posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

neoscenes.net at +31 years

A few comments on where the site is in the moment:

A year ago my old friend, Howard Rheingold—the Silicon Valley journalist, who, among other activities was part of the WELL and who coined the term “virtual communities”—connected me with a start-up hosting company, ReClaim, that caters to the educational community. I’ve been part of the global educational community for more than thirty years: if the shoe fits! That and I’ve been increasingly annoyed/disgusted with GoDaddy—fifteen years the site host—for re-defining their “unlimited” hosting offers. In 2021 they threatened to kill the neoscenes.net site unless I deleted 30 of the 40 gigs of content. Faugh, enough of that: I signed on with ReClaim immediately. Rescued! This was the sixth major platform rollover for the site since 1993, and it’s only recently that I was able to take the time to revive those 30 gigs of the archival content.

There are still some format/embed and sizing problems with images that accompanying postings before 2009, brought on by fundamental changes in WordPress. It’s an endless process to keep the beast up to even a minimal contemporary standard. Currently there are ~8100 entries, several thousand images, a few hundred videos and maybe 2,000 audio pieces. I’ve decided if I can hit 10,000 substantive entries I will either stop posting, and/or be declared a daisy-pusher.

Screenshot of site in 1995, when hosted on the ISMENNT server in Reykjavík.
Screenshot of site in 1995, when hosted on the ISMENNT server in Reykjavík.

In the meantime, compiling the wretched news on Social Security and Medicare, monthly income will be, well, grim, in this, the richest … country … in … the … world (sorry, gagging on the phrase). Okay, okay, I am a privileged white male who tried to follow his own idiosyncratic path internationally. And, honestly, it feels like the ‘system’ it meting out its interpretation of just punishment for my ludicrous belief that what I did along that path had some socially-redeemable value in cash: it didn’t.

Staring out the window on the unseasonably warm and very dry environs, waiting for the arrival of a colleague to gather the remaining office gear: two MacBook Pros; an iMac; iPad; a couple Dell monitors; 2000 slides in archival boxes; a set of data DVDs; some of the org swag accumulated over the years; university credit card; Mines BlasterCard ID; various cables; and my internal identity as an employee of the Colorado Geological Survey and the Colorado School of Mines. It was a job I took out of desperation to lock in some minimal fiscal security before boredom, age, and ageism made it impossible. Indeed, it filled that role, somewhat, but I’m still in a relatively precarious state. Will soon liquidate the Cedaredge property if a reasonable renter can’t be found, though I hate to give up the Covid-era 2.25% mortgage!

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Peter Lamborn Wilson 1945 – 2022

Dammit. Another passing. Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey. Got this news and the following remembrance today from friend Konrad Becker, founder of Public NetBase in Vienna.

death

Peter Lamborn Wilson died in his apartment in Saugerties in upstate New York last night, reportedly from a heart attack.

A “Cyberguru” in the nineties he had no email address and wrote his pieces by hand, or on an old typewriter. With 70+ books and titles like Pirate Utopia, he inspired several generations. However, his visceral abhorrence of digital media was softened by his clever use of resources in a digitally savvy environment. As the author of Temporary Autonomous Zone he was guest at the inauguration of Public Netbase and a regular visitor here in Vienna.

Sadly, despite his personal integrity, his fame and colorful queer identity also triggered offending smears and innuendo hard to oppose. In his last months he spoke self-deprecatingly of himself as an old hippy, maybe he was, I just wish there were more of this kind. While many drift into senility in their early forties, he was bright as a button until his last day and had more clever things to say about the electronic media realm than most of the new media experts I ever met.

Following up on his contribution to the book “Digital Unconscious – Nervous Systems and Uncanny Predictions!” and with the support of Autonomedia, Felix Stalder and I ventured into a series of deeper inquiries into the fabric of media un/consciousness.

There is a general narrowing and flattening of the imagination due to the global spread of consumerism and the increasing abstraction and quantification through which the social world is constructed. PLWs work can be understood as an exploration of alternative ways of being in the world that could offer escape routes.

We, by way of Jim Flemming and Fred Barney Taylor, conducted the last interview just a few days ago. In his last interviews he liked to talk of the end of the world which he defined as an ongoing process. His lucid analysis of what went wrong in the last few thousand years was never defeatist rather it was a call to arms.

As he liked to say: Even if you are going to die tomorrow, plant a tree today. The rebellious spirit of PLW and his alter ego Hakim Bey will be immensely missed.

His essay T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism condensed and articulated some core essences of my learning facilitation and media arts praxis while simultaneously atomizing it into a negentropic flow. I ran across it as I began to engage in the European context of media criticism and activism in the early 90s. The Anarchist Library has a wide selection of his other writings well worth perusing. A second fave selection is Overcoming Tourism which strips away the hollow shell of elite migrations of consumption, leaving the displacement of the soul as the core value of movement. Its modest goal … is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism. Thank god!

Knowing there were thinkers and writers, articulators like Wilson out there formed a supportive web of like-minds when the difficult situations arose in the facilitation of open systems, autonomous zones, wherein spontaneous creative action was not simply welcome, it was the essence of be-ing in such a zone. A few of my own reflections on the TAZ along the way.

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Edinburgh Festival Day 17: A game of two halves

A brief article explaining the very cool art project that I participated in — “Outpost Biennale”. When I get a chance, I’ll add some documentary images of my contributions.

[From the Independent, 30 August 1994]

They cost nothing. They are the size of a credit card. And they threaten to subvert the art world. Iain Gale investigates.

Across Edinburgh, people are looking at works of art, engaging in a visual dialogue which taxes their faculties of appraisal and evaluation. But the focus of their attention is not the impressive collections in the city’s art galleries, but 24,000 works of art which cost almost nothing and are just the size of a credit card. Despite their size and apparent lack of value, however, they constitute the most fascinating and innovative art show of the whole Festival.

‘Outpost’ is a revolutionary concept which aims to extend our understanding of the processes that condition the way we look at art. Originally the brainchild of Clive Sall and Emma Davis of FAT (Fashion, Architecture, Taste), the project, now supported by Independent Public Arts, is centred around 240 artists, of varying degrees of celebrity and talent, each of whom has been asked to produce 100 copies of an original work of art in two halves. One half is distributed from dispensers at sites across the city. You simply take one and make of it what you will.

This is the essence of a project whose raison d’etre is the willingness of the public to make its own critical decisions about art. You become involved the moment you take a card, effectively becoming curator, critic and collector. Once you have accumulated a few cards, preferably from different venues, the next step is to take them to the Outpost stand in the Traverse theatre foyer where, for a price which varies from 10p to pounds 10 (all proceeds go to an Edinburgh Aids charity) you can collect a ‘signature’ card which reveals the identity of the artist. For a further pounds 4, you can buy a catalogue which also acts as a display album. Stick in your cards and you have the exhibition.

It is simple and effective, and raises interesting questions about the way we view art. The credit-card format, for example, might alert the viewer to an intention to subvert the traditional hierarchy of dealer, artist, museum. But Sall is emphatic that he and Davis are not ‘art terrorists’; ‘We simply want to circumvent institutions,’ he says. It’s a simple thesis: art galleries, public and commercial, present works in a way which by its nature implies greatness. If it’s on the wall, sanitised and sanctified, it must be good. Decontextualising begins with the venue. By locating the house- shaped dispensers not only at the National Gallery of Scotland and the Fruitmarket Gallery, but also at Burger King, Waverley station, a post office and a go-go pub, the organisers are indulging in a form of gentle subversion. In a gallery setting, the layman will suspend critical judgement to worship at the altar of high art. The first thing to do is find the name. But with Outpost, the artists’ names are not revealed, along with the second half of the diptych, until the art is paid for. With no authorship evident, viewers are coerced into making the effort to regain their often neglected critical faculties.

There is much to choose from. The works of art are ingenious in their diversity, from a sculpture created from a piece of string and evidence of the recent fad for chocolate in the word piece ‘lick me’ through a mildly obscene fax from Germany to simple, effective abstraction. Having decided, in the crush of Burger King or the serenity of an art gallery, whether or not to keep the first card, the viewer’s next decision is whether to pay the amount demanded for the second. So, after the aesthetic judgement comes that of value. A twist is that while some of the artists on show are students, others (a list is available), are known and exhibited names. Part of the interest comes from the excitement of gambling on your own taste. Once the collection is assembled, its display in the gallery of the book is at the viewer’s discretion.

Via this sequence, the viewers become curators in a process which, one hopes, will teach them something that they won’t find in a textbook. Of course, the pool of artists is finite and generally not traditionalist. So one could say that the organisers have already imposed their own critical criteria. Nevertheless, by the time the dispensers are empty and, with luck, all the signatures claimed, there could be some 500 more people in the city who understand what it is to be a curator or critic. If only it were really that simple.

Artworks will be dispensed until 2 Sept. An exhibition will be held of the work. Details from Independent Public Arts on 031-558-1950. An Outpost project will be part of the Venice Biennale in 1995.

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manifestations of thought

Instead
of getting lost and bewildered in separate identity of things,
we must view their integral
interrelationships and significance.
If we consider,
the construction of a television
set and its astounding ability
of processing the endless set of images
and their interplay toward reproduction
of scenes and events and occurrences;
of transmission and reception
of an ad-hoc arbitrary signal,
of weaving the waves into picture after picture. more “manifestations of thought”

posted
  • place: Arabianranta, Helsinki, Finland

quick notes

The N-1 event is curious — I wasn’t aware it was a pedagogic exercise to be acted out in front of (!) students at Arcada. This makes it a bit awkward with some of the invited people, though I simply jump in to the scene, aiming that for the students it would not be a business-as-usual pedagogic activity. That was hard to overcome in the lecture hall (suitably exquisite quality as is any Finnish public construct). So we oscillate in and out of the building, the lobby, outside, and so on, enjoying the cool sunshine. The students somewhat perplexed, but seemingly engaged or at least present.

Most of us live much of our lives in the ether. We have a mobile phone with us at all times with the result that we are always on and never truly alone. We have maps and geo-positioning on our phones so that we are always traceable and never truly lost. We tweet and update our Facebook status so that we often say what comes into our minds when it comes into our minds, and we are rarely truly reflective.

In all of this we are telling each other stories about what we are doing, and from this we curate stories about who we are. From all the shards and slivers that we scatter across the digiverse we are piecing together new kinds of identities – and these identities propel us in some directions and constrain us from moving in others.
more “quick notes”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

well, the next step

hmm, well, another election. or so. Boulder voting 71% for Barack, and legalized pot. Amendment 64.

having fun with my students, they are struggling and coming up with what they can, the bar is high, the class can be harsh on presentation crits…

anyway, researching some Virtual Reality papers to pass on:

The modern notion of space is a compound metaphor that embodies all our concepts and experiences of separation, distinction, articulation, isolation, delimitation, division, differentiation and identity. The laws of perspective and of geometry for us are a codified summary of our normal experience of alienation, unique identity, and un-relatedness. It has all been abstracted, externalized, and synthesized into the cold, empty void we call space. This metaphor of space is our modern mechanism for avoiding the experience of oneness, of the chaos, of the ultimate state of unity to which the mystic seers and philosophers of all ages have referred.

Jones, R.S., 1982. Physics as metaphor, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

The American Scholar

The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never can find, — so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without circumference, — in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so, tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together, diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts. The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another, reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law, and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of nature, by insight.

Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested, that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation, sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of his soul? — A thought too bold, — a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, — when he has learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is, is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print. Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess. And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept, “Study nature,” become at last one maxim.

Emerson, R.W., 1837. The American Scholar. Available at: https://www.emersoncentral.com/amscholar.htm [Accessed August 27, 2012].

posted

finnagain

*
*
*j*
*
*
Now I am thoroughly disgusted.
GBU. snafu.
New York rubber rooms:
Rubber Hobo Economies, R.H.E.,U.S.A.:
Today my face is the Good the Bad the Ugly,
with 51 percentz lezz guudz ….
The Diet (of amplification)
of Juvenile Automata ….

HeisenHower: the prophecy of MICocracy:
the millenary idiom-dusty compress:
head-test traumaturgy:
the statement was already *quaint*
when it was made …. once upon a time:
bedtime story: “the news”: since that phase
of the metastasis of weapons-prod had begun
during the 1930s: German Japanese Tempires:
“fuses” set to explode: armor: tanks: radar:
V2 rocket:
ME 262 jet-aircraft: Fat Man Little Boy:
The Super:
these
were accomplished: *fait accompli*
when the HeisenHower spoked. A spook.
The factories had been operational for more
than a decade. HH, some ghost memorial out
of Shookspeer, Spookmerde.
Savant, Sirrpants,
of Pobolick Uppiniun.

My perceptions now correspond with Buñuel.
I cannot regard the *hiccup* the *halitosis*
proper to politic: the law: as something
other than Alibi, Hypnosis, Amnesia.
AHA.
Ubu roi.

Franz Kafka: the trial: the castle: the alibi.
I do not regard the texts as satires of “20th-
century bureaucracy”: the texts examine the
absurd consistency (Kurt Gödel) of the crazy
quilt of the Austro-Hungarian Empire: AHE:
“a family saga”: “tree”: minus “the family”:
*holy* family: the law exists *passively:* as in
the illusion: “time passes”: the law accumulates
(constipation of the cloud) and absorbs:
its function is intestinal: the apparition:
“the doom” of all who “enter” and “serve” it:
it performs no active intelligence, no perception:
it borrows “everything” “it has”:
Poe: The Conqueror Worm:

The famous *blindness* of Oedipus: exists *intestinally:*
labyrinth: blind intestine:
sphincter: riddle of the sphinx:
payment: prepare to receive: the word:
awe: the key: substrate of law:

to fast: to cleanse the ambient atmospheric body
of vain intestinal combats:

Roland Barthes: *I am sick of images* [image: as
blind accumulation: identity: (commercial) brand:]
The reporter in Antonioni’s *Passsenger:*
he knows disgust: he loathes: the image:
which imprisons him: society: social propriety:
the succubus:
metallurgy: bullets armors:
weapons sold within the church:

Joyce: hit upon it:
*Finnagain:*
to spell “correctly”:
is to cooperate: with succubistic law:

Enjoy the hills, the rills ….

A

posted
  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Friday, 01 June, 1962

Had some discussion with WZL, who mentioned two work areas — a) the Data Flow working group, and b) the development of a document to the physical basis of the STV tests. Apparently I was being offered a chance to shift to the other (data) work. It seems important to me to “develop the physical basis of the tests in the STV program,” as I mentioned to WW & WZL before. WZL expects to be at BSD next week and will endeavor o obtain their approval to do this since it involves going to the various Aerospace contractors.

Listened to a mtg. in Lee Murray’s office on the STV Data problem.

Mailed another letter to FAA Admin N. E. Halaby, on a) the addition of a/c identity & remaining fuel to the beacon response, b) the development of the safety and separation volumes around each moving a/c for computer up-dating, and c) suggested HJM as a good man to operate BRD.

Sticky

There was too much mud in the back yard to pour concrete in the AM, so I went to the office.

posted

on visibility

To look:

at everything which overflows the outline, the contour, the category, the name of what it is.

All appearances are continually changing one another: visually everything is interdependent. Looking is submitting the sense of sight to the experience of that interdependence. To looker something (a pin that has dropped) is the opposite of this looking. Visibility is a quality of light. Colours are the faces of light. This is why looking is to recognize, enter a whole. Identity of an object or colour or form is what visibility reveals: it is a conclusion of visibility; but it has nothing to do with the process of visibility which is as uncontainable, which is as much a form of energy as light itself. Light which is the source of all life. The visible is a feature of that life; it cannot exist without it. In a dead universe nothing is visible.
more “on visibility”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Nordic Nazi recollections

Hitler’s worldview included copious referencing of Nordic creation mythologies (thus his love of Wagner!). One consequence of this obsession was the emergence of strong pro-Nazi movements leading up to, through, and most disturbingly, after WWII in all the Nordic/Scandic countries (Nordic countries comprise all the Scandinavian countries (Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark), plus Finland). Some Icelanders eagerly supported these Nazi ideologies — documented in black-and-white images of uniformed goose-stepping rubes on parade in downtown Reykjavík before the 1940 British occupation, and the refusal of Icelandic authorities to allow African-American soldiers into the country during the later US occupation. These warped sympathies have persisted right up to the present time: a fact that was brought to my attention by a sequence of articles published in Iceland’s main national newspaper, Morgunbladið, back in the early 1990’s when I had recently immigrated to Reykjavík to take up residence with my future ex-wife, an Icelandic psychologist who I had met in Germany a few years previous. The current events in Norway bring all this back to mind, again… more “Nordic Nazi recollections”

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from a GMO soybean site

2. Maintaining identity of product

a. Each field must be identified with a number or other designation on the field application form and other pertinent documents.
b. Maps showing field identities and locations must be maintained and furnished to crop inspectors.
c. Field inspected product must be positively identified at all times.
d. A bin or lot number must identify all bins.
e. If product is bagged, bags must be identified with a stenciled lot number or a tag securely fastened to the bag.

3. Record requirements

The following records must be maintained:

a. Field number
b. Amount of product harvested
c. Assigned bin number
d. Record of any product transfers
e. Assigned lot numbers
f. Copies of all completed agency documents

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Reindeer on the Road

mikropaliskunta is back again! An expedition collects artists to explore the nationality of a tourist in Canary Islands 03-10.march.2009 The travel can be followed in real-time at renewed website https://www.mikropaliskunta.net

mikroPaliskunta is a series of interdisciplinary expeditions exploring contemporary imagined nation called Finland and its eco-social changes in a sustainable way. mikroPaliskunta has already made two expeditions: across Finland from north to south by a biodiesel car with a stuffed reindeer in 2006 and around Berlin by bicycles in Germany in 2007. This spring, the group starts a series of expeditions themed The Finnish on Holiday. The first expedition in the hell triangle of tourism is made to Canary Islands – the ever-popular holiday destination and a border shore for African refugees risking their lives to enter European Union. Following two expeditions head to entertain centers in Vantaa and Lapland in Finland The Finnish culture is moved to warm climate in Canary Islands. How does tourism intensify presented national identity in tourists themselves and in local people? Also, the affects of mass tourism from perspective of economic depression and ecological awareness is an interesting subject matter, explains media artist and member of the expedition Mari Keski-Korsu. mikroPaliskunta website is renewed for the Canary Islands expedition. As with the earlier expeditions, also this expedition can be tracked almost in real-time. The artists of the expedition work with their own individual themes producing articles, photographs, videos, maps and a series of performances about coffee drinking as a social phenomenon. All the materials about this and the past expeditions are exhibited at the website. Members of the expedition include media artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Mika Meskanen, photographer Eija Mäkivuoti, author and scriptwriter Taina West. Researcher of sustainable consumption and production Satu Lähteenoja is a special guest of the expedition. mikroPaliskunta is supported by Arts Council of Finland and Finnish Cultural Fund.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Qi approaching the Equinox

go to bed reading of Qi in Ted J. Kaptchuk’s treatise on Chinese medicine and wake up early from a deep dream where I was working with a group of boisterous and engaged young people who are somehow brought together by the impulse of Barack Obama. my immediate thought upon waking is why does a political figure enter my dreams? social action is important, sure, along with an interest in community dynamics, but a politician (community organizer none-the-less)? somewhat disturbing, though that thought is outweighed by the energy of the scenario. I suppose I am missing teaching. there will be opportunities for that in Oz, although I will keep it highly restricted to workshops rather than term courses. nothing should get in the way of the appointed task.

the Qi discussion illustrates the absolute difficulty in framing a concept in the language — the specific social protocol — within which the concept did not arise. the fundamental problem of translation. and in this case, translation of a term that is so formative to any worldview built on it that if one adopts that specific term, it will map, literally, where one stands in the world. and the ensuing conclusion that the adoption of another social protocol, language, precipitates a shift in worldview. no surprise there.

one global ‘solution’ to this issue especially in regard to fundamentals like Qi or energy (noting that even here I am making no one-to-one correspondence between the two!), when ‘comparing’ fundamentals, is to consider that each human individually is observing the world, and, at the same time, the social collective that they are participating in exerts an impressive synergy on all these points-of-view, and generates a collectively determined world view. this is the dominant social protocol, their language. Both the individual and collective world view are reductive apprehensions of essentially the same phenomena — that of be-ing in the world — seen from the particular point of view of that individual or collective. Of course, there are the instances where the worldview of the collective is impressed on the individual when the individual is forced to sacrifice personal autonomy to the collective — often through violence or threat of violence. it becomes a deep issue of personal autonomy or idiosyncrasy versus the power of the collective and where to set the line.

… the unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter…. (Furthermore) the continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter, signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted by Cartesian dichotomy …. Qi, in short, seems inadequate to provide a philosophical background for the development of empirical science as understood in a positivistic sense. What it does provide, however, is a metaphorical mode of knowing, an epistemological attempt to address the multidimensional nature of reality by comparison, allusion, and suggestion. — Tu Wei-ming in Confucian Though

furthermore, the adoption of another linguistic naming system or protocol represents the potential of seeing the world anew. at the same time as it represents a separation from the dominant or previous system. this is an essential feature of the process of immigration, this identity shift that comes through a (linguistic) re-naming the world. but it is also inherent in the process of adoption of any protocol or technology that is produced and imposed on the individual.

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thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

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

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

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

another TAZ?

tmp.deluxe. call for interest. huh? a large empty space inside a renovated neoclassic building with high ceilings and big windows. controlled on the U1 line by two smiling-but-thuggish youngsters merely flashing their KVB identity cards. as a performance or so. fortuitous to have the right ticket. €2.10 normal tariff. not so cheap. I’m committed to a single round-trip maximum per day. how to do this when a typical day might require getting to four destinations or so. anyway, make it to the tmp.space. they are asking for proposals. slowly the space fills. black clothes, I’m no exception other than wearing faded jeans. there are two of us sitting at a raw chip-board table. call for interest. two large stacks of bluish-white A4 paper, two glass ash trays, one with a few pens cradled in it, one empty. the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes. why is that smell the quintessence of stale? somebody changes the music — electronica for death-metal or so. conversations trip along and don’t seem to get through the aesthetic miasma that is anchored in the stacks of paper and the ashtrays. following the reasoning, following the line. and attempting to insert energy into the situation. having seen and been seen. and a child in a pink t-shirt wanders around. Papa! Papa! making space-testing sounds. to locate herself in the space. doing this, she locates all other receivers in themselves. placing them in the stiff reserve of their aesthetic opinions which they trade in measures, lubricated by wine. locative media while Rome Burns. or is this an exaggeration? more “another TAZ?”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

H5N1

there is no privacy at the speed of Light is a project hosted on ORF Kunstradio and authored by Bernhard Loibner and Tom Sherman aka Nerve Theory. It explores contemporary be-ing and the impact of social and biological entities on that being. Fragment No. 23 is the latest installment:

We live in a world of strangers. Because more and more of us choose to live in cities, we find ourselves living in a world of strangers. We find privacy in the city, and loneliness. As we gain autonomy and our sense of individualism grows, it is more and more difficult to convince others that we are trustworthy. There are two ways we can prove our worth, with credentials and through ordeals. Credentials include credit cards and drivers licenses, and educational certificates. We have identity tags like social security and passport numbers. To supplement our credentials we must submit our physical bodies for measurement and examination. We must establish our reputations through ordeals. Photographs are taken. We are asked to take drug tests for certain jobs, say a hair strand drug test or a simple saliva test. We are asked to place our hands on devices that verify our identity through hand geometry analysis. We are instructed to stare into video cameras for iris scans. These ordeals have become common in many aspects of our personal lives. We live in a world of strangers and it has become increasingly difficult to establish and maintain our reputations. In this world we still rely on personal, instinctive judgment — the way a person looks and smells, the sound of their voice, and if they can look us in the eye. The way a person moves or responds to our touch still tells us a lot. But our intuitive skills only tell us so much. What kind of music does this stranger like? What are her favorite movies? Does he eat meat? Before we have sex or exchange body fluids we must determine the probability of various kinds of infections. Credentials are important, but ordeals are usually necessary to close the deal.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Varela

Unless we accept that at this point in intellectual and scientific history that some radical re-learning is necessary, we cannot hope to move forward in the compulsive history of the ambivalent rejection-fascination with consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My proposal implies that every good student of cognitive science who is also interested in issues at the level of mental experience, must inescapably attain a level of mastery in phenomenological examination in order to work seriously with first-person accounts. But this can only happen when the entire community adjusts itself to the corresponding acceptance of arguments, refereeing standards and editorial policies in major scientific journals, that can make this added competence an important dimension of a young researcher. To the long-standing tradition of objectivist science this sounds like anathema, and it is. But this is not a betrayal of science: it is a necessary extension and complement. Science and experience constrain and modify each other as in a dance. This is where the potential for transformation lies. It is also the key for the difficulties this position has found within the scientific community. It requires us to leave behind a certain image of how science is done, and to question a style of training in science which is part of the very fabric of our cultural identity. — Francisco Varela

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  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

hiking tour

the sea in storm, Selatangar, Iceland, November 2004

Niels, Valgerdur and I head to Selatangar for a short hike in heavy rain and thick misty airs. the sea roils against the smashed and solid black stone. lichen splash some rocks with colored and white spraying splotches of paint. a visit to the Blue Lagoon is … different … from when it was a rough dredged pond in the lava, and a small wooden shack for changing. now it is business.

Nothing is ever really lost, or can be lost,
No birth, identity, form–no object of the world.
Nor life, nor force, nor any visible thing;
Appearance must not foil, nor shifted sphere confuse thy brain.
Ample are time and space–ample the fields of Nature.
The body, sluggish, aged, cold–the embers left from earlier fires,
The light in the eye grown dim, shall duly flame again;
The sun now low in the west rises for mornings and for noons continual;
To frozen clods ever the spring’s invisible law returns,
With grass and flowers and summer fruits and corn. — Walt Whitman

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity

8th Annual Teaching with Technology Conference — Final Program:

Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity. John Hopkins, CU-Boulder — Room 1B90

The focus of this presentation is on the convergence of digital/network technology and the arts, and the opportunities for collaborating with a global network of artists. This presentation includes an overview of several specific digital arts projects in Europe and the United States and commentary about the practice behind teaching and creative artwork. (https://neoscenes.net)

…

TWT Talk notes:

“teaching is an action, a practice that embodies art as a way-of-doing: a life praxis. in a matrix of social structures it formalizes the path of movement of energies between two people, the teacher and the student. at the same moment of this formalization, equal energies must reverse the implied hierarchy of this polarization and exchange the roles of the participants: the forces applied by the social matrix re-configured or simply discarded. the two collect the sum total of their knowing, rooted in their sensual awarenesses, and bring it to the forefront of relation. the harmonic flow, the oscillation, thus initiated must hold as its frequency the organic synchronicity of the two individuals and the existence of formal structure must dissipate into a Presence of genuine dialogue.”

background

did undergrad work in geophysical engineering at CSM, worked as an international explorationist for a major, quit to collect an MFA from CU in Photo and Electonic Media, then left the US in 1989 to live and work in a variety of places from Iceland to most countries around the Baltic Rim in Northern Europe running seminars at 15-20 universities each year under the title networking and creativity. here at CU as a sabbatical replacement, but about to return to Europe. more “Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity”

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1 + 1 = 3

[ED: This is the third report on selected actions and flows in the neoscenes occupation (nso)[1] network, published in acoustic.space #4 (2003 ISSN 1407-2858). Since the last report, learning and networks [2] in the acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858), nso has spun off two major networking projects and is constantly involved in a heavy creation-filtering-redirection of network energies on a sustained multi-channel and daily basis. This article will briefly look at these two projects, “expand” [3] and “<di>fusion” [4], and it will comment on the matrix of practice that the projects grew from.]

acoustic.space #4 (2003 ISSN 1407-2858), Riga, Latvia, November 2003

One of the biggest obstacles to finishing this article is trying to carve out a piece of time away from network and face-to-face communication just to write it! This fundamental dilemma lies at the core of neoscenes — why take time away from attentive one-to-one distributed action for anything related to re-production, re-creation, or re-presentation? For a network to remain healthy and thriving, it demands a flow of energies from node to node. There’s no time to spare. neoscenes prefers person-to-person as the core tactical expression of networking — neoscenes avoids centrally organized media and PR-related activities whenever possible. acoustic.space is a fine exception because of close linkage between paper artifact and the lively network-of-praxis that generates it.

So it goes.

By nature, networks are human-scaled and exist in human-scaled time. They develop at the speed of life. neoscenes was never a fast solution caught in the cross-fire hype of media-convergence-mania: and it definitely didn’t burst in the dot.com vacuum. neoscenes is dot.net [5]. The slow evolution of the neoscenes network is a vehicle for learning, creating, and sharing that does not seek stasis, spectacle, or speed. more “1 + 1 = 3”

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

education

new bike, the Nashbar 5000 now 15 or so years old. still running, in need of some new parts, though, so I will contribute it to some charity. when in Amurika, upgrade. to what end? newness (an energized statement against entropic decay). but it requires an energy input. constantly. that’s what makes gold so desirable, that it requires almost no input over time to retain its luster. you only have to get it.

Education is a process that necessarily entails an interpersonal (not merely interactive) relationship between people — student and teacher (and student and student) that aims at individual and collective self-knowledge. (Whenever people recall their educational experiences they tend to remember, above all, not courses or subjects or the information imparted but people, people who changed their minds or their lives, people who made a difference in their developing sense of themselves. It is a sign of our current confusion about education that we must be reminded of this obvious fact: that the relationship between people is central to the educational experience.) Education is a process of becoming for all parties, based upon mutual recognition and validation and centering upon the formation and evolution of identity. The actual content of the educational experience is defined by this relationship between people and the chief determinant of quality education is the establishment and enrichment of this relationship. — David F. Noble

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  • place: Montreal, Canada
  • author: Tom Sherman

The Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past by Tom Sherman

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.
more “The Finished Work of Art is a Thing of the Past by Tom Sherman”

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For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson

This essay, by London-based artist Ian Rawlinson, mentions a project I was involved with Clive Sall and Emma Davis called Outpost which appeared at the Venice Biennale (1995) and the Edinburgh Festival (1994).

In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign. more “For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson”