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Freedom in the Cloud

Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Absolutely brilliant talk by Eben Moglen — Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center — at an Internet Society – New York Chapter event back in February of this year.

In these two videos he presents an image of what exactly happened in terms of the internet infrastructure, completely outside the purview of political or wide social awareness which presents extreme danger to the fundamentals of our civil society. Explicit, clear, concise insights into the situation presented by corporate ‘log aggregators’ like Google and Facebook as well as the issues underlying how they threaten YOUR freedom.

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etc…

The holistic energy-based model is necessary for sense, harmony, and accuracy (in accordance with observed phenomena). However, the entire point is to frame a (creative) praxis that has a broader awareness of the complex inter-relations of things (beyond things, well into flows!). This suggests a constant critique of the status quo, a presumption that life is not proceeding with enough creativity or enough vis viva. When is enough enough? (Too much is never enough!). But are these volumetric quantities anyway? Spatial, Cartesian? Nah! Creativity is a flow, non-localized (it affects all): it is characterized by temporary states, transitory awareness, evolutionary phase changes. It is continuous and indeterminate, available always in the interstitial actions which lie outside the control of the social system.

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theme song

The armature of the final work is a combination of practice-based activities and a display of input-output (re)sources. Thematic threads (flux, energy, continuum, flow, movement, change, sound), and must needs vocal, aural, oral output/interface. The allowance to rest in writing, here, is a giving-up, a surrender, to the order. And critique cannot dominate the work. it must be proactively positive after shifting the basis of the argument from a traditional worldview to one based in energy, flow, and distributed presence. And transform the argument from argument to metaphor, to incantation, to invocation, to song, to a lived/living dialogue replete with rejoinder, complaint, excuse, bombast, and obscure platitudes.

Produced by writing, philosophical statements are no more authentic or truth-bearing than are literary expressions, and literary expression are no more pseudo than are philosophical dicta; they both fall victim to (or rather take advantage of) the figurality of language, its uncontrollable semantic slippage and syntactic leaps and bounds. In fact, the more one believes one can stay clear of or break free from the sign’s dictate, the deeper one is likely to sink into the ever widening semiotic quicksand. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p. 202)

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Energy and economic myths

Energy and Economic Myths, Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, Elsevier Science & Technology, 1977. ISBN 0080210562

Georgescu-Roegen critiques the mechanistic basis for much economic theory (which predominantly focuses on the movement of goods — a state which, thermodynamically, appears as a reversible process — and one which leads, at least conceptually if not in fact to the infinite cycle from production to consumption). It would appear that our current situation is the result of that infinite cycle occurring in a locally finite system.

This book leads to:

More heat than light : economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics, Mirowski, Philip, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0521350425 (hardback)

and ends up at this reflection from Borges:

It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws — I translate: inhuman laws — which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

In the introduction Mirowski inspires as he details his struggle to build a conceptual and actual bridge between physics and economics. Understanding that economics is an important dimensional descriptor of the techno-social system is a nice advance. Although the number of economists who have made this connection are few, and the bulk of the discipline are still mired in juggling abstractions. It’s important to realize that the abstracted metrics of economy are abstracted from something and that something is energized matter. He extends the argument, marking the parallel between the terms value in economics and energy in physics. And later, he develops the concept of energy as one critical to understanding economics, period. This is a good find indeed! And it might end up, by studying the principles of the conservation of energy too much and I will end up a conservative. (No chance of that, as no one ends up as anything but energy anyway…) Actually, bringing thermodynamics into the picture would radically change the nature and theories of market economics both on the right and on the left.

On pages 56-57 there is a symmetric coffee-colored ring, a primitive of a Rorschach test, and on 58-59, some bits of roll-your-own tobacco. The last record of being checked out was 1998. More than a decade ago. Not too much interest in these approaches within the traditional canon.

And later, on to the indeterminacy of human tendencies towards abstracted (but sometimes brilliant) reason, in describing his ideas on electromagnetic fields:

The substance here treated must not be assumed to possess any of the properties of ordinary fluids except those of freedom of movement and resistance to compression. It is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual phenomena. It is merely a collection of imaginary properties which may be employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way more intelligible for many minds … I wish merely to direct the mind of the reader to mechanical phenomena which will assist him in understanding the electrical ones. All such phrases in the present paper are to be considered as illustrative, not explanatory. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. — James Clerk Maxwell

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  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

silent selection

Buber’s story illustrating that Silence is communication opens a certain mediatory path. Especially that of listening, a critical reciprocal of expression: the act of open impression. A kind of inversion, equivalent with Simon Weil’s framing of human obligations versus the traditional (and often violent) struggle for human rights. This inversion also maps into the qualities of presence and absence implicit in the mediated technological space. Where scripted and centered Silence is necessary for balanced expression. (Both the silence of meditation and the silence of listening).

Kittler, in Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter: plowing through his expansive, eclectic interwoven threads examining the development of technology and the ensuing affectations on social systems, on people. I perhaps haven’t given him credit previously that he deserves, although I always found his presentations to be too dense to follow (simultaneous translation probably didn’t help — native speakers surely had to focus to follow his thinking). And this book didn’t come out in English until 1999, so wasn’t available when I was crossing his path. He makes clear points on the connection between technological development and war, the contingencies of warfare which don’t merely draw technological systems into a problem-solving process, but actually arise purely out of the need to more effectively, efficiently kill the Other. Optimization of defense, primacy of offense, protection of home-lands, via reducing the potential for the Other to accomplish the same. Natural selection. Is this what drives the techno-social system?

Kittler holds a fascination for these mechanisms, a boyish focus on the tool and on the technological ground of war without once making any moral approbation or moral critique of the way it goes. Has he given up? Does he care? Is he a techno-determinist? Does the intellectual fascination not accept moral argument? Or is the disinterested contemporary academic not allowed to take a moral stance?

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social networking crit

Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance
Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and
MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic
Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

Study: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_Surveillance_Fuchs.pdf

Background Information: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_E.html

The study recommends that citizens see commercial Internet platforms that store and evaluate personal data generally critically and that by establishing special consumer protection websites it could be documented in the public, which rights in dealing with personal data such platforms obtain by their terms of use and their privacy terms. Christian Fuchs: “There are many examples for how affected citizens try surveilling the surveillors with the help of websites. This can pose a certain degree of protection by making use of public information, but also has limits because the basic problem is that we live in times, in which on the one hand there are strong commercial interests in data collection and data evaluation and on the other hand after 9/11 continuously more political steps have been taken for creating surveillance societies. These are political-economic problems, not technological ones.”

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violence

Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people powered politics to international decision-making.

that from the site avaaz.org sent to me by a friend on account of the petition for stopping yet another wave of Palestinian-Israeli violence.

but I say oh, really?? to the first line: it would seem that technology and the internet has plunked many fat asses down on chairs and completely de-mobilized potential good citizens in an effective reign of (p)assivity where only the fingers move, and the perspectival point-of-view is locked within a few centimeters of the face.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Jean-Marie Gustave LeClezio

WOW, my all-time favorite writer, Jean-Marie Gustave LeClezio won the Nobel Prize for Literature! Splendid! Incroyable! Very deserving! I first picked up a copy of Les Giants, The Giants, in English translation back in 1987 or so at the CU Boulder library. I was hooked. Fantastically minute and prismatic observations of everyday moments. Incisive and elemental critique of human be-ing on the planet. On one of my trips to Paris in the 1980s I attempted to make contact with him through his French publisher, Gallimard, but was not successful.

I suppose this will get more of his books into translation which is a good thing, IMHO. I think that at least seven of the thirty or so may be found in English, slightly more than that in German.

as a preface to the online Center of the Universe documentation, I use

So everything is ready: ready for the journey to Purgatory, the journey to the land of black and white… The last remaining area of imperfection seems to disappear; the perfect work of not-being, a beautiful poem, monochrome and illegible. — J-M. G. LeClezio

Le Clézio, J.-M.G., 2009. Desert, 1st U.S. ed., Boston: David R. Godine.
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  • place: Berlin, Germany

more brainstorms

sotto voce (to brainstorms on the XO laptop deployment): And there is the entirely OTHER issue — that of autonomy. The techno-social system (in this example, the entire combined system that is providing the XO) deploys a device, it is not a simple movement of material items or even socio-cultural values (although that is the lever of most of the critique IMHO). It is also the tying in of that distant Other into that larger techno-social system — as soon as they begin using that device. The tying-in has a complex range of affects on the individual using the device. (Alluding to the attention issue, Howard) When that remote other begins to pay attention to the device (spending life-time which equals life-energy) they are removing that attention from a more local framework, and giving that attention/energy to the larger techno-social system. One consequence is that they become dependent on that system, another is that the system consumes that life energy in order to maintain itself (by the nature of a techno-social system). The distant Other is more-or-less bound into this relationship simply by using the device (independent of ideology or purpose!). The dependency expresses itself in an incremental loss in personal autonomy. If the device, now incorporated in the Other’s life, does not function, the Other is in immediate and critical dependency on that larger system. This fact alone is directly counter to the idea, for example, of locally relevant use of the device and goes a long way to suppress the construction of locally relevant learning ‘solutions’ as this deep nature of the device is very ‘corrupting’ (brings in all the values of that larger techno-social system)…

Prior to the introduction of such a device, there are greater possibilities (not necessarily happening, though, I will admit) of locally/individually relevant knowledge-building.

I am probably way too cynical at this point in life, based on experiential observation, though, to think that anything can ‘stop’ this globalized spread of the techno-social system. No political agenda has much power, no national government, no special-interest groups… it seems to be a bulldozer of humanity rolling ahead.

So, what to do? The only solution that I see is the reminding that all this system is built on the fundamental of granular f-2-f encounters of humans and we have to pay deep attention to the local Other first and foremost and definitely BEFORE engaging in the highly mediated techno-social dance of engaging the distant Other.

I apologize, I am sitting alone in a small flat in Berlin typing to you. I do not know my neighbors. I do not, in the moment, practice what I preach. We are already far down the road, soon (I see this in my students) we will forget where we came from. I will continue to remind them and myself. I’ll go meet a friend in a cafe in a couple hours…

that’ll be Brandon.

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  • place: Helsinki, Finland

panel & placard

Day two. Elénore catches her plane from Strasbourg, but gets tangled in security at Charles de Gaulle, missing her Helsinki flight and so I am left with a two-hour morning conference panel to anchor solo at the Goethe institute. Presenting the context of the workshop and the paper that I contributed to the Pixelache publication. It goes well. Although there are skeptics in the back row. Not vocal, but disturbing the atmosphere by talking during much of the talk/discussion. They make no direct critique of the propositions nor contribute to the lively discussion. Boring people who do that.

(01:52:28, stereo audio, 215 mb)

At another point, a bit later, someone who was to show up at placard in Kiasma isn’t able to come, so, with a little chunk of open time in my schedule I jump into the corner hot-seat and do a one-hour impromptu mix for a handful of headphone-donning folks. The sun streaming in the window, I have a good view of the Parliament building as a source of rock-solid and cubic inspiration.

Erik (aka Mr. Placard) runs the multichannel headphone mixers, the stream, and keeps an eye on the irc channel.

Then, there’s Manu & Mukul along with Indigo, their young boy. Hanging around waiting for the screening of their film Faceless in the Kiasma Theater.

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  • place: en route Aachen, Germany - Brussels, Belgium

migrations

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit (cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

photostatic

passing this on from editor Lloyd Dunn — a marvelous resource and inspiring source — the online photostatic ‘zine archives are now complete! Enjoy!

Over the last five years, the editor of PhotoStatic Magazine (1983-1998) has been gradually converting all of the issues of the series from their published form (on paper) into pdf files for the public to download. We are pleased to announce that the final installment of the archive (PhotoStatic no. 1) has been posted, and so the archive is now complete. All of the downloads are freely available, and 100% copyright free (as they have been ever since 1983).

During its run, the PhotoStatic Magazine series underwent several transformations, as some issues were published under differing titles, which include: PhotoStatic Magazine, PhonoStatic Cassettes, Retrofuturism, YAWN: Sporadic Critique of Culture, The Bulletin of the Copyright Violation Squad, and Psrf. In addition to the 49 print issues released between 1983 and 1998 (which includes two issues of double the normal page count), the archive also includes 10 issues on audio cassette (down-loadable as mp3s) as well has a handful of supplemental releases.

PhotoStatic was a magazine, a periodical series of printed works that focused on xerography as the source of a particular visual language that was widely used by graphic artists in the various art and music underground scenes of the 80s and 90s. During this time, the publication served as a forum to collect and redistribute artworks that originated in these scenes. Eventually, its scope extended to embrace not only graphic works, but also concrete poetry, correspondence art, ephemera from works in other media, essays, fiction, reviews, and reports on various cultural scenes, including Neoism, the home taping community, the zine community, and mail art.

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  • place: Livermore, California

after isea

a job possibility slips through fingers greased with imaginations of freedom and non-heirarchic relation. no, slips because the structure of relation is, in the case of that particular institution, not flexible or mutable enough to value my praxis. and under-developed skills of institutional negotiation. c’est comme ça. it’s a bit of a come-down and unfortunate for the committee who invited me to apply some weeks ago, but when one door close, another one open, as Fela Kuti would say.

and the iDC list blows up with a critique of ISEA. hard to know where to start with that. knowing so many of the artists involved, but also feeling a bit puzzled about some of the extreme juxtapositions at the symposium and exhibitions and around town. the term interactive city seems most problematic. at one end of the scale, the project Moveable Types and Instant Spaces which had a direct impact on locals, especially the enthusiastic kids playing in the fountain in Ceasar Chavez Park.

and maybe it’s just that city self-promotion in the US these days — an integral part of the ISEA / Zero-One event — is a shrill and aggressive process that is driven by the same ilk of developers and profiteers who have raped the rest of the land into submission.

a blissful 2 kilometers in the outdoor pool. after a week of imbibing in intellectual stimulation, stretching the body a bit in a turquoise 25 meter x 3-meter-deep pool is an absolute luxury.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

killing hidden waters

Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process, like the looting of ore deposits, soil, forests, and fuels, is the machinery behind the expressions “conquest of nature” and “the miracle of the deserts.” Rip away the veneer of western history and this consumption of resources links the centuries.

[and the final paragraph of the book:]

This writing has always been on the wall. It is not a revelation to learn that cheap energy makes societies boom, that groundwater in arid regions has negligible recharge, that humans tend to use as much of anything as they can lay hands on. We can ignore these facts and pump, mine, and combust with abandon, or we can recognize these facts and attempt to construct a sustainable society. There will be no painless answers, nor were there any in the past.

Bowden, Charles (2003) Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.

I was not expecting what he presented, and was fascinated when he repeatedly makes the connection between levels of technological implementation and several attendant processes — the consequent overall social structure, the impact on the environment, and the absolute energy cost of the different implementation levels. Starting with indigenous tribal groups and continuing through the contemporary inhabitants in the desert Southwest, he examines the usage of a range of resources — water, fossil fuels, soil, and forests — and makes a good case for the cataclysmic risk of unsustainable use. Indeed, pointing out the obvious, he makes it clear that unsustainable use (always) ends in some kind of socio-economic collapse — perhaps deferred temporarily by substituting one resource for another — but eventually depletion precipitates a collapse. Noting a sequence of energy-coalescing advances (the horse for the Comanche Indians, fossil groundwater for the High Texas Plains (the Llano Escatado), the metal shovel for the Pima indians, etc), Bowden examines the consequences of resource exploitation via those technological advances and compares the social system both before and after access to the resource (as afforded by the technology change). Basing the view on the intrinsic energy value of the resource, he forms a powerful critique against contemporary social systems that blindly insist on technologically maximizing usage of a non-renewable resource base. It is probably necessary to be reminded that these cycles occur across any (and all) civilizations, down to rather small population groups.

Compared to my own energy-based worldview, Bowden confirmed some examples that I often use in class — where the history of civilizations may be directly correlated to the existence of one or more non-renewable resources which causes the ‘rise and fall’ of the society. The rise is facilitated when the resource-base becomes exploitable through technological advance or through simple physical access to the geographic locus of the resource followed by the subsequent fall when the access is denied or the extent of the resource is exhausted. One example I use are the British hardwood forests that, through technical advance became the basis for the construction of the British fleet which eventually defeated the Spanish fleet. When those forests were depleted, the British had no substitute for the first-growth elm and oak trees which were used for the unitary keels of ships-of-the-line. Not long after the depletion of British forests towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, coal, a potent form of concentrated solar energy is discovered, and drove the industrial revolution. British Imperial hegemony follows the decline in this readily available coal. And, aside from a tenacious clinging to Gulf oil resources following World War I and continuing as a secondary partner to US hegemony, the British Empire is in very late decline. This example is over-simplified, but it is not difficult to make the case that a single fundamental resource or energy source or a combination of a few underlies any concentration of social power. And, conversely, it is not difficult within any social system to identify those primary sources, given that much of the attention of the social system as a whole is dedicated to the secure utilization of those resources.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Ramson Lomatewama

After a short visit to the Courthouse Square Bluegrass Festival, we wander over to the Smoki Museum to hear a presentation by Ramson Lomatewama, a traditionalist Hopi artist and poet from the Eagle Clan. He referenced Martin Buber’s I and Thou philosophy which pleasantly surprised me, commenting that the Hopi language did not allow for the it of English, making all relation an I/Thou state. With an audience of mostly greyheads, white retirees, he commented on several misconceptions about the Hopi, including a strong critique of Water’s Book of the Hopi, and a short history of Navajo encroachment. He works in a variety of traditional and non-traditional media including stained glass, glass-blowing, cottonwood-root Katsina tithu carving, intaglio printing, and poetry, the following called:

After the Rains

Sandstone cliffs
reflect the red
of the setting sun.

My hoe is caked
with evidence
of my labor.

I see clouds
going to the east.
Dark clouds.

I look to the sky.
There!
A rainbow
is arched above me.

As I walk down
the dusty road
I look up.

Again!
The rainbow
dressed in beauty
walks with me.

There is no need
for us to speak.

Silence
will speak
for us.

It’s a bit of a question, the whole concept of the Smoki Museum — founded in the 1930’s by a passel of white business (fraudster-)men who wanted to dress up like Indians and do fake ‘traditional’ dances: there is a strong streak of paternal exoticism in the premise (even the name Smoki is made-up). God what fuck-wits. Maybe it’s because what the bahannas (whites) have created for themselves isn’t so great, and that the ways of the indian are somehow more romantically sustainable. Add a dose of good old fashioned guilt at the unacknowledged centuries of genocide and lies, and an obsession with Southwest Art, and there you have it. Faugh.

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The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor’s note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 that set life on another trajectory.]

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. more “The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks”

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  • place: Prague, Czech Republic

tape beatles

about to have a meeting with Lloyd Dunn, a networker from the US who a few years back fled the regime and settled in Prague. we’ve never met f2f before, but have had contact through the MailArt network since sometime in the late 1980’s. he one of the Tape Beatles and the editor of the classic ‘zine PhotoStatic. very interesting to be able to compare notes on our similar creative backgrounds, pathways, and situations.

but first head to the perpetually crowded Tesco, chaotic but almost silent, long check-out lines. a rough-looking fellow in one line hands me an empty shopping basket. I’m surprised at this, though it is a necessary process for anyone coming into the store — more shoppers than baskets. and a stop in at Galerie Václava Špály on a powerful exhibition put on by the Právo na krajinu (Right to Landscape) movement in cooperation with the Ochrana Fauny Ceské Republiky (Czech Wildlife Protection Association). one floor was devoted to individual works in shopping carts, some of them containing sharp and sometimes harsh critiques of consumerism. I wasn’t supposed to make any photos, but got one. on the lower floor, there was a powerful installation by Miroslav Páral of a series of full-size sinks made out of enlarged dental castings of a lower jaw done in what appeared to be lead. inscribed in the lead were texts about consuming. the lower walls covered with roughly black-painted canvas. unfortunately a gallery guard followed me down, so I couldn’t make a photo of that. maybe they thought I was going to steal a sink.

Lloyd comes by FAMU at 1400 and we head out for a walking tour of the old town. plenty of tourists. recalling the distressing afternoon with Sanna here, and the warm evenings. those while-back years ago. dark and rainy. warm in the hotel room. interior heating is an extravagance. anyway, tea and a dinner with Lloyd.

posted
  • place: Ukiah, California

what is this?

landscapes: social, cultural milieu shift in range of eye and ear. Amurika, what it is, what it should be, what it imagines of itself, how it synthesizes its face, how it acts, how it predicts, within the full depth of its deepening un-sustainability. to surface through the fragile impossibility of material wealth. it’s confusing. no critique, rational or irrational, will have any effect. teevee shows of crying parents and wives, reading last letters of soldiers gone in Iraq. what is this for? why this mediation of grief. what is this? presenting the lined faces, the tears, the quavering voices, and the simple expressions of life now gone, erased through some destined fate, whatever that is. sustainability is erased in the same way the youth is erased from the soldier’s face.

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  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

soap bubbles

soap bubbles drift past my window. waiting to catch a ferry into town to meet Sanna for lunch at the Atheneum. the summer ferry schedule is on now, so three-per-hour for much of each day. takes the timing aspect away. Maria and David drop in for a bit yesterday evening.

the impending travel to ram5 is on mind. presenting a short set of ideas “the human need for open source space” as a participant presentation in “the practice of open source architecture.” fragments include:

in joining this workshop, I faced the issue of bridging between a series of phrases which I have yet to completely understand as a lived praxis, and my own understanding and praxis. This process is an essential part of open source, where a distributed system facilitates a set of flows that are not always subjectively related. In order to find a pathway across those often uncomfortable spaces of representational difference, one must sometimes let go of the actual symbolic content:

terminologies (need to remain open!) need to be fuzzy concepts that can accept input, crossover, and disruption from other directions.

and rather than a critique-filled, Luddite, anti-technological call for caution or complete rejection of these technologies which the military developed years ago and are only now trickling down for the intelligentsia to play with, (observation of this effect prompted Timothy Leary to come up with the conspiracy theory that “the KGB and the CIA collaborated to develop LSD and personal computers to keep the middle class intelligentsia busy and out of trouble”)

I would like to invoke a remembering of what these social systems are built upon, and what the goals might be in using them.

for me it’s still a question whether it is possible to deconstruct (or pick the locks on) the Masters house using the Masters tools. picking the lock is possible, but who wants to live in the Masters house anyway, it’s got a bad vibe and a bad smell in it.

recalling the basis of Open Source: the human exchange platform.

linguistic-based exchange is only the socialized framework, it is necessary to go beyond that mediated social space into the space of real energy exchanges.

this includes the abstracted space of finance (global capitalism being a subset)

Language, which includes

does not cover

split between linguistic/abstracted systems of exchange (which include legal codices, symbolic (vs real) monetary value exchange systems) and the ‘real’ space of energized exchange

(why con-fluence and con-ference and dancing afterwards are the meat of con-nection and com-munity)

should not end with movements of abstracted symbolic re-presentations of reality, but should be rooted in the real exchange… the adoption of these abstractions as reality is a core cause of alienation that is giving a very desperate edge to contemporary social systems

we must regain the root. (there must be an embodied corollary to each abstracted notion adopted)

this root is post-materialist, energized exchange that transcends at least at some points the limitations of abstracted re-presentations of connection and dialogue

it is clear that many implementations, sailing high on the hype of the dot.com days, are now merely the tools of state command and control.

we need situations that re-energize human connection regardless of the particular representative symbolic content. this is the essence of open source, it is more than a bazaar, more than a market place, more than any socialized system. it is about embodied be-ing and full-tilt presence, nothing more nothing less.

let’s dance!

Andrew shows up, along with Alison and John, we watch the neighborhood cat prance in with a live rat or voll, play with it, and theorize on the range of possible outcomes.

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

the Elder

We use narratives to impose order on our circumstances, and that will to impose order on reality (instead of discovering order in experience and attempting to conform oneself to that order) is characteristic of modernity. — Bruce Elder

narrative as a form (well, form itself has the explicit ‘meaning’ as an ‘outcome of a human re-configuration of energies,’ an intervention). so, although there are a plethora of po-mo critiques of narrative, and a certain level of critical art-making around/against narrative. even e-narrative and the hyper-text — that free and utopian post-narrative writing environment is fundamentally mired in the same ‘problem’ of having this applied form. it’s the same! Elder’s name comes up, synonymous in my pantheon with Brakhage, partly through formal connections, but also in the energized lived experience of his film work. only frustrating that nothing substantial of his writings are online. so, not available to me here. found a paper copy for sale of a short monograph that he wrote for the epic 42-hour “The Book of All The Dead” film on the occasion of it’s screening at the Anthology Archive in 1988 (a show that I was at and subsequently had coffee with Bruce later at his hotel). would not have missed that, as it was the last installment of the work, the first 19 hours of which he premiered at Boulder one weekend back in 1987. reel after reel, sitting in a small classroom with about 8 other people. transformative experience. a primal inspiration for subsequent duration-related works undertaken. pushing mind and body through many limits. buried in my archive is a copy of that document, it was required reading in one class in 1997 at CU, and I would like to make it available online if Bruce agrees. but that’s another time issue, when there are more pressing things to deal with. like logistics, as usual. most plane tickets are purchased to get me through the summer, but there is still the extant question about teaching in Tallinn before I leave this region; sending out emails about scheduling gigs for the next academic year; participating in an online conference at V2, and in several online events as well; presenting at RAM5 in Riga in a week, and so on.

massaging the database. updating all contact information. what else for the archivist to do? something that has been wanting for years. re-contacting folks, mostly making open distribution channels for current energy.

sun up early. real early, comes in exactly to strike the eyes as it rises over the roof of the quarters opposite ours on the courtyard. that Lightening buzz begins to stir somewhere in the troposphere.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

teaching with technology

Teaching with technology conference. Concepts swimming at the popular surface of the sea. Little diving to the basal bentholithic ground. Why the ascendancy of the text? (and David Abram’s critique of written language as the initial wedge driven between lived/immersive experience in the sensual world and the new rational sentient be-ing.) Hearing things from the keynote speaker, intelligent, that I have dealt with and modeled in my teaching already. hmmmm. Stating the obvious. And keeping to the center. not comatose. (my presentation: Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity)

Deep in production states, the initial 2-hour DVD burned for the installation coming up in a couple weeks. First time in artifact production for public show since the installation at Deiglan in Akureyri in 2000. Tested the plasma screen today, some sizing glitches, but otherwise, it seems to look/sound good. Second iteration will happen this week, perhaps a third after that.

So little writing done here, reflections seem to be submerged by influx, hinted knowings (tongue on 9-volt battery, citrus), secretions of saliva. pressure of hearing, adsorbing.

Open source, middleware, centralization, privacy, (the idea of standards, or the principle behind, actually directly decreases possibilities of innovation!) so, when standards come from open source communities of use, vs a central corporate monolith, you get different results. mandated innovation … hah.

Technology, arts, media. ‘talk the talk,’ but where’s ‘walk the walk.’ The focus on a particular level of technology to implement in a teaching situation. There is no correlation between deployment of technology and the quality of the learning experience (period).

Paragraphs. delineating breaks of time. illustrating the discontinuous nature of re-creating, re-production.

lost the life of language, the usage that does not spark, no internal voice. where the internal voice spends breathless hours; questions itself.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

I couldn’t understand it

my primary work when one calls it that, is the work in fundamental critique of the (meta)structure(s) that we are embedded in, in this sensual reality. it is not about the exigencies of work. It is mounted not in opposition, but in simple meeting-along-the-road. confronting that which manifests in the daily movement of life in life.

and I am astonished to discover that some of my students can’t read basic texts without simply quitting and saying “that was a terrible paper, I couldn’t understand it.”

I was WAY TOO EASY on the students I had this term. just not wanting to push them too hard. and that seems a big mistake. that they do not positively thrive on taking reign of their own progress, education, and enLightenment. not near rigorous enough. no toughness. but do they really need it? is this a condition? is it related to the social structure in which they are immersed? one where many of the human relations are mapped into incredibly convoluted and warped pathways. being graded. a scientific method, and a supreme lack of genuine dialogues. balanced flows. but is it worth it to try to change those flows? there are the hints of value. bright value, value that will float above knowledge, be a Lightness in life, perhaps. but the risk and inertia to overcome seems irresistible.

I mean, who IS the prophet in this time? Lennon has passed, Coltrane, Davis, Marley, and a hundred others, from all places and ways. but all on the same pathway. is it inside of time or outside? if not inside, then it is everywhere perhaps, or concentrated in one place. concentrations raw enough for the human to sense. and delve into. that we are not able to see the scale of all.

make assignments — for example, journal entries, no less than 40 entries with no spelling errors during the semester. ouch. but they need the discipline side. in Master Printing, I had the manifest tools, process available. with the computer, and the network, more difficult to pinpoint the tool and the process. but the practice, the living praxis, is the core/key.

for example — present the Apple iTunes screen “visual” algorithm. what is the politic of that? who made it? is that person an artist? basic questions to get things started. but on to harder ones. yeah, like pick an inspiring web space and describe why, in 500 words, it moves you. as a journal entry. with no spelling errors.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

notes on creativity

most of the texts that I have been absorbing in the last weeks deal with creativity as a discontinuous (non-cyclic) and anomalous event rising above the normal “level” of daily life. this view is an obvious artifact of materialist thinking that treats life as a linear (singular) trajectory and that the expressions of that living can be wholly reduced linguistically to various statements and formulations. accepting that this view IS true within its own limited framework (the history of rational thinking), a critique would have to deconstruct the whole facade of Western philosophy in order to make a substantive attack on the position. this writer is neither qualified nor interested in making such a frontal attack which would simply be tossed aside in the dumpster of academic discourse. instead, understanding that to even name a philosophy or a philosopher that stands supporting that edifice would only give power to a system that I believe is fundamentally flawed, I have chosen to proceed intuitively, and perhaps poetically, making enormous and possibly scandalous generalizations, leaving the normative conventions of the English language behind, and simply dive into thoughts that are reflecting through waters muddied by 42 years of thrashing around in a world that seems more intense and striking everyday. by this methodology, combined with a desire that these texts be only the opening for a dialogue with the Other who might come on it, here in the sea of hyperspace, I will begin. more “notes on creativity”

posted
  • place: Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany

oh, Valentines

workshop done. ending on an energized and high note last evening at the Podewil where the TransMediale was taking place. the class attended two lectures there, but were disappointed by both of them, based on the format and styles of presentation. as is common with art/cultural conferences, the standard of presentation was low and lacking much professionalism. believing that when one has an audience of several hundred people, one should respect their time and abilities. preparing materials to be clear and engaging and present. it was clear, again, that the format of conference/festival does not work except at such a surficial level of information-transfer that it is hardly worth it. only dialogue generates enough internal heat within all participants for things to get cooking. as an artist’s work is screened or otherwise shown, in a collective situation, the canon of history is written again and again, based not on the internal potential energy of a work, for the most part, but on the social visibility of the protagonist. Wolfgang tells stories from here and there during the last days. and I wonder that he doesn’t write a book about his life. fascinating abilities of observation. Theresa arrives from Kiel in the afternoon. we are talking when Jimmie Durham calls, they are working on an exhibition with him. I recall being a little astonished during a graduate critique in Boulder when he was there as a visiting artist. he had a bottle of vodka or tequila, I forget which, and drank shot after shot during the session. one installation I see in a recent catalog of his is a refrigerator, an old model, surrounded with cobblestones on the ground in a park. the cobblestones had been thrown with force at the fridge, leaving dents and paint chips.

later, Theresa and I talk a walk around the neighborhood in the chill and damp.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

psychic nomadism

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. finally getting around to exploring the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why real music is inevitably dangerous to readers). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar. more “psychic nomadism”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Vanguard

From Jordan on nettime: Maybe we need to EXTEND the market as a network, rather than resist it, developing ways of speaking through it.

Ted wonders what it would be like to assume that the intellectual vanguard “is in fact a reactionary force trying to protect its political patrimony by imposing traditional interpretations and ideals.” We have to be brave enough to realize to what extent this may be the case.

sotto voce: The vanguard is (should be!) that which is not engaged in criticism alone. The vanguard alights where action and word intersect. I was thinking that one measure of the efficacy of a critical point of view would be to see if that point of view could be translated into a way of living to be taught to a child! As an educator, I am seeing the glaring gap between the academic mind-set and the reality outside that students have to deal with and indeed is their milieu. I am not surprised when the answer to the question “what did you learn in the last 12 years of education that you use in your life?” is an uncomfortable silence from a roomful of young adults. They KNOW what they need, in many instances, the skills for humane survival, but they also need something to live for. They don’t get it through the system that built criticism.

Jordan’s observations about the futility and hubris in the thought of re-constructing a new way from parts of the old are quite accurate. That argument seems to be a repeat of those which vainly (in retrospect) dealt with deconstructing the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools. Naming and confronting the enemy simply strengthens it (whatever it is). Best to turn and walk away on a new path.

I hope the critics live for more than the sound of their own and others’ words in their ears and eyes. The network is alive. The vanguard needs to walk the walk at the same time as talking the talk: the walk and the talk must fly in synchronous orbit around a life that is engaged with those around it both in cyber extension and in physical extension. There are people doing this, and have been doing this (quietly) for years as Brad rightly points out.

To quote Saarinen and Taylor (from imagologies: media philosophy):

1. in the praxis-dominated world of ultra-tech, the politics of critique must take a new form.

2. the strength of theory is relative to strategies for action. action must lead, theory must follow. in opposition to mainstream modern western philosophy, theoretical and conceptual reason must serve only an instrumental role and thus give up its previously unchallenged position of supreme value in itself.

3. critique that is restricted to the realm of the literate and remains a literary project is no longer feasible as an effective strategy for action. Argument and objective analysis, pure content, abstract thinking, logic, and evidence, these forces of the word-centered world have lost their creative potential. Literate reason and the literary critic have become relics of the past.

When can we shake this reliance on the weakness of abstract reason and instead forge interactions of dynamic presence and being?

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

dinner

Time flickers again, days are lengthening. Last night a pleasant dinner party with the class, we’ll probably repeat that next week after the final critique.

posted
  • place: Tallahassee, Florida

moonburn

group portrait, heading to the Wacissa River, Tallahassee, Florida, October 1996

Time spins more and more. Now here as visiting artist at FSU, courtesy of net-worker Paul Rutkovsky. Last night Robert, one of the faculty, had organized a group moonLight canoe trip on the Wacissa River, about 20 miles from Tallahassee. The moon was full, and there were about 20 folks, mostly students, two to a canoe, some with flashLights. We put in with a guide, Fred, at a small parking lot on the river and slowly paddled down the river a few miles to a side-stream that ended up in a 50-meter-wide underwater sink-hole which was the source of the stream. Sink-holes are earth-surface phenomena — where the ground waters under a place have eaten holes in the rock — in this case, limestone, which is very soluble in water — and occasionally these holes are so large that the very ground above them collapses and caves in … Leaving holes that can be many tens of meters across and sometimes hundreds of meters deep. There are instances where houses have been swallowed whole by one of these beasts… In the case of the sink-hole on the river, it is fully immersed and actually is a spring source with a large volume of water welling up from the hole which is connected through underground channels to a lake about ten miles away. The water is about 20°C (70°F), chilly by local standards, but in the middle of the circular pool, someone had moored a small floating platform. Being the mad fool that I am, I had to go swimming — despite not having a swim suit or towel. I tried to talk some of the others into it, but they were too shy … ach, these Amurikans … So, I hopped out of the canoe and undressed on the platform and dove in. Moonburn! OOoooooo. Cold, but totally refreshing! Magic. All tiredness left my body.

moonLight, Wacissa River, Tallahassee, Florida, October 1996

It reminded me of a personal motto that I used to frequently quote to my friends — along the lines of:

I’ll do anything twice, three times if I like it.

I mean, trying something new once will never give a real taste of the undertaking, so twice at least allows the possibility to saturate the self. And, hey, if it is fun, than that third time, well … and I don’t mean that I necessarily stop at number three … But maybe that would be an interesting path to follow, stopping — so that one does not become too attached to the material process of pleasure gratification… It is marvelous, the power of the natural world. Despite all the mediation that is a daily fact of the world that I inhabit, despite the critique of the romantic vision of the natural world, despite all that, there is still massive healing power within the synergistic interaction with the physical world … My body and my eyes were totally relaxed by the water and the moonlit darkness. I cannot explain these things otherwise than to attribute them to the power of that natural physical force. Winter is miles away from my thoughts, here in this tropical locale. Kati sends me a fragment of E. E. Cummings, the English poet. She’s in Finland, so it has heavier meaning for her (and will for me when I head back north in a few days)…

autumn has gone: will winter never come?
o come, terrible anonymity; enfold phantom me with the murdering minus of cold – open this ghost with millinery knives of wind scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and gently (very whiteness:absolute peace, never imaginable mystery) descend

I get chills, sitting here in the Mac Lab in the Visual Arts Department. memories of Finnish winter… Air conditioning. It’s warm outside, and here my eyes are burning from the dry chill of conditioning and the blast of charged electrons in my face. Where are we in this mediation?

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Stockholm, Sweden

exile

Up early again. Sunshine. 0930 ferry into town, packed everything last night, so took my backpack over to the Silja terminal and left it there in a locker, then went direct over to Muu to get one more fix of fast digital life for the time being. I meet Tapio at Café Fazer, off the Esplanade. This week he is attending a conference put on by the American Studies Department of the University of Helsinki concerning a critique of media and culture. The prospectus looks, well, typically academic, and it is certain that they have good funding given the number of American … academics … giving papers. We have a long conversation about some of the issues that concern us both. At the moment the boat is slowly pirouetting away from the dock and heading past Suomenlinna to the open Baltic. more “exile”