritating, although if I had time, I am sure I could achieve the goal, I seem doomed to have to wait until Vienna at Mathias’ place or even Budapest at C3. Thank you Deutsche Telekom!

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  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

Fax You catalog

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Night of the Arts @ the Academic Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, 25 August 1994

In the spring of 1995, I was back in Helsinki teaching and UIAH/TAIK (University of Art and Design) — CAP (Computer-Aided Photography) Lab, and with help from Visa and funding from FRAME, I produced a 200-page photocopy documentation (pdf download) in an edition of fifty from the incoming and outgoing works at the Helsinki end of the performance. It was distributed to all the participants as well as a number of pertinent archive sites around the world including the ArtPool Research Center in Budapest and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. If you are interested in a copy, please contact me — I will pass one of the two or three copies that I have left along for U$D 500.00 postage-paid.

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For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson

This essay, by London-based artist Ian Rawlinson, mentions a project I was involved with Clive Sall and Emma Davis called Outpost which appeared at the Venice Biennale (1995) and the Edinburgh Festival (1994).

In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign. more “For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson”

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  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Fax You essay

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Project: Classic Fax

an essay by Jan Kenneth Weckman

Complying with the well-known maxim of McLuhan, that “the medium is the message,” nearly one hundred years of Modern Art has sustained the idea of a progress towards the self-referencing of the art object.

By sending pages chosen by the public behind the window of the academic bookstore from the drawing book of my son, Jason, I have acted out this slogan as a gesture of good-will towards those artists and writers who believe that through some event where “you take something, do something with it, then do something else with it,” you will reach a new level of conceptuality and artistic energy.

There are, of course, several complications to be analyzed in this event. Since the “now” of the avant-garde transforms into other moments of “now” in materials, vehicles, models, and codes, I see the medium in this case (the material and the vehicle of the fax transmission) as a remnant of the manipulative act of painting as an art. This same manipulative act it shares with photographic, lithographic, and photocopy working.

Images are produced by different configurations of material and vehicle. Meaning is produced through an agreed-upon common medium. The agreement is a sensual as well as a conceptual (historic) precondition to communication.

As I am only responsible for the decision to take my son’s drawings and use them as eligible imagery, separating the images transmitted from the vehicle transmitting gives a visibility to the classical notions of medium and message. That all this takes place within a larger field, that is, the World of Art, is not approachable for analysis within the event itself.

Any carrier of meaning which becomes an argument through its function of displacing something from one medium to another, resides within this classicism of the avant-garde.

The event could consequently be considered as a continuation of the tradition and craft of image-making that began in the ancient times of the cave-painters, and continued unaltered through Poussin, Cezanne, and Warhol.

In this context, writing is seen as evolving from the vast resources of an explicitly apprehended world, developing into a symbolic and systematic way of producing events and meaning. Human vision and human imagery is the facade of this relatively unlimited resource, a proof of which is pointed to by the technologic event of the fax-transmission.

The historic commonality of image-making and writing is well presented with the electronic techniques of the Fax. Thus is gives a thrust towards another angle: the non-classic fax project.

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Fax You performance

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Fax You performance, Academy Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, Night of the Arts, August 1994

Night of the Arts @ the Academic Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, 25 August 1994

The Fax You project, sponsored by The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and the Academy Bookstore, took place in the front window of the Academy Bookstore in Helsinki and the HERE Art center associated with the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York City. One evening at the end of August is a special one in Helsinki called “The Night of The Arts” where there are a variety of cultural events, Fax You was one of them. I was invited to participate by Visa Norros, the artist organizing the Finnish end of the event. Visa is an old friend who I first met when he was a visiting lecturer at the Icelandic College of Art a few years back.

Night of the Arts audience for Fax You are engaged and intrigued by the content filling up the windows of the Academy Bookstore in central Helsinki. Starting around 1700, we established contact via fax and telephone with the folks New York and at 1800 began the project with the first documented trans-Atlantic I CHING casting. (Well, as a late post-script here, I would defer this honor to a performance arranged by Roy Ascott for the Ars Electronica Biennale of 1982 where artists in a number of locations in the US and Wales were linked with terminals. They then did a casting which signified “CHU” or “”Difficulty at the Beginning”…) We, on the other hand, alternated cities for each consecutive cast of the three coins, generating the hexagram “The Power of the Great” which energized everyone during the next six hours of hectic activity. Some of the photos below done at the Helsinki end of the event show the situation as we worked in the windows of the Academic Bookstore. In my view, one of the more important outcomes a project like this is the establishment of some kind of lasting connection — else the electronic performance be simply an act of artistic spectacle.

Participants List

Curators: Julia Kauste (New York), Visa Norros (Helsinki)

New York
Julia Kauste, Steven Johnson Leyba, John Reaves, Emiko Saldivar, David Factor, Dayle Vilatch, Christopher Barker, Adrian Klein, Patricia Tallone Orsoni, Steve Bradley, Genie Nable, Marilyn Mullen, Cynthia Pannucci, Paul Pierog, Lotte Kjaer, Sandy Spreitz, Miran Kim, Jeff Severtson, Bob Laluey, Lisa Roberts

Helsinki
Visa Norros, Andy Best, Johanna Gullichsen, John Hopkins, Anders Tomren, Jan Kenneth Weckman, Anne Tompuri, Annu Vertanen

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  • place: Helsinki, Finland and New York City, New York

Fax You announcement

The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (FRAME), in cooperation with the Academic Bookstore, will organize a fax art happening with artists in Helsinki and New York.

Concept and Theme

A trans-Atlantic happening in which artists based in Finland cooperate with artists based in New York with the help of telefax as a medium of communication during three hours. The goal of the happening is to promote interactive art and communication beyond the boundaries of space and place, to experiment with the communication media, and to study alternative applications of telefax.

The act of making art is part of the happening: works are to be created during the happening. Artists add on top of each others works and comment on both the individual works and the surrounding environment. Photographers, who document the happening in both cities transmit impressions of the situation and atmosphere over the Atlantic. Authors and poets who present their works during the Night of Arts are welcome to participate in the fax happening. The artists work collectively in small groups. Trans-Atlantic working groups are encouraged.

Time. Place. Context.

Thursday the 25th of August, 1994 is a special night in Finland. The Helsinki Festival organizes together with the Academic Bookstore the Night of Arts. Most galleries, museums, theaters and shops in the city center keep their doors open until late into the night. Painters, graphic and performance artists, sculptors, singers, musicians, authors and poets perform for free in the streets and in the places mentioned above. In Helsinki the Fax Art happening is organized in cooperation with the Academic Bookstore from 10 pm to 1 am. Respectively in New York the happening will take place between 3 pm and 6 pm in an artists’ studio house.

Participating Artist

Novelists and poets, photographers, and 8-9 visual artists in each location.

The Medium and Necessary Equipment

Three telefax machines, two copy machines, two overhead projectors and a computer with a fax modem. Basic equipment will be provided by the organizers, however, artists are welcome to bring their own materials.

Bulletin

FRAME will document the happening in the form of a bulletin. It will be printed in five hundred copies and distributed to selected museums and galleries all over the world. The bulletin will consist of graphic, literature and photographic art works created during the happening.

Curators

In New York: Juulia Kauste, M.A. in Sociology of Art and Culture, M.S. in Urban Studies. She works as an Executive Director for the Finnish Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York.

In Helsinki: Visa Norros, graphic artist. Studies at the A. Tuhka Printmaking School in Helsinki; and at the Graphic Studio in Jyvaskyla, Finland. Internship at the Lithography Studio of Auguste Clot et Bramsen in Paris, France.

Sponsors and Organizing Parties

FRAME, The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, was founded in 1992 to make Finnish Art and photography better known abroad. FRAME operates under the Fine Arts Academy Foundation. The Foundation’s board consists of twelve members. Three are appointed by the Ministry of Education, one by the City of Helsinki, three by the Fine Arts Association of Finland, and one each by the Artists’ Association of Finland, the Finnish Painters’ Union, the Association of Finnish Sculptors, the Society of Finnish Graphic Artists, and the Union of Finnish Art Associations.

FRAME works in collaboration with the key art museums and galleries, art organizations,and individual artists in Finland. FRAME also carries out special projects in collaboration with foreign exhibition organizers.

The Academic Bookstore is characterized by large figures: a sales area of 2,800 square meters on three floors, 8,000 meters of shelf space, some 140,000 items, a stock of over 400,000 book titles from 23,000 different publishers in the computerized register, over a dozen different languages, more than a million books in all … All of this is managed by four hundred people. These figures make the Academic Bookstore one of Europe’s largest and most diverse booksellers.

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  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action

A limited 55-exemplar edition 300-page photocopy book+cassette — word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action — was produced from visual and sonic work sent in from around 80 artists and others from 30 countries in response to this invitation (pdf). The introductory essay below describes the intent. The Museum of Modern Art in NYC just happens to groove on this kind of stuff in their Library collection, so they just acquired a copy for that very musty purpose of Archiving-the-Objects that are spawned from life/art. An earlier form of the essay grew out of a performance I did way back in 1989 entitled Antithesis/Dialogue. Included with the book is a 90-minute audio cassette of sonic material.

front cover, Xerox Book II, Reykjavík, Iceland, April 1991

One might have put the words in a circle. That is, they form a cycle of active life: the active evolutionary life of the individual as a member of the human collective. As this is the title appearing on the invitations for this project, the assumption is that the works contained arise from the vital operation of this cycle. This book and cassette is about all five of these words — as they relate to carnate be-ing and do-ing and to spiritual development. Your reading of these Words constitutes a definite Action stimulated by Light, leading, perhaps, first to Dialogue, then on to Revolution!

Cassette Side A

(00:46:16, stereo audio, 110.1 mb)

Cassette Side Z

(00:45:52, stereo audio, 111.1 mb)
more “word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action”

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VEC Audio CD 0005 Scratch Symphony 1976

VEC Audio CD 0005 Scratch Symphony 1976
VEC Audio CD 0005 Scratch Symphony 1976

A Live Audio Event in Five Movements

this is the original scratch symphony
from vec audio’s first best room
to uher Royal live
no poking around at that def wave
in more ram than herr zuse ever dreamed of
scratch is about
getting together and making a noise
no pointing and clicking
til your eyeballs plop into your cold empty cup
and there’s no more feeling in the digits
scratch is about
booting from a fun partition
so remain happy
and spin the scratch
which is about just doing it
— t.w.

no sampler no midi no dolby no dub no remix no baseball cap on backwards

Featuring Seven Performers
coen eckhardt * jenne van eeghen * det huijbers * john miesen * rod summers * tom winter * lisette wissen

Twenty-Three Sound Sources
steel ruler*nanciphone*sheep-bell*chinese flute*musical box*soprano recorder*chromatic harmonica c*blues harps e and f crockery*hohner orkester bravo*cardboard box*doorbell*phillips and saba cassette recorders*grundig wireless*teleton tranny*framus e-guitar*glass rod*honeywell heater*martell miniature*plastic tubes*voices

recorded autumn 1976 in maastricht — a vec production

1. First Movement.

2. Second Movement.

3. Third Movement.

4. Fourth Movement.

5. Fifth Movement.