This was a year of infestations. Several varieties of grasshoppers hopped and flew rampant for a couple months, stripped my sole apple tree of leaves and were working hard on the native plum trees, stripping both the leaves and bark off any new shoots.
As with all natural systems, though, a boom of one species will generate a boom in another. Predator, prey. In this case, praying mantises (Mantis religiosa), supremely well equipped to capture and consume the bumper crop of grasshoppers. There are hundreds of both beige and green mantises everywhere on the property. They have always held a fascination for me, primarily how attentive they are to the presence of another being. Commonly kept as pets, I encountered this pair in rural Colombia:
neoscenes is again participating in the Reveil global audio streaming project for the tenth year, adding a small sonic expression to this ongoing collaborative broadcast: Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2024 (one dimension of Soundcamp) 03-05 May (depending on your time zone — see below for exact local times).
Reveil is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 4 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations and situations, at a time of day when many people are unaccustomed to be up and out, but sounds are vivid, especially in Spring. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Sounds produced by birds, amphibians, weather, fish, electromagnetic fluctuations, people, machines, vegetation, transmission artifacts, convey the variety of planetary soundscapes, captured from many specific places and projects. In the process, Reveil brings together dispersed and lesser known ecological projects and practices across disciplines and time zones, in a sketch of an acoustic commons in the making.
Streams range from temporary projects in people’s homes to large research networks. Each open microphone adds to the diversity of the mix.
This Reveil stream, neoscenes’ tenth year participating, comes from the property of friend and artist Jennifer Riefenberg, a tract of land sitting at 6850 ft (2015 m) on a rich riparian corridor along Surface Creek in western Colorado. The nearest village, Cedaredge is a couple miles away. To the northwest, north, and northeast, 10 miles (16 km) as the raven flies, sits Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, at 11,000 ft (3300 m). The surrounding property was formerly an agricultural area relying on irrigation waters coming off the Mesa. Before the white colonization in the late 18th century, this area was the Ute tribal homeland: it still is. There is a rich range of wildlife in the area—birds including Bald Eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), Red-tail Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), Great Horned Owls, Ravens (Corvus corax), Black-billed Magpies (Pica hudsonia), Starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), Western Meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta), Mountain and Western Bluebirds, Nuthatches, House Sparrows and Finches along with bears, mountain lions, coyotes, mule deer, foxes, raccoons, skunks, marmots, and ground squirrels. Surface Creek, the main drainage for the area, runs on the east side of the property in a shallow valley lined with cottonwood, juniper, box elder, mountain mahogany, 3-leaf sumac, service berry, yarrow, rabbit brush, and volunteer fruit trees. In the sonic foreground there is an irrigation holding pond that sees regular visits of a variety of birds. Early May is a time for maximum snow-melt off the Mesa, and Surface Creek can swell to more than 600 cfs (17 cms)—two orders of magnitude over minimum flow. It typically displays large diurnal variations in flow, depending on the ambient temperatures. The creek flow will be the dominant sonic texture.
The neoscenes stream, hosted on the locusonus soundmap will be live for the entire weekend; it will be selectively broadcast in the Reveil stream as follows:
Date: 06 May 05:50-06:20 AM MDT UTC-6 (this is the approximate time that the neoscenes stream will be mixed into the whole 25-hour stream)
Civil twilight (local time): 5:40 AM / 0538 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Sunrise (local time): 6:07 AM / 0606 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Location: online and Cedaredge, Colorado, USA
Streamer: John Hopkins / neoscenes
Coordinates: N +38.92349163182399° / W107.91730709264802°
Timezone: MDT UTC-6 — 7 hours behind London
It’s that time of year again, a rare instance for neoscenes to focus a small expression on collaborative audio streaming work: Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2023 (one dimension of Soundcamp) 06-07 May — see below for exact times depending on your time zone:
Reveil is an annual collaborative 24+1-hour streaming radio broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, co-produced by streamers around the world. Reveil follows the changing wave of sound that circles the earth continuously along the grey line of first light, returning to its starting point after 24 hours without repetition.
Sounds produced by birds, amphibians, weather, fish, electromagnetic fluctuations, people, machines, vegetation, transmission artifacts, convey the variety of planetary soundscapes, captured from many specific places and projects. In the process, Reveil brings together dispersed and lesser known ecological projects and practices across disciplines and time zones, in a sketch of an acoustic commons in the making.
Streams range from temporary projects in people’s homes to large research networks. Each open microphone adds to the diversity of the mix.
This Reveil stream, neoscenes’ ninth overall, and the third that is coming from a small ranch sitting at 6800 ft (2000 m) on the Surface Creek alluvial fan near the small town of Cedaredge in western Colorado. To the northwest, north, and northeast, 10 miles (16 km) as the raven flies, sits Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, at 11,000 ft (3300 m). The property surrounding the house was once an apple orchard, beginning 140 years ago, but that came and went, leaving open grazing fields that rely on irrigation waters coming off the Mesa. Before the white colonization, this area was a rich Ute tribal homeland. There are a range of birds — bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), red-tail hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), ravens (Corvus corax), black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia), starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta), sparrows, and so on. Surface Creek Road runs on the east side of the property, so there will be the occasional pick-up truck, ATV, or car racing up or down the long grade. The view to the south is to the magnificent San Juan Mountains, and to the southwest and west spans the long horizontal swell of the Uncompaghre Uplift at 9,000 ft (2700 m), looking everything like a massive dark tsunami, frozen in geologic time. The nearest neighbors are 1000 ft (300 m) away or more, but with few trees, one may hear goats, chickens, dogs, and cows in the background. Surface Creek is not far away, and will be experiencing peak springtime snow-melt, so there will be a low background sussurration arising from that.
The neoscenes stream, hosted on the locusonus soundmap will be live for the entire weekend; it will be selectively broadcast in the Reveil stream as follows:
Date: 06 May 05:50-06:20 AM MDT UTC-6 (this is the approximate time that the neoscenes stream will be mixed into the whole 25-hour stream)
Civil twilight (local time): 5:38 AM / 0538 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Sunrise (local time): 6:06 AM / 0606 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Location: online and Cedaredge, Colorado, USA
Streamer: John Hopkins / neoscenes
Coordinates: N 38.91734719755037° / W107.91045876607403°
Timezone: MDT UTC-6 — 7 hours behind London
[Ed: I’ve made many transits of the lands referred to in this informative if not disturbing read. One crucial issue not mentioned in this article are the rapid developments in the science behind groundwater modeling in relation to biotic vectors and what exactly is happening to uranium compounds that are available and mobile underground. The redox (and subsequent immobilization) of uranium through biotic/microbial vectors has recently been demonstrated to have major effects on reductive sedimentary environments, though gauging the precise impacts on particular situations remain difficult. See, for example, Biotic-Abiotic Pathways: A New Paradigm for Uranium Reduction in Sediments]
The town of Uravan, Colorado (named so, combining the words URAnium and VANadium) with the Manhattan Project era uranium mill operational, ca. 1950. Photo credit: Colorado Historical Society.
This story was originally published by ProPublica and was written by Mark Olalde, Mollie Simon and Alex Mierjeski, video by Gerardo del Valle, Liz Moughon and Mauricio Rodríguez Pons.
In America’s rush to build the nuclear arsenal that won the Cold War, safety was sacrificed for speed. Uranium mills that helped fuel the weapons also dumped radioactive and toxic waste into rivers like the Cheyenne in South Dakota and the Animas in Colorado. Thousands of sheep turned blue and died after foraging on land tainted by processing sites in North Dakota. And cancer wards across the West swelled with sick uranium workers. The U.S. government bankrolled the industry, and mining companies rushed to profit, building more than 50 mills and processing sites to refine uranium ore. more “The Cold War Legacy Lurking in U.S. Groundwater”
In the long run, we may be able to environmentally overcome our thickening web of industrial toxic wastes but, if we follow the cyanobacterial model, vast numbers of humans would be destroyed before natural selection kicked in. And despite our rather inordinate confidence in our own technological prowess, biology remains much more effective than human technology in devising elegant long-term solutions to pollution and population control. In fact, we humans have never sustainably done the former, and we show no signs of being able to do the latter (although war is the top contender). Plus, cyanobacteria compose not just a single species (as we do) but also an entire multispecies “phylum [that] exhibit[s] enormous diversity in terms of their morphology, physiology and other characteristics (e.g. motility, thermophily, cell division characteristic, nitrogen fixation ability, etc.).”
Clarke, Bruce, ed. Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet. First edition. Meaning Systems. New York, NY: Fordham University Press, 2015.
It’s that time of year again, one of the few instances for neoscenes to focus on a small expression of collaborative audio streaming work: Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2022 (one dimension of Soundcamp) this weekend — see below for exact times depending on your time zone:
Reveil is an annual collaborative 24+1 hour streaming radio broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, co-produced by streamers around the world. Reveil follows the changing wave of sound that circles the earth continuously along the grey line of first light, returning to its starting point after 24 hours without repetition.
Sounds produced by birds, amphibians, weather, fish, electromagnetic fluctuations, people, machines, vegetation, transmission artifacts, convey the variety of planetary soundscapes, captured from many specific places and projects. In the process, Reveil brings together dispersed and lesser known ecological projects and practices across disciplines and time zones, in a sketch of an acoustic commons in the making.
Streams range from temporary projects in people’s homes to large research networks. Each open microphone adds to the diversity of the mix.
This Reveil stream, neoscenes eighth contribution, and the second that is coming from a small ranch sitting at 6800 ft (2000 m) in the Surface Creek drainage near the small town of Cedaredge in western Colorado. To the northwest-north-northeast sits Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, at 11,000 ft (3300 m). The ranch was once an apple orchard, beginning 140 years ago, but that came and went, leaving open grazing fields that rely on irrigation waters coming off the Mesa. Before the white colonization, this area was a rich Ute tribal homeland. There are a range of birds — bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), red-tail hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), ravens (Corvus corax), black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia), starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta), sparrows, and so on. Surface Creek Road runs on the east side of the property, so there will be the occasional pick-up truck or car racing up or down the long grade. The view to the south is to the magnificent San Juan Mountains, and to the southwest and west spans the long horizontal swell of the Uncompaghre Uplift at 9,000 ft (2700 m), looking everything like a massive dark tsunami, frozen in time. The nearest neighbors are 1000 ft (300 m) away or more, but with few trees, one may hear goats, chickens, dogs, and cows in the background.
The neoscenes stream, hosted on the locusonus soundmap will be live for the entire weekend; it will be selectively broadcast in the Reveil stream as follows:
Date: 30 April 05:45-06:16 AM MDT UTC-6 (this is the approximate time that the neoscenes stream will be mixed into the 24-hour stream)
Civil twilight (local time): 5:45 AM / 0545 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Sunrise (local time): 6:13 AM / 0613 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge
Based on ideas and practices of ecological radio and acts of listening, this long-form broadcast will bring together contributions by climate activists and artists, both those gathering around the Conference in Glasgow and those individuals and communities around the world seeking to bring their voices to the collective demands for climate justice. Situated in Glasgow for the duration, As if radio (Air) will provide a platform for the voices less often heard at such events, interweaving these with ecological sounds combining live coverage and commentary from the COP and widening the soundfield to areas out with the official event. We anticipate a rich listening experience combining environmental streams from the Acoustic Commons network with a mix of reportage, radiophonic works, critical perspectives and environmental sounds, sonic interventions and untold stories of the climate crisis. There will be an emphasis on live content wherever possible.
neoscenes participates with an older, but still very much apropos composition, water fills the hall.
Running as an open radio studio at Civic House, Glasgow, AIR is dedicated to experimenting with ideas and practices of ecological radio and acts of listening. It will feature contributions by artists and climate activists in Glasgow and around the world, together with live environmental sounds on the LocusSonus open microphone network, real-time feeds and commentary from around and beyond the COP.
The open call invites diverse audio contributions by artists, activists, ecologists and other sound workers that engage issues of climate and ecological crises in their broadest sense. These might include live streams, soundscapes, field recordings, readings, environmental sound and transmission works – including live material wherever possible. We are also looking for live projects, performances, local reports and interventions over the COP that involve sound or can be adapted for radio.
We imagine the AIR station as a public platform for sharing work, learning about making radio, bringing remote places into conversation, organising, experimentation and acoustic commoning. The show will stream to a server at our broadcast partner, Wave Farm in Acra, New York, from where it will be available for other broadcasters to pick up.
We invite you to join us on-line or in the open studio at Civic House to find out more about ecological radio, for a streambox building workshop, performance or to join a broadcast.
It’s that time of year again, one of the few instances for neoscenes to focus on a small expression of collaborative audio streaming work: Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2021 (one dimension of Soundcamp) this weekend — see below for exact times depending on your time zone:
Reveil is an annual collaborative 24+1 hour streaming radio broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, co-produced by streamers around the world. Reveil follows the changing wave of sound that circles the earth continuously along the grey line of first light, returning to its starting point after 24 hours without repetition.
Sounds produced by birds, amphibians, weather, fish, electromagnetic fluctuations, people, machines, vegetation, transmission artifacts, convey the variety of planetary soundscapes, captured from many specific places and projects. In the process, Reveil brings together dispersed and lesser known ecological projects and practices across disciplines and time zones, in a sketch of an acoustic commons in the making.
Streams range from temporary projects in people’s homes to large research networks. Each open microphone adds to the diversity of the mix.
This Reveil stream, neoscenes seventh contribution is coming from a small ranch sitting at 6800 ft (2000 m) in the Surface Creek drainage near the small town of Cedaredge in western Colorado. To the northwest-north-northeast sits Grand Mesa, the largest flat-topped mountain in the world, at 11,000 ft (3300 m). The ranch was once an apple orchard, beginning 140 years ago, but that came and went, leaving open grazing fields that rely on irrigation waters coming off the Mesa. Before the white colonization, this area was a rich Ute tribal homeland. There are a range of birds — bald eagles (Haliaeetus leucocephalus), red-tail hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), ravens (Corvus corax), black-billed magpies (Pica hudsonia), starlings (Sturnus vulgaris), meadowlarks (Sturnella neglecta), sparrows, and so on. Surface Creek Road runs on the east side of the property, so there will be the occasional pick-up truck or car racing up or down the long grade. The view to the south is to the magnificent San Juan Mountains, and to the southwest and west spans the long horizontal swell of the Uncompaghre Uplift at 9,000 ft (2700 m), looking everything like a massive dark tsunami, frozen in time. The nearest neighbors are 1000 ft (300 m) away or more, but with few trees, one may hear goats, chickens, dogs, and cows in the background.
The neoscenes stream, hosted on the locusonus soundmap will be live for the entire weekend; it will be selectively broadcast in the Reveil stream as follows:
Here’s a recording of the stream as it happened:
(01:34:37, stereo audio, 227 mb)
Date: 30 April 05:44-06:16 AM MDT UTC-6 (this is the approximate time that the neoscenes stream will be mixed into the 24-hour stream) Civil twilight (local time): 5:44 AM / 0544 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge Sunrise (local time): 6:13 AM / 0613 (UTC-6) Local time in Cedaredge Location: online and Cedaredge, Colorado, USA Streamer: John Hopkins / neoscenes neoscenes/Reveil landing page: https://streams.soundtent.org/2021/streams/utc-6_cedaredge-colorado Coordinates: N 38.91735 / W 107.910422 Timezone: MDT UTC-6 — 7 hours behind London
This feed is set-up by Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist, learning facilitator, info-organizer. He holds a creative media practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, systems thinking, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY & DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He currently works at the Colorado Geological Survey where he translates geoscience data into natural language that the public might understand; he is on the faculty of the aforementioned Colorado School of Mines.
You may track his hopes for a prosperous way down and out for the human species at: https://neoscenes.net/blog/
Coming up 02-03 May, neoscenes joins in another annual live streaming broadcast for the sixth time with the Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2020 that is one dimension of Soundcamp:
Reveil is a 24+ hour radio broadcast of the sounds of daybreak, co-produced by streamers around the world on Dawn Chorus Day each year.Reveil follows the changing wave of sound that circles the earth continuously along the grey line of first light, returning to its starting point after 24 hours without repetition.
Sounds produced by birds, amphibians, weather, fish, electromagnetic fluctuations, people, machines, vegetation, transmission artifacts, convey the variety of planetary soundscapes, captured from many specific places and projects. In the process, Reveil brings together dispersed and lesser known ecological projects and practices across disciplines and time zones, in a sketch of an acoustic commons in the making.
Streams range from temporary projects in people’s homes to large research networks. Each open microphone adds to the diversity of the mix.
hopkins/neoscenes sends a dawning stream into the ether from the dividing line betwixt plains and mountains … enjoy!
This Reveil stream, neoscenes’ sixth, is out the kitchen window listening to the ambient neighborhood sounds surrounding Delong Park, a new park-in-the-making, in Golden, Colorado. Nestled at the base of the west flank of South Table Mountain, the sounds are under the dampening influenced of the moment: coronavirus, lock-down, social-distancing, quarantine, and so on. The park sits at 1765 m / 5790 ft. In the immediate foreground is a “ditch” — an dis-used irrigation ditch that used to carry water from Clear Creek Canyon all the way to the Plains to the east for agriculture in this dry climate. Children use the ditch as a play area. The Park was once a strange-shaped concatenation of lots, perhaps two acres in total, with a house on it. For some reason the house was destroyed and the lot donated to the city. It’s been used by locals already on a regular basis for, yes, dog walking, but also, snowball fights, frisbee, soccer practice, and picnicking. Soon, however, the city will unveil a *plan* for the space, to make it an ‘official’ park in the city schema. Not much else going on!
The live microphone feed will include: local neighborhood car and dog-walker traffic; interspersed with the conversational cries of the black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia), the hunting sounds of the occasional red-tail (Buteo jamaicensis) and Cooper’s (Accipiter cooperii) hawks, the territorial cries and pecking of the northern flicker (Colaptes auratus), and the cooing of the mourning doves (Zenaida macroura), along with a variety of other birds. There may be the occasional coyotes (Canis latrans) kicking up a racket, trying to seduce house dogs to come out and play (and get eaten)!
This feed is set-up by Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist, learning facilitator, info-space organizer. He holds a creative media practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, systems thinking, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY and DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He currently is translating geoscience data into natural language that the public might understand at the Colorado Geological Survey which, strangely enough, is now part of the aforementioned Colorado School of Mines.
TUNE IN HERE [PROJECT OVER]: soundcamp listen: https://streams.soundtent.org/2020/streams/utc-6_golden-colorado-47128682-fd2e-411e-a2c1-646043e26a15
The direct neoscenes stream [DOWN NOW] is located at https://locus.creacast.com:9001/neoscenes.m3u (open in iTunes or VLC … it may or may not be active at any given time as I have to keep my kitchen window open for the mike to sit).
[ED: After meeting and talking to Kirsten Volpi, Mines COO/CFO, at a faculty barbecue, I had some follow-up comments for her on being an employee at Mines. Especially relevant was the issue of tele-commuting, although we happened to be still some few months before the Covid cataclysm. We, the staff at the CGS, had been lied to by the former State Geologist, Karen Berry, who told us in a staff meeting that Mines did not allow any remote working, apparently because she didn’t want to allow it. The rest, as of March 2020, is history. I worked four years 100% remote until retiring, no problem.]
Hi Kirsten:
My comments here fall broadly under the ongoing topic of employee retention—an important interest for institutional management—that President Johnson mentioned at last Friday’s staff plenary session. I would hope that perhaps they might shed some anecdotal light on that critical issue from the point of view of an employee. I write as an alumni and a three-year administrative faculty member; and, as someone who cares about the place I work, the people I work with, executing my job with a high degree of professionalism, and the value of work/life balance.
Following up on the question I posed during the Faculty/Staff plenary regarding ‘remote working’, I would offer that if you are considering any staff participation in policy-making around this issue, I’d be happy to contribute my expertise to the discussion. I was surprised when you stated that there was no policy and that some people *were* actually telecommuting. We have been told by our so-called “manager” that it is a Mines policy: remote work is absolutely *not* allowed (thus my original question). And I note that recently one of my professional colleagues left the CGS because of this arbitrarily fabricated limitation. There is substantial research available on the subject that confirms that flexible working conditions augment productivity *and* job satisfaction. They also improve the ability for employees to fond and construct healthy work/life balances.
This brings me to a second point. When I was on the faculty at CU-Boulder, I noted that there was the Ombuds Office (https://www.colorado.edu/ombuds/our-services) that allowed for confidential tabling of any university-related issues. I feel that Mines is deficient in this area—that there is no equitable means for addressing the complex issues that may arise—especially as the school is expanding so rapidly. There is the confidential CARE system, but this seems to focus on student issues, not the wider spectrum of institutional dynamics. Perhaps the ombuds model should be considered.
Moving on, I will relate a couple example of negative issues that I have witnessed as directly impacting both myself and my colleagues at work, both which exhibit a flagrant disregard of staff and their well-being. There are others.
The CGS is located in the Moly Building which is currently under heavy construction and has been for the last eight months. The entire project was ‘presented’ to the staff essentially as a fait accompli. What little information that was passed to us was in a two-line email format: this is what is happening, deal with it. Further occasional emails dealt with the absolutely minimal warnings that understated risk to life and limb if one walked outside the building, ever.
Our first real experience of this particular ‘development’ project was to arrive at work to watch 15 100-year-old trees ripped down and sent to a landfill, while a large and well-established natural riparian area was eviscerated with heavy machinery. That area served, among other functions, as a buffer between our offices and the loud traffic of 6th Avenue, as well as, more importantly, a small but rich wildlife refuge. Given that Mines now has the word “Environment” in its tag line, we found this a richly disturbing irony. The water flow of that riparian corridor was completely disrupted by a typical ‘modern’ solution that shunts surface drainage from areas where it normally would be absorbed into groundwater. I could go into much more detail about available knowledge that demonstrates development does not have to mean utter destruction of a landscape. This violent construction process continues to this day with zero consideration or opportunities for any expression from our staff, despite the persistent stress of environmental destruction, noise, dislocation, delay, and general chaos.
There is a concept called ‘participatory design’ which operates under the principle that those who are to use the designed object or environment are given an active role in the design process. This is a crucial dimension to truly sustainable development. In this particular situation, however, the feeling is that there is no recourse, no mechanism for ‘speaking truth to power’. This is a sure way to cause those who can to move on to more humane working situations to do just that. If such a feeling is the dominant modus, an institution will be in constant internal conflict with its own potential (humane) success. I see this on a daily basis among my colleagues, how these small things add up to embodied stress and dissatisfaction.
The next step in this destruction process was paving over what remained of the open area bordering the riparian zone, so not only did we lose the buffer of trees, but then a vast sheet of unshaded black asphalt was installed that, among other negative effects, markedly increased solar heat buildup immediately outside our entire wing of the building. Car windshields reflected glare directly into half of our offices for much of the day. These are two tiny details, but it is in these details that makes a difference: there are many more that I will not enumerate here. There are ways to pave an area that allows for stormwater percolation using perforated pavers among a variety of other solutions.
The parking lot debacle segues into the second issue. Admittedly, the CGS is a bit of an orphan child at Mines, and this aspect came into sharp focus when the dictate came down to us from above that our parking lot fee would double from $265 to $497 per year. Not only that, but the lot is now requiring a ‘reserved’ permit that restricts the user from parking *anywhere* else on campus, despite the high cost! Our work flow at the CGS is not so similar to a ‘regular’ staff member in that we do come-and-go a lot, often with field gear, attending off-campus meetings (on campus meetings are even more complicated in that it can take 20 minutes to get somewhere on campus on foot). I’m wondering if the time lost to walking too and from personal vehicles is to be deducted from *my* time or from the institution’s time—if I do pay more to park, the institution wins on both counts, my cash *and* my time. I personally decided to subtract *my* cash completely from that picture—by canceling my parking pass completely, in protest—I will follow your advice on the second factor. I happen to live in Golden, though, and can bike commute, while most my colleagues have significant car commutes. Many other staff folks dropped a tier or cancelled, tired of being cash cows with no good alternatives. Some of the few who went for the higher fee did so because they were afraid of the risk to their cars and personal safety as has been demonstrated most recently in the area. Given the fact that no one else will be using this lot aside from folks working in the Moly building, the occasional contractor, and perhaps a few Facilities Maintenance folks, it would seem that this decision to double rates is a shameless and rather ignorant grab.
I know this may read like an editorial, but that’s because, in part, I was a Special Editor for the Oredigger, back when. And while I would like to think that this letter will have only positive outcomes related to my employment here, sadly, I am not confident that. Being a squeaky wheel—one that actually cares about the institution, its legacy, and the people working here—will perhaps ultimately cause my departure.
At any rate, thanks you for your time and consideration, I would reiterate my interest in helping develop an up-to-date policy for telecommuting (noting that my father authored a number of reports out of the White House’s Office of Technology Policy on tele-medicine among other tele-processes *in the early 1970s*). It’s about time!
We organise overnight soundcamps where people can sleep outside and investigate the sounds of unusual locations, especially at daybreak. We transmit REVEIL: a 24 hour radio broadcast that tracks sunrise around the globe, relaying live audio streams from collaborating artists, independent channels, and a variety of streaming media assembled for the event.
We are a platform for artistic and trans disciplinary work in the emerging field of live streaming audio.
We contribute to research and development of open source solutions for relaying live sounds, and establishing a permanent open microphone network as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.
We assemble and produce materials online and in print as contexts for The Live Archive which Reveil taps into and extends.
Join soundcamps and streamers who will open microphones for the Reveil 24 hour radio broadcast, tracking the sunrise around the world for one earth day.
This Reveil stream is coming from a house set in a suburban mountain neighborhood at the fringe of wildlands on the east-facing side of Apex Park in Golden, Colorado. Overlooking the wide expanse of the High Plains, the house sits at 1890 m/6200 ft, the Mother Cabrini Shrine isn’t so far, at least as the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) flies, nor is Deadman Gulch. Apex Park is yet another expression of the Laramide Orogeny of the Rocky Mountains as they rise from the Great Plains of middle America. The view to the east is expansive and includes Lakewood, and off in the middle distance, the high-rise towers of Denver, Colorado, and the eastern horizon, looking towards the state of Kansas, is far enough away that you may easily see the curvature of the earth.
The live microphone feed will include far-away-though-still-violent vehicle susserations from Interstate 70 and 470; un-throttled air traffic ascending hard to cross the high mountains from the Denver Int’l Airport; local neighborhood car and dog traffic; interspersed with the conversational cries of the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) and a variety of other birds. It’s not unusual to see large herds of elk (Cervus canadensis), very fat suburban coyotes (Canis latrans), lynx (Lynx rufus), and mountain lions (Puma concolor) among the houses here, but they are generally silent or absent at dawn.
Rápidas manos frías
retiran una a una
las vendas de la sombra
Abro los ojos
todavía
estoy vivo
en el centro
de una herida todavía fresca. (1)
A half-circle rotation, standing, looking east: from the far north, left, the Flatirons, vertically-tilted 280-million-year-old sandstone spires; then, North Table Mountain, a broad mesa of Paleocene lava flows, paired with South Table Mountain; then a wide gap straight east across the flat Denver Basin and, eventually, Kansas; book-ending the view to the south-south-east, right, the low expanse of Green Mountain; behind me, the raw mass of the Rocky Mountains. Late spring dawn slices directly through this horizon, the actual sunrise a brilliant post-Cartesian process. There is, yes, the left-right-up-down event, (artificially) timed — astronomical, nautical, civil — along azimuth, ecliptic, and the eventual arrival at zenith way up above, later.
But every instance, every now of dawn, every sequential instant is different. It is the same difference — the anisotropic distribution of energized matter in the cosmos — that drives the gravitational oscillations rolling our Gaian marble on a nautiloid trajectory, revealing and hiding stars, planets, and sun. Here, though, on the dividing edge, one is affected by that same attraction of masses. The mass of the mountains to the west — at one’s back while watching the dawn — create a slight lightening effect on the body: given the calculated metrics of the “terrain” and “Hammer” corrections to the local gravitational field. This, a complication of the two-infinite-half-spaces geophysical model of the earth that speaks only of earth below and heaven above, what the I Ching reads as matter and spirit, darkness and light. But it is the incremental, the incomplete, the fuzzy, and the complex interplay signified in the fluid transitions of topography, of ecosystems, of orbiting bodies, and specifically, of dawn that bring us to Life.
Beyond the unbalanced weight of waning dark and waxing gray; beyond the vocative release of the local aviary; beyond the grinding realization that it is probably a work day; beyond the memory of the reported deaths of the previous day; beyond the inexorable procession of awakening to light; beyond the rime of red-eyed pollution staining the horizon; beyond the shreds of nightdream; beyond the warmth of feathered bedding and gently aspirating partner; there is the underlying nature of reality:
Two forces rule the universe: light and gravity. (2)
We organise overnight soundcamps where people can sleep outside and investigate the sounds of unusual locations, especially at daybreak.
We transmit REVEIL: a 24 hour radio broadcast that tracks sunrise around the globe, relaying live audio streams from collaborating artists, independent channels, and a variety of streaming media assembled for the event.
We are a platform for artistic and trans disciplinary work in the emerging field of live streaming audio.
We contribute to research and development of open source solutions for relaying live sounds, and establishing a permanent open microphone network as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.
We assemble and produce materials online and in print as contexts for The Live Archive which Reveil taps into and extends.
Over the weekend of International Dawn Chorus Day on 5-6 May, soundcamps and streamers around the world will open microphones for the Reveil broadcast, sharing the sounds of places we hadn’t heard of or heard in this way before.
From a house perched on the rugged east-facing side of Mount Zion, at 1865 m/6120 ft above sea level, the view of sunrise is spectacular. Mount Zion is the first uplifted (remaining, continuing) expression of the Laramide Orogeny of the Rocky Mountains as they rise from the Great Plains of middle America. The view to the east is expansive and includes the town of Golden, Colorado, once the territorial capital, in the foreground; then comes the low North and South Table Mesa neither completely obscuring the view of the far horizon that is perhaps 75 mi. away towards the state of Kansas. The curvature of the earth is apparent, looking over this western edge of the Great Plains.
The live microphone feed will include a constant machinic backdrone of the Coors (beer) Brewery that sits on the east side of Golden; along with that is the sucking hiss of cars driving at high speed along a piece of 6th Avenue; often there is a significant wind; possible early-morning mountain bikers huffing up the Chimney Gulch trail below the house; interspersed with the conversational cries of the black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia), the buzzing flight of ruby-throated hummingbirds (Archilochus colubris), and the rattling duel of gilded flickers (Colaptes chrysoides). There are red-tailed Hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), and the occasional golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), the occasional neighborhood dog barking, lots of LBBs (little brown birds) that I cannot name in the moment.
This year, for the morning sunrise, I plan to have a soft-and-sweet-spoken guest, and we shall have a dialogue that will float in the background of this sounding.
This stream is initiated by Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist, learning facilitator, information-space organizer. He holds a creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the& Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY and DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently organizing the geoscience dataspace and archive of the Colorado Geological Survey which, strangely enough, is now part of the aforementioned Colorado School of Mines… strange circles.
We organise overnight soundcamps where people can sleep outside and investigate the sounds of unusual locations, especially at daybreak.
We transmit REVEIL: a 24 hour radio broadcast that tracks sunrise around the globe, relaying live audio streams from collaborating artists, independent channels, and a variety of streaming media assembled for the event.
We are a platform for artistic and trans disciplinary work in the emerging field of live streaming audio.
We contribute to research and development of open source solutions for relaying live sounds, and establishing a permanent open microphone network as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.
We assemble and produce materials online and in print as contexts for The Live Archive which Reveil taps into and extends.
From a house perched on the rugged east-facing side of Mount Zion, at 1865 m/6120 ft above sea level, the view of sunrise is spectacular. Mount Zion is the first uplifted (remaining, continuing) expression of the Laramide Orogeny of the Rocky Mountains as they rise from the Great Plains of middle America. The view to the east is expansive and includes the town of Golden, Colorado, once the territorial capital, in the foreground; then comes the low North and South Table Mesa neither completely obscuring the view of the far horizon that is perhaps 75 mi. away towards the state of Kansas. The curvature of the earth is apparent, looking over this western edge of the Great Plains.
The live microphone feed will include a constant machinic whining from the Coors (Beer) Brewery that sits on the east side of Golden; along with that is the sucking hiss of cars driving at high speed along a piece of 6th Avenue; often there is a significant wind; possible early-morning runners and mountain bikers huffing up the Chimney Gulch trail below the house; all this interspersed with the conversational cries of the black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia). There are red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis), and the occasional golden eagle (Aquila chrysaetos), a neighborhood dog barking, and lots of birds that I cannot name in the moment.
It had been a dry winter here, in the transition zone, though the mountains got plenty of snow, up until last weekend when we got 30 cm of wet springtime snow. Now things are quite green.
This stream is initiated by Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist, learning facilitator, information-space organizer. He holds a creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the& Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY and DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently organizing the geoscience dataspace and archive of the Colorado Geological Survey which, strangely enough, is now part of the aforementioned Colorado School of Mines… strange circles.
REVEIL relays the sounds of live open microphones provided by streamers around the world.
Starting on the morning of Saturday 30 April just before daybreak in Rotherhithe near the Greenwich Meridian, the Reveil broadcast tracks the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of sound that loops the earth every 24 hours.
Sounds are provided by the LocusSonus network and other streamers, together with a collection of live audio sources assembled for this broadcast.
REVEIL is different from the vast majority of radio available online: it is not dedicated mainly to music or talk, and none of it is pre-recorded. Each sound is propagating live somewhere in real time.
Our aim is to open a space for listening to something else – especially, but not exclusively to non humans and from wild places – and in the course of one earth day to provide a sketch of this emerging field.
The Live Audio Archive is both paradoxical and fluid: streams come and go in response to technical issues, seasonal changes, and the movement of people and other creatures on different projects or migrations.
From the Prescott National Forest, (altitude 5400 ft/1650 m) in a third growth ponderosa or blackjack pine (Pinus ponderosa) forest, sitting on a 1.5 billion-year-old granite batholith, a live microphone feed before, during, and after dawn brings the sounds of the common ground-dove (Columbina passerina), red-naped sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis), common raven (Corvus corax), and a variety of other birds, some neighborhood dogs, a few wind-chimes, the occasional susseration of automobiles in the distance, and the wind in the pines. It’s springtime, but after ten weeks of late winter that broke all records on heat and lack of precipitation, the environment is stressed and desperate for any moisture. Wildfires, once seasonal, may now start at any time of year.
This feed is sent from the small under-reconstruction cabin studio of Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist and learning facilitator. He holds a creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY & DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently hunting for meaningful work in a social system that is itself under severe psycho-spiritual duress. Is this the beginning of collapse?
Here’s a recording of the stream as it happened:
(01:25:21, stereo audio, 207.2 mb)
The neoscenes stream parameters:
Date: 30 April 0445-0600 MST UTC-7
Location: Prescott, Arizona, USA
Streamer: John Hopkins
Link(s): https://streams.soundtent.org/2016/streams/utc-7_prescott-arizona
Coordinates: N 34 31′ 48.763″ / W 112 28’56.712″
Timezone: MST UTC-7 [no DST] 8 hours behind London
Civil twilight (local time): 5.12 AM / 0512
Sunrise (local time): 5.39 AM / 0539
Broadcast window (London time): 13.12 – 13.39
Start time (approximate – London time): 13.25
OR AT my direct locus-sonus stream: https://locus.creacast.com:9001/neoscenes.m3u (this URL is live sporadically before and after the actual dawn stream time period). You can copy/paste the address into iTunes (use ‘File’ menu — ‘Open Stream’ option), or other mp3 players once it’s live. Headphones recommended to capture the ethereal density of the stream!
[…] The misuse and destruction of the environment are also accompanied by a relentless process of exclusion. In effect, a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged, either because they are differently abled (handicapped), or because they lack adequate information and technical expertise, or are incapable of decisive political action. Economic and social exclusion is a complete denial of human fraternity and a grave offense against human rights and the environment. The poorest are those who suffer most from such offenses, for three serious reasons: they are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment. They are part of today’s widespread and quietly growing “culture of waste”. […]
Pope Francis, 2015. Pope Francis’ Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly. The New York Times. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/qdmyswf [Accessed September 25, 2015].
Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!
*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.
We organise overnight soundcamps where people can sleep outside and investigate the sounds of unusual locations, especially at daybreak.
We transmit REVEIL: a 24 hour radio broadcast that tracks sunrise around the globe, relaying live audio streams from collaborating artists, independent channels, and a variety of streaming media assembled for the event.
We are a platform for artistic and trans disciplinary work in the emerging field of live streaming audio.
We contribute to research and development of open source solutions for relaying live sounds, and establishing a permanent open microphone network as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.
We assemble and produce materials online and in print as contexts for The Live Archive which Reveil taps into and extends.
From the Prescott National Forest, (altitude 5400 ft/1650 m) in a third growth ponderosa or blackjack pine (Pinus ponderosa) area, sitting on a 3.5 Billion-year-old granite batholith, a live microphone feed before, during, and after dawn brings the sounds of the common ground-dove (Columbina passerina), red-naped sapsucker (Sphyrapicus nuchalis), common raven (Corvus corax), and a variety of other birds, neighborhood dogs, the over-powered air-conditioning system that the empty neighbor’s house has running, a wind-chime, the occasional automobile, and wind in the pines. It’s definitely spring, so there may also be the sound of some of the flying insects that are out in large number.
This feed is sent from the studio of Dr. John Hopkins (aka neoscenes), a visual/sonic media artist and learning facilitator. He holds a creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney, an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied film under renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage), and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His transdisciplinary research and workshops explore issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked & tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY and DIWO processes, networked creativity, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently materializing a successful Kickstarter project in the mountains of Arizona and serving as education adviser to the Ecosa Institute.
“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A person without a name is nobody. A human’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing — nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was — the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.” —
Abbey, Edward. Abbey’s Road. New York, NY: Plume, 1991.
Plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, years since reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” his writing seems dated, depressing, even dark. So much of the landscape that he passed through is (de)evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the land. The forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). Bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe MacMansions to dot the landscape along with scaled-up vehicular afterbirth: Hummers in every five-car garage. Although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale—meaning the easily visible—local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. But with any consideration of scientific data—atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, and hydrological systems are being irretrievably altered. What of the domination of a species that will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live on briefly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to a viral celebration in the host of hosts. Definitely, catch it while you can. Take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. And the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.
At any rate, this is a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog – Hyla arenicolor). But note the incredible coloration. The green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. The pinkish blush of the oxidized feldspar in the granite. There were four of them literally stuck to the side of a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. This particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, it was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. The other three were glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. So, this one had to do. The beautiful beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.
We conclude that economic liberalization and other policies that promote gross national product growth are not substitutes for environmental policy. On the contrary, it may well be desirable that they are accompanied by stricter policy reforms. Of particular importance is the need for reforms that would improve the signals that are received by resource users. Environmental damages, including loss of ecological resilience, often occur abruptly. They are frequently not reversible. But abrupt changes can seldom be anticipated from systems of signals that are typically received by decision-makers in the world today. Moreover, the signals that do exist are often not observed, or are wrongly interpreted, or are not part of the incentive structure of societies. This is due to ignorance about the dynamic effects of changes in ecosystem variables (for example, thresholds, buffering capacity, and loss of resilience) and to the presence of institutional impediments, such as lack of well-defined property rights.
Arrow, K., Pimentel, D. & Costanza, R., 1995. Economic Growth, Carrying Capacity, and the Environment. Ecological Economics, 15(2), pp.91–95.
The maintenance of the organization in nature is not — and can not be — achieved by central management; order can only be maintained by self-organization. Self-organizing systems allow adoption to the prevailing environment, i.e., they react to changes in the environment with a thermodynamical response which makes the systems extraordinarily flexible and robust against perturbations of outer conditions. We want to emphasize the superiority of self-organizing systems over conventional human technology which carefully avoids complexity and hierarchically manages nearly all technical processes. For instance, in synthetic chemistry different reaction steps are usually carefully separated from each other and contributions from the diffusion of the reactants are avoided by stirring reactors. An entirely new technology will have to be developed to tap the high guidance and regulation potential of self-organizing systems for technical processes. The superiority of self-organising systems is illustrated by biological systems where complex products can be formed with unsurpassed accuracy, efficiency and speed.
Biebricher, C.K. & Nicolis, G., 1995. Self-organization in the physico-chemical and life sciences: grant contract No. PSS*0396, Luxemburg: Off. for Official Publ. of the EU.
I responded to Suzon Fuks’ invitation to join a waterwheel performance this week – Wednesday, 22 August, between 1800 – 2000 MST (time converter here) — the detailed info on the performance as well as the gateway for joining in online is here. As I haven’t had much time to prep and to explore the potentials of the platform, I’m doing a relatively simple improv remix titled “Crossing the Yampa” with video material from Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, along tributaries of the Yampa and Green Rivers. Looking up, looking down, looking all around, listening, receiving the immersive flows, it’s about water and the life it supports.
Suzon set up waterwheel as a live/online collaborative performance space:
Exploring water — as a topic and metaphor — Waterwheel is an interactive, collaborative platform for sharing media and ideas, performance and presentation.
Waterwheel investigates and celebrates this constant yet volatile global resource, fundamental element, environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. It encourages you to explore and discover, share and collaborate, contribute and participate.
Waterwheel calls on everyone — performers and artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, you and me, anyone and anywhere — to test the water, dive in, make a splash and start a wave. It provides a platform and forum for experience and exchange, expression and experimentation.
Waterwheel draws together different people, practices, places, media and modes of expression. There are no borders or boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.
There are different degrees in which our experience of the world is not technologically mediated, at least at the center of our perceptual and bodily experience of that world. For example, even though clothed and inside some “machine for living,” as the functionalists have termed buildings, the normally sighted and hearing person simply hears and sees what is immediate. In contrast, anyone using corrective lenses or a hearing aid clearly has sight and hearing mediated through a technology. At the level of touch, first in a surface dimension, we always can become specifically aware of the bodily surrounding immediacy of what we touch. In short, our sensory life, even if at close range or enclosed, retains that sense of direct perceivability and of bodily motility in the immediate environment. How this bodily actional and perceivable experience differs from more specifically technologically mediated experience will play an essential role in the initial difference I am trying to isolate for this analysis.
Once having located this central core of perceptual, bodily experience of an environment, it is possible to point to both its constancy and its pervasiveness. As long as I experience at all, I do so in bodily perceptual ways, and this is the case inside any technologies I may occupy. In a cold environment, I could tactilely experience the wind and chill; but if I have “chosen” to mediate that cold by wearing down clothing, I now substitute feeling the wind for feeling the warmth of what I am wearing. In this case, the “environment” is simply brought close and itself has the texture of one of the many cocoons humans employ in all non-Garden situations. The technology (clothing), however, transforms this immediately experienced environment; and it is that transformation which must be investigated. Direct bodily-perceptual contact with an environment counts as one side of the non-technologically /technologically mediated human experience that forms the focus of an entry into the analysis of human-technology relations.
Ihde, D., 1990. Technology and the Lifeworld : from garden to earth, Bloomington [etc.]: Indiana University Press.
posted
place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts
Perhaps an ECM study would be useful. It could be based on some of the ideas in Schlesinger’s book “Principles of ECM,” where he defines “4 Basic Steps.”
1) Evaluate the electronic environment, i.e., the intelligence situation.
2) Select an ECM tactic.
3) Employ the tactic.
4) Evaluate the results.
He also shows a trace-off graph, plotting payoff against the ratio of ECM gear weight to weight of explosives. His payoff function is (Prob. of Survival) x % damage from explosives carried.
It would be relatively easy to apply this analysis to the ICBM situation.
Aubyn Freed in with 4 GE docs. that contain lists of objectives, sensors, sample rates, etc., for the Mark 6 Mod 4 vehicle.
Wrote a status report with a little more in it that usual.
Overcast Medium Humidity
Paid Leo $11.74 and made arrangements to pick up a roll of 6″ x 36″ x 10 g. x 150′ reinforcing mesh which I did after dinner.
Found a place in Belmont where I hope I can get a mallet handle.
This morning, listening to Talk of the Nation, hosted by Neal Conan with a program on the Colorado River from the Aspen Institute. I sent the following email part of which Neal ended up reading on air:
[Hi Neal!]
[Great topic, important to my life!]
I just spent 2 months traveling around Western Colorado, seeing the effects of this year’s especially intense drought, with rivers all down to August levels as early as April… A river is a crucial element in sustaining everything in the West, and most people just have no clue how crucial it really is!
[As someone who has spent years in the back country of Colorado (an alumni of the Colorado School of Mines and University of Colorado Boulder), I have always recommended that anyone living in the West read the book “Cadillac Desert” which explores the (disastrous!) history of water development in the West. Humans, as with any living organism, affect the surrounding environment. The Colorado River is no exception and has been brutally controlled and diverted, rendering in the long term an unsustainable system.]
Spend time on the Yampa River, the only uncontrolled tributary left in the Colorado system, and one sees immediately that a living (uncontrolled) river is so completely different from a controlled one!
John Wesley Powell suggested that the Western water problem could have been solved much easier if the geopolitical boundaries of cities, and states were drawn along watersheds rather than arbitrarily along other ways. Since it’s not the case, there are completely intractable legal issues around use, ownership, and sustainability of the whole system.
Cheers, John
[I used my Melbourne sig file, so, I’m identified as “John from Australia” ;-]
The program was not so in depth, but Sandra Postel, one of the guests, is an articulate and focused advocate on global water issues. She’s one of the authors of Rivers For Life.
There are two state variables: structural body volume and energy reserve density.
There are six energy fluxes: assimilation; somatic maintenance; somatic growth; maturation; maintenance of the state of maturity; and reproduction. These energy fluxes are irreversible.
There are maximally three life stages: embryo’s, which neither feed nor reproduce; juveniles, which may feed but do not reproduce; and adults, which may feed and reproduce.
The rate of food uptake is proportional to the surface area of an organism, and is a hyperbolic function of the food density.
Energy assimilated from food becomes part of the reserves. The dynamics of the energy reserve density are first order, with a rate that is inversely proportional to the length of an organism.
A fixed fraction of the energy flowing out of the reserves is used by somatic tissue (somatic maintenance and growth), and the remainder is used for maturity maintenance, and maturation or reproduction (stored until reproductive event); maintenance demands have priority. This partitioning of energy cancels when somatic maintenance needs cannot be fulfilled; then somatic maintenance demands have priority.
The chemical compositions of structure and reserves are constant. Thus, the following are constant:
the conversion efficiency of food into energy;
the cost to maintain a unit of structure;
the cost to form a unit of structure;
the cost to maintain the acquired state of maturity;
the cost to mature a unit of structure;
the cost to form a unit of reproductive matter.
Life stage transitions occur when the cumulative amount of energy that is spent on maturation exceeds a threshold. An embryo initially has a negligible amount of structure. With eggs, the energy reserve density of the embryo at hatching equals that of its mother during egg formation. A foetus develops at a rate that is independent of the reserve density of the mother; at birth, its energy reserve density equals that of the mother. Micro-organisms divide into daughter cells a constant interval after the initiation of DNA replication; replication starts at a threshold size.
There is one state variable for each toxic compound: the density of that toxicant in the aqueous fraction of structure.
There is one independent compartment: the aqueous fraction of structure. The density of toxicant in the aqueous fraction of structure is always in equilibrium with the toxicant density in other parts of the body (dry fraction of structure, reserves and stored resources for reproduction). Toxicants are exchanged with the ambient through the aqueous fraction of structure.
Toxicants in ingested food are assimilated with a constant efficiency. Other toxicants in the environment are taken up at a rate that is proportional to the surface area of an organism and the ambient toxicant concentration.
The rate of toxicant removal (excluding the release of reproductive matter) is proportional to the surface area of an organism and the toxicant density in the aqueous fraction of structure.
Toxicants do not affect energy budgets when their density in the aqueous fraction of structure is below a fixed value, the no-effect concentration (NEC). At higher levels, the effective toxicant concentration is proportional to the density in the aqueous fraction of structure corrected for the NEC.
The flow of energy declines as a hyperbolic function of the effective toxicant density. Demand driven fluxes (maintenance demands) are compensated such that the net commitment to maintenance increases linearly with the effective toxicant concentration.
Toxicants act on different energy fluxes with equal strength.
Nisbet, R.M., Effects of Metal Toxicants on the Energy Budgets of Marine Organisms: A Modeling Approach. Available at: https://www.coastalresearchcenter.ucsb.edu/scei/Metaltox.html.
…[T]he last 15 years have witnessed the ascent of an alternative view, that of embodied or enactive cognition. This new wave arose because the computationalist doctrine failed to account even for the most elementary coping with the world: walking, perceiving object in a natural setting, imagination. Slowly the cards turned into considering that the basis of mind is the body in coupled action, that is, the sensory-motor circuits establish the organism as viable in situated contexts. From this perspective the brain appears as a dynamical process (and not a syntactic one) of real time variables with a rich self-organizing capacity (and not a representational machinery). So in this sense the mind is not in the head since it[‘s] roots [are] in the body as a whole and also in the extended environment where the organism finds itself.
– Francisco Varela, Cosmos Web Forum letter 12e (1998?)
We conclude that economic liberalization and other policies that promote gross national product growth are not substitutes for environmental policy. On the contrary, it may well be desirable that they are accompanied by stricter policy reforms. Of particular importance is the need for reforms that would improve the signals that are received by resource users. Environmental damages, including loss of ecological resilience, often occur abruptly. They are frequently not reversible. But abrupt changes can seldom be anticipated from systems of signals that are typically received by decision-makers in the world today. Moreover, the signals that do exist are often not observed, or are wrongly interpreted, or are not part of the incentive structure of societies. This is due to ignorance about the dynamic effects of changes in ecosystem variables (for example, thresholds, buffering capacity, and loss of resilience) and to the presence of institutional impediments, such as lack of well-defined property rights. — Kenneth Arrow, et al. here
Systems depend on power, which they use to develop structure and functions that self-organize according to laws of energy transformation and use. As suggested by Alfred Lotka in 1922, maximum power results from self-organization according to the natural selection of systems designs. This chapter explains energy laws, including the maximum power principle and its control of production, growth, competition, succession, energy storage, diversity, and the oscillatory pulsing of all systems. more “highly recommended!”
The key program of a surviving pattern of nature and man is a subsystem of religious teaching which follows the laws of the energy ethic. … We can teach the energy truths through general science in the schools and teach the love of system and its requirements of us in the changing churches. System survival makes right and the energy commandments guide the system to survival.
Odum, H.T., 2007. Environment, Power, and Society for the Twenty-First Century – The Hierarchy of Energy, New York, NY: Columbia University Press.
Hmmm, Odum outlines a radical take on the relationship between humans and the natural system of energy flows they are a part of. A bit dogmatic sounding, though, so, out of context in that dimension. But in the context of science and, for example, climate change, it might be worth it for humans to get some scientific religion. Then again, maybe it’s all dogma and the processes that thermodynamics seeks to circumscribe will be the ruling factor: they will be, unless there is an intervention by forces beyond anything that science has framed. This is possible at any time, but seems unlikely. Who wants to depend on the unlikely and the improbable as a policy driver?
if creativity cannot be taught, cannot be ‘made’ to happen, how best to approach the assumption that it can be fostered or stimulated within situations?
one answer to this is a consideration of the meta-structure of flows that characterize a particular situation. I have talked about meta-structures elsewhere. to begin with, each instance itself is only ‘separated’ from everything else through a process of abstracted defining. separation is an abstraction, a reduction of the actuality of holistic, immersed, and connected being and presence. so, best not to consider separation, distinction, and particularities. rather, retain a sensibility to all possible flows, or flow in general. easy to say, despite the (English) language being wholly insufficient to deal with such concepts. (Csikszentmihalyi is pretty good at making a natural language argument for flow, though he comes from a completely different direction than me, the conclusions are similar, will explore that when I shuffle through some of the references…)
a long conversation with Anthony this evening. always stimulating coverage of the non-typical meta-structures of social and individual existence.
the thought comes up, in teaching — most recently the “Multi-platform Story-telling” course that I was involved with this past semester at La Trobe — how seldom the holistic social meta-structure of the grouping of students (and teachers!) is considered in the facilitation of a learning trajectory. this includes the cumulative totality of all relations (power and otherwise!) that occur within the grouping. I call this space the continuum-of-relation and define it as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. Based on the assumption that we are in a holistic and continuous universe, it is possible to extend the definition to include the set of energy relations that humans have with the detailed and greater cosmos around them, and indeed, this is an important aspect to consider, but it is easier to limit the scope to a specific subset comprising relations between all humans. There are infinite sub-sets of relation that may be delineated, one set being those which arise in the process of learning facilitation. much attention is paid to syllabi, curricula, classroom technologies, and wide-scaled social ‘relevance’ of education systems while very little is paid to the immediate and long-term embodied needs for a recognition of presence of all the humans involved in the actual learning process. and especially the needs for deep human encounter and connection. is it such that this university, as with most others, is merely reflecting a wider scale of civil social decay when those crucial relations and their attendant qualities are simply ignored in the stead of assessment protocols, schedules, cash-for-services, and the general corporatization of education. more “conversation”
Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:
Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.
sotto voce: If you want to dig (no pun intended) into this more, I’d highly recommend this audio/video panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
It’s a good in-depth intro to this issue by a panel of three experts who look at the contemporary situation with rare earth elements (which do not include niobium and tantalum from coltan deposits). But it is basically the same idea/situation — in the sense of there being a rare resource, in demand by a multiplicity of large forces/powers, in places where local people are considered to be disposable commodities.
(I am not promoting their opinions, but they do describe the situation well from their point of view, both historical and today’s view)…
I believe it is worth it to consider the principle, not the details, in these areas of activism, as EVERY material that the techno-social system uses for re-forming matter causes a similar distortion of localized systems: That is, look around your home, what’s made out of metal, plastic, chemicals, paper, wood… etc etc, it all requires machines to make which require more metals, plastics, chemicals, etc. etc… which make necessary the entire range of the global extractives industry which is closely allied to WAR (of every kind — both aggressive overt weapons war as well as slow and equally deadly environmental degradation warfare).
Humans do this. It is not avoidable. The only factor that we have the power to influence is *how much* we use — of course, this *how much* does imply choosing one type of device over another. It also places the choice directly in our power. We can make choices, we can influence others to make choices. But as long as this discussion proceeds here on this (telecom-based) mailing list, we are being somewhat hypocritical. Of course, educating each other is paramount, but the best teaching methodology is to ‘practice what one preaches.’ Which puts us squarely in a very problematic position of having to implement radical change in our tele- lived lives or else continue to support large portions of this global system.
If you want to stop mining, then you have to stop telecommunications. You have to go back to an industrial base before rare earths and coltan were discovered and rendered fit for use. (1800 were the first discoveries, but little use came before the beginning of the 20th Century).
Otherwise, this process will simply continue and expand, along with demand, and along with all the horrific effects that the human struggle for control of resources entails everywhere…
hmmm. god that sounds bleak. sorry, but from this materialist approach to global problems, there are no solutions. It would seem that a Buddhist approach which posits that *all is change* and to try to grasp and manipulate or put off change is a futile process. We must simply move through this incarnation and while treating each other as best as we can, not get caught up in the grasping at illusion…
I don’t know. (I type on my laptop and stare at the letters string themselves across the screen…)
A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”
Okay, so in the process of simplifying last week’s posting — 08 Jan — I’ve got to take yet another look at how control is projected by an organism. Or maybe that should be a question — does an organism exert control over its environment? Or does it merely synergize with the flows that are available to it? What affect does the neurophysiological field of action of a particular organism exert on the localized situation? Primitive neuro-systems read gradients or difference that ‘matter’ to their existence. Quantifying these existing gradients of energy relates to an organism’s ability to find the energy sources through which it survives to prolong its life and procreate. This is the fundamental means by which life has prolonged itself on the planet continuously since it began. The existence and control of thermal (heat) energy gradients are also extremely important in the regulation of internal physiological systems through direct biochemical reaction-rate regulation. The surface or edge of an organism is clearly ‘signified’ in thermodynamic and physical terms; the maintenance of internal gradients might be called ‘control’ where the control is a function of defining the primary limit of the organism’s field of action. hmmm.
Again, back to voice. Given the process of coalescing and erosion. In order to bind the grains of disparate disciplines, different socio-cultural systems, and idiosyncratic paths, a voice which allows some transcendence of localized protocols of communication is necessary. That voice must needs to be poetic in a fundamental sense. It need not have a particular density or timbre, but it does need to be located somewhere within and without any and all those disciplinary spaces, pores.
Is a poetic voice immediate or is it cumulative? It is supposed that the smallest increment or grain of uttered language, the phoneme can hardly be a poetic vocalization. So, maybe language is generally cumulative, accretionary, in that geologic sense of layered erosional deposition, reification, burial, uplift, and consequent re-erosion. In this instance, it is then possible to find a shiny-smooth cobble of, say, cloudy quartz. Well-balanced, raising expectations of imminent knowledge of something when in the hand, pleasing to the eye. What are its origins since arising from the heart of stars: silicon, oxygen. At one point following the gravitational accretion of the planet, the silicon was oxidized by some environment rich in oxygen. Silicon dioxide. Under pressure, super-heated, igneous differentiation allowed masses of these molecules to collect and form crystalline agglomerations within a cooling batholith. Uplift and erosion brings that raw mass to the surface where it is shattered slowly, washed by waters, and dragged downwards by gravity. The cobble is smoothed with many others, and buried with all those, pressure cementing them all again into a single mass, a conglomerate. Another uplift and erosional cycle breaks the conglomerate cement and releases this smooth stone into a creek bed, into a river, where it is further polished. Holding it in the palm, what is its voice? What does it say? How does it speak to its temporary holder? What does it say other that the mute message of gravity to be let down, to be given back to the earth? If the holder knows, they might read signs in the surface, in the raw presence of the thing-ness of the cobble. The signs point to histories and pathways. The reader has to understand the basic elements of those signs in order to create their own understanding as to the origin of the object. But of its pure presence, nothing need be known, but only the immediate experience of the Self in juxtaposition with this thing. Naming all this is the root of language.
Plucked from the poetic talus, the transformed erosional product of language, the cobble might be heaved through the wall of the proverbial glass house of culture, period. Howl.
I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.
There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.
Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.
It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.
The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.
This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:
(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.
**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit
Up early again, before all the girls are off to school, the morning routines are quite entertaining to witness. Compared to similarly-aged kids in other places (the US!), all the kids I’ve met here seem quite relaxed. Is it the culture here, or? There is a laid-back quality, but I haven’t been here long enough to see how it suffuses through the society. There have to be substantial social issues, with colonialism having left such an influence on things. The stack of histories of NZ that Kerry loaned me before traveling told of savage open conflict until around the time of the US Civil War which is quite recent. Though no longer in direct living memory, it is still quite close. It’s is obvious, from the clear-cut timbering alone, seen from the air, that there is an ongoing and deep conflict over land-use, with powerful development and/or exploitation forces. On the other hand, there are definitely strong voices for nurturing the environment (and human lives on the island) back to something more sustainable.
We take a visit to the waka (canoe) boathouse to check on things — there is a crew of young gals who are practicing waka racing for the national championship. A group of absolutely charming young women.
Mike, our main Maori host comes by, what a expansive and powerful spirit he has! Julian has really cultivated some amazing connections with people here. Everyone met so far has been friendly, open, welcoming, relaxed, ready with a smile, along with some challenging/enLightening conversations.
Hardly time to make any entries now that the road has come up to meet my feet, so to say. Prepping mentally for the symposium coming up in a few days. But there is still so much indeterminacy that I will really have to improvise, and simply go with the available and auspicious energies of the moment. Many stories are already told about energy and informatics.
Towards sunset, an impromptu picnic on river turns out to be a neighborhood gathering, yet another example of a relaxed bunch of folks. Such a (WELCOME!) contrast to Sydney!
Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.
I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.
Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!
The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.
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”
Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active lif, that is: ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself). These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic. The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source. more “work, labor, action”
Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time and in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms which produced them. The human voice traveled only as far as one could shout. …
We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions of holes in millions of public and private places around the world.
Schafer, R. Murray. (2006). The Music of the Environment in “Audio Culture.” New York: Continuum International Publishers.
This Julian Treasure talk is a very short (seven minute) but provocative dance around some issues of sound and hearing (and listening).
By substituting the concept ‘energy’ for ‘sound’ the issue expands and finds some wider principles. Action, activity, creative and destructive both, releases energy. Many times this energy is in the form of sound. Techno-social systems generate massive amounts of waste energy in this form of sonic vibrations. Living organisms tend not to generate waste sounds as any wasted energy possibly compromises the life-form (life being a negentropic energy-optimizing process). On an evolutionary scale, waste energy (in the form of adaptive experimentation by the life-form) is incrementally minimal when considered in juxtaposition to the total energy expenditure of the life-form itself. However, en masse life clearly plays a role in accelerating the production of entropy of the Terran system when considered in comparison to a planetary system without life.
Humans, in their superficially intelligent pursuit of technological solutions, especially in the recent era, have created the means to generate tremendous amounts of waste energy. While engineering is about solving problems in the most efficient manner possible, the vast majority of devices created are clearly inefficient. This is especially apparent when the entire process necessary to bring a device to a completed configuration is considered, ensemble — that is, the extraction of earth materials, transport, processing, and manufacturing.
Whenever one has a technological process, it is likely that at one or more points in the process, sonic waste energy is being spewed out into the surroundings. This plethora of waste energy impinges on the body system with (un)certain results. (Remember the experiments of playing heavy metal or classical music at plants? It’s easier to understand the effects when you consider the energy content of the two different sonic manifestations.) In a typical urban environment, a tremendous amounts of (sonic) waste energy is, literally, reverberating everywhere. Any flux of (waste) energy will change that which it encounters. It will change the energy state of everything along its pathway to eventual almost-dissolution in the un-stellar void.
Using your ears to guide you, find a place where you can comfortably be for an hour. If eyes desire — sight falling between night sky stars tracing on the retina — could carry the ears to a same-such place, life would have different potential.
It is the emergence of mass media which makes possible the use of propaganda techniques on a societal scale. The orchestration of press, radio and television to create a continuous, lasting and total environment renders the influence of propaganda virtually unnoticed precisely because it creates a constant environment. Mass media provides the essential link between the individual and the demands of the technological society. — (Ellul, 1967)
What would poor Jacques think about the ubiquitous constancy of FaceBook and Google and mobile telephony and locative media and RFID chips and biometrics?
[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”
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!
The foot print, the pressure of the foot on the ground, walking in mud, on grass, ice, walking on the water.
Edward Tenner’s book intimates how walking itself is, at least partially, a learned social process, with variations introduced by the prosthetic (shoes) and localized environmental responses.
I had observed one aspect of this affect when I moved to Iceland. Icelanders are generally quite healthy — statistically, their longevity is second only to the Japanese. But one formal thing I did notice is the lack of prominent gluteal muscles. Flat arses! The difference was notable, coming the ethnically diverse US, where (aside from rampant morbid obesity) arses are, well, noticeable. In Iceland, they were noticeably absent: flaccid and flat. This puzzled me for some time until winter arrived and ice began to cover everything on a regular basis. Walking with a rolling gait that emphasizes a constant forward propulsion, ending with a final accelerating push off the big toe is fine when on a solid surface with decent traction. Try that on ice (this is Ice Land, right?), and one immediately discovers how, without traction, that ‘normal’ gait destabilizes the balance as the body is expecting acceleration, but not getting it (when it loses traction). The push off with the toe is ineffectual, and when one foot actually leaves the surface, between the lack of acceleration, and a compromised vertical positioning of the body (which was expecting the legs to be more forward), slipping and falling becomes a very real possibility.
Tenner, E., 1997. Why things bite back: technology and the revenge of unintended consequences, New York: Vintage Books.
Understanding this from being aware of my own movements (and instances of compromised balance), and watching locals, I noticed several major differences between their gait and mine. The primary feature of the local walk was that both feet never really left the ground and contact was flat-footed and somewhat stiff-legged. There was a substantial time when the full sole of the shoe was flat on the ice, and it was during that time when forward acceleration was made.
If you try this yourself, you will immediately see that the glutes are not the site of any muscular effort for locomotion as opposed to when accelerating off the big toe and Achilles tendon. Could this be the source of the predominance of flat bums in Iceland?
Aside from the glare-ice technique, there was another endearing and embodied gait by farmers when walking their fields. A thousand years of overgrazing sheep has seriously compromised most of Iceland’s grasslands. As the land was overgrazed, this exposed the underlying volcanic soil directly to powerful eolian erosion which could strip meters away down to a gravelly bedrock surface in no time. When life again attempts to establish itself on that surface, after sheep are removed from the picture, it first starts as minuscule moss colonies which grow in the shelter of a small cobble or so. The moss begins to capture wind-borne soil which gradually increases the colony size which increases the turbulent capture of airborne sediment. Over a period of decades these moss colonies form a hummocky surface with a relief of perhaps 50 cm (18 inches) and a horizontal frequency of a meter or so. To walk across such a surface is absolutely exhausting unless you conform your body in a particular way. The Icelandic farmer’s gait consists of the following: hands clasped behind the back, an exaggerated forward hunch of the upper body, and the knees bent dramatically. Leaning forward, and using the bend in the knees to essentially level out the distance between the upper body and the average ground height of the bottom of the hummocks, one takes long strides where the torso never goes up and down, but rather the level changes of the hummocks are compensated by different extensions of the knees. It’s humorous to watch, but is highly effective and a very rapid gait. If one tries ‘normal’ walking, climbing up and down the hummocks, it is slow and absolutely exhausting.
Try a couple more timelapse shots, but they are unsatisfactory with all the technical drawbacks. Stability, resolution, quality, etc. Nothing to be done about it without a $10K investment, or more.
Instead, after the driving rain all night, start a fire in the morning, in the rain, but gradually it tapers off, though still very cloudy. The guy who came in late yesterday in a Ford Explorer with a Rocket Box on top left at some point in the morning. Gah. No place to go! He’ll surely end up in a ditch somewhere. more “Sand Canyon transect”
Sleep difficult, not sure why, whether simple discomfort, though the back of the truck seems very comfortable in the immediate impression, warm, soft enough, but body cannot find a comfortable position, side to side, somehow, problems. Could be that yoga hasn’t been happening in the last days. Hiking is a challenge for the body as well.
Drive up to the head of Sand Canyon, intent on doing a hike, but what looks like bad weather coming in, a heavy front across the whole west, sends me back after a short recon along the Bench Road. It seems doable as an alternative escape route, if this end is the worst, though, in wet conditions, forget it. And it totals thirty miles to Elk Springs, not just the three miles I did on recon. Almost all of it is in the red and yellow (bentonite) clay-sandstone alluvium, and this is precisely this same stuff which sits at the top of the Echo Park Road — from the 2000-foot displacement on the Mitten Park Fault, so, no real solution in heavy and widespread rain. However, this doesn’t seem the case — the rain is sporadic, fast-moving, and interspersed with bright sunshine and the roads are basically still dry after two days of ‘winter storm,’ so fretting about it is a waste of energy. Either I get out on Friday or I don’t and have to wait a few days. Plenty of water, fuel, and food, so that is no problem. The only locked-in point is the flight next Wednesday evening to Portland. But I’d still hate to miss the yurt-raising in Glade Park at Collin and Marisa’s this weekend! more “western terminus Yampa Bench”
40pc.png "Reveil 24-hour live broadcast, online and Golden, Colorado, May 2019")
ss.jpg "Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2015, online and Prescott, Arizona, May 2015")
