posted
  • place: Margaretville, New York

ski house

Skittles lounging around on the poof: yet another visit to the ski house. A slightly different crowd, but the same nice vibe. A little bit of new snow, and a leisurely day of putzing, and writing.

But then, later, googling boggle? Finding that one Allan Turoff was the inventor of the game, and he died in his 40’s from some disease.

Shit, just goes to show you.

Then the task of optimizing Bill’s digital office work flow. Interesting procedure. Keeps me swamped with mental and actual data/device organizing for a week.

posted
  • place: Köln, Germany

netart 2007 – Feraltrade

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich https://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

An honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call:

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

posted
  • place: Lübeck, Germany

e-culture and good food

Over in Lübeck, meet miga and then head to lunch with Andreas at Nui which I remember from the teaching at ISNM before. Had to get some outline of what is happening to the slowly sinking Titanic and what is required from me when I do a short course on e-culture in the spring.

Content: This seminar will explore the entire global regime of the trans-disciplinary field called “e-culture” as an intersection of digital technologies and cultural practices. Using case-studies to find out what is working and what is not, we will examine the technologies that most affect this sector, the political and economic policies that form it, and the social systems where it finds its place. As one model for the engagement of “new media’ technologies and social systems, “e-culture,” along with the “Creative Industries,” are the scene for much innovation, research, hype, and media reportage. This seminar will hunt for some truth by examining specific situations, precedent, technological infrastructures, and current trends.

Key phrases include: infotainment; web 2.0; economics of attention; locative media; wearable computing; technology globalization; media research; reception, storage, and transmission of culture; creative industries; cultural patrimony; cultural computing; corporate culture; jobs?; non-governmental organizations (NGO’s); ubicomp (ubiquitous computing); e-government; society of spectacle; globalization/dislocation of culture; Ikea for the Art Market; European Union effects; Soros Centers; networking; creative action; Road Warriors; First or Second Life?; the Finnish Model; future scenarios; borders and cultural difference; collaborative presences; and so on.

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

African Feedback

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.

and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany
  • author: Sarah Chung

Sarah Chung

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: https://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
https://www.neoscenes.net
https://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
https://www.pierrebastien.com/
https://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
https://www.mutek.org/
https://www.haamu.com/launau
https://www.colleenplays.org/
https://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Uni-see

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

The Wild Surmise

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father, a senior Pentagon analyst, sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitoes, and dark star-brilliant skies. more “The Wild Surmise”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

grandaddy

Helping Uncle Al get his image archive in order and safely backed-up. Seeing histories of people. Many of them gone. They were once lively teens, twenty-somethings, young parents, in the late 1930’s and 40’s. Wondering how it was that he was using German (Agfa) films well into the 1940’s even during the war. Here’s gran-daddy, John Malcolm Mackenzie, at the Somerville house in 1938. The particular quality of the hand-developed film with very high silver content gives the images a special luminosity even in the digital scanned versions. Contact printing these negatives on Azo #1 paper would be quite nice. But Kodak no longer manufactures that paper, or anything else, for that matter. Time passes.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

ubicomp

Inane story on NPR, dancing around the hype of ubiquitous computing (still?) — With the installation of a network of sensors on house plants that will send wifi info to their owner about their condition.

Who sets up this network? Who maintains it? Who interacts with it? When and why is it interacted with? Under what conditions is it necessary to interact with it? Or is it ever necessary to interact with it? Those people who are so interested in spreading digital networks somehow forget the necessity of manufacturing, deployment, installation, configuration, and, especially, maintenance. Not to mention the actual (life-)time necessary to interact with the data being gathered, tweaking it if necessary (or even possible) into a form that is understandable and usable to the idiosyncratic self, NOT the generic Everyman (who is the Grail of the data collectors).

These questions point back to the cultural (d)evolution which mandates a rolling over of systems from localized individual control to a centralized social command-and-control. Now, a big argument used by the ubicomp community is that the existence of these networks liberates the localized Everyman from the drudgery of some localized chore or another. Watering house plants, in this case. But there is a hidden factor — the subsequent reliance of the individual on the centralized system of production and (standardized control) — which creates and deploys these devices. It costs money to have these devices. And the greater the deployment, the larger the social infrastructure necessary to produce and deploy these devices and systems. Think, for example, of the mining and basic industry that provides the raw materials that go into the construction of the machines used to make and deliver the devices. The individual consequently must be participating in this larger system in order to receive the device. To participate in that system requires a payment of (life-)time (converted in the grind of social production to cash). So the (life-)time freed-up by the device is more than consumed by the (life-)time drawn from the individual in this general participatory process. Think of working at a long-term job so that you have the long-term income to pay for the apartment where you have the house plants. Stability is a core value here to consider here as well — without long-term stability (a stable environment), exotic house plants are imperiled. To have house plants assumes this long-term stability (which the social system relies on!). So not only is this further reliance on the deployed ubicomp system NOT about liberation — it is the opposite — it is about a subtle enslavement to a greater social system for which instability is anathema. The drawing-off of the lifetime (and life energy) of the individual into that social system is the primary source of power for the centralized social system.

All of this is on a sliding scale. But assuming that condition, there likely is a certain tipping point where one might go too far and not have the possibility of retrieving individual autonomy. Where is this point? Have we reached it? Clearly it is different in different social systems, despite the healthy state of global systems which draw their energy from widely-dispersed humans. Tolerance for autonomy is different in different socio-cultural systems. Intolerance for instability is generally higher in more organized systems (which came first, the need for organization or the intolerance for instability and dis-order?)

posted
  • place: Rushcutters Bay, Australia

fried day

Superstitious or what? Dawning like other days. Up at the crack of (early to sleep after perusing some Plato (The Symposium)). Birds cranking away. No particular breeding time, apparently when it rains it means raucous amorousness. No rain, but just the arrival of daytime. Something to crow about.

Jumping around today. Met one faculty member at COFA, then on downtown to meet Ian Gwilt over at the University of Technology. Catching up and mapping out the states/conditions/problematics of university educational institutions among other issues. There’s a nice exhibition of large-scale portrait prints at the UTS:Gallery (digital prints, I wonder — very sensuous paper surfaces) from Jon Lewis of images he made in Bougainville. And later, meeting Anna, finally, to have the beginning of a more long-term conversation. There was one point that we skimmed across — the idea of setting up a consulting framework for corporate advising — because the problems in any social structure may be the same. Academic, corporate, creative, politic. And so on. Beginning to expand the scope of foot-travel, changing routes, checking things out slowly. Still have not internalized any form of orientation. The harbor lies east-west, and there are a variety of towering office and apartment blocks, and the downtown skyline. But the topography is contorted and wrinkled like the Coast Range immediately south of San Francisco proper, and so, no easy sights to maintain. With only a one-page Google printout of the immediate neighborhood, the mapping-dependent side of orienteering is limited. Get lost. That and get to the beach. Tomorrow. Bondi. Or bust.

Now and then — but this is rare — one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from the lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been Home — as the native reverently and lovingly calls England — know better. It is ‘costermonger.’ All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid y is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. — Mark Twain in The Birth of Sydney

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki - Turku - Helsinki, Finland

Digitally Yours

rising too early again, out to Turku with a few hard-cores to tour the exhibition Digitally Yours that Andy Best had curated. not enough sleep. even our tireless Pixelache host, Juha, was unable to roll out of bed in time for the train, so it ended up there were only five of us who actually made the trip, but it was well worth it.

begin to get a migraine after seeing the show at the Ars Nova museum — most of the artists were there, so we were able to interact with them directly. I recorded several of the talks, so, hope to get that online shortly. great also to have a bit of time to spend with Mukul and Manu with their deLightful boy.

Digitally Yours examines the relationship between technology and humanity. The exhibition maps out how everyday life and art have changed over the period when digital technologies have become commonplace. The artists in the exhibition all use digital technologies but their relationship to it is critical. They consider the relationship between man and machine, the dreams and promises, the realities and threats. The works in the exhibition ponder the fundamental questions of humanity in this globalized information networked world, while building on a new type of collaboration between the artist and the viewer.

Animaatiokone Industries (FI); Laura Beloff (FI) & Erich Berger (AT); Elina Mitrunen (FI); Chris Burden (US); Anita Fontaine (AU/US); Phil Coy (UK); Ed Burton (UK) & Zachary Lieberman (US); Juha Huuskonen (FI) & Tuomo Tammenpää (FI); Manu Luksch (AT/UK) Christian Nold (UK); Stanza (UK); Soda (UK); Markus Renvall (FI); Åsa Ståhl (SE) & Kristina Lindström (SE); Pia Tikka (FI)

on the way back, I get off before Helsinki to have dinner with David and Maria at their new place in the countryside. unfortunately, my head it really done in by then, so, I’m hardly good company. David drives me to Linnunlaulu where I finish packing. the migraine dissipates somewhat and I am able to go to the closing party for an hour to say goodbye to folks. then off to crash for another even earlier rise and 26 hours of travel torture.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : info

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

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

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

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

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

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

PARTICIPANT PROFILE:

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

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

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

TO APPLY:

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

THE DETAILS:

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

There will be a substantial exploration of the subjects of:

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

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

In the search for Architectures of Participation, the workshop:

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

Bio for John Hopkins:

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

Brought to you by:

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

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : call for participation

Call for Workshop Applicants:

Remote Presence: Streaming Life

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

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

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

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

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

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

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

For detailed information visit:

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

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

THE WORKSHOP IS FREE OF CHARGE.

Those interested will need to send:

NAME:

LOCATION:

EMAIL:

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

neopixel@pixelache.ac

DEADLINE for Applications 5 March 2007.

posted
  • place: en route Soquel - Santa Cruz - Santa Barbara, California

clickety-clack

Long day yesterday starts with packing up, more conversations around breakfast, and then on to UCSC to meet with Margret, chair of the Digital Arts / New Media program. Good sushi for lunch. That and a couple of fine muffins that Isabelle packed for the ride south, alright! Arrived in Santa Barbara after a longish drive down the 101 — slowly getting acclimated to the car culture, though with some guilt feelings about carbon footprints and all. No time to do the legendary Route 1. Met August at UCSB in a dark parking lot and were in good time for a presentation by Takuro Mizuta Lippit, one of the Artistic Directors at STEIM. Cool to be reminded of the vitality of euro-culture while far-away here in SoCal.

arts birthday comes up in a few hours…

posted
  • place: Livermore, California

back to work

hanging out with the family. Dana is the initial portrait for the New Year’s project — a return to the work that I dropped in the interim between stopping with black&white 35mm film-based and getting the new Nikon D200 SLR which makes that work once again possible. in between, a hiatus of six years, while having access to a variety of digital cameras, the serious lack of one critical feature made my work impossible. that feature is the near-instantaneous synchronization of the shutter — when the shutter-release button is pressed the shutter goes without hesitation. the D200 is the first digital cam that I’ve had where there is no delay. that millisecond delay in cheaper cams makes the difference between the picture and a wasted shot. it’s all about synchronicity between my eyes, the collaborative subject, and the mediatory machine.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

vholoce

another Furtherfield review:

All phenomenon have the potential of being converted into infinite data-streams which become an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organize social behavior.

Vholoce is one project in a long line of projects which seeks to creatively engage the ubiquitous data-streams that are flooding our virtual world. The rising flood of data is useless without sensible display. Visual (and sonic) display of digital data is a fundamental contemporary issue. But what is sensible display? Using a data stream as a basically random source for visual display is one way to play with the stream. The syntax of visual display (possibly) becomes the site for expression by the creative producer. The data-stream source, the method of (and reason for) display, and the overall creative process need to be interrogated in order to find the basis for type of digital engagement.
more “vholoce”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Bruce Elder

blast not having a digital copy of this essay, but as it is one that I use in teaching on occasion, and one that brilliantly explores the spiritual dimension of the alienation of the age we are stepping through — so I type it by hand from the catalog printed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York on the occasion of a screening of Elder’s Book of All the Dead in November 1988. I was not present at that screening, but was at the prior premiere of the first 18 hours of the 40+ hour cycle which happened in the Film Studies building at CU-Boulder. there were just three of us who sat through the whole weekend event in an ancient classroom in the now-razed Film Studies Building. a handful of others made parts of the reel-after-reel intensity. it was a transformative experience — from the simple physical immersion that 18 hours of film induced, but also the visual energy from the work itself, and the intellectual rigor that was embedded into the narrative and visual contents. it has resonated for years as a source. neoscenes dreaming and the performative visual-sonic works that came around that impulse owe something deep and intangible to the Book of All the Dead. I was deLighted that Bruce assented to my hosting of the essay, adding to the small collection of ‘third-party‘ essays replicated for interest and convenience.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

ghs 1976

Working out. In a room with others, loudish 1970’s rock music playing. Does this fit the demographic? Sweating. I climb the same number of floors in the World Trade Center. 110 in 25 minutes. Sweating. 275 calories apparently. Listening to Prairie Home Companion on the way home, there is strange background music playing for one song. Turns out it is my new phone, incoming call. Don’t know the ringtone yet. Static floods the radio when I park in the Frys lot, there is a radiostatic hole around there — no doubt related to the high-voltage lines crossing the land nearby and a massive switching sub-station across the street. And maybe a cosmic convergence. When I get home I erase Kevin’s home and cell number from my old phone. But what about his old address in my database? Leave the name, but erase the address? the phone? The plight of external memory in remembering and forgetting. Better to allow meatspace memory take over instead of archival databases. Especially when remembering those who have passed. My embodied memory of him. But then there is the issue of the painting archive. Digital? Rather look at the painting themselves. Have one sitting in the bedroom, a purple wave.

On the phone with friends who generously input into the choices coming up shortly. I seek energy from my network in this time of change, of possibility.

On the occasion of the upcoming thirtieth reunion — beginning to process and upload the scanned images from Gaithersburg High School, graduating class of 1976. As the main yearbook photographer, I ended up with several hundred negatives from that year. At that time, many of the negatives were not printed for technical and other reasons. Now, though, it’s pretty easy to scan negatives and make a decent image with Photoshop. So, a couple months ago I scanned around 400 of the images.

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

polar/solar crossing #1

the last day, more lunches, meetings, panels, and sessions. of multiple form, but with threads of connection throughout. that’s the core thread, or simply the core: people. the structure of most of the collective events is the usual podium-stage-screen-VIP-amplification (who was chosen for social and real amplification?). I am only interested in the granular micro individual un-amplified events.

Steve provides this nice image from a small polar/solar path crossing in Caesar Chavez Park in downtown San Jose.

the SoundCulture presentation with Ed Osbourne, Shawn Decker, and Nigel Helyer … where the organization SoundCulture aims to be a trans-disciplinary, trans-regional, pro-actively critical platform for sound art …

sound is field-like … fluidity … formlessness … nomadic and transient … sonic everywhere (related to Light … because it is another manifestation of field energy)

sound in spaces … how to solve (or use) spatial pervasiveness of sound …

sound is one of the first inter-media areas, linking multiple practices and media

sound is vibration and relies on material

sound as environment — sustainability & architecture

sound and music — hearing and technologies, but what about music and sound difference …

comments:

overlooked as field; eye is master, ear is slave; architecture going backwards; plus sound-specific work isn’t always that way … music — the 500-pound gorilla in the room; electroacoustic; sound vs composition, etc. I commented on the possible parallels in the development of photography-as-art-form and the subsequent isolation it faced as materially-defined art form, and then a gradual realization as the digital began to make headway into its domain that photography was just another way to put a 2-D mark on paper.

finally catch up with Tapio as well, for a bit of conversation time.

head home before the SOFA street party really gets underway. don’t have the energy to keep on with it. carrying a bunch of equipment is an anchor. so, after filming some of the Latino concert action in the convention center with Amanda and Sophea, I head back to the car and the commute up 680 to Livermore.

posted
  • place: Glen Ridge, New Jersey

swim meet

we all head down to the Glen Ridge community pool for Evon’s first swim meet where he’s stoked for the 25-yard free-style. the first pictures with the Nikon D200 are clunky and … ill-composed. 6 years of shooting video — sonic & moving visual — so different from using a SLR camera. simple things like the 3:2 image ratio vs the video 4:3 ratio make a big difference, along with the limitation of having only one shot, and no sound. at least the camera works like a film-based SLR in that it actually takes the picture when you hit the shutter-release. none of that annoying delay as with cheap point-and-shoot digital cameras. but the size is a bit daunting as is the sheer number of buttons and menu items.

posted
  • place: en route West Elk Wilderness - Bailey Creek, San Juan National Forest, Colorado

long high day

floating through a high country day. mountain bike ride after breakfast. up to the trail head into the West Elk Wilderness. back out, Sage keeping pace even on the downhills. pack up and make the circle around the north rim of the Black Canyon, and down through Delta. saw a gal parked having a picnic. single bike on the rear rack, like me. wondered about how one crosses paths. make a stop at the Ute Indian Museum.

it’s far from present Ute lands, and most of Colorado was once populated by one or another bands of Utes who are now reduced to three small reservations in Colorado and Utah. another dreadful history of crimes against humanity. are we really better than that now?

seek wisdom, not knowledge. knowledge is of the past, wisdom is of the future.

to go on a vision quest is to go into the presence of the Great Mystery.

the soul will have no rainbow if the eye has no tear.

another stop at the Gunnison National Forest main office to check out any information they might have, as well as inquiring about jobs. looks like everything is through the JobsUSA website. one path to travel. have to look into that again when online next. Ridgeway seems interesting again, with some commercial buildings for sale. question is, what to do in these small towns to survive? could computer consulting work? construction is no longer an option with the L5 disk acting up, could be major trouble in the near future. website construction? teaching high school? vocational tech? uff. re-forming trajectories seems at the same time daunting and full of possibility. how can it be problematic when so many others are employed? and so many have managed to gather so much capital in this country. but the path between scraping poor-ness and abundant wealth seems so … arbitrary. there is no clear specifications except for self-confidence.

end the day almost at tree line, up Bailey Creek, off Lizard Head Pass in the San Juan National Forest. the luxury of dispersed camping (finding places up 4×4 roads that are not developed, but make excellent camp sites) is appreciated. no cost, only fuel to get there, and that expense suggested that instead of an immediate return to Prescott, that I take several days and enjoy being back in Colorado and check out several new places. in Curecanti Creek, I saw only one car in two days, and up this rugged route, doubt I’ll see anyone until I head out and down and south west tomorrow. feeling a little guilty being out of phone range, but have no messages except one from Gary, so, figure all is well in the greater telecom world. make a short video of sunset on a nearby peak. and in the process of reviewing the tape after finishing it, I discover that all the footage that I shot of Kevin’s memorial in NYC in March had that effing bad audio. really disgusting — Bill, Stefan, Martha, Rosemary, and others talking about their memories of Kevin. the glitch seems due to bad mike contacts, or a dirty record head. it pops up randomly, and has affected some other critical footage previously. and the pondering on the idea of getting a 3-ccd hd prosumer cam comes back up and/or a Nikon prosumer digital still camera. what else to do with capital? shopping is a dumb way to make a cash flow (negatively). better to keep the investments growing and multiplying. and purchase only items that can definitely be positive cash generators.

whatever the end result, work is the next necessary step to confront. that and the June 18th Month of Sundays performance. finishing up with the house, packing things in a way that maintains some viability to several pathways of action. but meanwhile, watch the sky and the land.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

famous fantastic mysteries

worldly remains floating through networks. shut down most incoming stuff several weeks ago. mailing lists, discussion lists. too much input. material purging via ebay. helping Uncle Al get rid of all his sci-fi ‘zines from the 40’s and 50’s — he was expecting to get a dime for each copy. so far, I’m averaging $5 for each one. seems to be a market. we’ll split the profits. it’s a hell of a lot of work, scanning in the (often VERY interesting) covers, and getting it all ready for auction, but fascinating as well. wishing to have all the stories as digital pdf’s but that would require the destruction of the volume (staple bindings and fragile paper). Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Poul Anderson, John Brunner, Damon Knight, Lester del Rey, John Christopher, Clifford Simak, Fritz Leiber, Cyril Judd, Willie Ley, and on and on. each volume with several of these and other luminaries, cranking out their visions of the future of the burgeoning post-war science-driven society. strange planets, but familiar problems. heroes and half-naked (or half-space-suited) ladies. but always a clean future with simple solvable problems, that is, if science is brought to bear as a passive-but-dominant element of the social situation. the stories are less timeless than some works of fiction because of this expansive naivete of that time and its specific vision, but reading deeper than that, a few have substance that holds up to the 60 years fallen away from Imperial cowboy beginnings.

He had no way of knowing that just as there are winds that blow through space, so there are winds that blow through time. Such winds may be strong or weak. The strong ones are rare and seldom blow for short distances, or more of us would know about them. What they pick up is almost always whirled far into the future or the past. …

… Sometimes we may be blown about by whimsical time winds without realizing it. Memory, for example, is a tiny time breeze, so weak that it can ripple only the mind. … — Fritz Leiber

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

VisitorStudio

Furtherfield subset Furthernoise VisitorsStudio is the place. A Flash-based live-online visual-sonic collaborative platform developed at furtherstudio by Neil Jenkins. Roger Mills organized a test run with nine artists from Europe and US to come together today for a sequence of individual and collaborative performances in preparation for events later in June. Somehow, in the juggling of files in preparation, there are grim traces of current states of mind: in extremis.

Furthernoise is an online platform for the creation, promotion, criticism and archiving of innovative cross genre music and sound art for the information & interaction of the public and artists alike.

Furthernoise encourages new methodologies and practices in creating adventurous music and sound that is not bound by the constraints of historically experimental genres. We showcase artists work through critical reviews & features as well organising performances and events on the internet as well as public venues and galleries.

&

Furtherfield creates imaginative strategies that actively communicate ideas and issues in a range of digital & terrestrial media contexts; featuring works online and organising global, contributory projects, simultaneously on the Internet, the streets and public venues. Furtherfield focuses on network related projects that explore new social contexts that transcend the digital, or offer a subjective voice that communicates beyond the medium. Furtherfield is the collaborative work of artists, programmers, writers, activists, musicians and thinkers who explore beyond traditional remits.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Contaminations

long-time digital artist and writer Joseph Nechvatal updates me about his exhibition Contaminations in the Beecher Center of the Butler Institute of American Art in Youngstown, Ohio. By programming randomized computer viruses which interact with the structure of a digital image, Nechvatal explores the dynamic and metaphoric interrelation between healthy host and the contaminations and mutations of viral attack. given the current excited state of global epidemic both virtual and carnal, these re-presentations exploring that intersection are especially relevant.

posted
  • place: en route Prescott, Arizona - Glen Ridge, New Jersey

habitudes

On the road. It’s been nine months exactly since arriving in Prescott. And aside from the short tour with Christian, been stuck there the whole time. I have to go back a couple decades, maybe more since the last time I was in locare habilus for such duration without boarding a plane. Imbibing of this life in the middle class. Planes instead of buses or trains. Flying cattle. This time of rehabilitation has worn me down at the same time as charging me up. Time to look at projects done over the last decade, documentation, rooting trough the mail-art archive. That busyness of postal creativity and networking. Thinking it woulda’ (coulda’, shoulda’) been nice to have made good documentation of the many events and projects that went down in that process: too late. Gone. Digital archive will not survive the EMP of nuclear war, but that seems so foreign a concept, that the world will witness an instant catastrophe. More like a gradual poisoning of the environment.

Was reflecting on the dis-connectedness of this blog (ugh!) from the blogosphere. How the blogosphere is extremely self-referent and only occasionally populated by strong individual voices.

Ahhh, making a cross-connection between nodes in my personal network. Very satisfying, when there are inspiring results. Or simply good energy flowing. What more could a networker ask for? But to initiate pathways where the chances of flow are much higher than random. yes-sir-ee.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

thots

so on. scanning all sorts of crap into the archive so I can continue to liquidate hard-copy. thinking about shopping. thinking about film-based photography, thinking about digital photography, thinking about video, thinking about cars, thinking about moving. thinking about stopping, thinking about flying, thinking about sitting. thoughts over done on being stationary. thoughts about work. what is possible, what is not. maybe all is still possible. doesn’t look like that, except when one runs into one of those supremely un-qualified jerks making money for nothing (and the chicks fer free). so, everything is still possible.

Sarah decides to apply to KHIB, hope that goes well. I send out information to the network to aid in the process. networking.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

response to Lev

sotto voce: Some comments (on the nettime post from Lev Manovich, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 – his text snips in yellow)…

We Have Never Been Modular…

but we have agreed-upon standards via political hegemony, pressure of dominant ideas, and participating in the easy consumption of ‘whatever works’. And since standards underlie the concept of modularity, I’m afraid that I disagree unless you are talking about another collective “we” that is represented by the demographic you are addressing and are member of.

Thanks to everybody who commented on my text “Remix and Remixability” (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the excitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am “following the mainstream view” in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture…

And it is worth mentioning that none of those ideas are remotely sourced in digital technologies — they are constructed on the entire precursor socio-technical infrastructure of engineering in general. digital technologies are a ‘final’ product of a long and continuous development process of standardization that started when Empire (or collective social life) was born.

Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other – i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for…

From an engineering point of view, modularity is a subsequent process result following the necessary precursor: the development of standards.

As a simple anecdote, I recall traveling across Europe in the early 80’s. When crossing a border, say, between Italy and Germany, or France and Germany, aside from the ritual rubber-stamping of the passport (and occasional body searches, but that’s another story), one was aware that suddenly, when before the streets were full of Renaults, Citroens, and Peugeots, they were now filled with VWs, Mercedes, and BMWs. To such a degree that if you saw a Citroen Deux Cheveaux puttering around in Bavaria — a car I occasionally had in those days — you would invariably honk and wave (at the ‘hippies’). The currency changed, the language changed (obviously), the places for money exchange shifted, the electric plugs morphed, the telephone rings, cables, and plugs changed. Distance didn’t unless one crossed the Channel where temperature, length, weight, currency divisions, and volume changed to absurdly baffling non-decimal fractions. The socio-political history of the EU (and globalization as well) is mapped over the development of international standards that (have) effectively wiped out those prior social differences.

The history underlying any and all movements towards a pervasive technology (regardless of the geographic extent) is the history of standards development. This precedes any (modular) engineering deployments. (A wonderful USD350 million glitch on a NASA Mars project — when an engineer (collaborating with ESA) forgot to convert between metric and US measurements). Of course, economic (military) hegemony is absolutely connected to this process of standards development. You join in a military alliance and if you are the minor partner, you have to re-bore your cannons to take his caliber of projectile, lest, in the heat of battle, you run out of usable ammunition.

I think a discussion of standardization supersedes the discussion of modularity as most (all!?) characteristics that arise in a description of modularity and its impacts are derived from the ‘textures’ of the socio-technical landscape that are determined by standardization. In a way, collective knowledge as a very broad and general social product is a result of standardization, especially if you are considering, for example, knowledge that spans disparate physical locations. Even with the existence of the basic technology of the Internet, no collective knowledge may be derived without a standardization that transcends the physical restraints on the digital system — a primary one being calibration of time scales, but there are many other calibrations that must take place as well. In the Paul Edwards article quoted below, he points out that there are heavy consequences for detecting global warming because the propagation of measurement standard differences between national and international organizations. An example of the fragility of knowledge building and the importance of standards in collective action.

Strip Latin from biological nomenclature, and international collaboration in the entire discipline is immediately snuffed.

It would seem that the larger the social span of an institution, the greater the built-in desire to establish and propagate standards among its constituents. Maybe remix is the ultimate surrender of the individual to the collective. Standardized idiosyncrasy. Lovely end result.

And at the other extreme, some of the more powerful expressions of artistic creativity take place in a landscape where there is some freedom to deliberately ignore standards (and modularity) and filter lived experience through the idiosyncratic filter of self — re-presenting that lived experience rather than an obsession with filtering someone else’s signal…

I think your mention of musicians sampling published music points to something perhaps more tiresome — related to the instance when rock stars sing about life as a rock star. A simulation of a simulation. TeeVee shows about teevee producers. Escher’s lizard consuming itself. Maybe remix culture will turn out to be so efficient that it will come to that — annihilation by self-consumption of its own mediated worldview…

Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul N. Edwards

Edwards, P.N., 2004. A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology. Science, 304(7 May 2004), pp.827-828.

Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. — Jeff Flowers

Flowers, J., 2004. The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards. Science, 306(19 November 2004), pp.1324-1330.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

V2

tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.

sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors — image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging – PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a Cartesian system. Mcluhan’s suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer’s time. so, scaling causes the development of a “whole new media”… new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then surveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics — based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. “as much data as we want.”

the parallel irc discussion (see below) leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm. but it works within the attention economy.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Partial Description of the World

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. more “Partial Description of the World”

posted

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”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

baggage

traveling Lighter than usual. Eagle Creek suitcase: 2x jeans (blue & tan), 7x socks, 7x underwear, swimsuit, swim goggles, knit hat, 4 teeshirts, 3 dress shirts, 3 pullover shirts, scarf, leather gloves, heavy wool gloves, biking half-gloves, umbrella, Birkenstocks, cables (firewire-dv, rca, 2 rca-to-minijack adapters, s-video, composite video, ethernet), three miniDV cam batteries and power adapter, usb mouse, digital cam battery charger & usb adapter, 160 gig ext hard drive, power adapter, cd/dvd case w/ OSX disks and 8 blank dvds, spare 250 mb zip disk, shaving cream, razor, 3x blades, tiger balm, skin cream, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, electric toothbrush and charger, toothpaste, dental floss, brush, hair ties, 4x earplugs, extra glasses frame, 3 cans of almonds, bag of almonds, bag of pistachios, bag of walnuts, bag of cashews, 4 Luna bars, uh, what else? oh, an incredibly compact self-inflating sleeping pad — normally my camping pad, but with my back problems, it is a good solution to soften some beds enough to ensure a decent night’s sleep.

daypack: digital still cam, iPod, adapter, 2x earphones, miniDV cam, boom mike, remote control, spare DV tape, PowerBook & case, power adapter, dv-to-vga adapter, passport, ticket printout, several select rail schedule printouts, 2x Science magazines, Finnish bank deposit forms, glasses prescription, Visa card, Visa Gold card, SIM art union card, Icelandic residency card, bound notebook, eyeshades, 1-liter water bottle, toothbrush, ear-plugs, toothpicks, fine ball-point, cd marker, Euros, Dollars, some GB pounds and Danish Kroner…

wearing: bikers jacket, black boots, black jeans, red pullover, fleece pullover, heavy socks, tee-shirt, money belt, leather cap, earplugs, sunglasses, ear-plugs in pocket, but otherwise nothing else that will set off the metal detectors…

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

daily grind

bouncing between pool ends, Brian decides to share a lane with me ’cause all the old folks have filled the other lanes, we laugh about it. he’s a tour bus driver, for high-end groups like the Stones, Winton Marsalis, folks like that, use to live in Denver, around the time I was doing the Feyline shows for the Denver Post and the college paper, way back. good to share the lane with a fast swimmer. I have to crank a bit to keep up the pace, but definitely am getting stronger since I’ve been doing around 200 fly at the end of the 2500-yard workout. go into the Safeway to pick up drugs from the Pharmacy for Mom. can’t stand these stores, like the new WalMart that has a minimum of 100 vid-surveillance cams, those big black hemispheres hanging from the corrugated ceiling, and the squat armored boxes, multiples, on poles all along the front of the building. makes me wanna take ’em out. or at least pull out my little digital cam and start taking pix. just to see what happens. and they smell. of commerce. the javelina head dangles on the barbed-wire fence-post, half-eaten. it’s season, but it looks like a mountain lion kill.

posted
  • place: Ukiah, California

netart 2004 – Ping Melody

The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:

where is netart?

When invited to join this year’s netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat skeptical that such an exhibition—with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World—would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.

However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded—the information flow personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network—while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: it’s getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.
more “netart 2004 – Ping Melody”

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen - Åarhus - Copenhagen, Denmark

Åarhus

back on routes, a grueling week from Iceland to Denmark, to New York to Maryland to San Francisco. all in seven days. after the early morning departure from Ice Land in a chill dark snowy wind. nothing else but. so it goes. leave-taking, the usual heart pain.

dash away for a lunch and meeting with Søren in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at the Åarhus UNiversity. then a brief stop at the Art Academy of Jutland, home of splab, to meet Tanja and take a tour of the place to satisfy my always-keen curiosity to see schools and organizations on the ground. run into mr. noisejihad himself, Mikko, who participated in both di-fusion events and was a co-curator of the Overgaden festival as well. connections, connected, but the total brevity of the visit makes it almost useless. feeling antsy about getting somewhere, and the in between sensation gets overpowering when stops are too short. needing like a week to chill and engage anymore. and I didn’t even visit folks in Iceland hardly. nomad leaves for the steppes where stars are hard and cold, and many. check out. rocketing through the night by train, in the hvileplads car (the quiet-place). phones and talking are banned. I lucked out getting a seat in this car, the train seems pretty full. yeah, just noticed that I haven’t heard anyone speak except for the conductor going through asking for tickets. even the guy selling food didn’t really say anything, but is suddenly smiling in my face.

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

the long night of radio art

At the vilma offices thanks to Gediminas and Nomeda — for hosting the stream I’m sending to Steve of art@radio in Baltimore who has an elaborate studio set-up for the live streaming he’ll be doing from there to The Long Night of Radio Art that is part of the Reinventing Radio project of KunstRadio. the whole project will be broadcast on FM, shortwave, a special 5.1 digital satellite transmission, and online. (Taking a breath). Yeah, live online. Meet August on the IRC channel broadcasting from Santa Barbara.

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

ram6.1

ram6 starts. Breakfast brings many familiar folks out from closed hotel doors. Nomeda said that we are the only people checked into the hotel for the duration—it gives the feeling of a large house. Soaked on the walk up the hill to the Contemporary Arts Center. Find Kim working so we go have lunch until the opening session where the workshop presenters introduce our respective plans to let attendees know what they can choose from. As usual my speaking is a bit cryptic, but there is a line of people afterward asking good sharp questions and it ends up I have an overflow. A bit wishing to be an attendee only, though, to catch Kim’s, or Sara and Derek’s workshop, for my own selfish reasons. And with thoughts to tomorrow, making the core decision to follow praxis by theory, rather than the other way around, at the beginning of the workshop tomorrow morning. Simple risk, though taking risks in a teaching situation is something that is more than less difficult, relatively: already the deep risks inherent in many previous workshops prove the worth of each step in the direction a distributed and autonomous learning. Facilitator, not teacher, or so.

Also was thinking I have to improve the content of the travelog photos. They seem stale. I don’t do many portraits because the medium of digital snapshots seems so … unstable. And unsatisfactory—primarily because of the delay, the ponderous e-lapse from the time the shutter release is depressed and when the electronic shutter activates. Impossible, so I stick with architecture and static life.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

pixelache over

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

doctoral meditations

weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.

conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase “ahead of his time” that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web — the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student of mine is hired to do network-based teaching… or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so. argh!

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

archiving

what should I write about here? no blogging spew to be had, not that I really care about putting something down each day, hardly have done that in the history of this whole work.

spending time on the archive. looking through old 16mm family films. there are more than 4,000 feet of silent Kodachrome from the 1950’s. mostly Alaska. researching the telecine process going from film to digital video. want to get them all transferred so that folks in the family can actually see them. there used to be a 16mm editing console (manual splicing and viewing unit), but that has long since made its way to the Goodwill or so. so I manually spliced the remaining 100 foot reels together onto 400 foot reels, there are ten or twelve of those along with “The Alaska Movie,” as we call it. a 1600-foot behemoth 45-minute-or-so series of fragments of hunting polar bear by air, Inuit dancers, glacier break-ups, family parties, sledding, trailing moose in the car, panning gold, and on and on.

part of this increasing tendency to archive these days. bought archival storage cases for all Dad’s and Aunt Mary’s slides, amounting to about 7,000 or so. numbered boxes for much of my own small archive of negatives, prints, and other art stuff. seems spurious, out of all the things to do in the world.

so cycling 20 miles in the 100+F heat seems the other thing to do. winds make the difference. with the wind downhill, against uphill.

much time spent taking Dad in for his almost daily hospital visits to get his leg wound looked after. really shocking. shows how much more difficult it is for the body to heal as it ages. eventually there is not enough energy turn-around to bring order back to the system.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

University of Colorado – Boulder, US / Advanced Digital Art :: Jan-May.03

Carina Bañuelos, Ian Bauer, Leah Gose, Nicola Hodkowski, Chris Poyzer, Brigitte Richard, Ryan Riss, Kate Schwerin, Alexis Thrash, Zachary Weinman, Jaimee Brielmaier, Richard Donohue

this studio workshop is scheduled as a follow-up on FINE2126 intro to digital art. however, as a visiting artist, there are many topics specific to my own practice and world view which I will offer as a platform for participants to frame their own creative practice—topics that have not yet been raised in the context of courses offered at CU. specific technical topics will be determined collectively based on need, interest, and the experience-base of all participants. practically, I do expect participants to be comfortable with at least some of a variety of programs as well as the operating environment of the Mac and the ability to deal with significant flows of information.

the course is about exploring the possibilities of networked space as the locus for creative action. there will be opportunities for deep exploration of each students individual creative practice regardless of their particular manifest pathway. wetware will take precedence over hardware and software, but topics will seek to clear a conceptual space for the participants creative practice to flourish.

it is not just about art-making skills related to technological tools, it is about creating new paradigms for living and creating new ways of being. it is presented as a series of lectures, working sessions, practical exercises, projects, and, most importantly, dialogues designed to introduce new concepts. participants should be prepared to engage in attentive and dialectic interaction, explore the possibilities presented, engage the tools covered—as the formal structure of the course is integral to the content presented. students are also expected to bring their own ideas, creative impulses, and perceptions into the classroom situation to generate community action and discussion. students should expect to undertake a collaborative networking project.

proceeding directly in the concept of distributed networks, the course will rely on the spontaneous energies of all the participants. the specific operation of the workshop will not always follow a plan; participants should be comfortable with indeterminate states of being in the process of change. with this in mind: the syllabus for the course IS SUBJECT TO CHANGE. this is in order that the course situation itself might more dynamically evolve, reflecting the interests and directions of the participants. one of the most powerful creative motivations is unforeseen necessity. if you find change to be a stimulus, this course is for you! in the words of organist E. Power Biggs, “be prepared to have a happening, if not, MOVE BACK!”

the focus of the course will be the production of a major live/online happening roughly in the form of fusion so there will be many skills to generate and roles to play.

the mailing list fine-4126@lists.colorado.edu will be an active forum for the duration of the seminar. attention and participation on the mailing list is as much a part of the course as in-class meetings. attendance is mandatory for all sessions.

group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
group portrait, students, final brunch, FA4126 Spring Semester 2003, CU-Boulder, Colorado, May ©2003 hopkins/neoscenes.
posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

proto definitions

The end of this year approaches. I jot down some definitions for class:

Proto definitions:

digital art — artifacts/performances enabled by a digital device

(computer)net art — art(ifacts?) on the net (what’s the net?) Internet? Any network?

web art — specific art(ifact?) for viewing on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that remote dataspace)

networking art — art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human/technological) networks; use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in). the network which is an extension of the socialized being

mediation — the act of standing between; a carrier; that which carries from one to the other. a bridge across/through the sensual world standing between the Self and the Other

media art — artifacts created via (traditional, analog) media devices

multimedia — more than one media

Keeping to several centers, not comatose in any of their distributed flows. Understand that now the up-springing source for the publicly “creative” work is something of a distortion created in the fabric of childhood (listen good parents) — that reverberates in the fractured pattern of shot-gun-fire in a rock canyon, each present de-formation of being expressed across the local social matrix is a hard surface that often will reflect and repel energy of any kind. The curling whine of ricochet as peeled-sheath bullet changes trajectory and spins to a sonic resonance within ear.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Carillion article

for the record, as the university (of Colorado) no longer publishes nor maintains the archive of this magazine, this is the text of an article done by a CU J-School graduate student, Nicole Gordon.

Visiting artist John Hopkins explores relationship between art and technology

After twelve years of living and lecturing in Europe, digital artist John Hopkins is back in the United States. He’s no stranger to the University of Colorado at Boulder; in fact, he earned his master of fine arts degree from CU-Boulder in 1989. These days, however, Hopkins has returned to campus as a visiting artist rather than a student.

“I’ve always had a deep connection to the physical landscape of the West, and intellectually I find Europe stimulating,” Hopkins said. “I’ve attempted to have both, though in the end, physical location is not always important. What is of primary importance is surrounding oneself with humane and positive people — then anything is possible.”

Hopkins’ interest lies at the intersection of art and technology. He describes his work as “art that is not artifact-oriented, but delves into the unique communicative aspects of global networks.”

“John Hopkins has a long-standing commitment to the art network,” said Jim Johnson, interim chair of the Fine Arts Department. “He brings to the department a dedication to art as an ephemeral human process and his work in the digital community has been a natural outgrowth of that dedication. He has inspired numerous art students to pursue art in the real context of one-to-one communication as opposed to the conventional and isolated production of precious objects.”

Hopkins has been a professional artist since 1985. His career has taken him to Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and Austria as a visiting artist or guest lecturer. His art has been recognized at the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria and he has works in numerous private and public collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City.

At CU-Boulder, Hopkins is teaching introductory and advanced digital art classes, as well as working on individual projects with students and doing international performances.

One of his most recent projects at CU-Boulder, in collaboration with students, is a live, online open-platform happening for creative expression and action called di>fusion. The project, which can be experienced at https://neoscenes.net/projects/difusion1/, simultaneously occupies global network spaces and local physical space with collaborative performance, sonic, music, disc- and video-jockeys, text, poetry-slam, and video events.

“I have done similar projects with students across Europe,” Hopkins said. “And indeed, projects like di>fusion are only partially geographically grounded. Much of the project happens in the space of networks, so there are participants and audiences in many locations.”

Hopkins studied geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines as an undergraduate and worked as a geophysicist before pursuing his art career. He says that art and science aren’t so far apart.

“I worked with electromagnetic fields in geophysics, and I’m basically doing the same in art,” he said.

After receiving his art degree, Hopkins found that the European cultural scene suited his ambitions.

“During the decade of the 90s, while the United States was heavily involved in the dot.com bubble inflation and bursting, there were others in other locations who were looking more critically at technological innovation and the rise of global networks,” he said. “These critical views were often coming out of creative cultural research in Europe.”

Hopkins also noted that funding for arts and culture in Europe is much greater than in the United States.

“There have been many opportunities to get funding for creative projects that could never be realized in the U.S.,” he said. “Scandinavia is generally more advanced than the U.S. in terms of technological implementations society-wide, so naturally there were many interesting things happening on the cultural side related to technology.”

An experienced teacher, Hopkins says that he is committed to the dynamics of the learning environment as a critical and important facet of his work.

“I seek to create vital learning spaces — conceptual and physical zones where the exercise of free expression and spontaneous dialogue take place,” he said.

Examples of Hopkins’ work and more information about him can be accessed on his personal Web site at https://neoscenes.net.