posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

life, or

Life, or what’s left of it changes to a different ground state. Still indeterminate, still challenging, still energized. with others, with the self, with the world, with all perceived, all known, all thought of, all sensed.

But, when infertile senses are gone, what’s left? A hollow (corpse)? A teeming emptiness? A plasmatic field? A soul? or no thing.

I prefer no thing. I’m tired of the endless material chase of noun, of structured and reductive sameness. The soul-less naming of the world. The endless descriptions, declensions, and derivations, not to mention re-creations and duplications. Enough is … enough. Gluttony gnawing at the root of satiation. The belly ever larger than the eye. Consume this. It’s gone.

And yet, fully immersed in the stuff of nightmares, no stillness of soul. The body wracked by energies of disorder. Has hypostasis reversed itself, abandoning body’s object?

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

media artist to media ‘specialist’

The turn has begun, a shift initiated by the contingencies of the social system that I inhabit and how I determine my relationship with it. As an international educator (learning facilitator) and media artist, the nomadic pathway was sustainable in the present, demonstrably sustainable over the past years, but apparently not into some unknowable future. As the sliding scale of living shifts over time, the indeterminacy of the future [uh, the crap shoot?] (op)presses into the psyche in a way that is unknowable in youth.

The other dimension of the transition is driven by a (lack) of ‘intersection’ (in the Venn A ∩ B sense). A is what I’ve brought to the social system; B is what the social system ‘wants’ to be supplied with. The intersection is what the social system is willing to share its accumulated resources for: for the life-time/life-energy input of the individual.

In this sense I was not able to excavate a niche allowing an accumulation of resources that subsequently would aide in securing that indeterminate future. The concept continually rises to the surface: that no amount of resources will truly secure the future pathway that life takes. And that living without regard to the future is a more authentic path for momentary and cumulative life to take. Isn’t “be here now” a concrete invocation to not allow the illusion of what the future may bring to impose a rigidity, a compression of possibility, on the present?

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

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Rules of Storytelling (yikes)

Maybe this is why mega-media animation is SO EFFING BORING! It’s prepared by recipe… Compositional rules of any sort are more than simply annoying, they are counter-creative. Formulaic executions are a great comfort to those expecting normative expressions. But they are the bane on innovation, adaptation, (r)evolution, and anything else pertaining to Life (versus stasis and death). Life does not come with rules, and it does not conclude as a neat package. The process of consuming mediated abstraction simply takes us away from the immediacy and indeterminacy of living.

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

waka – Day 6 – eNZed

learning Maori numbers, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

Up early again, before all the girls are off to school, the morning routines are quite entertaining to witness. Compared to similarly-aged kids in other places (the US!), all the kids I’ve met here seem quite relaxed. Is it the culture here, or? There is a laid-back quality, but I haven’t been here long enough to see how it suffuses through the society. There have to be substantial social issues, with colonialism having left such an influence on things. The stack of histories of NZ that Kerry loaned me before traveling told of savage open conflict until around the time of the US Civil War which is quite recent. Though no longer in direct living memory, it is still quite close. It’s is obvious, from the clear-cut timbering alone, seen from the air, that there is an ongoing and deep conflict over land-use, with powerful development and/or exploitation forces. On the other hand, there are definitely strong voices for nurturing the environment (and human lives on the island) back to something more sustainable.

We take a visit to the waka (canoe) boathouse to check on things — there is a crew of young gals who are practicing waka racing for the national championship. A group of absolutely charming young women.

Mike, our main Maori host comes by, what a expansive and powerful spirit he has! Julian has really cultivated some amazing connections with people here. Everyone met so far has been friendly, open, welcoming, relaxed, ready with a smile, along with some challenging/enLightening conversations.

Hardly time to make any entries now that the road has come up to meet my feet, so to say. Prepping mentally for the symposium coming up in a few days. But there is still so much indeterminacy that I will really have to improvise, and simply go with the available and auspicious energies of the moment. Many stories are already told about energy and informatics.

Towards sunset, an impromptu picnic on river turns out to be a neighborhood gathering, yet another example of a relaxed bunch of folks. Such a (WELCOME!) contrast to Sydney!

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From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

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routed, rooted

If everything now becomes about the Road: it all falls along that infinitely converging line, that pavement rising to the foot, hard, on occasion scraping the nose, the knees, or the palms; it is both that which is down-trodden, and the means to get there. A path for social flows, climbing, gathering, consuming, dispersing. Freedom, indeterminacy, hydrocarbon wastage, imperial protocols, signage, regulation, safety, danger, possibility, newness. On the road, carrying the old with oneSelf, in a worn knapsack, that which is old, known, important, very important.

So, three or four threads: 1) the Self on the road; 2) the encounter with the Other on the road; 3) the road as an expression of the techno-social context for human relation; 4) what to do on the road that cannot be done elsewhere or under other conditions — what the road proffers to life, how one gets there, that and imagining the end of the road (Oz! to meet the Wizard (or Sorceress) hehe, from the Yellowbrick Road to Oz, now ain’t that whacked!).

In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”

Writing on the road. The translation of movement and sensual input to text. Learning what filters to apply, what social protocols to apply, what protocols to transcend, what to hold, what to release. Discipline.

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ant(s)

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Energy and economic myths

Energy and Economic Myths, Georgescu-Roegen, Nicholas, Elsevier Science & Technology, 1977. ISBN 0080210562

Georgescu-Roegen critiques the mechanistic basis for much economic theory (which predominantly focuses on the movement of goods — a state which, thermodynamically, appears as a reversible process — and one which leads, at least conceptually if not in fact to the infinite cycle from production to consumption). It would appear that our current situation is the result of that infinite cycle occurring in a locally finite system.

This book leads to:

More heat than light : economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics, Mirowski, Philip, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1991. ISBN: 0521350425 (hardback)

and ends up at this reflection from Borges:

It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws — I translate: inhuman laws — which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

In the introduction Mirowski inspires as he details his struggle to build a conceptual and actual bridge between physics and economics. Understanding that economics is an important dimensional descriptor of the techno-social system is a nice advance. Although the number of economists who have made this connection are few, and the bulk of the discipline are still mired in juggling abstractions. It’s important to realize that the abstracted metrics of economy are abstracted from something and that something is energized matter. He extends the argument, marking the parallel between the terms value in economics and energy in physics. And later, he develops the concept of energy as one critical to understanding economics, period. This is a good find indeed! And it might end up, by studying the principles of the conservation of energy too much and I will end up a conservative. (No chance of that, as no one ends up as anything but energy anyway…) Actually, bringing thermodynamics into the picture would radically change the nature and theories of market economics both on the right and on the left.

On pages 56-57 there is a symmetric coffee-colored ring, a primitive of a Rorschach test, and on 58-59, some bits of roll-your-own tobacco. The last record of being checked out was 1998. More than a decade ago. Not too much interest in these approaches within the traditional canon.

And later, on to the indeterminacy of human tendencies towards abstracted (but sometimes brilliant) reason, in describing his ideas on electromagnetic fields:

The substance here treated must not be assumed to possess any of the properties of ordinary fluids except those of freedom of movement and resistance to compression. It is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual phenomena. It is merely a collection of imaginary properties which may be employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way more intelligible for many minds … I wish merely to direct the mind of the reader to mechanical phenomena which will assist him in understanding the electrical ones. All such phrases in the present paper are to be considered as illustrative, not explanatory. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. — James Clerk Maxwell

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?”

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  • place: en route Maastricht - Amsterdam, Netherlands

onwards

short morning with Rod. then off and about in the Light rain. just make the train by a minute despite leaving with plenty of time because of the bus driver shutting the bus down after a couple stops. reason? at the second stop about 40 high school kids get on, packing the bus, a couple stops later, while trying to sardine people onto the bus, he wants them to transfer to the bus behind him. they refuse, so he turns the bus off. and waits. interesting scene.

on to Amsterdam. to de Waag. some serious aerobics up to the third floor reception, am handed a phone and keys, then back over to the flat which sits on the south side of the Nieuwmarkt.

nice place. a single cold beer in the fridge. but the wifi from Waag does not quite cut across to the flat. sort of, but not quite. so I am offline for the weekend perhaps. though Sher says that the network should be accessible at the restaurant in the ground floor of de Waag. I’ll be checking that out tomorrow, for sure. and on for a dinner with Geert and Linda, Calin Dan, and Emile Zile.

The whole problem is one of abandoning a style of critical thought that is the very essence of our theoretical culture, but that in some sense comes under the head of a prior history and life; of carrying out, just as we have carried out a deterministic analysis of a deterministic society, an indeterministic analysis of an indeterministic society, a society that is fractal, random, exponential, one of critical mass and extreme phenomena, wholly dominated by relations of uncertainty. — Jean Baudrillard

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  • place: Bremen, Germany

bouncing

well, what else, the month is over, notes here few and far between (trying to get an article done for the pixelache2007 publication). and simply trying to keep the logistical complexities under some level of control. but the time between now and the end of March is pretty much locked in regarding the where, of course, the contents of the where are largely indeterminate. a good state of conditions, IMHO, to have the intact vessel for living in hand, and only the action of filling it with human connections.

Was ich suche,
ist immer um mich.
Was ich suche
ist immer in mir.
— das Buddha Natur

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

vholoce

another Furtherfield review:

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

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

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  • place: The Mission, San Francisco, California

places, sounds, words

portrait, Sirpa, Mission 17 Gallery, San Francisco, California, June 2005

make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice’s home and drive down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.
more “places, sounds, words”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the price of linguistic reduction

the sheer indeterminacy of ideas about things and actions and events:

Bohr was the first to recognize that the new quantum theory presented us with a view of experience in which different interactional arrangements resulted in complementary perspectives that need not be logically consistent, compatible, or commensurable, and in many critical cases could not be so. The reductionist trick was predicated on the assumption that the different ‘pieces’ or views from different perspectives could always somehow be neatly fit together. But we now know that material processes cannot be comprehended, cannot be exhaustively described within any one single self-consistent formal discourse. They always overflow the limited possibilities of our semiotic models of them. It is only by building more and more semiotic-discursive models, each internally self-consistent, but not limited by requirements of mutual consistency with each other, that we can, by adding together such ‘complementary’ views, attain to the most complete possible account of material phenomena, including semiosis itself. Thus we still come back to a version of ‘assemblage’ but hopefully a more sophisticated one, one that takes into account our own role and perspective as observers, as well as the material means by which we observe, compare, and assemble — the material mediation of our semiotic practices. — J. L. Lemke, in Material Sign Processes And Emergent Ecosocial Organization

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

tech-no-mad rising

finally positive and official confirmation on the artist-residency award in Helsinki. March through May or so, artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology. with a nice flat on Suomenlinna, a stipend, and no real teaching contingencies. the first time in a decade I have had time to work without the pressure of teaching and/or movement hanging over my head. some teaching before and after in Germany and probably trips to other places here and there in between — Riga, Tallinn, Venice, Amsterdam, Köln. open-ended. Europe as destination, home? but with the welcoming spirit shown, it is something of a homecoming. that old dilemma of a spiritual home in certain landscapes of the West, and an intellectual/social creative home in the urban energies of pan-Europe. after the last two years of geopolitical developments across the Atlantic, I understand that things will be different now. and the time of returning to the US may be further off than I can imagine.

facing the tech-no-mad inside. the usual stresses surface. destination instabilities, fiscal indeterminacy, psychosocial unknowns. people to see, two years on, at least, the amount of time I have been in the US without leaving at all. but the forward look that travel requires begins to liven my mind again. stories to share about the lapsed time of distant absence.

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

event horizons

peristalsis. purge that machine could never achieve. only Light is left. full moon, pull neck back and gaze up. perihelion. azimuth. traverse no azimuth. an old phrase that crept into mind during the winter nights of Iceland. only words here, no blog. no trend-spotting, no riding choking waves of socialized enigma. only transience.

the governor of Colorado says that 300 million in state debt will come from higher education. (because the higher-education sector opposes his policies.) so, I begin to pack bags and chart routes to familiar and unfamiliar ports starting in July. Leubeck will be one stop. there will be many, as it was before. nomadism becomes a partner with networking. and the antithesis of successful integration into the system that I was programmed to perform in. outsider art.

letting notes get more and more cryptic and indeterminate. as a result of the floods of noise that arise when static social embeddedness increases. walk with the flux. feed on the flow, drown in the flood, speed up to “c,” and watch it all reduce to null. flatten and spread into a now of forever. and a place of only here. singularity. trip on event horizon, bruise the shin even as the Lights go out.

dream-forge. and the realization that only great loss, those shivering moments caught replaying between dream and dream, will transform, or, no, they will not. they will only amplify the emptiness. there is little left to do.