These are wild dreams. Yet since, now a week ago, on me, as I stood on the height of St. Peter’s, they have ruled my imagination. I have chosen my boat, and laid out my scant stores. I have selected a few books; the principal are Homer and Shakespeare. But the libraries of the world are thrown open to me—and in any port I can renew my stock. I form no expectation of alteration for the better; but the monotonous present is intolerable to me. Neither hope nor joy are my pilots—restless despair and fierce desire of change lead me on. I long to grapple with danger, to be excited by fear, to have some task however slight or voluntary for each days fulfillment. I shall witness all the variety of appearance, that the elements can assume—I shall read fair augury in the rainbow — menace in the cloud—some lesson or record dear to my heart in everything. Thus around the shores of deserted Earth, when the sun is high, and the moon waxes or wanes, angels, the spirits of the dead, and the ever-open eye of the Supreme, will behold the tiny bark, freighted with Verney, The Last Man. — Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, The Last Man.
should
Caught on radar a couple days ago:
“Should is the killer word in the English language.” Tobias Wolff quoting Michel Herr in conversation with George Saunders last evening, three authors. Should I explore this? Should I try writing about it? Nah. Another day. But it was nice seeing George on screen, an aside to our ether-mediated text trading of the last decades.
Morning comes and writing, any writing, needs to happen to both purge and to temporarily preserve what is left of Life. (While acknowledging that there is no craft available here to draw on, only a poorly exercised habit of projecting symbolic detritus from mind to screen: excretion.)
Okay, the should problem. One obstacle set oblique to it: the close-to-asymptotic barrier in writing truth. Especially when the perception of weakness arrives in view when attempting to write such. Why is this? Is it that behind any truth is the reified presence of mortality? Photographer Richard Misrach comes to mind, describing his impression of the desert as having a ‘terrible beauty.’ It is within the verity of instantaneous sensual engagement with the world we subsequently come to know that we are transitory. This initiates a deep terror: the only escape from which is a return into the ongoing flow of the senses receiving the source of that terrible beauty. It is the process of reification, fixing the image, that is the initial corruption of truth. Writing that approaches truth is writing that is sourced in the precognitive, the pre-rational, the pre-symbolic: the momentary encounter committed to page with a crafted or spontaneous urgency. Should is the reified abstraction of Life.
I should try to transcend this limit. I really should: Black speck on the wall. A fly. No compunction to snuff a life with dried and calloused hands made so after cleaning thousands of tiny fly-shits on surfaces, no, on edges around the house. Yes, insects excrete. And, yes, they habituate certain places for this: edges, corners, windows, shitting, tiny rust-red circles, a couple millimeters in diameter. I should cease writing and continue cleaning the house. Were that I was a fly on the wall, I should take a shit as well. Should write, should shit, should clean. This is how life goes.
Application: Field_Notes – The Heavens
Application to the BioArt Society Field_Notes workshop:
A native of Alaska, Dr. Hopkins is an international media artist. He holds a creative practices PhD in media studies from University of Technology Sydney and La Trobe University; an MFA from CU-Boulder (where he studied film with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BS in geophysical engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His trans-disciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative systems, distributed and community-based DIY processes, and developing empowered approaches to technology. His creative practice explores the role of energy in global techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter through performance, image and sound work, and writing. He has taught across more than twenty countries. He is currently working as an editor and information specialist at the Colorado Geological Survey in Golden, Colorado. Traces of his praxis may be found at https://tech-no-mad.net/blog/.
(1) SECOND ORDER group – With a fundamental interest in the process of information and knowledge transfer, especially in the context of deepening public engagement in science, I find the idea of (critical) second-order observation compelling. In this Gaian moment, the creative engagement of art/sci (research) practices is of great importance. The precise processes by which they are informed and disseminated – through a synthesis of engaged human encounter and dialogue, intense and centered (even meditative) observation, along with the impact of empirical information sources — is an important object of inquiry. Previous workshops I’ve led have explored the meta-structures of participatory creative action and their relationship with energy/life.
(2) HAB group – My sound/camera-based work is not about product, but rather rooted directly in the meditative mind-state of the observer, being especially aware that the “observer changes that which is observed.” Watching the sky is a daily process for me.
I contribute in two ways: listening to the Other’s stories, and sharing stories from my own experience. I hold a philosophy that says in open exchange/dialogue between the Self and the Other, there is a powerful third energy source that arises which may subsequently be tapped into as a source for creative action. Having lived as an expatriate for most of my life, I have a deep sensitivity to cross/trans-cultural communication and collaboration. This I have demonstrated facilitating and participating in transdisciplinary workshops/residencies around the Baltic Region. That and my significant background in the science and environmental/geosciences specifically will add to the collective knowledge-base. I am an experienced field researcher, and traveler, and I bring a wide on-the-ground experience with Arctic, high-altitude, desert, and arid ecosystems. My personal creative arts/media praxis is multi-disciplinary and I enjoy engaging with other practitioners about the textures of their practices.
https://neoscenes.net/blog/category/project/clui-residency
In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation
Application: Anthropocene Resonance: Interdisciplinary Approaches
Our present geologic era, the Anthropocene, has already mobilized transversal and hybridized research approaches by calling attention to the patchy assemblages of our environmental encounters. This symposium celebrates and encourages such cross-pollination, and invites ecologists, technoscientists, environmental humanities scholars, biologists, data scientists, creative practitioners, green economists, ecofeminists, policy scholars, environmental designers, ethicists, and others to explore shared articulations of researching and visualizing the Anthropocene, and to develop concrete modes of working together on common problems.
Specifically, the symposium will engage scholarly and creative approaches to making climate change tangible, whether through data visualization, mapping, media, science communication, art installation, sonification, or other methods. The symposium will consist of short paper presentations, followed by working groups which will concretely address the challenges of working interdisciplinarily.
Submitted abstracts should be 300-500 words, and may address the following questions, among others:
- * How can the environment be documented, visualized, communicated, or presented in ways which are accurate, nuanced, and emotionally resonant?
- * In what ways has environmental change been documented, visualized, communicated, or presented historically?
- * How has the environment and environmental change been presented in mainstream media, and what are the effects of these approaches?
- * How can counter strategies be deployed to address existing problems in environmental depiction, visualization, or communication?
- * What are strategies for facilitating interdisciplinary work between researchers in science and technology and creative practitioners?
Changing the Course of Nature
This presentation circumscribes a personal creative praxis rooted in a vision of both Nature *and* the nature of reality as a dynamic configuration of energy flows. Guiding visual-sonic explorations of elemental energy flows, the author suggests that the human organism’s impact on its proximal and distal environment—expressed through the techno-social system—may be better understood using the scientific model of thermodynamics and entropy as a creative starting point. One simple, ongoing performance series “Changing the Course of Nature” demonstrates, onsite in the desert West of the US, how life at all levels expends the energy it consumes and thus changes … everything. A brief sketch covering a ‘natural history’ of sound is included.
John Hopkins is a media artist and learning facilitator. He holds a transdisciplinary creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney; an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His collaborative trans-disciplinary research and teaching explores issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked and tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY & DIWO processes, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently organizing the data space of the Colorado Geological Survey while solving the challenges of transforming geo-scientific data into knowledge that the wider public might engage. You may track his processes at https://neoscenes.net/blog/.
Online Resources:
CV/Resumé
energy (research sketches around energy/thermodynamics)
CLUI Residency (a recent residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation)
An ongoing sonic (field recording) performance series Changing the Course of Nature
deserted downtown
An excerpt from “The Tourist”
One of the key lines in the movie “Wall Street” is delivered by Father Martin Sheen: “It is good for people to spend their lives creating, not living off the buying and selling of others.” Anthony Zega uses the same concepts when describing the basic conflict between the Tourist and the Indian: “Creation” and “The Market.”
Two years ago, Anthony moved from his home in Princeton, New Jersey to Colorado, his base from which to visit reservations throughout the West. Anthony is searching for his own spiritual grounding and we are pleased that he will be sharing the information he finds with the readers of The New Common Good.
We are pleased to introduce Anthony Zega who will act as a Western correspondent for this publication. We will present his photographs, articles, and interviews as part of our investigation of Native America. more “An excerpt from “The Tourist””
virga
A new word crosses the textual radar: virga. Seen often in Western skies, especially immediately prior to Monsoon season, and during transitional seasons. Puzzled that I don’t recall knowing it before. Maybe I just don’t remember.
Best described as wispy filaments of rain, thin curtains, falling beneath storm clouds that haven’t the energy to transition into full-on thunderheads: the falling precipitation evaporates before reaching the ground. Extremely frustrating to the parched throats waiting for any water to fall from heaven in these desert regions.
In the metaphoric: life-blessing from Heaven, reaching the soul on occasion. sensed, though far away. ethereal. falling to quench the soul. gone.
field work
cryptic and incomplete 2016 review
I think 2016 started with the thought that it couldn’t be more challenging than 2015. If change is a challenge, 2016 definitely was that.
It started out slowly, ensconced in the modest house I bought in Prescott in 2014 that contained my full art-media-production studio and archive in Prescott, Arizona. As the art-scene in Prescott consists mostly of bronze cowboys, turquoise-and-silver jewelry, and paintings of blue-eyed Indian children, my work had to be virtual and remote: Patrick of framework:afield invites a piece for his internationally syndicated weekly program on field recording; Arts Birthday; AudioBlast; Reveil 2016; continuing contributions to aporee::maps; and, later, Radiophrenia (Glasgow). Portrait work continues but I haven’t really put any new landscape images online for awhile.
One local exception came when Tom, the director of the Natural History Institute invited me to do a public lecture and workshop on ‘acoustic ecology’ titled “A Natural History of Sound” in March.
April saw something of a (Plotner) family conclave for Al’s interment at the Antelope Hills cemetery. I was the sole representative from the Hopkins/MacKenzie side of the family. Good to see those folks again, might be awhile before the next family-type conclave.
I spent significant time the past couple years on a conceptual re-development of the Ecosa Institute‘s ‘regenerative design’ curriculum with a small group of folks along with volunteer work at the nascent Milagro Art Center. more “cryptic and incomplete 2016 review”
me Tilley hat
Well, my second Tilley hat bites the dust in the whirlwind of solar-cooked labor on the house in the last eight weeks, here in the desert. Damn good hat, saw many years of the top of my head, but the stitched band is a weak link over the eons. That and acrid sweat, yuck. I’d buy another one any time: didn’t need to however, as this one was replaced under their life-time guarantee. Good on ya’ Tilley! Besides, I’m half Canuck anyway!
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!
the map is not the territory
The following, a (lightly edited) reply (to Brian Holmes) on a nettime thread (that invoked a NYT article on GPS navigation ‘blindness)’.
Hallo Brian —
I had read about that Amurikan tourist in Iceland, and your notes, and thought to re-reflect/meditate on that from a personal/historical Icelandic context:
Naming of location is a traditional, age-old process. It is often the association of place with event (long- or short-term). Event may be natural or social, short-lived or cumulative. The naming process was once local, embodied, idiosyncratic, or personal. Local suggests that the naming is contextualized by a specific human experience of the place. Embodied suggests that the naming was propagated by verbal expression, and stored in human memory. Idiosyncratic in that it was the inverse of global — it was understood by and carried situated meaning for an individual or small grouping of people who lived there.
more “the map is not the territory”framework:afield broadcast
I promised Patrick that I’d prepare a re-edited broadcast version of water fills the hall for his wonderful syndicated phonography (field recording) program framework:afield — by September 2015. Well, time got away from me and then last Thursday morning he let me know that the following Sunday’s slot was open. Nothing like having a deadline. I had procrastinated on it as I knew I needed to include at least some voice-over to introduce the work to the radio audience. I can’t stand the sound of my own voice, so, voice-over, argh! But with a little digital sweetening and tweaking, once I got the script done, it didn’t turn out all that bad.
So, framework:afield show #540:
(00:55:02, stereo audio, 132.1 mb)
this edition of framework:afield has been produced by john hopkins, aka neoscenes, and is entitled water fills the hall. notes from the producer:
water fills the hall is a sustained drift through the hopkins/neoscenes personal archive of field recordings relating to water. There is no detailed playlist as the work is a multi-track layering of sources and includes essences of several hundred field recordings from four continents. Many of the individual field recordings are available on the aporee::maps field recording project under the neoscenes moniker.
To sketch a few: it opens in the Mojave desert, as flies collect around the body of a dead rattlesnake, the dry air desiccating the corpse; there is organ practice by the harbor in Sydney; and wandering through the Pergammon on the Spree; students protesting along the Vilna River; monsoon rains and thunders, falling and filling desert cisterns in the High Sonoran desert; telecom wires hum in moist Arctic chill; melt-waters slowly cleave the Rocky Mountains to dust; film projectors clatter while representing fluid realities (homage to mentor and friend, film-maker Stan Brakhage); Geiger counters count what heavy waters we’ve made; rains falls on the roofs of hydrocarbon-fired chariots; rivers rage, and whining pumps pump the rivers; while F-18s storm in the wet clouds overhead, and baptisms soulfully bless the swimming pools; a plague of cicadas stands ready for the waters to recede, and is it Noah’s ark departing into an unknown future on the gray Baltic?
As a current and former resident of the US southwest with its tremendous water problems, the work is intended partly as a complex exploration of and meditation on water itself. Water in motion energetically yields sound; and thus, the work is about moving waters. Humans seek to direct those movements to their advantage with (lovingly graceful!) machinic systems, and in that lies a fundamental conflict. This is a mapping of that conflict: how the human species alters the flows of energy in the bio-system around itself.
The I Ching suggests that water simply flows, on and on, filling up all the places through which it moves. Nothing can make it lose its own essential nature: it remains true to itself under all conditions. What are we in the face of such an energized flux? Are we advancing or are we retreating with the tide? Will the rain wash our sins away? If we can swim, will we drown? Do we recall our amphibian soul? Are we thirsty for more? Are we simply thirsty?
Art’s Birthday stream :: 16 January 2016 :: stay tuned
Once again, hopkins/neoscenes — joining the party, walking the plank, perturbing the ‘net — will delve deep into the archive to bring a signature improv sonic streaming mix to the Eternal Network, celebrating 2016 Art’s Birthday, the 1,000,052nd. The stream, in fond memory of network friend Robert Adrian X, will originate from the neoscenes studio high in the Arizona desert mountains between 12:00-14:00 (GMT-7) 16 January.
Stay tuned here for up-to-date information on catching the live improv stream. Mark the time — (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones). If you are in the Prescott, AZ area, you can attend the performance live @ my place — but please RSVP before-hand, there’s very limited space!
Phoenix – Saturday, 16 January 2016 12:00 noon – 2:00 PM GMT-7 (MST)
New York – 2:00-4:00 PM GMT-5 (EST)
London – 19:00-21:00 (GMT)
Helsinki – 2100-2300 GMT+2 (EEST)
Sydney 6:00-8:00 AM Sunday, 17 January GMT+10 (AEDT)
Auckland 8:00-10:00 AM Sunday, 17 January GMT+12 (NZDT).
Sonic stream address: https://locus.creacast.com:9001/neoscenes.m3u (this URL is only live during the scheduled performance times, starting 30 minutes before). You can copy/paste the address into iTunes (use ‘File’ menu – ‘Open Stream’ option), or other mp3 players once it’s live. Headphones recommended to capture the ethereal density of the stream!
I’ll also be on IRC chat.freenode.net #artsbirthday along with some of the other international participants — it’s possible to connect through a browser-based connection at: https://webchat.freenode.net/
******
The stream is over, but you can listen to the archive broadcast in its entirety:
(02:06:17, stereo audio, 303.1 mb)
wide-eyed god in the desert
World Listening Day 2015: hopkins/neoscenes live-streamed sonic improv
Based within the project changing the course of nature: an ongoing sequence of actions that alter the fabric of the universe, this live one-hour neoscenes sonic improv stream will play with water while hopefully staying dry in the midst of desert monsoon season.
Stay tuned here for up-to-date information on catching the live improv stream. Mark the time — (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones). If you are in the Prescott, AZ area, you can attend the performance live @ my place — but please RSVP before-hand, there’s limited space!).
Phoenix – 18 July 2015 12:00 noon – 1:00 PM GMT-7 (PST)
Denver – 1:00 – 2:00 PM GMT-6 (MST)
New York – 3:00-4:00 PM GMT-4 (EDT)
London – 20:00-21:00 GMT+1 (CET)
Helsinki – 2200-2300 GMT+3 (EEST)
Sydney 5:00-6:00 AM Sunday 19 July GMT+10 (AEST)
Auckland 7:00-8:00 AM Sunday 19 July GMT+12 (NZST).
Stream address: https://locus.creacast.com:9001/neoscenes.m3u (this URL will go live a few hours prior to 12:00 noon GMT-7 on the day of the performance). You can copy/paste the address into iTunes (use File menu – Open Stream option), or other mp3 players once it’s live.
[here’s the archive of the stream]:
(01:04:50, stereo audio, 155.6 mb)
ENJOY! (And for future alerts, subscribe to the tech-no-mad blog (to your right))…
sacrifice, botryoidal quartz and Chilopsis linearis
Keeping track of perceptions
Keeping track of perceptions, not of feelings: scattering insects beneath an overturned stone. the sense of being watched by a lizard’s sentience, a scrub oak, pruned, pushing out red greening suckers; red ants colonizing a rock wall, defending their space; the heavy moon rising over the Bradshaws, hours pass and it is a brilliant piercing in midnight sky directly above. the ravens roost restlessly, wings sloughing against ponderosa branch and needle in the dark. earth moistens overnight, showing dark stains in the early morning. later, while drying under the cloudless sun, soil lightens, hardens, begins to recall that this is desert. internal paralysis is never reflected in these perceptions. how is it that humans are so filled with a moist clinging substance that pushes away, reverse polarity, any hold on perceiving-before-knowledge? while at the same time neural traces cannot leave their accustomed path. and how is it that the social leaves perception to chance?
water fills the hall
New work for Galerie Díra, aka The Hole Gallery, a site-specific sound art gallery space in the courtyard of Školská street no. 28, in Prague. The Gallery was founded in 2012 by Mlok Asociation in collaboration with Školská 28 Gallery.
(00:52:45, stereo audio, loop, 127.2 mb)
As neoscenes is wont to synthesize, water fills the hall is a sustained drift, this time through a profusion of sonic liquids that flow — in drips, burbles, washes, rushing, splashing, crashing, soothing — hard against the (lovingly graceful) machinic systems we deploy to direct those flows. The I Ching suggests that water simply flows, on and on, filling up all the places through which it moves. Nothing can make it lose its own essential nature: it remains true to itself under all conditions. What are we in the face of such an energized flux? Are we advancing or are we retreating with the tide? Will the rain wash our sins away? If we can swim, will we drown? Do we recall our amphibian soul? Are we thirsty for more? Are we simply thirsty?
With sonic samples from four continents, many cities, and, especially, many wilderness places, this multilayer movement begins in the Mojave desert, as flies collect around the body of a dead rattlesnake, the dry air desiccating the corpse; there is organ practice by the harbor in Sydney; and wandering through the Pergammon on the Spree; students protesting along the Vilna River; monsoon rains and thunders, falling and filling desert cisterns in the High Sonoran desert; telecom wires hum in moist Arctic chill; melt-waters slowly cleave the Rocky Mountains to dust; film projectors clatter while representing fluid realities (homage to mentor and friend, film-maker Stan Brakhage); Geiger counters count what heavy waters we’ve made; rains falls on the roofs of hydrocarbon-fired chariots; rivers rage, and whining pumps pump the rivers; while F-18s storm in the wet clouds overhead, and baptisms soulfully bless the swimming pools; a plague of cicadas stands ready for the waters to recede, and Noah’s ark founders on a reef.
Sam Shepard on Amurika
From an interview with Sam Shepard by Laura Barton:
He struggles to think of contemporary American writers he rates, beyond Denis Johnson. “The thing about American writers is that as a group they get stuck in the same idea: that we’re a continent and the world falls away after us. And it’s just nonsense.”
Did he ever get stuck in that idea? “I couldn’t see beyond the motel room and the desert and highway,” he says slowly, and turns his glass a little. “I couldn’t see that there was another world. To me, the whole world was encompassed in that. I thought that was the only world that mattered.
“And it’s still there,” he adds, “but now it’s redundant because everything’s replaced by strip malls.”
The situation, he believes, is irredeemable. “We’re on our way out,” he says of America. “Anybody that doesn’t realise that is looking like it’s Christmas or something. We’re on our way out, as a culture. America doesn’t make anything anymore! The Chinese make it! Detroit’s a great example. All of those cities that used to be something. If you go to a truck stop in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, you’ll probably see the face of America. How desperate we are. Really desperate. Just raw.”
But why, I ask, is the world still so infatuated with American culture? Why, even, do we remain gripped by a play such as True West? “Oh, because they all believe the American fable,” he says. “That you can make it here. But you don’t make it.”
You’ve made it pretty well, I say.
“Yeah but I’ve also… I’ve… yeah,” he hesitates, laughs, a long, rich wheeze. “But you know, oddly, I wasn’t even fucking trying.”
long dialogues: alexithymia: interhemispheric transfer deficit
Conversations range through histories, futures, thoughts, and dreams. Nothing like spending time with old friends: with my oldest friend this week. Junior High, seventh grade, we shared all seven class periods each day, 40+ years ago. How histories recede: resonant memories tend to be supplanted; revivifying them in active recollection makes them last a bit longer, fills them out from another perspective, another memory system. Until our outward form sinks into the background (dis)order of the cosmos. There, the memories persist as slowly devolving trajectories of activated, materialized energy.
Gary’s evolution and sustained presence inspires so many of the people who are around him including myself. What to think about this? Do we ever really evolve, or do the changes we experience along the way in life impose merely small surficial modifications of our root character? And of this root character, what may be said? Is it the outcome of a chain of incarnations, is it an alignment of planets, the arrangement of molecular spirals? Inspiration from Day One? Predetermined be-ing? Can we change ourselves?
This particular trip takes the form of yet another pilgrimage, a soft confrontation of what the word ’empathy’ is in lived praxis among the network of friends. Finding empathy’s place, there is no pre-existing internal road-map. Its locus is within sight, reach, and touch, but it cannot be accessed directly except through thoroughly unpretentious and purely expressed action (not merely words). Embodied, in motion, moving towards. Up to this point, there are only fleeting instances where empathy as a defined characteristic is questioned. Having it, not having it seem to be questions that do not touch its real nature.
Then come the questions: Is it possible to attain an empathetic state where none existed before? If not, what becomes? Is life for some a desert of hollow resonance, disconnected from any Other? I don’t know, I don’t know, (pushing through gray curtains of neural absence). Into the Light, or, at least, looking for the Light.
the Beast
The inverse of the old truck: the coolness of the changing climate, hydrocarbon-friend, bane of the world, crawler-of-deserts, and, especially, cash-outlay:
The First or The Last Acts
The New Year opens such:
2014 opens with Grieg’s “Peer Gynt, Op. 23 – The Death Of Åse: Funeral Music” by random chance. Followed by the blasphemous exhortations of Bern Porter‘s “The Last Acts of St. Fuck You,” a classic. HAH! Bern was a mail art correspondent of mine (and many others!), a physicist involved in the Manhattan Project, and the development of the Atlas rocket and the cathode-ray tube. He was later based in Belfast, Main, his home state. Kevin and I stopped by his place one summer day in 1992 when driving from Mt. Desert Island back to NYC following the long Conrans/Habitat shoot in Acadia National Park. Bern wasn’t home. Damn. Our exchanges and his poetic “founds” publications electrified me with the extent of him being outside the art canon (at the time, though Wikipedia says he had a postmortem show at MOMA in NYC in 2004, who cares! I know he wouldn’t).
Anyway, is this a portent of something … cosmological … in extent?
Day 18 – Hawk Moon Ridge
The Landscape becomes reflective, human and thinks itself though me. I make it an object, let it project itself and endure within my painting….I become the subjective consciousness of the landscape, and my painting becomes its objective consciousness.
…
I am becoming more lucid before nature, but always with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses…. Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply, the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study of the most powerful interest and so varied that I think I could occupy myself for months without changing place by turning now more to the right, now more to the left. — Cezanne
The lucidity that Cezanne speaks of gives way in the dry heat and white Light of the desert West to a (con)fusion of flows. The canyon below the house, a side-feeder to the spectacular Ute Canyon in the Monument, provides a setting for random movement driven by impulse: gravity applies. Following the topography of the canyon wall, following the central wash, following contact lines between regimes. Returning when Light begins to fail. Full moon around now allows for easy navigation, but any cloud cover can seriously compromise safety of movement. Mind flows purely no matter the sensory setting. The reflecting process, that is, the mind’s perception of what is there is perhaps the source of the objective reality. But how could we tell otherwise? Finally, we will die for this knowledge/die with this knowledge.
Monday, 01 April, 1963
Left for Dallas & El Paso on AA 121 at 7:15 AM, arriving at 11:20 MST — Went on to El Paso where ELE met WZL, WW & I. We then drove up to Holloman AFB and met w/ Col. Asa Whitmire for 1-1/2 hours. He was a captain in the summer of 1945 — on the CPS-6 Project — it was pleasant to see him again — he said that Ed Snyder is at Sylvania. I’ll have to look him up.
Drove around Alamagordo after dinner.
Early fog
Up at 5:20 AM. LCH took me to L2, arriving at 6:30. The driver for L2 had been alerted for 6 AM, so on arriving at the AP, I had only a few minutes to spare, leaving on AA Nr. 121 for Phily, Balto, & Dallas.
Phoned John Zvara from Phila. to see if he can get Don Muirhead to put some stiffeners on the inside of the front middle panel o the new spkr enclosure — 1/2″ or 5/8″ plywood x 1-1/4″ or 1-1/2″ — on edge with screws & glue — to eliminate any mechanical vibration of the front panel. Hope this works! The scaffolding starts to come out tomorrow.
Up to Alamagordo in the PM — staying at the Desert Aire Motel.
Coyote, recently
Coyote picks a path of grace, given that without grace he wouldn’t survive a day in the desert. Between the spines on everything plant-like, and the sun, and the clear night-cold. It’s starvation country. Keeps the coat scruffy and the ribs right under the skin. Traverse this only by the grace of God. Traverse for his whole life, looking for sustenance. Never traversing any zenith. Day after day. On course with belly piloting. Keeping an inward smile, as though there is a forest of mint inside your jowls. An attitude. Smile, Coyote, smile. Laugh, Coyote, laugh.
Coyote laughs when he sees Two-foots rocketing along on their smelly flat paths. He even laughs while he races across those burning ways; laughs in the seconds of being eviscerated and shortly reduced to slushy goo by the howling and hungry beasts they ride. It’s the same goo in a slightly different form that they feed the fleet-footed beasts. They can’t eat, they can only drink, so whatever corporeal bodies they crave have to first be reduced to the liquid that they are greedy for. This process takes a long time. They search for ancient bodies, anything ancient, dead, and, by then, black, burns the nostrils. They do this by digging holes in the ground, looking desperately for smelly dead things. When they find them, they cook them down until they are clear, drinkable, and full of fire.
Coyote laughs more and more these days, as he watches the crowds of Two-feet spread across the land, digging for the dead, and killing each other in the process.
evolving spaces
An example of the sliding-scale metaphor I use often in teaching — that whatever dialectically opposed concepts (i.e., networks vs hierarchies) the actuality of the situation is that neither exist in a pure form, but instead exist always in hybrid collision of dynamic evolution — in this case, a net/archy. Another instance (see this):
Smooth space and striated space — nomad space and sedentary space — the space in which the war machine develops and the space instituted by the State apparatus — are not of the same nature. No sooner do we note a simple opposition between the two kinds of space than we must indicate a much more complex difference by virtue of which the successive terms of the oppositions fail to coincide entirely. And no sooner have we done that than we must remind ourselves that the two spaces in fact exist only in mixture: smooth space is constantly being translated, transversed into a striated space; striated space is constantly being reversed, returned to a smooth space. In the first case, one organizes even the desert; in the second, the desert gains and grows; and the two can happen simultaneously.
Deleuze, G., Guattari, F. & Massumi, B., 1988. A thousand plateaus : capitalism and schizophrenia, London: Athlone Press. p 475.
Talk of the Nation
This morning, listening to Talk of the Nation, hosted by Neal Conan with a program on the Colorado River from the Aspen Institute. I sent the following email part of which Neal ended up reading on air:
[Hi Neal!]
[Great topic, important to my life!]
I just spent 2 months traveling around Western Colorado, seeing the effects of this year’s especially intense drought, with rivers all down to August levels as early as April… A river is a crucial element in sustaining everything in the West, and most people just have no clue how crucial it really is!
[As someone who has spent years in the back country of Colorado (an alumni of the Colorado School of Mines and University of Colorado Boulder), I have always recommended that anyone living in the West read the book “Cadillac Desert” which explores the (disastrous!) history of water development in the West. Humans, as with any living organism, affect the surrounding environment. The Colorado River is no exception and has been brutally controlled and diverted, rendering in the long term an unsustainable system.]
Spend time on the Yampa River, the only uncontrolled tributary left in the Colorado system, and one sees immediately that a living (uncontrolled) river is so completely different from a controlled one!
John Wesley Powell suggested that the Western water problem could have been solved much easier if the geopolitical boundaries of cities, and states were drawn along watersheds rather than arbitrarily along other ways. Since it’s not the case, there are completely intractable legal issues around use, ownership, and sustainability of the whole system.
Cheers,
John
[I used my Melbourne sig file, so, I’m identified as “John from Australia” ;-]
The program was not so in depth, but Sandra Postel, one of the guests, is an articulate and focused advocate on global water issues. She’s one of the authors of Rivers For Life.
In Memory of W. B. Yeats
I
He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.
But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.
Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.
But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.
just the first of three stanzas, the latter two seemingly thinner than this first one. gloomy a bit, but the evident strength is marvelous.
Wednesday, 23 August, 1961
Early fog
Took car to Ford agent in Sussex, NB, who found dwell ok, the vacuum line bent badly. He fixed this, but it still heated. I set the timing back, twice but to no avail.
Stopped at 5:45 PM at the Bareadreu Trailer Park on Mt. Desert Island.
Tried again to find the Vine family, but didn’t again.
We may stay here tomorrow.
The Vine’s called after we had turned in.
movement (again) and storms
Morning air is diffuse and golden, a Light fog, perhaps from this event some 200 km away or so. Nothing like the Great Sydney Sandstorm of 2009, but nothing to trivialize either. If only humans would realize that the butterfly that made the storm is the self-same one that they startled from rest when ripping by on their ATV last weekend, celebrating hydrocarbon (inter)dependence in the desert.
… snip …
Movement ends up being a critical combination of idiosyncratic prognostication (what unknown lies ahead of me?) along with the repeated familiarity of bland acculturation (MacDonalds). The known and the unknown form a powerful dialectic in all life-trajectories, all movements. It is these two characteristics dominating individual presence in concert that carries us forward. Preparing to engage both change and the unknown relies on the clarity of present awareness, breadth of past experience, and the level of tolerance for existence in interstitial and autonomous zones. The preparations for movement include gathering enough knowledge and gathering enough things to ensure survival. The existence of known factors bolsters the potential for survival: otherwise questions like “where do we get gas?” and “where are we having dinner?” become overwhelming contraventions to even cursory local voyages of discovery. Not to mention “When are we going to get there?” This ranks very high along with “Where are we?” as being among the most problematic questions, raising high levels of existential angst in the Cartesian order. In the post-Cartesian it simply doesn’t matter!
interview with Niina: art & technology
Niina has been researching art and technology for some years now. We met when I was teaching my old netculture class at the Media Lab in the University of Art and Design Helsinki back in 2000. I participated in her research for her PhD then, and … now
Ei Niina — this is all I could manage, it’s impromptu, but honest, with a bit of humor mixed in… a little complicated, as there’s no time to write an essay about what world-view lies behind the answers. You might want to reference https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/pixel.html an article I wrote for Pixelache in Helsinki in 2007 — the same year I did a workshop there too https://www.neoscenes.net/projects/pixel/index.php
you could also check out:
https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and search on
https://neoscenes.net/blog/?s=network
or so…
even
https://neoscenes.net/blog/date/2001/11
> 1.What changes have happened in your work and practices as an artist during the
> last ten years? Do you think your relationship with technology / or the way you
> use technology /has changed during this time?
My practice has widened intensively to take on a tough challenge of the entire techno-social system we are embedded within, are part of. Yes, this includes my relationship AND my understanding of the relationship between all flows that are the substance of technology. This also includes all aspects of life governed by techno-social protocol. When I use (a) technology I understand what I will both lose and gain when using that particular protocol. Using a technology is in fact, a changing of flows of energy that we are embedded in, part of. We are not separate in any way from everything else!
along the road’s verge
A long roll through hard-core Sonoran desert, some heavily irrigated agricultural land, some military, some BLM, some National Forest, some private ranch lands, and so on. Most of it feeling the human hand and its divers prostheses. Not to mention the skies heavily clouded by seeded sky-worm trails swelling like strings of celestial popcorn.
heading back northeast: desert to mountain
road-trip
It’s been years since Gary and I were sitting in a car for a road-trip, but when he called me a few days ago saying he would be in Yuma and had to drive from there to the Bay area for a few days for some meetings, then back to Yuma, I figured, what the hell! We’ll head for Nancy & Steve’s place, and surprise Loki in the process. So, up extremely early for the four hour drive to Yuma. Pretty damn cold and plenty of snow on the road– moonset, icy fog, snow deep in the National Forest, until I drop down 3000 feet to the Sonoran Desert then it’s warmish and dry. Along with scenes of military-industrial development and other realities.
Meet Gary in a part of Yuma that is not on Google, 1000 yards from THE southern border. He had to talk me in — very strange place, hard-core crop-raising every other section line alternating with new or seemingly abandoned California-style suburbs. I drop my car at his friend’s place and we head out in a rent-a-car. West along the border, to the Salton Sea bypass (used to be only a rail access frontage, a bad one! Now it’s fully paved! Bizarre.) Gary and I had last been on this stretch of Interstate almost 35 years previous. I remember it was 125°F so we sat in a MacDonalds for several hours before going to camp near the sea. Between the flies, and the earth re-radiating copious amounts of IR energy all night, it was a bad night, then we drove straight on through to Orlando Florida in somewhere between 48 and 52 hours. But that’s another story.
We have a constant conversation from the moment we cross paths. Last time crossed paths was in Missouri last year, spring with Nick, Karen, and Deb. And before that, it was years. Although we’ve talked by phone every few months. So we talk our way past the Salton Sea, through Palm Springs, Yucaipa (used to live there ages ago), Riverside, Santa Clarita, over the Grapevine and gun barrel north on Interstate 5 to the I-650 Bay turn-off to Livermore. Surprised Loki.
more on control and autonomy
A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”
cafe ambience
Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3
February 18
L.A. notes, again . . . one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article . . . test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert . . . but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends don’t work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won’t make it . . . especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York . . . the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end—of anything.
Thompson, H.S., 1991. Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American dream, New York, NY: Pocket Books.
The narrative elsewhere in this blog lacks the edge that Thompson eventuated in his published works. Compact bursts of driving prose—the energy of which does not rely on the gonzo subject material—but instead brings directly to life the internal processes of be-ing and places them in direct juxtaposition with the madness of what’s out there. This is the trick: and it is precisely this trick, when the two flows are brought together, synthesized, and ultimately exposed to oxygen to be reduced and transformed into a sustenance for the human spirit.
That spirit is then taken to places it needs to go—not where the mutations of socialized comparison point it to, not where material consumption takes it, not where fear in all its phantasmal coloration deLights to compress the soul into. The soul needs to be able to expand, not contract. And it should have within itself a means to source for this infinite expansion. Should, would, could. For the infinite, there are no means, there is only the denominated will of the spirit—which, in the end, forces a division by zero.
And that’s an illegitimate operation. As is Gonzo generally.
Wanderlust
I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work, and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. — Rebecca Solnit
Solnit, Rebecca (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books.
It’s hard to brightly imagine that when we decide to retreat to the desert or to the mountains to walk, it is a process deeply colored and, literally, in/de-formed by relatively recent cultural contingency.
The retreat is steeped in a socially constructed reality that began to emerge around William Wordsworth and J. J. Rousseau’s time and was sparked, in part, by their actual perambulations and especially the writings that welled-up whilst they were on the road (The Excursion, by Wordsworth, for example, and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker).
But in a completely different sense, walking (and be-ing while walking) is ahistoric. Because the present moment is never to be repeated, nor is a life-time to happen twice, the momentary events of that particular movement are unique, and uniquely inspiring. Embodied movement is a passage through the flux of difference, regardless of the pathway. And although I cannot anymore go to the delicious extremes of span and height and endurance that so many others have done and will do, it is not extremity that brings the timeless essence of movement. When all is change, the senses are taught to discern the minute difference of the everyday, ever more. In this, the near becomes just as exotic and inspiring as the far and less reachable places.
the fluidity of leaking
What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.
The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”
From The Regime of Amplification to The Road
[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”
The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming
ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Because of the heavy-duty editorial tasks, I otherwise didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!
We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even secret pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism
This volume Migrating:Art:Academies: represents yet another step on the (linguistic) migration from nation to nation, academy to academy, culture to culture, friend to friend, order to order, life through life. As with the first volume, Migrating Realities, any impossible contortions of English are this editor’s responsibility, and given the time constraints for this latest MigAA tome, there are sure to be some short-comings. But then, of all the movements within the social, language migrates the most of all. It is never static. Nor should it be, especially as it accompanies the learning process — a process which is essentially about encountering and naming that which is not (yet) known. more “The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming”
turbulent
Public transport to the airport in the rain. Portland has a close-to-German system running between trams, buses, streetcars, and suchlike. A change of planes in Salt Lake gives a view of the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Wendover stomping grounds on the way in, along with the nasty and turbulent winds. The next hop to Denver goes right over Echo Park. Weather on the Front Range delays us in a holding pattern over Rocky Mountain National Park. Those peaks are all too close! On the ground, full-blown summer afternoon thunderstorm patterns are in play. With the full moon rising over the eastern plains. Look at those clouds!
Sand Canyon transect
Try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a $10K investment, or more.
Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, in the rain, but gradually it tapers off, though still very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll surely end up in a ditch somewhere.
more “Sand Canyon transect”
back on the road
Transit of Utah. From west to east, along a winding trajectory from desert to forest to desert, oil drilling, wind power, gas stations, Mormon farms, gold mines, high-security military bases, municipal alarm towers scattered across the landscape — for warning the population surrounding the bases where testing of bio- and chemical-warfare devices is ongoing — warning them of impending disaster. Continuing on the isolated Pony Express Trail, then descending into populated areas. Calling ahead to Dinosaur to see about road conditions. Plenty of snow on the Uintahs, plenty! At the last minute after checking out the Green River campground on the Utah side, I get word that the Echo Park road is open. So, gas up, including the extra tank, and head in from Jensen. Excellent weather, and finally arriving, no one else around, very good. Get the pick of the few camp spaces, #5, 7, and 9 are the best for shade, seclusion, and access to firewood — though shade is not the issue at this time of year, more important would be the access to morning sunshine to warm up — but since there’s no one else around, I can use the #6 picnic table in full sun in the morning for breakfast. So, I take #7 and offload/set-up quickly: already charged at being here once again…
CLUI residency — Energy of Situation
Some final words on the residency period:
Energy of Situation
Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).
Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”
CLUI: Day Twelve — Silver Island Mountains
Neal makes it in from London after last weeks aborted attempt from having the flu.
A loop north around the Silver Island Mountains paralleling the Bonneville Salt Flats traces many textures of rock, sky, and the interface between. Numerous forays away from the truck into the landscape, looking at everything, smelling everything, hearing … nothing … or so. The space vehicle rumbles onward on the bad road. Bad road. All bad roads lead away from, further away from, Rome.
Leave the car, be here now. The desert commands that (or the fearful response, deny here now, and insulate the embodied self from any manifestation of here, get back to the car, now).
Turning to the west at the north end of the mountain fault-block, I am suddenly met by five huge white Maremma (or Great Pyrenees?) sheep dogs, each over 100 pounds, ready to shred whatever fleshly appendages might be protruding from the truck. They were guarding a sizable flock of sheep who were busy razing the already marginal winter foliage. gah, why they allow sheep farming up here, I’ll never know—the BLM’s “multi-use” philosophy destroying what land cover there is left in this place. The circuit continues across the playa from Pilot Peak and on to Leppy Pass and a human installation.
(Ed. note — have solved the image gallery as you can see. Seems to be relatively glitch-free and less work than my previous solutions. This is one image from a number — Pennsylvanian-Permian-aged lime/mud-stones, highly contorted. Do hope to get all of them up from this trip so far, sooner than later. But there is so much code to do for that — I still haven’t settled on a means to display images on this blog — there are several pre-packaged plug-ins for WordPress in this regard, but I haven’t decided. Not going to Flickr things nor use Facebook as the data management and control is passed off to those cloud services (not to mention the perverse End-User Licensing Agreement terms). The travelog blog means was good, but the file structure of WordPress does not lend itself to any automation if I use that older technique, and I desperately want to get out of the manual compilation work that I have been doing all along. It’s incredibly time consuming and easily bunged-up with (simple) code errors. Ach, as this site evolves into its 16th year, it remains something of a millstone, given the relative paucity of traffic (1 – 2,000 hits a day total).
CLUI: Day Ten — transit
A forced migration to the Holy City of Moroni. Tire issues—the damaged rear cycle rim from the red clay mishap in southern Utah and the front-end alignment of the truck. Locate appropriate places to effect the repairs before coming over. A monstrous wind from the south dogs the transit across the flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert on I-80 and whips up a blinding dust storm in the middle and at the eastern fringe at the Kennecott Copper mine’s massive tailings dump.
Salt Lake City is quiet, wide empty streets, pedestrians are frequently toting suitcases-on-wheels. There are bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crosswalks with baskets at either terminus with fluorescent flags for folks to carry when crossing.
Retreat when the work is done and after lousy lunch Reuben at The Bakery. Retreat looks like this (yes, cars and trucks in my lane do retreat forwards, I am, it seems, the slowest car on the road):
CLUI: Day Seven — shorelines
Aim for the nearest topological features to the south, some small intrusives, an isolated fault block, likely, rhyolitic basalts of some sort (with some peridotites or greenstones possibly?). Lake Bonneville paleo-shorelines are visible, with a prominent one slicing the hills like a poorly-made isometric topo model. The hills are technically on the Air Force test range, but I disregard the signs (parking behind some low hills across the road in order not to attract attention).
Definitely a different regime than, say, the Sonoran desert. Here, the land seems more sterile and has only very low scrub, most less than a foot high. Low or black sagebrush (Artemisia), salt brush (Atriplex), rabbit brush, black brush, tumbleweed (Salsola pestifera), and a handful of other species are thinly scattered, with either desert varnish, pebbly sand, or the occasional small colony of cryptobiotic soil. Can’t really tell if this lack is a direct result from severe overgrazing (this is, after all, BLM land) or just a harsh (colder, drier!) regime here compared to the relatively abundant biota of the Sonoran.
Plenty of evidence of other human intrusions on top of the igneous stuff that these hills are made of. Bullet casings, scraps of glass and metal everywhere, bullet holes in anything worth shooting at. Two mines have burrowed into the earth, leaving debris, holes, and mounds, a refrigerator with major firearm damage, a twisted bike frame, and the shattered glass crunching underfoot.
The hills are much larger than they initially appear, a frequent phenomena in a landscape without the normal metrics for scale (trees and human structures). A great view in all directions from the top.
A lake shore sand deposit in the form of a light tan mudflat attracts my attention on the talus-skiing descent, as it is bisected by the old roadbed which exhibits the typical roadbed riparian affect — with visibly larger brush on either side of the eroding pavement — the direct affect of the slight concentration of runoff precipitation. Walking here in the flats one feels … exposed … as the occasional mining truck speeds by a mile or so away. The only relief among short sage brush are the holes dug by coyotes into smaller varmit holes, now that would be something to watch! Good for spraining an ankle if step is not watched closely. The only other difference are the widely scattered aluminum beer cans, mostly effaced of any markings by the brutal sun, sitting pell-mell in the sand.
I notice later that the Nikon has more crap on the CCD, about which nothing can be done — you can see two spots in the lower left center of the images. My irritation with this camera system increases as the years go by. I am constantly astonished at the poor quality of the lens, along with the dirt accumulation on the CCD — it’s a closed system, for god’s sake, how does it keep getting dirty? I don’t even take the lens off, ever! I think the Canon system is superior both optically and technologically. But nothing to be done about it, unless I decide against getting a new laptop and instead get a new camera. Ach, I get tired of technology!
Clui: Day Five — tangential contact
In the sonic realm, this part of the western desert (the spatial extent defined by precipitation at least) seems, at first, quiet. Stepping out of the car after a bruising day of fighting the wheel, ah, only the susurration of blood pumping in the ears. But, despite this initial impression, human intrusion in the western desert is never silent. The ambient pre-human sonic domain is defined by a few animals making occasional signals “I am here.” Ravens and coyotes are perhaps the noisiest, with others following in a rapidly declining decibel range. Wind is mostly, literally, in the ear of the beholder as a register of turbulent flow around the aural orifice but occasionally one is in a place where the wind makes some secondary sound (in a riparian regime, in seasonal leaves, or whistling around a certain rock formation, but these are rare and difficult to record without exceptional and expensive equipment). Otherwise, then, there is only the human incursion. This incursion is typically related to the movement of those intrusive humans through the domain as few have the desire to stop and actually hear silence. The few who volunteer or are forced to stop for a longer time are not necessarily prone to sonic disturbances, though that group, as a whole, are dominated by willing or unwilling participants in the military-industrial machine. The balance, a small remainder, are likely seeking the silence. The members of the machine make plenty of noise via everything from weapon systems testing to mining to toxic waste incineration, but access to these secretive sonic sources are for the select, not the transitory rabble.
Those engaged in field recording are left with the experience of tangential contact. That is, functioning as a stationary point, recording the arrival and departure of a nearby transport vector — trains, planes, and cars. Given the proper conditions, especially the lack of wind, these can make interesting (and startling) recordings. Trucks may be heard many miles away and render an impossibly slow Doppler shifting that is also modulated by differential density and velocity metrics of the intervening air. Planes are often more difficult as the most dramatic contact is with the low-flying fighter aircraft which will show up practically without warning and are so loud that recording is impossible. The db peak of that tangential contact pegs the meter. Before the air-to-ground missiles are launched at you, the target, and field incursions become moot.
So, what to do? Muddle along. Hit the casinos. Though I’ve been tossed out of those in the distant past for making photographs, the H4 Zoom looks suspicious, so I think it also will attract attention from security for sure. Ach.