the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::
traces pathways and actions encountered and undertaken
Paul Bradbury came out & I showed him how to work on his car some more — timing, guessing, vacuum guage, etc. Didn’t get much done on the Ford.
Fixed the zipper on Johnny’s jacket — it took about an hour.
DCH to one of Woody’s parties — a progressive dinner. It broke up at 10 PM — he got home at 1 AM.
Sally stayed w/ us overnight so she can go to PSC in the morning. NJH went to dinner at the Congregational Church with Sally.
Rain
Arrived at PSC at 0910 to find Geo Costello already there. We put the Line Amp & Power Supply on the left rack, and tried to put the tone control in , but it didn’t work. After considerable work, we put in the 980∿ filter and seemed to gain about 6 db. As a signal source I took my GE radio in with the Pilotuner, and put a microphone in front of it in the SS Room, plugging the microphone in at the Pulpit.
Obtained an audio test film from Ideal / Mr. Ladd.
Got home about 5 PM, and went to bed early. Read in the Maksutov Club Notes for a while. They contain a great wealth of information on telescope design and construction. I found a reference to a British multipurpose machine tool that looks good. The Zeiss lens grinder seems to be excellent and not to hard to make either.
DCH sang(?) and played his pan at a Folk Song Sing at Wayland High School. He got home at 1:20 AM Sunday morning.
Ed Poore wanted to know about the TV for the CE Conference so while he was around I made arrangements with Fred Lake at home — VI3-3131 — to rent us the TRW camera that he demonstrated a few weeks ago. It will be in place starting 07 November thru 10 November.
Thinking back: Walnut Cafe South in the Table Mesa Center, meet Chris for one of our weekly Boulder breakfast get-togethers.
Subject of resonance comes up. and the term coupling which I did not include in the dissertation discussion on resonance. Coupling is where two circuits designed to resonate actually transmit electromagnetic energy from one (the transmitting coil) to the other (receiving coil). This is used to do wireless power transmission. The two coils have to be in relatively close proximity otherwise there is significant power loss:
By designing electromagnetic resonators that suffer minimal loss due to radiation and absorption and have a near field with mid-range extent (namely a few times the resonator size), mid-range efficient wireless energy-transfer is possible. The reason is that, if two such resonant circuits tuned to the same frequency are within a fraction of a wavelength, their near fields (consisting of ‘evanescent waves’) couple by means of evanescent wave coupling. Oscillating waves develop between the inductors, which can allow the energy to transfer from one object to the other within times much shorter than all loss times, which were designed to be long, and thus with the maximum possible energy-transfer efficiency. Since the resonant wavelength is much larger than the resonators, the field can circumvent extraneous objects in the vicinity and thus this mid-range energy-transfer scheme does not require line-of-sight. By utilizing the magnetic field to achieve the coupling, this method can be safe, since magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms.
(written in Wikipedia-English!)
Is there any way to explore if this occurs on some scale between organisms? Transmitters, receivers? Coupling? Would seem to be an obvious model for interactivity between any organisms — the question being what is the nature of the embodied resonant circuits? Can an organism or a part of one be modeled ‘properly’ as such a circuit? Or is it too complex — the electromagnetic ‘field’ of a body as a mass of overlapping radiations and flows — such that there is no comprehensible order? Nah, of course there is a ‘sensible’ order — that may be expressed as the general sensuality of ‘presence’ that a living organism exudes. (This presence signified by the dynamic of interaction that any single organism exhibits with other organisms — as defined by evolutionarily-developed interdependence.) For example predator/prey interactions would suggest that there are highly developed coupling mechanisms such that the predator can identify with a high degree of precision a potential prey.
Interest in resonance is spread widely as the phenomena shows up in many systems. In bio-systems resonant responses to [energy] burst communications (as an intrinsically generated stereotypical pattern of closely spaced action potentials) is a crucial means for the propagation of flows across neural networks: STOP SHOUTING AT ME, I get it!
Many electrical, mechanical and biological systems exhibit free vibrations or damped oscillations when stimulated by a brief strong pulse. The frequency of such oscillations is known as the natural frequency or ‘eigenfrequency’ of the system, and the period is known as the natural period. For example, the Hodgkin–Huxley model exhibits oscillatory potentials with natural period 12.5 ms when a single brief pulse of current is injected. If the injected current is sinusoidal, sweeping through many frequencies (a so-called ZAP current), then the elicited oscillations of membrane potential have largest amplitudes (possibly resulting in action potentials) when the frequency of the input is near the natural frequency of the system, which is 80 Hz (1/0.0125 s) in the Hodgkin–Huxley model. (This frequency might be slightly different when an oscillating synaptic conductance rather than a current is injected.)
Izhikevich, E.M. et al., 2003. Bursts as a unit of neural information: selective communication via resonance. Trends in Neurosciences, 26(3), pp.161–167.
Had 10 copies made of our lists of problem areas and questions, and handed them out to those who made them up, with copies to AAG & WZL.
Sat in a mtg with 3 chaps from Lockheed Electronic, who spoke of their development of a small jamming decoy. It looks good except their antenna at the lower frequency. Their Mr. Kemp Bennett did a good job of explaining what they have done. They will submit a proposal to BSD. He left a paper with AAG on how many jammers to use.
Overcast
Took DCH to Explorer Post Mtg. He has 2 papers to write for his driver’s training course, due tomorrow, but he has left both until tonight. He was sent to bed at 9:30 PM, actually got into bed at 10:10, and then proceeded to get back up and put a pair of pants across the door so he could put the light on without making the light show. He ought to realize that this sort of lying and cheating doesn’t do him any good.
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.
Some final words on the residency period:
Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).
Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”
The condition of virtuality arises when humans create a situation which attenuates the flows that are impinging on their sensual and embodied presence. When technology is defined as a way to alter the paths of energy flow: virtuality is a subset condition of the altered flows such that the flows that are obviously (or not!) entering the body system are attenuated. The obvious (materialist!) subset of the widest set is that grouping which attenuates the classical sensory-input spectra. These may be ‘scientifically’ framed based on typical wave-based mechanical and electro-magnetic physics: the EM frequency band of visible Light, the pressure-induced electricity of touch, and so on. In a holistic approach to presence, the affectations of flow are continuous, complete, and substantive.
Alluding to yet a further subset is the use of glass as a specific form of energized matter which is placed between the eye and the ‘world out there.’ This is a fundamental form of virtuality, where silicon dioxide is introduced as an attenuating filter of flows between embodied presence and the cosmos. (this is a short intro to a longer text on the history of glass that’s cooking on the back burner.)
I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that is, the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements, rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, as they do govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.
Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language-as-protocol. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-processes of one’s self. This particular energy ‘form’ arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body that allows for that particular expression: the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth, and so on. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ from the Self to the Other, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.
Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)
The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time), a protocol on the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation: when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):
There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)
(a title: On The False Invariance of Text)
Writing is oscillation, it is frequency, it is tone and overtone. It is directed at a hundred thousand invisible targets some not yet alive, most dying, some dead. It is all-encompassed by the infinite flux of be-ing at the same time as being uncircumscribable. Resonance drives the text. Without resonance, the text is more than dead, it is simply not. Null, less-than-zero. Silent. While speaking in tongues, interfacing with one another, we tack meanings to the words, sounds, making them become for a moment, a surfacing out of a wider flow of dis-connection. Or merely happenstance accretion, coagulation, a resulting (sepsis-in-mind) of something (quelque chose), making: turbid agglomeration becomes acculturation.
The whole engagement with the idea of doing the doctorate arises from a combination of pragmatics and desire. The pragmatic considerations are real to the degree that the author understands the social value of ideas that are formally exposed, independent of format, and that the Other takes up, paying life-time and attention to. This is a basic premise. Desire enters the process where there is the need to be recognized, this, not on a social scale, but on a simple and uncorrupted personal scale. There is the deep risk that both these motivations are hollow and base-less. To defeat that potential, the process will be open and open-ended, unending. It will not begin and end with bound covers and stitched bindings. It will mimic life that came from who-knows-where and is going elsewhen.
One point of this blog is to de-stabilize the general process of writing to the degree of opening up expressive possibility. It is not here to be a blog, with endless sifting through and cross-referencing of network sludge. It is an armature on which to hang the infinity of idiosyncratic individual inputs and some limited external inputs into the process flow.
a much longer ramble with a heavy wind at my back until it’s time to turn around. the dunes are located here for a reason and that reason is the frequency of very intense winds being funneled across the valley into Medano Pass where the sand generated by the Rio Grande out-wash in the (west side of the) valley is dropped in large quantities against the Sangre de Christo mountains. it’s a marvelous phenomena. today, I follow the base of the dunes along Medano Creek which is flowing with copious quantities of chilly snow-melt. the intersection of the dunes with the creek and the mountain terrain is rich with variable riparian regimes and provides shelter from the wind which is carrying plenty of grit up to about 3 feet off the dune surface. the air is charged with particles, it is charged. more “Medano Pass”
sleep dissolves along with the darkness. full moon is covered with high clouds most of the night. but morning brings full sun breaking over the eastern horizon. in the bed of the truck, it finally finds my eyelids. and brings first a reddening haze, then, with squinted opening, shafts of eyelash-broken brilliance. the five percent humidity has scraped the throat and nose raw. water is the first thing: imbibio. reaching up to unlatch the rear gate which slams open with a thud and lets in the sound and sun of morning desert. impact on body by place is subtle and brutally immediate at the same time. already leaving this particular place, only four days. leaving precisely when there is that draw, that pull to go deeper, longer, to simply become there or at least to completely resonate to its frequency. resonate to rattlers, springs, green stone, slickensides, smaller and larger bursts of psychedelic colors every few centimeters, the dead cow, the lone cottonwood, the humming, the air, the water, the Light; thoughts of other places, other people, and other lives bring mostly a deepening melancholy and turbid state to clear thinking. ants. mosquitoes. snakes, thistles. what did I kill by walking, by being there? there are indeed thousands of tiny flowers scattered on the ground everywhere. the cattle have already destroyed the vast majority of the cryptobiotic soil spanning between the other, larger vegetation. they represent the most damaging influence on the desert environment. specifically they cause the widespread compression of the upper surface which cryptobiotic soil cannot recover from in any short-term way. so, every step taken… life destroys to create. only problem now is the plague species, humans, and how the system will deal with them.
Late monsoon storm rolls by Granite Mountain, seen from the deck.
Equinox spent in a mega-church, The Heights Church or a church aspiring to be one. dot.com. Which suggests the necessity for threading through the complex layering of cultural, social, and political detritus. A guy walks in ahead of us with an NRA tee-shirt on and a giant insulated travel-mug of coffee in hand.
Al always sits in the front and center of the large industrial sanctuary space. One row back from the front row. His eyesight is pretty bad, macular degeneration, and likewise, his hearing is attenuated to whatever narrow frequency band that his hearing aids provide.
I have my shit-kickers on, the dressiest items available for church at this point. Can’t find my Colorado School of Mines belt-buckle with the hand-tooled leather belt. The bronze buckle in the form of the school seal cast in a metallurgy class with an ancient prof, forgotten his name. Proof of Western citizenship.
There on the stage — one of those portable raised prefab affairs for concerts and political spectacles — is a miked drum-set, a bass and amp, a Rhodes with vocalists mike, a set of congas (not timbales!), and a guitar on a stand. No podium, dais, but plenty of microphones. On either side, two very large video projection screens.
Club scene? Will there be a concert? The Rhodes is the most prominent object, at the front edge near the center of the stage. later the preacher uses it to as a place for his notes and Bible.
It’s the eight o’clock service. Al tells me that there are usually around three hundred people at this, this first of four services. The 300? We are early.
As the service starts out, it’s clear that I should have brought earplugs to attenuate the 100 db blast from the sound system.
Somehow I can imagine doing a visual-sonic performance here. good sound and video system, focused audience, yeah, a good venue overall. More notes on this later.
[ED: This text is essentially an extremely preliminary draft—written in Berlin, Germany in 2007-08—of my dissertation The Regime of Amplification.]
I decided to release this text in advance of any hard-copy publication, with another chapter nearing its final stages, and several intermediate chapters forming more concretely. The following is the original ‘final’ text, although there will be a significantly improved one in the years to come.
This essay is built on the subject of one chapter in a book-in-progress titled “Energy of Being :: Dialogue of Creativity” which explores in greater depth many of the issues that are danced only Lightly around here.
KEY TERMS
TSS (techno-social system), Regime of Amplification, energy, amplification, attenuation, flow, continuum of relation, life-energy, life-time, evolutionary development, natural selection, self-organizing, radio, military systems, resonance, social energy bank, life-time=energy=life; attention=life-energy=life-time, feed-forward system, biochemical amplification, concentration, rarefaction, command-and-control … (to be continued)
more “The Regime of Amplification: A Primer”
Miss a meeting with Angela, got the wrong cafe in Hyde Park, there are two. Sent a SMS, but got no response. Ended up doing more audio work — of the Salvation Army Band in front of the big ANZAC Memorial. Called her, but she must not have had her phone on.
(00:09:21, stereo audio, 18 mb)
Wandered down to Darling Harbor to sit and write about amplification, surrounded by amplified and simulated culture. Hmm, the relationship between amplification and simulation could also be interesting to explore. Where amplification is a (possible) subset of simulation. Because the amplified signal is no longer the thing itself, but a simulation of the thing itself with a change of character, volume in the case of auditory works, intensification in the general sense — the intensification of a particular neurological input signal whatever the input is. At base, electrical — as in the stimulation of the auditory nerves. So, an intensification and sometimes narrowing of frequency (bandwidth) of the signal. Simulation is also about the re-creation of an original signal — one whose characteristics are well known — a re-production of those characteristics.
The better-known the parameters, the better that the signal can be re-produced. Always a reduction, always not the thing itself. Always the reductive. Efficient perhaps, amplifying the essential. But who determines the essential? That is embedded in the technology which is a determinate (determinating) product of the social system. Therein is one source of a significant skewing factor in the presence of these amplified and simulated signals. That the characteristic of these signals are being largely determined by a dominant social system which may or may not be optimized for the individual, or for even the greater good. Because the generating system for these re-productions has a long-term directional inertia coming from the technological production process — the larger the infrastructure (the more generally and specifically) complex the social production system, the greater the inertia, the greater the inertial resistance to changing conditions, the less relevant the amplified signal is to the individual or collective itself.
City of Angeles approaches. First announcing raw presence in air quality, flushing through the pass, spreading out through the desert air’s invisibility, making air visible. Then the Light at night. Not able to compete directly, from east rising lunar fullness to western post-solar glow. But it’s there in the whining of high-performance vehicles wrapped out to extremity of rpm. And the Marine base, long across the high valley. Night flare drops, leisurely falling stars, choppers circulating around, thundering low-frequency rumbles that speak of war and preparations for war.
Back in, around Joshua Tree. Choosing two places to try and see some raw landscape, the first pull-out and hike ends in a maintenance yard out in the middle of nowhere. The second, simply ends up next to a big parking lot. Landscape littered with detritus of this tourism — multi-liter Big Gulp cups, cigarette butts, and bleached aluminum cans — it’s a wonder how we impact the world. The maxim in wilderness-designated areas of “take only pictures, leave only footprints” seems so … quaint. When the foot-stomping impact now includes the air breathed so regularly by the body. Maybe there’s no answer to this. Life impacts the space-time and energy continuum of the locality (with locality being relative).
French tourists loudly remarking, “écoute la silence!” Repeatedly. Making it clear that in order to find the same, one would have to leave the park entirely.
as Anthony stated once: re-arriving simultaneity. back in Echo Park. brew some black tea, and wander down to the water’s edge. after craning neck for a long look at Steamship Rock. the river seems high but not near flood stage.
frogs texture the air with the only sounds except for birds. a few people in the small camp ground. maybe a total of 5 people in the whole place. and one just left. hoping that there will be only silence and nature this evening. as my small stove roars while heating water. taking glasses off when NOT looking at this screen. what is it that the glass shields us from? full-tilt apprehension of the world. blurry.
different amphibians make sounds now, others stopping, the texture becomes more varied as I listen more closely, something I can do only when I stop typing and sleep the hard drive. so, I do that now. the battery is low anyway. more “craning neck”
sotto voce:
reading list from the alter ego:
the sky in the morning (re-mix of the previous day, delivered direct to the eyes)
the sky in the early afternoon (especially passages on primitive turbulence of pre-strato-cumulescence)
the sky during later afternoon thunderstorms (the chapter on electromagnetic radiation in wide frequency bands is stimulating)
the sky closing in on sunset (the chapter on red-shift)
the sky 2 hours after sunset (requires adjustments to the eyes from black on white to white on black)
the sky in deep night (the chapter on the Milky Way is most spectacular in a post-Debordian way, as is the anti-spectacle of getting eyes (the corners of) to read nebulae in any detail)
whups, just tripped over my feet, gotta read more of the ground as well, but that’ll have to wait until tomorrow — as I try to remember to stay motionless when doing close readings…
on the west flank of the Sangre de Christos up about 400 feet above the valley edge. parked in a leveled area — a mine dump. debris and slag and a Lazy Boy recliner. altered landscape. pondering the routes that got me here in this moment, and the whole long term of life. how the School of Mines was a turning point, and the great feeling I had when I first drove in between North and South Table mountains into Golden, 30 years ago. what was another turning point? leaving Big Oil? perhaps. certainly led to a long road of different activities, culminating in the move to Iceland. and having a child. way points in life. while some set a course early in life, and never stray from it, making progress in an endless sea is a relative condition. while this life has been more stopping to check way points, and re-setting the heading, bearing, route based on what was discovered at any one point. not having a particular destination. but sometimes feeling as though the boat is sinking. listing, taking on water, swamped. stoved-in, derelict, drifting, rudderless, without compass. but, still moving.
and still the big issue is the desire and idea of getting word committed to paper. in such a way to boost productivity and profile and prospects. an investment of a year. but the deep doubts…
mountain side, of the Blood of Christ’s, changing colors already: high up, and when backing away from the verge, the roots of the mountains, seeing the peaks dusted with night snow.
From Armin Medosch in a call for papers to WAVES – electromagnetic waves as material and medium of art (Acoustic Space Issue #6)
Pantha Rei – everything flows
Radio waves occur naturally. Society puts the biggest emphasis on the ability of waves to carry signals. Radio, television and mobile telephony are some of the most widely used applications. The worlds fixation on content and its socio-political implications makes us forget the waves themselves. The proposed exhibition takes a look at the physical properties of waves. Waves are considered to be ‘immaterial’ from the point of view of visual art. However, light is just a specific band in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves. Some of the properties of waves change according to their frequency and wavelength. It is worthwhile looking at those properties and exploring their implications for art. Wave-like phenomena play an important role in various aspects of reality, from the physical consistency of the world (audio-, air-, water-waves) to Kondratiev-cycles and the carbon-cycle (the storage and release of CO2 by oceans and forests).
more “what burns?”
trawling, ANT (actor-network theory), social network theory, many many theories, some incomplete descriptions. mostly there is a neglect of the energy-transfer. most stay in the realm of abstracted social relation with only oblique reference to the actual embodied dynamic. why facing someone is different than standing at right angles. why eye contact is ‘important.’ and reading a book of Justyna’s about the architectural uses of glass (the airport here a good example of that usage). letting visible Light in is the normal paradigm. resisting natural flows, reducing the total possible bandwidth. from the asymptotic infinitude of blasting flows of the universe to something more manageable. the numerous graphs showing (transmissive) attenuation vs frequency only focus on the visible. a holistic approach would consider the full range of attenuation (what is not allowed to pass). glass is great for a narrow range of Light and some EM radiation off the incredibly narrow range of visible Light, but that’s about it. it stops everything else.
wind (as a formal naming of the flux/movement of air) is a form of energy. sit in a clear glass box in a tropical paradise. and you will die shortly. a glass box is the predicate for scientific (reductionist) experimentation. with a glass (optical) window observing.
again, back to the history of glass. a fragment of an idea that I have often explored with class groups. the history of glass.
They tore down the bus station
there’s chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I’m walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
300
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm’s Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered,
laughing,
in the mechanism. — William Gibson
recalling the time, Kevin and I driving the rental truck full of Conran’s Habitat furniture and location gear from NYC to Acadia National Park for the catalog shoot, stopping in to see Bern, but he was out. cruisin’ around the town, found a place to buy Maple Syrup which I loaded up on to take back to Iceland for French toast and corn bread later. I took a picture of Kevin in front of Bern’s porch. don’t have that neg scanned, but it does exist perhaps as an artifact in Kevin’s collection of my postcards. or actually, I think I sent one later to Bern as well.
Bern says:
I finger zero, readjust my couch in a void that sloth built, the better to do nothing.
…
Obsolescence revolts me. The alleged modern is a repetition of the ancient decorated in chrome, styled with air-flow and color-engineered to abomination.
…
Thus, communication-wise I junk drum beats, smoke signals, semaphores, flag codes, light flashes, telegraphs, telephones, radios, television sets and all other such systems, devices and developments for my own sensory organs wherein desiring to make known my wishes I merely think them in a frequency universal and in a tongue world known and whomever wishes to hear, receive and understand does so.
The spoken word, printed and tele-dramatized word becomes a particle of thought energy.
The drawn, photographed, painted and kinescope-picture becomes more of the same.
All of the devices of locomotion, subterranean, surface and aerial equally reduce.
I am at all places, in all forms, at all times.
What were books became word sequences screen projected, then free-floating vibrations which impinged upon my mind as I desired them.
What was art left museum walls to become gaseous fusions in color similarly projected, then all prevailing rhythms of radiant energy that stimulated my eye whenever I wished them.
What was poetry became equally transformed to responses for feeling.
Architecture became constructions of ether and light.
Clothing a logical extension of skin without embellishment.
Theatre a pageant of masked spectators.
Automobiles, body rockets.
Toys, fondling in the dark.
No civilized thing was left unmodified or unreverted to its natural, logical and true state.
I transformed the world and in so doing I found myself.
leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.
Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:
Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!” more “spins”
with an image, Valgerdur reminds of a conversation we had early in the year at a dinner at her house. she was describing a trip with a friend of hers in the back-country of Colorado where they happened on an impressive place. synchronicity. nothing surprising, given the PLACE. and the person…
a walk to the Joensuu town beach, first along the river, then to the lake. the thin Light, sharp. always forgotten when away, dissipated from body memory as soon as body is exposed to the power of Colorado or Arizona Light. it evaporates, too blue to stand the brunt of vertical noon desert. but, on the returning north, passing through the land, there raises the high-frequency trace, intaglio, acid-etched, displaced faux-memory. to a temporary and precious foreground. from yesterday to today a chill entered the air. coming from 105F (43C) and going to 57F (12C) and wearing the same t-shirt. no shorts anymore, though, and no sandals. back to black work-boots, black jeans, dark everything. sit on a small floating dock and stare at the water-sun. geese scolding each other. sharp spicy air. elegant birch trees, precious in scale: these same eyes absorbed the Light of the Sequoias this summer. the birch tree leaves are changing color. over one night it comes. no turning back now.
all week submerged in digital things. recoding to mp3. adding to this massive archive. each year, resolutions and accuracies and the ability to fool the mind and the eye into believing that what we create digitally has some indelible relationship with the Truth. the possible negativity of this illusory de-evolution is further obscured by linguistic shifts happening with a frequency and amplitude spectrum of a jet-fuel A turbo formula nitro Pratt&Whitney revving in the starting line up. who cares? juggle-not! using old language and new language bits keep the self stuck, cut free and use only new things. instead of “cut free” (when was the last time you were tied with rope to a point?) the New Self says “I have now three SUV’s.” this translates to complete freedom to those who buy into that worldview. but maybe it is itself only an illusion that this is a prevailing worldview. public opinion is a synthesized meme, knowledge-bit. not arising from the real life of anecdotal information, the real life of birth, death and just about everything else that happens in between to each of us.
Sunday. St. Olavs cathedral is over there. as I look out the sixth-floor windows of the Academy office. sunLight coming over the hills to the south illuminates the row of buildings along the fjord. the far side of the fjord is bright, too. mind is flat. with all the activities that churn and churn the mind. silence is broken by whining hard drives and other high-frequency beings. outside is behind glass. inside too.
AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) is undertaking its last meeting of the 20th Century. I recall going to one of those meetings in Boston when I was just 14, accompanying my father. photographing the Vice-President, Rockefeller, giving the opening keynote speech. later going to see Arthur Fiedler perform with the Boston Pops (he was sick, so had a replacement, could it have been Seiji Ozawa?). we ended up sitting next to Dr. Harold Edgerton, the famous physicist from MIT who developed the electronic stroboscope for making ultra-high-speed photographs. My father knew Edgerton from when he was working at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Harold gave me a signed copy of a postcard reproduction of his famous image of the milk drop frozen like a royal crown. Edgerton was one of the founders of EG&G, a major military-industrial corporation.
Sanna sends a bar of white chocolate that Anna-Maija hand-delivers to my office. just as I am looking up the street address in Helsinki to send a card. synchronicity. it is snowing all day heavily. drifting, and I decide not to go swimming in the evening after making a circuit of town to the bank and grocery store. cold. I need a different kind of hat — a balaclava face-mask I think. I cringe against the wind as it whips around my eyes, turbulent flow that makes me cry. inside the wind makes a low-frequency sucking noise on the stove ventilator, but since most windows here are triple-glazed, outside noise pollution is minimal. if you hear the wind, that means it IS serious! the internal heating system which is some combination of radiative hot-water heaters under the windows, along with a forced-air duct system is the source of the greatest environmental noise.
sotto voce:
You know, I have a deep unease about the re-posting of MSNBC articles on nettime, especially in their entirety. I can understand editorial excerpting for the purposes of making a point or presenting information, but to presume that the repetition of such writing on the nettime listserv somehow strengthens our community, I just don’t know.”
“I have spent much time and concentration to arrange certain types of filters for incoming information: applying single-frequency filters like *allow anything from Tapio in and read it*, or *check out most things on nettime* or *talk to certain friends on the phone and ponder what they say to me* and as well, MANUAL filtration techniques like *don’t read the Wall Street Journal* (I made this rule after living some years in the Belly of the Multinational Beast (an engineer for a large oil company) consuming the BUSINESS NEWS of the DAY when I was flying First Class to countries where my own operations were to help get the oil, at whatever the local cost)…
I started writing the preceding to nettime a couple weeks ago, noticing that suddenly almost every posting appearing on the list had been lifted from what I would term mainstream media, I never finished, and have since noticed the continuing string of articles. While, granted, I trust the nettime filter system implicitly, I wonder what has occurred with nettime — has anyone else been affected by this shift? Am I paranoid? Has anything really changed? What is going on? Don’t we have voices? Isn’t silence better? (speaking as a networker who only rarely contributes to the listserv side of nettime, but who more often is in individual communications with many of you). I feel like something has slipped, has been lost, some momentum drained. Does Bill Gates’ invitation to us have anything to do with this?
lethargic and slow snow falls, something like I imagine the fallout from a nuclear winter, ashes, ashes, we all fall down …
Manus manum lavat. (One hand washes the other)
Thom quotes that to me, and it brings back the memory of high school with Mr. Crawford, the Latin teacher. who used to entertain us by tuning a little am radio to the same frequency as his heart pacemaker and his whole ancient body would start jiggling. this was 20 years before Stelarc ever considered the body-as-machine-the-machine-as-body. Mr. C. is dead, surely, now, his body gone. later that day, lazing around, writing correspondance et al. Christa is playing the piano in the living room. Thom and I end up deciding that I should visit his class tomorrow in the Institute of Computer Sciences at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz.
No idle moments to be spent dabbling in web-site improvement. I dream about making some significant art projects this year, but it looks to be a year spent in teaching others, working for others … The snow gets into my cuffs as I step down to the school this morning to take advantage of a decent Internet/ethernet connection. I am able to spend a couple hours getting some items updated. I think constantly about re-doing the entire web site from scratch. Starting from zero. What that would change. Ego is the primary intervening force against clarity of vision. The long string of self-portraits that I have done over the last two decades suddenly come into my face as interventions — either cease the making of them or make them to use them as a tool to knock the ego from its intervening position. Make them so transparent that they show nothing but vision! In the end, it would not be for the Other, these exercises, but purely to loosen the self from the constant grip of the ego. raking leaves was. shoveling snow now. snow transpiring negatively to hard ice under the pressure of daily life. blue ether air twiLight seen between the slats of the dirty beige plastic venetian blinds fluoresces and vibrates. You Vee. like the ozone hole lets in leaks of deep space that, after a singeing from solar radiation, bleeds high frequency blue-ness into our realm. the snow consumes it, the cold consumes it, and it is gone eventually after a slow lingering of one hand of hours. it all makes me lie. it is really subsumed by gravity. I putter through digital letters written only year-ages ago. The archive that I have with me goes back seven digital years.
But do words truly bring us to a higher state of awareness — aren’t they just tools of a technology so old that its origins are inseparable from the origins of human thought? That is, language is merely another one of humankind’s shields from the terror of life on this earth. We are occasionally brilliant enough to realize our own physical weaknesses and subsequently to create prostheses that magnify the energies of our puny bodies, but we are not brilliant enough to recognize that our spiritual strength does not lie in our clever forays against the world, but in the limitless possibilities of the interface of mind-body-spirit, and the choices we make, and the Others we face in spiritual dialogue.
A collective dinner tonight seems to be a precursor to the midsummer’s party that will follow on the coming Saturday night. And tomorrow night there will be an evening of touring some local parties and such. I am afraid that not much more work will be accomplished before I leave, so I am desperate to finish at least one more video work (waking up in Finland). 0345 and the sun is busy coming up, well, just still up, nothing different. Day is day. And there is no night. Coffee swelling in my veins. But I get much more video work done. The strength of the Solstice is a humming vibration shaking from the feet up, a harmonic oscillation with a frequency of the pulse, exactly synchronized from moment-to-moment. Pulse speeds for a flight of stairs and the heart-ringing does not become asynchronous but always stays tuned to the frequency of being. No deviation and the two become one whole massive vibration that shakes the self, and all that one perceives and senses, so that gradually one becomes aware that there is only the vibration and ones awareness becomes this vibration. Buildings and trees shake in perfect rhythm to the eyes, relativity rules. Nothing deviates except the internal awareness of swinging at a vast distance from the pivot, the fulcrum, moving through a knowing-ness at skin-peeling speed, yet there is no movement. The space within which things wholly revolve has dimension imposed by relativity. No faster than we can know, no slower than we can care.
The days here vibrate with a frequency that invades the soul. It is almost the Solstice. The nights are signified only by subtle changes in the color of the clouds, and of course, the changing azimuth of the sun. Local time here is Greenwich Mean Time, but the actual position of Iceland on the globe is approximately 1-1/2 hours to the west. Because of this, high noon, defined as the time when the sun is at the highest angle above the horizon, comes at approximately 1330. And so, at 0130, or astronomical midnight, the sun is at its lowest point, which, now, is just grazing the sea direct to the north. It is the Arctic sun. It vibrates, a high-pitched squeal. Vibrations that invade the soul, not leaving it until this night Light is extinguished from memory towards the winter Solstice. So, the days — the times when Loki is awake — are still filled with swimming, playing with rocks by the rivers or ocean, hiking in the mountains, eating ice cream. When he sleeps I work pretty hard on network things — this web site, email and snail-mail correspondance with folks, proposals for teaching work for next school year, and wondering how I will survive financially. I found out my bank balance in the US was U$D18, so I had to transfer most of what I had left here to the US except for enough to survive on for the next ten days and to pay for the bus to the airport in Keflavík and then from Kennedy airport to Stefan’s place in Manhattan, I guess. Shit way to live. Beginning to wear out my welcome maybe, too. I mean, I am wealthy for all the friends who have shown incredible generosity and hospitality on this long impositional road I have been on, but I am lame at organizing the fiscal side of life.
At the close of this century we are witnessing a major change in how value is determined. The value of material wealth is giving way to the value of information. In this time of transition, these apparently incongruous value systems mix and form hybrid systems for determining value. Unique, precious material objects still hold their value; some actually increase in value in a relatively short time. Information that is useful but scarce is also valuable. Scarcity, even in an era marked by an abundance of information, is still a key factor in determining value. Those who hold valuable information may still wish to maintain exclusive, proprietary control – to increase the life of the information. Information is subject to decay or aging. Information is not inexhaustible. It may revert to data, the raw material from which it is formed. How and when information is maintained and released is determined by those in control; those who initially recognize its value, manage it and operate with it accordingly.
Contemporary art is part of an emerging sector of the economy called information and knowledge. Knowledge-workers create information for others to use. Worker in this case does not imply those who act only upon the instructions of others, knowledge-workers think for themselves. They know things that others do not know. They solve problems or help others solve problems. Knowledge- workers produce information, they transform data into information-distinguishing key aspects of disorder through the discovery and/or imposition of form. Artists fit nicely into this description of knowledge-worker. Contemporary artists, curators, critics and art historians are the knowledge- workers who form the contemporary art domain of the new sector of the economy called information and knowledge.
CONTEMPORARY ART MUST BE SEEN AS INFORMATION TO BE OF VALUE
more “The Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past by Tom Sherman”
