posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

QoD

In the stead of the tedious roll-calling in my more formal university classes, I started to implement a Question of the Day process. At the beginning of the semester, at the start of each session, one student was asked come up with a question and pose it on the QoD form which then circulated around the room during the session, to be filled out as decided by each individual. I placed no restrictions on content, and one didn’t have to answer at all, but at least had to note presence.

This turned out to be a marvelous way to tap into individual/personal energies that students would typically not ‘reveal’ in a classroom setting. As the paper circulated, accumulating answers, it would travel slower and slower as students read prior answers and came up with their own. The process sparked both basic human connection as well as significant discussion on occasion, and on others, amusement. After a couple weeks of me assigning the Questioner, there were usually volunteers at the beginning of each session who had come up with something to query their peers with. Also interesting was the sheer variety of handwriting samples and forms of expression.

Question of the Day, Atlas2000, 25 April 2013, CU Boulder, Colorado.
Question of the Day, Atlas2000, 25 April 2013, CU Boulder, Colorado.
posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

changing up the trajectory

und so. Lots’a mulling over these past months, and the conclusion is that moving forward I will spend as close to 100% of my time [outside of the regular CGS workday] in proceeding to get on with my creative work. This means an end to what has anyway been an impoverished social life of the last year. Time is slipping, and in order to accomplish something, anything, before the clock runs out, the days of nomadic shuffling around to engage with folks f2f are over, gone. Much life-time was spent in this pursuit over the years, but now, the archive calls, to be reassembled, reconfigured, simply maintained, fwiw: there is certainly no worth in it residing in boxes. Hundreds, thousands of vintage silver prints, slides, negatives, tapes moldering away in boxes. And I need to spend the time in getting works out, or something. The bulk of my creative production went into that personal network, and it seduced me into thinking it was a sustainable pathway. It was not. It brought me to the miserable situation that I am in now. I see this reflected in every postcard of mine that I run across. A piece of my life-time/energy spent in the desperate drive to remain connected. more “changing up the trajectory”

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!

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liberties of communication

There are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within actual daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another. But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them. I often think to myself what madness it would have been for van Gogh, and how destructive, if he had been forced to share the singularity of his vision with someone, to have someone join him in looking at his motifs before he had made his pictures out of them, these existences that justify him with all their being, that vouch for him, invoke his reality. He did seem to feel sometimes that he needed to do this in letters (although there, too, he’s usually talking of finished work), but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity get rid of each other for good.

Rilke, R.M. & Rilke, C., 2002. Letters on Cézanne, New York, NY: North Point Press.

posted
  • place: Glen Ridge, New Jersey

Civilization of the Dialogue

The Civilization of the Dialogue is the only civilization worth having and the only civilization in which the whole world can unite. It is therefore the only civilization we can hope for because the world must unite or be blown to bits. The Civilization of the Dialogue requires communication. It requires a common language and a common stock or ideas. – Robert Maynard Hutchins

Retro look into Socratic principles. Do these have any relevance now? Perhaps, when settled into a social context. However the concept of a common language and common set of ideas immediately projects the issue into the space of the political.

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

Of the Imperfection of Systems

On the tail of a disruptive hardware failure that takes several weeks to recover from. It’s still in progress, and external communications, words, are in short supply — or perhaps the means to express them is temporarily lost, along with an accumulation of visual and sonic material, new and from the archive, to be cleared, sheesh. The digital archive increases in size with the localized ability to mine the analog one.

The need to be initially organized in order to undertake a project is something of a hurdle, but doesn’t seem to negatively affect the outcomes. Once work starts to flow and a work process begins to form, things get pretty messy at the same time as being productive. This is the armature provided by a familiar praxis.

The settled two months on Hawk Moon Ridge blazed by far too fast, as per other residencies and such, they become stops on a longer pilgrimage of nomadic working. Anyway. Whatever. Where ever. How ever. Why?

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Productivity and Existence

“A remarkable and charming man, your friend,” said the professor; “but what does he really do? I mean … in the intellectual sphere?”

“In the intellectual sphere…” I answered, “H’mm … in the intellectual sphere … he is simply there.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, his occupation is not, in fact, of a very intellectual nature, and one cannot really assert that he makes anything out of his leisure time.”

“But his thoughts?”
more “Productivity and Existence”

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

Of the Imperfection of Words

Chapter IX

1. Words are used for recording and communicating our thoughts. From what has been said in the foregoing chapters, it is easy to perceive what imperfection there is in language, and how the very nature of words makes it almost unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations. To examine the perfection or imperfection of words, it is necessary first to consider their use and end: for as they are more or less fitted to attain that, so they are more or less perfect. We have, in the former part of this discourse often, upon occasion, mentioned a double use of words. First, One for the recording of our own thoughts. Secondly, The other for the communicating of our thoughts to others.
more “Of the Imperfection of Words”

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

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Jaromil’s Law

Long story short — with trolls on the bricolabs list, Jaromil suggests:

You see: if you want to create an un/common ground of discussion among very different people, minimalism is your friend. So to say, keep your shit together. :^)

‘nuf said.

But the whole issue goes back to language. sotto voce:

Yes, the existence of a shared protocol within a social system (community, network) is a strange necessity that is demanding that we comply and yet provides the (only!) possible conduit for connection. This goes for English as it goes for IP (Internet Protocol) and for the metric system. All function similarly to control us and our expressive energies in specific ways, pathways. There is no connection without some kind of such protocol. Some are more flexible and forgiving than others that are rigid and very *unforgiving* while at the same time, flexibility carries the risk of mis-communication. This presents us always with a paradox.

And, yes, perhaps I have a bit more restricted (but also deeper) understanding of English, as a native speaker. But having lived in second-language situations most of my adult life, when I am in such a situation, I always give respect to the fact when others are using ‘my’ protocol, as I hope is returned when I am using theirs.

Whenever a new protocol is picked up to be used, the user should be aware that great damage may easily occur (in the communicative act) when the protocol is not used ‘correctly.’

History is littered with the bloody results of such mis-understandings!

If the Battles of Trafalgar and of Cape St Vincent had gone differently, indeed we would not be mostly speaking English on this list. Pero la vida es un camino extraño, eh?

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Proxemics

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that is, the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements, rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, as they do govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language-as-protocol. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-processes of one’s self. This particular energy ‘form’ arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body that allows for that particular expression: the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth, and so on. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ from the Self to the Other, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time), a protocol on the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation: when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

more Buber

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language have their place in this only in special instances, as when, between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign, but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On the other hand an element of communication, however inward, seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dialogue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some ‘mystical’ event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence. more “more Buber”

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trauma

Yes, there was an event; yes, an event began, barely, when she began to say something. But this event did not come to fruition, for nothing, nothing really, happened — except a sudden defamiliarization of my world, an unforeseen estrangement brought about by the least violent of all acts — the mere emitting of sounds — that topple the sense-structure of my world. After she breached my silent existence, silence returned, devouring both of us again by expropriating my ability to respond. So nothing, nothing really, happened. But this nothing, compared to “idle chatter” and the “forgetfulness” of an ordinary conversation, was much more dramatic. It produced in me an effect like no other. Considering what happened, or rather, what failed to take place, I must confess that I was profoundly affected by it. In fact, I am still living that event through the unique nothingness brought home to me by the incident, suffering from it, agonizing over it as an event that keeps returning as a non-event. In any case, the undeniable fact is that there was an event, there took place a situation that, although nothing, nothing really happened in it, is still happening now. It was like a traumatic “primal scene,” forever gone but constantly coming back. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p 224)

Reflecting on the abstracted essence of the gap between the self and the other: it suggests the reality that we cannot share the same point of view. There exists an infinitely deep irruption, separation, or gap, between the Self and the Other. This is defined partly by the presence of the energized matter that makes up our bodies and by the fact that this particular embodied form of matter cannot be collocated or commingled with another body. There is the warm and wet topology of sensual engagement, but this is not collocation, though some would like to believe that it is. The Self will never share the same point-of-view as the Other. My eyes cannot be collocated with yours. I may exchange places with you, but when all is change along the arrow of time, what you experienced there and then, I cannot experience there and now. The interstitial chasm exists within constant change and flow and it exists as long as life is embodied. Some models of transcendence suggest a unification, an omniscient one-ness, after embodiment ends, but here and now we all face the challenge of hypostasis, that puzzling duality of existing in a transitory body now and yet connected with an apparently detachable spirit before and after.

Communication cannot not take place. — ibid, p. 227

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

many impressions, no time

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy’s Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. old Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up and show pantied crotches at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it’s the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can’t bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose. more “many impressions, no time”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

open dialogue

What of the experience of an opening, an open, dialogue? Re-creating that experience of presenting the Self to a random collection of Others. Or to a single Other. I keep thinking of identifying, finding an Other who would be willing to have a series of dialogues that would be re-produced for the purpose of mapping out the initial space wherein the model (as script) is to be constructed. The script being a primary resource for a 60-80 hour workshop (which would never be used because the workshops are open systems and have to leave a script behind soon after starting). It would merely point in the direction for certain issues (resourcing them), giving a framework that is an optional (inspirational) component for the process. As a multi-modal hypertextual object within a social networking space, it would imitate/mimic the knowledge-flow features of a more traditional teacher (and little or nothing else — memesis of a teacher being a fundamentally antithetical concept regarding outcomes of learning!). Fundamentally, the workshops are about attentive presence, that crucial realized, actualized, and embodied facilitation process. You had to be there. (So, back to the conundrum of being and not-being when documenting, re-producing life.)

Memory — especially the memory of human encounter — is the tangible, real resonance between the Self and Other, arising through the movement of energies. Memory is a re-configuration of the energy-field that is called body; it is a dynamically persistent re-configuration of the Self. This re-configuration requires the movement of energy between the Self and the Other. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. That is the minimum requirement, and, perhaps is the only requirement, as it is the essence of the process of encounter. It is the encounter, and the flows that are the event of encounter (the Light coming from the body of the Other, the sounds emanating from them, their cumulative presence) which precipitate change in the Self. The only further commentary might come from a qualitative exploration of the flows, and the possible blocks to flow that are ever-present in relation. This view of communications does not fall easily into the traditional phenomenological tradition of communication theory. And indeed, most theories of communication that I have run across are tightly focused on language and meaning rather than any acknowledgment of a real and tangible exchange of energies that occurs in any human encounter (even when subject to the relative intensities of mediation which, in fact, are simply the presences of different forms of energy pathways imposed by cultural conditions (both internal and external to the encounter)). [ED: burbling parenthetic expression, uff]

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Theorizing Communication

Hunting in the communications area of social research, doing a basic review of various theories of communications to focus in on what might be a useful jumping-off point. I’ll need one that is anchored, but also with some degrees of freedom to map the important new characteristics of my broader definition of dialogue. Craig and Muller’s survey of the field of communication theories (seven by their count) is a helpful text, allowing me to zoom into the phenomenological area of inquiry (anchored by Buber and people influenced by his committed I-Thou dialogical approach). More on that shortly. I’ve got 15 books out from the library already, and have made more than 200 entries in Zotero… yikes, how to cope with all that material! Still generating a internal process methodology that brings at least some impression of progress on a daily basis.

Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, Craig, Robert T. (Editor), Muller, Heidi L. (Editor), Sage Publications, Inc; 1st edition (April 5, 2007) ISBN-10 1412952379

It’s a pity that I didn’t previously know this book and that the editors were at CU-Boulder in the Communications Department. That would have been a nice coincidence, and perhaps if I get up there sometime in the long-term, I’ll drop them a line.

The most daunting challenge is the difficulty of mind-mapping all the disparate sources. I’m thinking a big wall with sticky notes might be good, and translate that over to hyper-linking within this WordPress armature. The sticky-notes technique has served me well in workshops situations. Howard has been using Adam Somlai-Fisher’s prezi mind-map software (think Minority Report data-space interface), but I find it too clunky. In theory that would be an excellent way to map and interface with the substantial data-cloud that will eventually accrete. But on this old G4 PB running Firefox, the Java scripting seems to dog the whole machine, consuming the CPU and rendering the machine worth-less. One would be better off with a huge wall-sized touch-screen to play with. So, sticky-notes are fine.

posted
  • place: Bedford, New York

chicken carnage

a few more entries. done with the 2007 travelog except for some more sonic remix additions when I get the chance. and some image additions. retrospective work should continue, but what does it mean when the ROI is null.

The fundamental problem of communication is that of reproducing at one point either exactly or approximately a message selected at another point. Frequently the messages have meaning; that is they refer to or are correlated according to some system with certain physical or conceptual entities. These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem. — Claude Shannon

no problems here. except for three dead chickens, four by the end of the day. a raccoon opened the sliding trap door to the chicken coop and spent the night killing chickens for sport and biting the wood frame trying to get back out. I come in in the morning and the first thing I see is one chicken walking out with the comb of another in its beak, faugh! I walk in, open the outside door, shoo the chickens out and fail to see the raccoon until I notice a large ball of fur in a dark roost. I immediately retreat and grab a hoe, not knowing what’s up. I prod and poke until the big fat guy moves, but as there is only one way out, he ends up climbing up to the eves of the coop and stays. I close things up and again retreat to figure out what to do. bag one corpse, and then there is a third chicken with half it’s neck eaten through. the other birds are pecking at it in the run, so I isolate it, and shoo the rest out into the yard. long story cut short, the raccoon finally leaves before the ‘wildlife specialist,’ Bill, arrives. no charge, and plenty of advice (like — raccoons can pretty much open any latches and doors that a human hand can open!). later in the afternoon, Juniper, one of the dachshunds, who in the morning got a bit of chicken blood taste, apparently kills yet another bird, a rooster no less. sheesh! house-sitting carnage.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

As-Sahab

Jan has this installation and documentation Black Cloud — with a nice remix of Lebanese radio that he gathered during a recent visit there — Love is in the Air.

Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren! — Paul Watzlawick

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

N’awleans on Mars

since Mars is taking a bright spot in the heavens these weeks, no need to imagine the canals when one can go to the Themis site and see broken levees at 17-meter resolution. meanwhile in a conversation with Master Zega, the prognostications of a certain Frenchman come up:

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. — Jean Baudrillard

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

one month gone

one month out on surgery. some things have improved, many have not. no stamina, little strength, watching muscle mass melt away. going to physical therapy — it adds some dimensions to movement and increasing strength, but existence is ever limited. memory is poor, desire to communicate limited. thankful for the continuing cool and cloudy monsoon weather. spectacular clouds, occasionally the massive thunder storms intersect the house here, though most often they do not, Chino protected by a dry bubble of upwelling air. sometimes there are storms on all sides yet none will migrate over the area.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Weiner

back to the thesis application preparation. the following is, in a way, a Utopian case that forgets the holistic and distributed system that communication and its impulses arises in:

We have thus established the basis in man for the simplest element in his communication: namely, the communication of man with man by the immediate use of language, when two men are face to face with one another… this capacity is not intrinsically restricted to the immediate presence of the individual, for we have many means to carry this tool of communication to the ends of the earth. — Norbert Weiner

while the premise is intrinsically true, Weiner neglects (for example) the reality of the infrastructure assembly process to undertake the real movement of language across those vast distances. those infrastructures do not materialize themselves. they are specific and real social constructs. assemblages that social systems expend liberally on to assemble and maintain: they are the fabric of the social system — the techno-social system. therefore, while the mediation of abstracted language can be shuffled around, the human participating in the system of shuffling does, somehow use some real energy in order to participate. while this energy, considered on a limited scale may seem minor or non-existent — i.e., someone hands me a phone to make a trans-continental call, which I undertake with an expenditure of a marginal amount of embodied energy — someone, somewhere, as part of the larger social system, collected vast amounts of energy from the distributed individuals that make up the system and assembled the entire electrical/physical infrastructure of the telecom system.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Leary

In planning a session, the first question to be decided is “what is the goal?” Classic Hinduism suggest four possibilities:

  • 1. For increased personal power, intellectual understanding, sharpened insight into self and culture, improvement of life situation, accelerated learning, professional growth.

  • 2. For duty, help of others, providing care, rehabilitation, rebirth for fellow men.

  • 3. For fun, sensuous enjoyment, aesthetic pleasure, interpersonal closeness, pure experience.

  • 4. For transcendence, liberation from ego and space-time limits; attainment of mystical union.

…snip…

Instructions for Vision 4: The Wave-Vibration Structure of External Forms (Eyes open, rapt involvement with the external visual stimuli, intellectual aspects)

O nobly born, listen carefully:
At this point you can become aware of the wave structure of the world around you.
Everything you see dissolves into energy vibrations.
Look closely and you will tune in on the electric dance of energy.
There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles.
Consciousness will now leave your body and flow into the stream of wave rhythm.
There is no need for talk or action.
Let your brain become a receiving set for the radiance.
All interpretations are the products of your own mind.
Dispel them. Have no fear.
Exult in the natural power of your own brain,
The wisdom of your own electricity.
Abide in the state of quietude.
As the three-dimensional world fragments, you may feel panic;
You may beget a fondness for the heavy dull world of objects you are leaving.
At this time, fear not the transparent, radiant, dazzling wave energy.
Allow your intellect to rest.
Fear not the hook-rays of the light of life,
The basic structure of matter,
The basic form of wave communication.
Watch quietly and receive the message.
You will now experience directly the revelation of primal forms.

— Timothy Leary, Ph.D., Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., & Richard Alpert, Ph.D. The Psychedelic Experience

Ah well, stumbled on that, following a thread from Aldous Huxley. As for the effort to shift awareness from a dominantly materialist point-of-view to one that has a central locus on an energized movement: I just had the realization that I probably will not ever produce a text-based representation circumscribing the territory of my own worldview. [ed: well, fast-forward to 2013 and my dissertation!] And unless in a situation where there can be an unfolding of the thoughts, in concert with an Other, there will be no revelation, no representation. Only action, doing, facilitating, and teaching. The 2126 class moves fast and with gusto. A deep difference with the spring class, where students seemed tight, fearful, and distracted. Just war? or, hmmmm, does it confirm or refute my theory that much education is about saturating individual, forming humans in a certain fear of non-conforming, while in-validating divergent behaviors and thoughts. How come I resist letting my child be wild?

posted
  • place: Glasgow, Scotland

circus ends

here now, gone tomorrow. the conference over, people drifting away to their home locations. I think that my ad lib review of the workshop at the closing plenary turned out very well. for once I felt concise, directed, and clear in the process of communicating the background of my concepts and basis of artistic practice in less than 15 minutes. and this with a cross-disciplinary, sophisticated, and eclectic audience. and indeed, the energy available in those concluding remarks was rooted in the process of the three sessions, each of which involved a different group of people from the conference.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

TempLab

day after the Temp Lab presentation on Balkania. again, I don’t make so many notes about anything these days, so full of busy-ness everything is. but last night somebody made the statement, something like “art after artifact, art as communications.” which somehow, despite its obviousness to me, jolted a resonant cord (spinal or astral) inside that had not been directly stimulated before. the conflict between the two areas (matter vs [energy] flow) is apparent but is not surfaced much in the space of discourse that I circulate through. but so little discourse occurs anyway in the Academy, it could happen that by spending too much time in that ideological space, internal sources are bled away completely. and awarenesses diminish to the normative social pre-tension.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

burger

barely time to. most of the day in my Lasipalatsi office working online. remote communications and tele-presence. late dinner, no, another hamburger. uff.

posted
  • place: Bergen, Norway

laundry memories

equinox energies abound. perfect balance at one moment today. can you guess the exact moment? not sleeping well, think I have an abscessed wisdom tooth. had two removed about five years ago — two on one side, and was SUPPOSED to go back the following week to get the other two out, but between the pain of getting the first ones out, and the question why should I have two perfectly good chewing devices pulled out, I never went back to the dentist. so, now, dental things creep into awareness. several migraine-like symptoms all on that same side of my head are pointing red arrows direct at that tooth, though I can’t specifically feel pain radiating from there. have to find a dentist in Helsinki when I get back on Friday. and then, the laundry problem to be solved. the building I live in has a laundry room, but one needs a key to get in. the janitor speaks no English at all — my first attempt to get a key went something like, find his flat, the door was cracked open, I ring once, twice, and finally this geezer comes to the door looking like the recently fired (for over-consumption of vodka) footman for the Czar. at his heel a growling chihuahua. I ask politely, “do you understand any English” and am met with a stone-glazed look and some words which I was sure weren’t Finnish, and the chihuahua growling all the time. I motion and say to him that I will have a friend call instead, he shrugs and turns away with a suspicious look, the chihuahua poised for attack like a Doberman. sometimes I really don’t like living in a foreign country. how come I have been doing just that for a DECADE now? what quirk of fate brought that along? shit. now here in another place, networking. again. meeting people met before, and people never met yet. until now, slinging emails and SMS messages and phone calls across fiber optic cables and stuff like that. never ending. remote presence. and tomorrow morning, I have to leave to Oslo. now I go to call Kenneth, and Hilde, and so on.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

memories of Alda

portrait, Alda with her roses, Hrísey, Iceland, June 1990

Monday morning. means nothing to me except for the beginning of a quick and long week of dinners, lunches, and other friendly convocations. lunch with Sari. Loki is still sleeping in bed after a late evening with Holly, Natalie, Rick, and Sally. he goes to bed very unhappy, and I am not sure whether this is a factor of fatigue, accumulated lack of attention, or what. MB sends me a sad email saying that Alda of Hrísey has died. Going to the island will not be the same. I recall meeting her for the first time when I was visiting Jón and Helga at their summerhouse on the island situated in the mouth of Eyjafjördur with Stefan back in August 1989. Actually Hrísey is called the Pearl of Eyjafjördur by its situation in the fjord. Alda was into her 80’s although no one that I talked to knew her age exactly. she lived alone in a modest-sized home at the far east end of the village of around three hundred that sits at the southern, sheltered end of the island. likewise, on the south side of her house, there was a small greenhouse and a very tortured fir tree. during the summer months, in that little greenhouse she tended the most fabulous roses that I have ever seen. one summer MB and I stayed in the downstairs corner room in her house, and all through the bright night a thrush sang at least 15,000 of its 30,000-small repertoire of riffs. LOUD. sitting either on top of the greenhouse, or right below the window on that fir tree. the tortuous pangs of beauty.

What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication. … If your goal is to communicate, you must use whatever means you have at your disposal in a given situation. Communicative praxis must always be radically contextualized. … — Taylor and Saarinen, from Imagologies: Media Philosophy

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

breaking the glass

I send a proposal to Christa for the Ars work coming up:
word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action: breaking the glass

The history of mediation is also the history of humans seeking to lessen the impact of raw nature and human aggression on their physical being. Language may be thought of as a primal mediating technology, and in that sense, the further mediations imposed on communications between humans — those mediations that are more commonly referred to as technology, are merely additional obstructions to understanding that overlie language. None-the-less, in this moment, it is still possible to speak, and to listen. At the very same moment that mediation stresses our attempts of attentive presence with the Other, it becomes more imperative to engage in Dialogue and in the creation of spaces in which Dialogue might flourish. Dialogue stimulates genesis, transformation, and revelation in life — it is a revolutionary art itself when in critical juxtaposition to silence. Dialogue, as pure expression of heart and soul, is the core of all meaningful activism.

This talk will explore the be-ing of Dialogue, the stresses of mediation, and our presence in the noumenal world.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Dialogue and Technology

My workshop at MUU MediaBase began this morning. It has the title Dialogue and Technology and will be addressing issues where the power of individual dialogue intersect the mediating forces of technology. My own introduction runs something like:

To approach Dialogue as a fundamental human condition that springs from individual existence and experience; to develop a definition of Dialogue as an historical, psychological, and ideological tool (a living way of going); to inspect the intersection of Dialogue and art (art as defined as that social-cultural production we consume); understand the implications of technological mediation on our attempts at Dialogue and compare these mediations; understand the power of single dialogue vs collective communications. (Practical considerations will include an examination of some of the software available including IRC (primary example), CUSeeMe, and MUD’s as well as discussing other applicable technology-based ways of going) Caveat: constructing such a workshop is problematic, it is without ideological base (except my own experience), so that the juxtaposition of our different selves and ways of going will be the most important aspect for this convocation. I am open to share the full construction of what I have pre-considered — something which I cannot plan in measured paces, but can only allow to spring from the Dialogue between us.

posted
  • place: Stamford, Connecticut

inscrutable

At Randy and Amy’s place. I have to stop this. The crashing at friends’ places is beginning to wear on the friendships. I want to disappear, taking no space and needing nothing. I feel irresponsible and unsuccessful. (Money is the measure of success that I all too often apply to myself — because I live within a culture that pushes and reinforces this value above all others.) To consume is to be. Not to consume is not to be.

Should I care about this? Yes and no. As I drive inward with questions, I am still faced with a feeling that somehow what I am doing is right, scary though it may be. Not that I consider it exactly honorable to ask of others some generosity or hospitality. This is not my mission, and actually I have no mission at all, except merely to survive in a world that has become more and more inscrutable to me. Senseless combinations of events are strung together to make a Public History for which I have no feeling whatsoever. Or at least no more feeling than for any other fragment of the past that I might stumble upon in my own travels.

For communication to have meaning it must have a life. It must transcend you and me and become us. If I truly communicate, I see in you a life that is not me and partake of it. And you see and partake of me. In a small way we then grow out of our old selves and become something new. To have this kind of sharing I cannot enter into a conversation clutching myself. I must enter it with loose boundaries, I must give myself to the relationship, and be willing to be what grows out of it. — Hugh Prather

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

CUSeeMe

Sunday morning. The workshop is over, wrapping up on Friday evening with the CUSeeMe event between Rotterdam, NYC, University of Iowa, and other locations. The technical quality was mediocre — which seemed to be an effect of line congestion outside of Finland. MUUMediaBase has a loaned line from the Helsinki City Library which is in the same block, it generally seems fast. We are on the cutting edge of consumer technology.

posted
  • place: Vienna, Austria

tech-no-mad

Warmer still today. I worked on the PowerBook for the morning, but had to get out to enjoy the weather. Took a leisurely stroll back to Public Netbase and spoke with Konrad shortly, checked out the library they have downstairs and then went back to check my email at the university … It struck me today, what a strange path this is, this Tech-No-Mad that I have become. At the same time as experiencing a real existence in a rather large variety of places, I have a double life running through email and the Web which extends the range of my experience to each of the many nodes to which I am connected. Of course it is a question how much the impressions sent from others via email make an impact on my daily existence. Sensory input is limited to the reading of the texts that carry the sentiments, logging into a computer, sitting for some time reading from a screen, and so on. But certainly in my internal existence, these communications form a web of, what can I call it, emotional intensity within which my daily existence is suspended. Not that it is womb-like in the sense of encompassing, isolating, or stabilizing, but it forms an ethereal internal tableau upon which the momentary impressions of reality play out. Difficult to describe. I have experienced a similar situation when engrossed in a good book while on holiday, where the reality of the written text becomes intertwined with the other, more direct, sensory input, resulting in a compound memory of place, one that is intimately tied to both sets of stimulation. How can this compare to existence without this more-or-less instant form of communication? I have traveled before in situations where I have gotten no post, no telephone, and, of course, no email. It is hard to recall exactly what it was, but it does seem that there was a similar level of internalization — probably relating to my own personal psyche. Still the daily writing, writing that, as I call it, is a chanting, the chant taking the form I keep to the center, comatose or I keep to the center, not comatose. I find that the writing is a self-conscious manifestation of internal uncertainty that seeks to contain as a vessel the total accumulation of experience and what is to become the memory of the time. The impact of rapid communications with others around the world broadens the intensity of the situation by making the cumulative text expression (both incoming and outgoing texts, as well as text remaining within my journal) dynamic and dialectic: containing the powerful ritual of call-and-response. It does not devalue or lessen the impact of momentary sensory experience related to a Place, instead, with careful attention, is allows a means to fix real events in memory and share them with others likewise. There is a point, though, where one wonders about the amount of time is required to sustain this kind of active networking (a networking that has no goal, in a way, no ultimate purpose other than as carrier of this experiential content, a ritual sharing of stories).

The nomad is not necessarily somebody who moves: there are travels in which one does not move, travels in intensity, and even from a historical point of view, nomads are not those who move like migrants, on the contrary, they are those who do not move, and who start nomadizing in order to stay in the same place and free themselves from codes. — Gilles Deleuze
posted

talk

man talk

talk(1) User Commands talk(1)

NAME
talk – talk to another user

SYNOPSIS
talk address [ terminal ]

AVAILABILITY
SUNWcsu

DESCRIPTION
The talk utility is a two-way, screen-oriented communication
program.

When first invoked, talk sends a message similar to:

Message from TalkDaemon@ her_machine at time …
talk: connection requested by your_address
talk: respond with: talk your_address
more “talk”

posted
  • place: Reykjavik, Iceland

Letter to Dan (RIP)

Well. Dan

“Lethargy is simply frozen violence”

What else? I sit in the middle of the Arctic Night (The middle always remains the same, no matter how long the night is). Waiting for sleep to fill my head, looking at a CRT screen. Eyes are getting crippled by the stress of focusing. Goodnight.

The next day late morning. All is gray. When I develop film here I notice the lack of contrast, especially after Colorado. The Light is different. I have taken to capitalizing the first letter of Light, and I have also quit using the Lord’s name in vain you know? Two changes from my previous life. You can look forward to wonderful things like this happening when you finish graduate school.

The work you sent arrived a bit worse for wear, and surely to the perplexity of the customs/postal people. They keep a close monitor on my post here, almost all packages are checked… A bit disturbing, but also amusing…
more “Letter to Dan (RIP)”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

to my thesis adviser

[ED: The following was written in March 1989 to the chair of my MFA thesis committee at CU-Boulder. It hints at the endemic bullshit that was going on in the Photography section of the Art and Art History Department at the university. The entire department went into academic receivership not too long after I graduated (successfully) and left the country. It also expresses additional background concerning my final thesis project “Antithesis Dialogue” that took place (successfully!) shortly after this letter was written.]

[Prof.] Alex [Sweetman],

It is not surprising that you are standing in adamant opposition to what I plan to do, claiming misunderstanding. It does not surprise me at all. In the two-and-a-half years that I have been here, it seems that the Photography area thrived on misunderstanding, miscommunication, and mistrust. An unfortunate state of affairs, but not surprising. Dialogue? What’s that? Sharing? What’s that? Favoritism? We know what that is. And so on.

All the while, you have claimed to encourage me to do “something different.” Well, it is happening, whether you regard it as a thesis or not. I just hope you begin to exhibit some of the openness that you profess to have. I am well aware that the contents of this letter so far are a serious indictment about the “situation.” But only because there is no relationship between you and me: only institution. Despite all those trips to my house for reasons unspecified*, there was never much dialogue beyond the barest surface.

And this incident with my grade form is so imminently typical. You act as though I have made no contribution to the program in the time I have been here, no volunteer assistance, and no effort to do the work that we agreed upon for the independent study. Not to mention the work of helping hang the show in Mackay Auditorium. Is this some kind of balance-sheet situation? For what it is worth, I believe that you agreed to this when we were in Barbara’s office? I certainly am willing to do work if I am given the authority to get to it—without this interminable “next week” syndrome. I don’t have the time to fool around. However, I would like you to fill out and turn in the grade form, as it has almost been a year.

The next day, I rest on my anger and let it pass. The trials of your system are not so important. I understand your level of attention to my work in how it is measured: lost assignments—handed in and vanished; letters misplaced and unread and unanswered—don’t speak to me about miscommunication. As for my thesis, following are points of importance to me and reasoning behind the exercise/activity:

1) Absence of objects. Our culture is a cult of the object: money being the epitome. I personally am tired of the consumerist aspect of art-object-in-Amurika. I know that hoarding and showing objects will not save me or anyone else. Although I am completely capable (both spiritually and physically) of making as strong an art object as anyone in this (non)community, I have decided that activity is best reserved for audiences (in Europe and privately) that are interested in that experience. This activity exists independent of your likes and dislikes.
 
2) The gallery in Amurika has become a dead space, devoid of dialectic interaction. So, I am not to be much of a part in it, by choice. The space of my artistic dialectic is beyond the psychic reality of [Victor] Burgin—and it crosses many physical and ideological borders. I have seen too many exhibitions come and go in the CU Galleries with the same crowd wandering in for the (let’s dress in Black!) opening. Yawn.
 
3) This action is a direct promotion of dialogue and direct contact between artist and community: I have seldom encountered in any way free exchange—I am open to interaction (as I also believe you are not—that you cannot even see what I am doing). The spontaneity of this type of dialogue is intimidating to many, and I believe it to be a loss to the community that dialogue such as this is a rarity—that most artists are cornered into the hole of (hide-behind-object) by a culture of Mass Media. I counter that directly in the entire way I work.
 
4) As for any record of the action: I will be logging all interactions. There will be a variety of scheduled events: everything from students having to present group projects (as I will be home the entire week) to a “panel” party with the subject of “the concept of dialogue.” I am receiving strong community support. I know the action will be a positive experience for all involved by word of mouth. I am not doing blanket TeeVee advertising or using the Goodyear Blimp. This is a community action in the true sense of community.

***
So, if you have constructive criticism as opposed to demeaning commentary and will engage in a dialogue, I am ready and willing to speak with you. I have contacted the other members of the Committee and have suggested that a reconvening is desired.
***
As for the independent study: I can live with it on my record; I really don’t care, especially after your attitude-attack on Friday. I don’t need bullshit like that, and I consider it a personal affront. I have always been willing to put my hands in positive activity during the time I have been a student (and even before).

I hope you made it this far and I hope that we will be able to resolve this conflict.

John

* scoring from and smoking pot with my room-mates…

posted

Fulbright Application: Statement of Proposed Study

I would like to photographically explore the Icelandic people, my relationship to them, and their relationship to their land. My current work is about personal relationships in the context of daily life. Specifically, my photographs are visually sophisticated fragments that allude to the complex interaction between the photographer and subject and explore the synergy between the subject and environment.

A three-week trip in the spring of 1986 left me with a strong impression of both the Icelandic people and their surroundings. Physically and culturally, I have found few locations that have retained the unique sense of place that Iceland has. The visual reality of the landscape is dominated by the seasonal variations of the Arctic sun; I was overwhelmed by the extraordinary quality of this natural light. As a native Alaskan and avid mountaineer, I feel I am physically and visually tuned to the extremes of the sub-arctic environment. My geophysical background has given me a direct intuitive connection to the primarily volcanic and glacial landscape. I made this trip to visit an old friend working for the geologic survey of Iceland. He introduced me to a number of Icelanders who have since become close friends. It is through these friends that I will have an intimate entry point into the contemporary culture. Many of these people have extended families living outside Reykjavik, so I will also have the opportunity to travel widely around the island.

The Icelandic sense of independence has generated a strong artistic community that is both influenced by contemporary Western movements yet remains distinct from them. Many Icelandic artists extend the themes of Iceland’s traditional literary heritage, the Sagas, by presenting them in contemporary visual-art forms. Others, primarily painters and sculptors, are involved with more global political and human issues. The academic tradition is carried on by the College of Arts and Crafts in Reykjavik, where most working artists are also centered. While undertaking my own photographic work, I plan to engage in a collaborative exchange of Ideas with this established art community. To this engagement I bring my broad cultural experiences, my technical expertise in black and white printing, my own personal vision, and a willingness to share.

Art is a powerful unifying tool to explore and understand cultural difference. It also allows for direct communication unencumbered by language or politics. Without the personal and cultural exchange of ideas and experiences, Art becomes hollow and profane. To promote cross-cultural dialogue I would like to arrange at least one collaborative exhibition in Iceland. A more ambitious goal is to establish a precedent exchange of artists and artwork between the Unites States and Iceland. As a member of Avantiere, an actively exhibiting group of European painters and sculptors (I am the only American and the only photographer in the group), I have access to galleries both in Europe and the United States for this type of collaboration.

I hope to exhibit in Iceland the photographs created during this time as well as using them as the core of my MFA thesis exhibition at the University of Colorado in the fall of 1990.