posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas: done

Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas, Migrating Art Academies, March 2015 (pdf download)

So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!

Those errors aside, Migrating Art Academies is a brilliant program, period.

Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100

Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.

Best,
Mindaugas

Displace
A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8

Download preview @
https://www.migaa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MigAA-Displace_preview.pdf

This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.

The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.

In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.

The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

// Migrating Art Academies https://www.migaa.eu
// https://www.migaa.eu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/migaa

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next considerations

How to deal with the finished, formal text? Distribute as-is, as a locked pdf; wait until the entire thing is re-worked into a more formal & well-designed book that includes images and such. Begin to iterate the text as per desired and simply slide it all out there? Copyright? Copyleft? Creative Commons? hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Statement of Multi-Cultural Experience and Practice

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

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

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  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.

The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”

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the leisure class … (at 11.11.10, 11:11)

The erection of class/caste protocols (another harsh historical judgment in the midst of the industrial age):

Entrance into the leisure class lies through the pecuniary employments, and these employments, by selection and adaptation, act to admit to the upper levels only those lines of descent that are pecuniarily fit to survive under the predatory test. And so soon as a case of reversion to non-predatory human nature shows itself on these upper levels, it is commonly weeded out and thrown back to the lower pecuniary levels. In order to hold its place in the class, a stock must have the pecuniary temperament; otherwise its fortune would be dissipated and it would presently lose caste. Instances of this kind are sufficiently frequent. The constituency of the leisure class is kept up by a continual selective process, whereby the individuals and lines of descent that are eminently fitted for an aggressive pecuniary competition are withdraw from the lower classes. In order to reach the upper levels the aspirant must have, not only a fair average complement of the pecuniary aptitudes, but he must have these gifts in such an eminent degree as to overcome very material difficulties that stand in the way of his ascent. Barring accidents, the nouveaux arrivés are a picked body. more “the leisure class … (at 11.11.10, 11:11)”

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Migrating: Art: Academies: done

MigAA book cover (pdf download)

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers! more “Migrating: Art: Academies: done”

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  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

(How to Sit) Zazen

It’s a good example of the affect of mediation on socially-generated practices of any sort [this came into mind when I saw a poster advertising a IEEE conference here in Sydney. The posted contained all the recognized and standardized functions of conferences anywhere on any subject. The cocktail evening cruises on the ________ (fill in the blank) river/harbor/lake. The hospitality suites in the _________ (fill in the blank) hotel. The keynotes by famous personages. The plenaries, the break-outs, the posters, workshops, and seminars. yadda, yadda. Don’t people get tired of this endless repetition of heavily coded social protocols?]

The following was downloaded from the UM (University of Minnesota) original Gopher online text retrieval system sometime in the winter of 1991-92. I think it’s the first document (extant) that I downloaded via that new networked document system — the direct precursor of the WWW. Coming around in a very long, very wide circle, from the roots of the digital coming-to-being in the last millennium, breathe deeply:

1. Sit on the forward third of a chair or cushion.
more “(How to Sit) Zazen”

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L-I-M-I-T-E-D

Aside from a fraction of a kilo-ton of human-re-configured matter that has been more-or-less permanently jettisoned from the immediate gravitational field of the Terran system, all human activities are and always have been fully immersed in what, for the purposes of modeling, may be seen as a limited (eco-)system with limited energy resources. L-I-M-I-T-E-D. Followers of the develop-and-consume-at-any-cost economic philosophy appear to think that there is an un- at the beginning of limited. But are these limits germane regarding the scalar possibilities of alteration that 6.9 billion humans applies to the ‘closed’ system? Can this plague-species actually cause significant change? It’s maybe only a question of where on a sliding scale the alteration sits, and what range on that scale indicates ‘significant’ change.

It is not difficult to observe that all expressions of life have an affect on the immediate vicinity. The bed of dead leaves beneath the cottonwood, layered by age: age showing as a returning dissolution, collenchyma structures in the veins remain longer, the epidermis stripped away by insects, solar radiation, weather, and time. The altered rhizosphere full of exudates nourishing symbiotic microbial life which, in turn, alter the chemistry of the surrounding soil. The altered atmosphere, being distantly distributed by the wind, the absorption of Light. Animals consuming leaves, wandering away. Reverberatory. What does a tree do to the rest of the cosmos? It does. Clearly any form of life has this effect. It’s just a question of how much. Quantitative, with the qualitative in the affirmative, but still open to how.

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technology fails

20100116 The latch handles on both the driver- and passenger-side door are broken. There is a certain geometry on the plastic lever-arm which, over time of repeated lifting motions, fails. So I have to replace them. The truck is relatively old, compared to the average age of vehicles on the road. I call the Toyota dealer nearby, and they want almost USD100 for each replacement handle. This is called an OEM part — Original Equipment Manufactured — a part which carries some of the branded weight of the maker and its record of quality along with a premium price (including a substantial markup to underwrite the existence of the dealer distribution system). Too much! I knew this would be the case before I called, but I wanted to set a ceiling price before looking elsewhere, online. This particular vehicle model was globally a widely-distributed frame, body, and engine combination and so there turns out to be a substantial non-OEM parts market. The only question is one of quality. Non-OEM parts online appear to be both Mainland Chinese- and Taiwanese-made with what seems to be a substantial US distribution presence in the form of highly discounted warehouses designed for online mail-order sales (with Ebay, Amazon, and their own web sales presence). I find the parts, in several styles (chromed plastic and black) for a small fraction of the OEM cost, USD 20 with free shipping. more “technology fails”

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fealty to nexus

without framing the precise context, a couple quick notes to Rob, regarding the Internet of Things (IOT) and social pro-activity:

sotto voce: I’m not sure these two concepts — decentralized and protocol — can occupy the same actualization (of the techno-social)… protocols arise through a shake-down/feedback/evolution of social relation which ultimately cannot be distributed: but instead they concentrate at certain crux points along social connectors that may not be ‘central’ in that material sense, but that do form a nexus (Latin, ‘a binding together’) which all participating members must drive their expressions through — as a form of fealty to those protocols. Technically, this is not ‘central,’ but because it is formative to the life-trajectories that the participants live out, it is of the same affectation as any (‘centralizing’) social stricture. It’s only a question of degree, how much or how little it alters that individual trajectory to its own purposes. Essentially it is a question of what is done with the shared energy that collects along a shared (protocol-defined) pathway of life-energy. The norm is such that the energy collected from shared social participation cannot (easily) be utilized for the good of the individual. Instead the energy is used for the good of the collective, or, worst case, for a(n elite) subset of the collective. Thus is is statistically rare that there is general satisfaction by all individuals in a collective as to where their collective energy is expressed. (Except when we are talking military victory — where survival-for-procreation is extended by a time.)

and

sotto voce: Unfortunately, however, the language upon which the computational process (devices as well) is constructed upon has that subject/object stasis built in to it at the most fundamental level of the language(protocol) itself. So, to loose oneself from the deterministic relevancy of that system is perhaps not possible because it pervades the underlying ‘logic’ of the system which a ‘new’ form of computational ‘perception’ can’t escape. One might have to code in Sanskrit … in the heart.

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

resonance, matter, and poetry

I wake up this morning remembering spatial plans for grocery stores in Prescott, Arizona, and then, one in Kiel and another two in Berlin, Germany. As I started to think about it, after a few minutes, I came up with (mental) spatial maps for more than 50 different food stores in ten countries. Small segments of an enormous set of spatially-framed memories of tens of thousands of situations passed through. Repetition of exposure is more likely to create and lock those memories into recall-ready be-ing. It is what structure and structured situations impress onto the embodied life. The access to these memories arises as a sequence of resonant flows across consciousness. As mindfulness scans a region of mind, resonances appear as bright spots of particular order in a dim background. Resonance is a fundamental indication of higher or concentrated energy states. Fundamental quantization of resonance will cause distributed peaks and troughs in the strength of resonance. The subtlety of resonance guides our movement through the flows around us.

(Who cares?)

Does it matter that dominant views exist? Does it matter that humans are faced with a decision to submit to those views or not? To matter is probably the wrong question, because matter locks us into one view to begin with.

How to transcend the rigidity of extant protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is perhaps one pathway, poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol.

Poetry. The Prose Edda, especially the Skáldskaparmál comes to mind, Snorri’s guide to the forms and language of the Saga, and the process of kenning or naming the objects of that world. Imagine making such a device for covering the territory of inquiry. It brings up the text sketched, though later scrapped, for the Hybrid Spaces workshop: The Hybrid: This and/or That. Could be a useful source for later on…

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affects and intentions

The idea comes that I can place different narratives and sonifications in the aporee context, making a global mapping of ideas mixed with sounds mixed with voices. But somehow this seems flat. Not that the platform lacks some aesthetic appeal, but the tendency would be to continue the same old process of archive-building (with the same old criteria of acquisition of material). Or, I thought about making a performative series in the Speakers Corner in the Domain. Still, the best idea to this moment is the one where I would simply engage with this material with one Other, expanding on it, presenting it in a dialogic setting, and reproducing that. Or this dialogic situation as a live performative undertaking with an audience.
more “affects and intentions”

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ant(s)

Latour’s network(s) of relations (in ANT) are complexifying descriptors for a multiplicity of flows where each actor in the network are the origin and recipient of various flows. Or, they are merely the nodal locales of concentrated flow (as conscripted by the social structures). Again, back to the observation that the structure of the social is the prescription that forces flows into rarefied and concentrated zones or pathways. Each attenuation (measured in relief to a ‘natural’ background flow) becomes an actor in full, constant, and distributed relation to at least some other points in the field. The theory, the image of a multiplicity of flows, taken to a near-infinite limit, a beyond-multiplicity, an infinity of nodes would then approximate “reality.” If the network is functioning properly — that is, constructing a plausible account of real social systems — the network will be “an expression to check how much energy, movement and specificity our own reports are able to capture.” (Latour) Those reports, though, are always reductive and incomplete. A map locating the nodes and noting the flows across each one is not the lived territory in time, nor does it accurately express the character of the flows, which in the end are more important than the nodal points.

Is this blog a report? If so, the question becomes how it might more accurately invoke the territory of inquiry. [indeterminacy, trans-disciplinary (discipline being “mortification by scourging oneself”, yikes!), without genesis or terminus, and sampling as many strands of lived-impression (not just screen-mediated living) as possible.]

If network is an accurate description of a situation then a consideration of the order that the network imposes on the situation is called for. Network and order, (including Latour’s actor-network) is about the application of a decodable order applied to a diversity of actors within the object of study. It implies reduction, though hints at an ever-expanding point-of-view. It is couched in language (report, correspondance, academic paper, speech, communications) which is problematic, but this limit is applied to practically anything social. Order is rooted in the negentropic tendencies of life in opposition to the entropic character of all non-life. (Depends — is an accretionary disk of stellar matter, through gravity, rising as anisotropic presence of order as the star forms negentropic, or not — is there any fundamental (ordered) difference between varying (relative and Cartesian) densities of energized matter?) The biggest problem with most current usages of network is that very often the nodes are well-defined (to a fault), as are the geometries of connection, but not so much the qualities of the flows between. I’ll have to pay attention to that lack as I troll the literature. There is the (network) engineering efficiency approach which examines the issues around signal transmission and reception including power usage and signal/noise ratios — which are inextricably linked to amplification issues.. But the efficiency is determined after the fact of the signal being strictly defined by existing protocols.

ack! my usage plunges into a cesspool. the Jekyll and Hyde of free-style and efficient. faggeddabouddit!

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theme song

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

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

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

energy/complexity

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a Utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. — Joseph A. Tainter

There is much to explore in the ideas around organizational complexity/simplicity correlated with high/low energy requirements for a system — essentially basic thermodynamics (it always comes down to this). If the wider (widest) scale of human systems could scale social complexity down, the energy requirements would experience a correlative drop. But this is a very substantial IF. And it would mean that the energy reach of the average individual would consequently contract. And human natures seem to preclude any sacrifice of control that is a crucial part of the existing order. China fancies itself victorious, clambering over other nations to arrive soon at the top of the influential complexity heap, but it will soon discover that the price for this status is, literally, high. And it too, as a complex system, will gradually implode again. Though likely not after extracting, demanding, a high flow, or tribute, as the US is now doing, from the global system. That flow comprising the over-consumption and thus concentration of widely distributed materials which now, in their post-use state leave the globe energetically worse off. In the end this is not an issue of nation-state guilt, it is simply the evolutionary state of the tool-wielding bipedal mammalian species. The (over-consuming) developed world crosses many demographic and geographic borders, while likewise the under-consumers are widely distributed.

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet’s energy balance. — David Price

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Energy and Society

Excellent resource which will allow me to trace both forwards and backwards in time on this particular worldview which, although the definition of energy is strictly based on contemporary physics and thermodynamics (of that time), it provides a valid and detailed approach to the issue.

(Not to mention that the copy I got from Newcastle University was “donated by the Newcastle District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.” Would for the survival of humanity that engineers take in the consequences of thermodynamics at all scales!)

Cottrell maps out in some detail the inter-relationships of technological (energy-usage) and the consequent/subsequent social change/evolution that occurs.
more “Energy and Society”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

https://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980’s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

https://neoscenes.net/blog/cv-resume

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT more “Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)”

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thesis proposal :: Basics

Title

Sonic Presence Within The Networked Regime of Amplification

This research explores the relationship of (sonic)energy to social be-ing, technology, and the consequent possibilities for creative action.

Subject

Sound is energy, sound carries energy. Sonic energy is a product and a by-product of life. It forms one expression of organismic presence. It is one particular energized expression of our band-limited life that developed its particular characteristics through evolutionary processes. These processes are essentially structured around variations in the (spatial and temporal) concentrations and availabilities of energy. As one such expression, sound is employed as one means through which humans enhance their survivability. Amplification represents a particular model for what is essentially a life-process that operates on various energy flows, modulating their basic characteristics. How human collectives generate and interact with sonic energy governs a wide swath of their consequent techno-social interactions. This research is a distributed exploration of sound as a carrier of energy between the Self and the Other — as it is mediated through the globe-spanning network of techno-social amplification systems. Specifically, it will be a critical exploration of our contemporary techno-social terrain through the application of this model in a variety of creatively energized situations.

Outcomes

Formally, outcomes will include the dissertation, live/online performances, workshops, a blog, festival participation, and conference presentations. Through developing an energy-based model that amplification provides an armature for, it is my hope that this research will generate a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamic affects of technological systems on creative human engagement at all scales. This knowledge will be applied to facilitate actual situations for this engagement to be explored.

Keywords

amplification, sound, (sonic) energy, power, technology, techno-social systems, networks, continuum of relation, dialogue, collaboration, presence, sustainable creativity, social action, entropy, thermodynamics

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thesis proposal :: Background

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. more “thesis proposal :: Background”

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thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
more “thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts”

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  • place: Bedford, New York

butter :: knife

what’s a sharp knife for? I like toasted bread, toast, with a variety of toppings including butter. definitely not margarine. butter comes either frozen, chilled, or at room temperature. frozen or chilled it’s hard as heck to cut a slice of and especially to spread around most toasts, depending on the bread that is being used. the spreading process can dent, squash, or even shred the toast, seriously degrading the aesthetic experience. I prefer to have chilled butter and an extremely sharp thin-bladed carbon steel knife. (my Opinel serves the role well). this allows the butter to be sliced so thin that spreading is not necessary: multiple thin slices may simply be laid across the surface of the toast. the thin slices will melt quickly, prepping the toast for the next layer of topping and avoiding the problem of un-melted butter chunks getting moved around by, say, the cold tangerine marmalade or thick Nutella which comes next. thin slices of butter have the advantage of getting the butter flavor evenly distributed around the surface of the toast without having to use excessive amounts of the stuff or seriously affecting the structural integrity of the bread. the worst possible scenario is frozen butter, fluffy white bread, and a dull knife — the bread gets completely crushed, but not after large quantities of butter are smashed into the air cavities. the result is something of a distinctly English culinary experience. I prefer dense German multi-grain breads which can withstand pretty much anything you can throw on them, and provide a robust snack.

a caveat on the sharp knife is that one should not use a ceramic butter dish as that rapidly dulls the knife. it is common, when first attempting to cut thin slices from fridge-hardened butter that the knife slips and smacks the plate rather hard. this will render the knife useless for smooth tomato and vegetable slicing later. a plastic dish it is — and one that is disposable as in the end, the plastic will be destroyed through the repeated slipping of this trusty blade. a lid from a yogurt container functions well for this purpose.

who designed the butter knife, anyway? the one which was around my parents home was a fat stainless steel affair from the 1960’s with not just a dull blade — actually it was so dull as to defer the designation of blade — it was about as good for slicing butter as a chopstick. certainly nothing to pass onto for the grand-kids! non-functional. I’ve seen some older ones, carbon-steel-and-silver affairs which are thin-bladed like regular table knives of the same era — say, late 1800’s.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

Melabudin

through the white Lightness, reminded of Light, suffused with Light. the pressing back of liquid globes, securely maintaining a barrier to all that Light is from entering the soul in extremity of be-ing. what more to say.

see some people, some products arising from the lives of people, tasting some compiled energies. distributed and distant lives come close for a moment of microscopic visioning and, yes, tasting. within all which is living.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

drawing

old networker-friend, Paul Rutkovsky (of floridada) and I have some nodes in common in Lithuania of all places. he was just there and here in Berlin as well. he sends this invitation from a recent show of drawings on paper that he had in Vilnius.

suspended ambronesia, the whole week gets screwed up. and what do I have to show for it? nada. started off good at the Institute meeting on Monday, giving a short presentation to students on the block seminar that I’ll be doing in early June Sustainable Creative Presence :: Distributed Be-ing. have a few conversations afterward with some interested students. then a brief faculty meeting that is conducted mostly in English to my astonishment (for my sake).

Technology arises from human systems, but what is the nature of that genesis? Is technological advance increasing the possibilities of or increasing the limitations on creative activities?

As techno-social systems continue to evolve and become more pervasive, their effects begin to dominate all aspects of the social and cultural landscape. These evolving forms radically alter the possibilities of human presence as well as the range of social controls on that presence. It is human presence — and especially human presence in collaborative and vital relation — that is the basis of creative action. A deep understanding of this continuum of relation brings exceptional power to a sustainable creative process.

This seminar will ask many questions about where we are in this moment — a willingness to engage with others in open and honest discussion is most important. With open dialogue among the participants, the answers will be relevant and life-changing.

The approach will be decidedly interdisciplinary: students from different backgrounds are welcome.

posted
  • place: Köln, Germany

brainstorms

conversations with Volker and others range across vast spaces of cultural, spiritual, personal, and social thought and practice. as per usual. great!

I’ve been checking brainstorms more than usual lately, jumping into discussions with Howard, Bryan, Andee and many others on the topic of academia, education, learning, teaching, students, and what a struggle it is to be involved with this sector of the techno-social system.

sotto voce: In the 1:1 dialogs it’s usually a volunteer student, but, of course, a volunteer is never really a volunteer unless the power relation in the classroom is fully devolved into a truly distributed system. Which is never the case until the class is completely over and grades are posted — then the teacher can come into a more human-to-human relationship with the student in our traditional system. This is one reason I have maintained an autonomous nomadic status as educator. I can more easily set up a (more) balanced relationship with the students as I have no particular position in the local institutional hierarchy. Of course, there is the more difficult issue of my status as the teacher (which has to be devolved) … but I do devolve that as much as they and my own personality would allow … it is always a sliding scale, and I’d like to go further than I allow myself … in this, the fear of the unknown is a significant resistive force among the students and in myself.

Ideally, a class could consist of going around the group manifesting all possible dialog relationships between everyone, not just between the teacher and student — more accurately, there is no need of the teacher in this scenario anyway. In this situation, all are teachers and students both. In any case, this is a radical pathway which is a direct threat to business-as-normal educators/institutions because it makes them directly redundant, or, at most, facilitators.

These techniques are not specifically limited to f2f either — I will sometimes mandate a text-based 2-hour ‘dialog’ or phone call or other more heavily mediated type of connection to explore ‘virtuality’ and the attenuative affects of technological intervention.

Sometimes when I am lecturing, I do so with my back to the students.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

gridcosm & slacker

it’s been ages since I’ve spent time checking out gridcosm — a SiTO project initiated by net amigos Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast pushing a decade ago already. it’s getting very active again, as a new generation of SiTO artists have at it. I’m quite sure it’s the oldest and longest-running collaborative visual network project around. a singularly deep (literally!) visual essay on the past decade of network pop-being. or so. explore it! Jon and Ed are brilliant networkers and an inspiration to me over the years with their easy-going attitudes and intuitive insights into distributed creativity. last time I saw those guys in meat-space was in Montreal at the 1996 ISEA. Keep up the great work!

then, watching Slacker on DVD by Richard Linklater, appreciate the smoothness of film-making and a fluid and spontaneous anti-narrative:

… When young we mourn for one woman … as we grow old, for women in general. The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, what are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. — Joseph Jones, Slacker actor

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

back in touch

a happenstance crossing with oima last week on a V2 irc channel brought back warm memories of big streaming parties. so I checked in later with oima on their current home base DFM RTV INT — home of veteran streamers based in NL with a nice global distributed network of djs. oima does a show NO FRAG LIMIT on Wednesdays 2300-0000 CET (GMT+1). hmmmm, thinking of doing a sonic gig on DFM in the near term. DFM has a nice vibe, reminded me of the best of public radio in the US — eclectic, smooth, and electric. and also, memories of Radio GoGaGa in Boulder a decade ago already.

True love is a sacred flame
That burns eternally,
And none can dim its special glow
Or change its destiny.
True love speaks in tender tones
And hears with gentle ear,
True love gives with open heart
And true love conquers fear.
True love makes no harsh demands
It neither rules nor binds,
And true love holds with gentle hands
The hearts that it entwines.
— John Clare

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

reflections on the classroom

to the IDC list

sotto voce: Although, as a University educator — I agree with John’s appraisal of the condition of the contemporary educational institution (having taught in around 50 institutions in Europe and the US), there is this critical area to consider: yes, the classroom has not undergone a physical re-design, but perhaps it doesn’t need one. When the door closes, it has the potential to be a space for transcendent encounters between the participants IF the oppressive effects of the fear that is instilled by the dominant educational system in both student and teacher — the fear of nonconformity, the fear of personal idiosyncrasies, and the fear of the unknown — if the fear is mitigated. I believe this fear is a result of the accumulation of pathological (unbalanced) relationships that are mandated between humans when operating in hierarchic situations. If, as a facilitator more “reflections on the classroom”

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

yadda yadda

counterpointing Bateson’s eclectic digressions with Ronald Burt’s social systemics seems to point to a schizophrenic day of reading. Bateson clearly saw the dangers of the flows that power social systems, where Burt sees opportunity for command-and-control through semi-distributed systems. His view on ‘social capital’ is a mapping of positions for maximizing influence that this form of capital offers. Bordieu suggested the trinity of economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital, it is the latter that seemed to popularly circumscribe the most influential aspects of human relations. And as a way of mapping power, it floats to the surface of social consciousness.

The myth of power, is of course, a very powerful myth; and probably most people in this world more or less believe in it… But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably to all sorts of disaster… If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind versus matter, we shall probably also come to see the world in terms of God versus man; élite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation and man versus environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this strange way of looking at the world can endure…

The whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable during the Pre-Cybernetic era, and which were especially underlined during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to think in the new way. — Gregory Bateson

another oracle, or madman?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

distributed empathy

living on the back. no longer an upright animal. except part-time. and no driving for another couple months. perspectives are limited. constant aching. phone calls with empathetic Others, emphasizes the distance of distributed being, how help is only visceral. hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Weiner

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

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

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

posted

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

up the Berounka

Milos and I , along with all of two students, a Czech and a German, catch the 1000 train to Beroun, up the Berounka River about 50 minutes. already this slacking show of the other 9 confirmed participants bodes ill. in the presentation yesterday, there are some glimmers of interest, but also, afterward, a student in the typical Goth black leather trench coat walks up, gets in my face, and aggressively demands what I will provide for him (later determined to be an Estonian), I turn him away when I try to briefly review the nature of an evolving distributed system, that it works only when everybody puts their attention in. he snorts and stalks off. thank god for that.

a few of the rest trickle in over the next 8 hours, but I do not want to start until I have the undivided attention of a more-or-less stable constellation of people. nothing more disturbing for concentrated focus than having to repeat the same thing over and over.

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: 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: Berlin, Germany

workshop

after a shaky start on Friday (combination of not enough sleep, early rising, not enough food, water). today flows. rainy outside, sun now.

This seminar/workshop explores some particular pathways and practices of creative activities with a close look at the impact of contemporary technological developments. It proposes and critically examines implementations and strategies for sustainable and relevant social engagement as mediated by technological networks.

Especially important is the establishment of an in-class situation for open dialogues on personal worldviews and experiences. This distributed human situation will be the core source for the seminar and will allow us to explore topics that are directly relevant to the practices of the individual participants. Another words, the actual form of the workshop will, by necessity, reflect the content to be discussed.

Participants are asked to share their experience-base and engage in attentive and focused discussion about the ideas that arise in the moment, and to target specific issues that inspire, challenge, or block their creative engagement of technology. These programs tend to be highly flexible and dynamic, with uncertain outcomes. But it is exactly in those un-defined spaces that novel and life-changing events occur.

The seminar facilitator, John Hopkins, is an experienced international artist, teacher, and technologist who is most currently working with live/online collaborative performance actions — occupying the social spaces represented by global telecom networks and facilitating creative action in those spaces. He maintains an extensive web space at https://neoscenes.net. Particularly relevant as an introduction to the seminar is a brief article that he wrote about his praxis for the AcousticSpace 2002 entitled “1+1=3”. That article may be found at https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/xchange3.html. Documentation of recent activities may be found via his CV at https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/index.php.

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

soap bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Language, which includes

does not cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

let’s dance!

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

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

microphysics & son(net) subterfuge

Manu sends an image from TRyPTiCHON, with Amanda and I standing after the performance. a blue-Light special.

Foucault falls into my hands, though I am not particularly fond of the French School of philosophy, or, maybe to say it more concisely — I dislike the widespread invocation of his name. but, a book from the library is here, so I pick it up. immediately the term microphysics pops out from the intro. along with the observation by the editor that Foucault’s work never was successful in addressing the dynamic of social change and the autonomous nature of social action. ahah. my model does this explicitly! another spray of Lighter fluid on the fire kindling under my thesis. doubts remain, many, but as I bang words around, there seems some hope that this task gets done.

dinner last night with some of the other residents.

and then, the thesis issue keeps popping up.

Certainly, fantastic theories must not be arbitrarily invented contrary to the regularity of experience; nor must there be any departure from the harmony of Nature, since she tends to be simple and always consistent with herself. — Isaac Newton

cranking with Josephine in Amsterdam on the dress rehearsal for Son(net) Subterfuge which takes place tomorrow evening. a distributed dance/network happening, I’ll be supplying one of two incoming audio/video mixes that Jos will re-mix to be projected into the dance performance piece in Waag’s Theatrum Anatomicum. everything was stable last night. knuckles rasping to a bloody pulp on wood — to ensure the same tonight…

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: Helsinki, Finland

mind-trekked

moments. wind rattling windows. a monotone voice forms opinions and reveals information on nature. but is the language natural? back to burnished sleepy skin. as the Finnish chapter rapidly comes to a close. sleeping and waking up, and the connected-disconnectedness. after jazz.

this week’s workshop in Media Lab, in the fourth day, seems to bring different energies into play, following in the steps of the explosive catalysis of last week, where students are now taking their education into their own hands, resisting the command-and-control structures and rules of the school in Tampere. last week’s workshop was the most difficult I have ever done, and, in a way, the most successful, traveling through conflict arising from the polar clash of distributed structures and hierarchical structures: resolution and dialogue brings an incredible energy source streaming.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Lev’s edifice

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

confrontation

Bob Marley, Confrontation

Flows of energy cannot be categorized, only experienced. this is clear, though when you see them, feel them running the wrong way, like some minuscule route becomes a high-voltage river that rearranges all physical forms in its way, the energy sparking and running last night, my hand aching far into the night, gripping Sanna’s tightly for the duration of one of the most heart-clenching-peeling conversations I have ever had, suomen/englanti kielellä.

On the verge, and it is killing me. if I do not slay the dragon that is running me into the nothingness of insensibility, St. George’s dragon, like Loki’s favorite CD cover — “Confrontation” with a stylized and dreads-akimbo-barefoot Bob Marley astride a white horse (that’s Night-Shining-White, I tell him, the name of an obscure Chinese minister’s horse in an electric drawing at the Met, my favorite). there Bob sits, astride Night-Shining-White rearing, and the Dragon already impaled on the spear that the Rasta Mon wields. killing the dragon. brings my spirit up!

Night Shining White, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York

I temporarily stopped this travelog somehow partly because the manic energy which has driven my erratic and hectic movement during the last 5 or 20 years is dying. but not dying graciously or painlessly. it dies like a snake, no smart dog to whip it from the tail to zero being. just slow removal, slow in time, but time is moving fast, an inverse relativity. it has shed its skin a hundred times, and shape-shifted a million times, once for every moment that it was to be handled, grabbed, or even examined from a distance. another million times as it entered each other place, each of them, each millisecond, each micrometer of difference in viewpoint recreated it again. but it HAS to die, I HAVE to kill it, quickly. retrospect comes (with age?) or just with point of view? and retrospect says that I have made mistakes that now dog me. sinner paying. nah, like, it just has to be re-routed. re-formed, redistributed. (fat half-moon rising over the city horizon). eighth floor, on Mannerheimintie, with a view over Ruskeasuo, the “Brown Swamp,” a rather wild chunk of land that stretches north out of the city center to meet something of real Finnish forest — if there is such a thing in a place where all revel in endless rows of copy machines making copies of all things copyable and even some of those holy things that are not. endless trees turning into sheaves of toilet paper and laser copy feed-stock to take the words of one million and turn them into the collated and stapled tomes of twenty, a hundred million. nah.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

cold journalism

extreme cold, blizzard weather that would make most Amurikans shudder. myself included! prepping for a series of lectures on New Media and Journalism. reminds me of days when I was the Special Editor of the College paper — producing primarily music reviews and interviews — but also breaking the mold on the two tendencies in journalism, that of centralized versus distributed.

posted
  • place: Linz, Austria

Snow White

Equinox here and gone. equality, balance. being. beans. a walk in spring snow and sunshine near Linz. with Thomas and Christa. speaking of many things, specific and distributed. systems, situations, attitudes, conditions, awarenesses, presences. exercise of this worldly head floating through (maybe they call it a crimson haze) and the discoveries! what is found in the interstices, between what are commonly recognized as samples of meaning, between the gaze and vision, between pleasure and passion, between Light and materiality. (oh, about singing the body electric and such). telling stories that I well know, like, back when I was living in eLAy, taking Snow White to a Keith Jarrett concert at the LA center of the Arts, downtown downtown, as they once said in eLAy. yeah, she played/danced Snow White at Disneyland in SoCal (Southern California), Anaheim, long legs, and she never flinched at the idea of commuting 60 miles one-way to get to work, I think she said that she put 150,000 miles on her car in two years. faugh! long legs, she didn’t really get into Keith Jarrett, but we went to a Neil Young concert, too, when he was in his wired electric phase. she had a perfect profile, and I can’t remember her name.

hey hey, my my, rock and roll will never die…

so it goes. long legs. my cousin Pete introduced me to her, right when I had moved out there to work for UNOCAL back in 1982, that was when he was heading security at Disneyland. gees.