posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

from source to sink to source

Thermodynamic and electromagnetic (energy) models of reality use the terms ‘source’ and ‘sink’. Given that certain aspects of living organisms are accurately modeled by thermo, it follows, reasonably, that in a science-driven interpretation of reality, these terms may be applied to human life.

Eau de source: spring water, water that is safe to drink. Source, re-source. Life-source. Keeps life in motion and creating.

And then, sink: to submerge (in water?). Water that kills, hypothermia, a demonstration of inverse heat capacity, from source (body engine) to sink (cold water). Taking from, depth, gravitational pull of the Sun at night: into the earth. Drawing, winding down, running out.

From source to sink and vice versa. The movement of energies from energy-dense to energy-deficient regions.

Back to the anisotropic distribution of energy/matter in the cosmos. Life is predicated on this seeming imperfection. It is the ground condition of Life as a negentropic phenomena. Pure sameness was once disturbed and began to differentiate. Back to Weil’s “Two forces rule the universe: Light and Gravity.”

Mind has forgotten how to string words together. Mind knows no more names. A retreat from naming is the end’s beginning. I will stop naming what I cannot recall. Rather, turn naming into an action stripped of all symbolic content. No adjectival building of sense: mere non-sense. A good thing perhaps? Rules broken, expression by fiat, without the symbolic chatter, without symbolic precision.

An urgency to fall back into a frenzy of creative action emerges from a deep loathing of empty-headed criticism of pointless tasks that have no use in changing the social system: the dysfunctional working life. In service of the overwhelming human inertia directed into the search for (re)sources. Sources. Am I then guilty of helping sustain the unsustainable? Maybe, but worse, guilty of tolerating the intolerable idiocy of management: an energy sink.

To be a source is to allow a flux of energy to pass into and through the body with minimal disruption, minimal blockage. Channeling, not grasping, not riding the tiger, but simply be-ing the tiger, inspiration, be-ing the tiger’s roar, expiration. Nothing to do with the social, the fiscal, the political, the noumenal.

 

 

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

matters

Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek

Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

more on control and autonomy

A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

road :: amplifier / the difference?

The amplifier/road difference would sound something like this:

I defined the amplifier as a concept which exists at many different scales and in both ‘natural’ and human-dominated systems (though that particular dialectic is a problematic one). It is a system which concentrates (and by default attenuates) energy flows. It is a defined set of pathways for that energy to flow along. (a life-form is an amplifier!)

(As an example, fundamental physical laws, such as the set of principles—gravitational attraction, strong/weak nuclear forces, EM radiation, thermodynamics, etc.—’govern’ the process of stellar evolution and ‘supply’ the ‘protocols’ for the ‘expression’ of Light energy (radiation) in a highly specific and concentrated form (compared to the availability of that same energy in any random location in the universe).

In essence, humans are simply harnessing these physical laws to form their own pathways of energy flow. Indeed we can do nothing else, as these laws govern the entire observed and implied universe. So the difference between the amplifier and the protocols that ‘define’ it may only be question of articulation — that is, those physical laws, in human terms, simply exist (for us to discover and articulate over time). The protocols arise as humans initiate articulations of the extant energy flows within which we simply are. So the protocol is, again, merely, a human (socio-linguistic) reduction of observed and extant phenomena. We cannot do anything counter to those phenomena that those laws are ascribed to. However, using these reductive protocols/formula, we set up a wide variety of sub-systems which, cumulatively, are our techno-social systems — complex systems of re-routed energies. As soon as energy is re-routed, you have an amplifier situation because you consequently have a concentration/attenuation of flows. An amplifier is perhaps merely the condition of the existence of a concentration of energies. (this does get into the question of the role of, for example, gravity as a ‘protocol’ which drives the coalescing of energized matter in the universe — or is gravity actually increasing the entropy of that matter?)

more “road :: amplifier / the difference?”
posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

momentum

waking up early. so early.

a gap opens in the flow of being. stopping all progress. no forward momentum. inertia scrapes the pavement. heels dragging, eyes on the ground, not the horizon nor the stars.

posted
  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI: Day Eight

A few notes on techno-social systems:

In analyzing the affect of technology on a social system it is critical to identify and understand 1) what actors or protocols are determining the pathways of energy flow, 2) ultimately how individuals in the system interact with the pathway(s), 3) the resulting benefit and who receives it, 4) the mechanisms by which benefit (energy) is accumulated by those controlling the protocols. Prior to this it is probably necessary to map the general sources of energy that are being re-purposed (directed) by the techno-social system.

By tracing in detail 1) the relations of power, 2) the pathways along which energy and power flow, 3) the sources and destinations of the flows, the entirety of human relation may be positioned at both a macro scale and a granular (that is, human-to-human) scale: with the implicit understanding that all relation is permeated by the affects of the wider system.

For a techno-social system to be successful, by definition, it has to capture a certain minimum of the life-time/life-energy of participants in the system: this is a technology’s ultimate function within its social system/context. What is deterministic is the absolute need for life (human and elsewise) to continue, and in this continuance, to refine pathways of energy flow to aid in that continuance via the collective augmentation of the techno-social system.

(Are there technologies which do not concentrate energy within a certain subset of individuals to increase their ultimate life-extending pro-creativity? Are there systems which re-distribute widely their concentrated sources?) What about the struggle of certain individuals for a greater level of personal autonomy — those who would seek to either not participate in prescribed flow pathways or would seek to alter those pathways to suit individual desires? The inertia of the techno-social affects the personal trajectories of adoption or imposition.

In a wide social system, a techno-social system, technology is generally used as a means for concentrating energy for a subset of elites of the system. The balance of the participants, the drones, the prolls, the slaves, are inculcated from birth with the fiction that they are receiving more than they actually surrender to the social system. In the case of slaves, this balance reads: your life for your embodied labor.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

innovation

Fundamental innovations almost always seem to come from outside the established market leaders, who suffer ‘path dependency.’ Established firms are usually too committed to a particular conception of what their product is. This commitment is embedded in its manufacturing process and endemic in the thinking of its managers. When a major innovation appears, a leading firm understands the technology, but remains committed to its product and its production system.

Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Nye, David E., MIT Press, Boston, 2006.

Technology, at base, may be defined as a means or pathway to gather and concentrate the (productive) energies of individuals in a social grouping. The difference between inventions lost in the detritus of history and those that become widely integrated in a social system is not necessarily related to the efficiency of the technology itself. The primary difference lies in the efficiency with which the broader social system uses the technological pathway as an effective means of tapping into the individual energies of the population. The broader social system is usually controlled by a subset of people, elites, who impose the pathway on the whole (and who tap off a surplus of energy from the pathway). It is controlled by those who define the pathway of flow. Set pathways have come into being to benefit those who are accessing the concentrated powers they provide. When a pathway is set, it has a built-in inertia which more-or-less resists alteration. This inertia is a mapping of a (counter-(r)evolutionary) resistance of human systems to change. The resistance comes from the relationship of energy flow that the pathway is defining. Individuals participating in either giving and receiving energy are reluctant to change the architecture of that relationship: it is a symbiotic relationship. There can be no receivers without those willing to give their life-energy and attentions to the receivers. Change comes hard. Innovation, the tendency to seek (newer and more) optimal pathways, is always negatively affected by this resistance to some degree. A(ny) technological pathway, once fixed upon, is adapted to and becomes the norm. (The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster is a nice fictional sketch of this from 1900.)

Nye addresses many other topics aside from innovation, so I’ll be picking through his book in the next days.

posted

roadkill

death strewn on the highway. roadkill. carnivore, herbivore, amphibian, insect: getting to the other side of the road is just part of the inexorable (natural) systemic flow. Roadkill represents one intersection of human-defined flows and naturally-existing flows. The result of this fundamental intersection is near-death or absolute annihilation, a rapid reduction to component complex molecules. from the thathunk of meatier species to the simple fluttering splat of the butterfly. Leathery carcasses that persist for days despite the brutal pounding of truck tires and hard-to-remove stains on the windshield that resist even the most vigorous squeegee scrubbing whilst filling-up the tank.

Insects with a low weight-to-surface-area ratio can sometimes avoid liquidation by the slipstream effect which will carry them up and over the vehicle. But trajectory is all, and the meatier bugs, the swarming locusts and grasshoppers, have too much mass in their sagging torsos to experience this sanctified reprieve and thus become one with their maker in a soul-wrenching milli-second that can be a marvel of colorful abstraction a-la Pollack.

Along one stretch of the UFO Highway in Nevada, red locusts were on the march northward along a specific pathway that they were intent on following without regard to individual survival. At 60 MPH, the dynamic was such that their flight reaction to the approaching truck got them only a couple feet off the ground, not over the height of the hood, so, the lower grill was a mass of dessicated carcasses by the time we got to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a hundred miles away. Many more were simply crushed by the wheels, leaving greasy red-greenish stains on the road and in the wheel-wells: their natural trajectory on the ground was clearly discernible where it intersected with roads. I noticed in the gas station parking lot in Ely there was a small flock of birds who were picking over the the resulting detritus on the ground, and when they could manage, actually hanging onto the grills and directly harvesting the carnage, ‘burp!’ What would the evolutionary outcomes be? Birds that can smell idling cars? Locusts who tunnel for 40 feet underground when they encounter traces of heavy hydrocarbons, with luck, getting to the other side.

Larger animals, the mammals are the worst, though, when encountered at any speed. Moose and elk torsos will behave something like the old paper-straw-through-the-raw-potato trick — inertial physics at its most fundamental. The front bumper of the car will take out the long spindly legs whilst the massive quarter-ton of body-meat, at just the right height to clear the hood, will simply stay where it is. But where it is relative to the speeding windshield means that it will simply obliterate anything in the front seats of the vehicle. At low speeds, this can mean a struggling, injured animal in the laps of struggling, injured humans, gah.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

here, there, etc

the play of reification. when mind stops, not confronted by any particular obstacles, but merely by an inertial lag. lacking the energy to proceed. while outside weather changes, un-noticed, unless it is rain. it has fallen below the threshold of modern awareness. inside people. like writing here. slipped by the side of lived be-ing.

wander over to to the Art Gallery of NSW to catch a screening of Gimme Shelter. flashing-back to Ancien Régime of mid-century Amurika, seeing the radical youth of that time — youth who are now retiring boomers fighting to keep a big slice of pie — what’s theirs by right, eh? bah!

a stroll out to Sculpture by the Sea, an uneven sprinkling of expressions placed along the Bondi-Bronte path. Shar says the water is 19.5C, gettin’ there. I’ll be in before long. inflammatory Thai dinner after that.

Willy and Andy unveiled a new blog, a collaborative effort covering “absolutely everything.” Welcome to the blogosphere folks!

posted

the Four, the Five; the Sink, the Skink…..

wow
bow-wow
and a swoon.

what an exhaustion,
what a prolongation,
what a
yeast-explosion
(souffle)
(implosion)
yesterday
was.

The Past is not dead;
it’s not even past.

Recently,
often enough,
my body has been a
contagious site

for arduous,
tenacious
spirits

for collisions,
elisions, litterings,
erosions,
floods
of certain humours,
certain histories.

Very much
in the Locus
of Mallarme and Naufrage,
Coup de des.

This “present” circumstance
(of intellectual inertia)
is untenable,
is impossible.

It Is Time—-
to cut the Strings
(of the Violin)—-
and to way with the giving Storm,
across the gravelled
waves.

The rigour,
the balance,
the elastic effervescence
of the Sycamore
surpass
every aspect
of the House.

No Need of Nature,
No Need of Art for This—-.

Franz
conceives of a “man”
who awakens in “his” bed
with the body of a scarab
(Old Egypt and its Love
of Puns);
a “man” who yet
(miraculously)
“retains” his human head.

What
might we say of a man,
who neither sleeps nor wakes;
who finds himself
inside
a Mural-Wall,
Wall-inside-a-Forest,
Land
travelling at Sea?

Wall: as Compass.
Forest: as its Clock…..

A….Reader? ….Reader-Hand?

Aestival,
estual,

Rain-Hand

Palus-Reeder?

(As with
*I Ching*—-
Biting-through-the-Sack….

What
kind of Sky?)

An.

posted
  • place: en route Berlin, Germany - Vilnius, Lithuania

non-transformative systems

flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.

lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.

got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970’s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.

Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.

(00:03:38, stereo audio, 7 mb)

We stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. The garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. Stone walls + narrow streets + no speed limits + bad roads = intense noise levels.

posted
  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

amplification, initial round

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.

posted
  • place: Huntsham Court, Devon, England

the party begins

this entry will morph in the next days, I’m really behind in getting images and entries online, so…

definitely here now. the house grows to accommodate the arriving crowd as the day wears along. several children, a dog, and a wide variety of humans. I prep chicken for dinner under the direction of Tanya, along with Jane and Jez. a fine curry from all fresh ingredients in the outrageously stocked kitchen (stocked with the food that packed the van to the ceiling). brought into the dining room set for 45 people. tonight it’ll be set for 75 folks. making sound recordings, images, and a little video tape. trying to not get too caught up in documentation to simply enjoy. massage is the theme for today — several masseuses were hired, and so folks are disappearing and wandering back to the first floor in bathrobes looking refreshed.

take a walk with Jeff and Lorna. to the church and graveyard, and around about.

over the door of the church:

Keep thy foot when thou goest to the House of God and be more ready to hear than to give the sacrifice of fools — Ecclesiastes 5:1

snow-drops everywhere. rain comes intermittently, darkening the sky, and flushing the air, which already has a marine feel to it, with more clean moisture. finally head back to the house after taking a wander out to the huge Cedars-of-Lebanon in what remains of the extended garden beyond the croquet field in the back yard.

steam is building, literally, in the hot-water heating system, and in the party inertia.

posted
  • place: en route Sangre de Christo Mountains - Boulder, Colorado

Valley View

plowing through connections that will be inductive to progressive evolution. so that fluid state-of-being constructed today is different than that of yesterday. attitude to be adopted is that of the vital. means is not thought but embodied action. although it is correct to say that we are never the same from moment-to-moment, this is at the finest level of be-ing. the more gross and dominant levels, change is incremental and often subducted by the inertia of comfort.

soaking away in the Valley View Hot Springs for some hours with Sage tagging along.

If we set ourselves down on the bank of the moments so as to observe them as they flow by, all we are able to recognize in them in the end is a meaningless succession, time which has lost its substance, abstract time, a transformation of our inner void. One step further, and from abstraction to abstraction it becomes more and more threadbare through our fault, it dissolves into temporality, it become a shadow of itself. Our task now is to give it back life, and to adopt a clear and unambiguous attitude towards it. — E. M. Cioran

posted
  • place: en route - Prescott, Arizona - Durango, Colorado

road-trip

still mulling Marc Tuter’s article in Leonardo; mulling how the praxis model for supra-academic success entails generating texts that fit into book-forms; mulling rhetoric; mulling spin; mulling at the inertia which keeps social institutions functional. as long as individuals are willing to place life energy in representative forms.

when co-option takes place — it is often (always) from a form of exhaustion of the self to resist the social inertia of a situation. peer pressure in a vastly more brutal and subtle way. although one powerful solution to this creeping anti-autonomy is to have a sustainable/sustained lived praxis that is authentic — with spiritual presence and active engagement.

social inertia keeps me on the road on the long drive across the reservation to Durango.

Maps are power. Either you will map or you will be mapped. — Nietschmann

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Mambo Mail

looking deeply into the past, the query from Mambo Mail, Eskifjördur, Iceland surfaces with a vengeance. and with no apparent meaning.

What is Mail-Art?
Where is it from?
What is it for?
Where is it going?

The response:

Who is Mail Art?
Why is she from?
When is she for?
How is she going?

My Dearest Mambo:

Okay, great, a text book, for historians to study all about this elusive character, Mail Art and her characteristical characteristics.

How do I love thee, Mail Art, let me count the ways:

Always a challenge to get a long with / without.

I have a special room reserved for the neoscenes Mail Art archive, now I have to sleep in the closet.

Email is fast subverting my postal inclinations. it is cheaper, and that cheapness shows up in quality.

Post is my second largest expense behind rent (especially since the national Postur og Simi raised postal rates, some up to 250% in November 1992.

Postal Authorities the world over resist all forms of hierarchical organization and are an essential form of negative inertia to keep the world free from efficient government.

The US Postal Service is the largest employer in the world behind the US Military (and, I suppose, the Army of the PRC). Over 1,000,000 employees.

Mail Art is going away.

Mail Art will never go away because it is probably the most democratic form of global communication.

Hardcopy letters that are handwritten will become great rarities.

Love by Mail will cause world population to increase precipitously until The Apokalypse comes in the form of a massive

Publishers ClearingHouse mailing to everyone on the planet declaring each and every human a winner.

— neoscenes, reykjavík, iceland, january 1992

posted
  • place: en route Akureyri - Reykjavík, Iceland

flying

en route already again, away from this land, moving ahead with relative purpose, dancing. gray day, low clouds, rain on the inward-slanting airport lounge windows, Scottish accents drift in tour’s end quiet across the coffee shop / boarding hall. got here too early as well, but as the moving inertia took over from that of comfortable stasis in a certain place, rang up the taxi place. as usual, for the pre-boarding chill-out time. a pick-up truck drives the landing strip. English Football, the Euro corollary of the American League, entertains with silent subtitles.

posted
  • place: en route Phoenix, Arizona - Cleveland, Ohio - Boston, Massachusetts - Reykjavík, Iceland

rotless jottings

verily on the road. in the sky, between earth and heavens. and with an inertia far above the normative baseline (of tethered being). perhaps pivotal in locative presence. with the strange old dilemma of Europe beckoning, offering cultural and intellectual stimulation, and jobs; the US only to be inhabited with a begging bowl or throat-cutting PR tactics. and this highly incidental and mercenary gibberish of law, politic, militarism, and market. but the spaciousness of the land, it’s enveloping and readable sky (sky slowly dying in down-wind Los Angeles and coal-fired über-powerplant and endless wide-fogging sky-worms). vegetation that is sensible, and sensuous, full of necessity.

so. anyway, officially this space again becomes a travelog. once I called it rotless jottings, tagging a label on the notebook entries that fit face-to-face in closed books in a locked trunk somewhere, sometime. because otherwise, these notes still dance around the voice of the void. not the voice inside, but an external expression that is stiff and formal with social conformity. not yet freed from the externally measured usage. the development of voice, so often spoken about by writers, must be a unique and very much internal coming-to-know process. nothing frugal or ascetic, but rich, debauched, and psychic. transient as any heightened state of being. sustainable only with tremendous self-discipline or complete abstention from reasoned living. so, what path is this, developing in the time of … war?

flows of strangers surround, carry, float the senses in a proto-typical field of mellow drama (“gripping meller drammer,” my father would say, transiting the teevee room) and bland media platitudes.

but, hallo, where am I? elsewhere. another airport again, a new-ish feeling, not fitting, but fossilized in mind. an homage to Bedouin. past flickering lives, partially transparent bodies that echo histories and occasionally abundant futures.

what did you say?

whiskers grow…

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

I couldn’t understand it

my primary work when one calls it that, is the work in fundamental critique of the (meta)structure(s) that we are embedded in, in this sensual reality. it is not about the exigencies of work. It is mounted not in opposition, but in simple meeting-along-the-road. confronting that which manifests in the daily movement of life in life.

and I am astonished to discover that some of my students can’t read basic texts without simply quitting and saying “that was a terrible paper, I couldn’t understand it.”

I was WAY TOO EASY on the students I had this term. just not wanting to push them too hard. and that seems a big mistake. that they do not positively thrive on taking reign of their own progress, education, and enLightenment. not near rigorous enough. no toughness. but do they really need it? is this a condition? is it related to the social structure in which they are immersed? one where many of the human relations are mapped into incredibly convoluted and warped pathways. being graded. a scientific method, and a supreme lack of genuine dialogues. balanced flows. but is it worth it to try to change those flows? there are the hints of value. bright value, value that will float above knowledge, be a Lightness in life, perhaps. but the risk and inertia to overcome seems irresistible.

I mean, who IS the prophet in this time? Lennon has passed, Coltrane, Davis, Marley, and a hundred others, from all places and ways. but all on the same pathway. is it inside of time or outside? if not inside, then it is everywhere perhaps, or concentrated in one place. concentrations raw enough for the human to sense. and delve into. that we are not able to see the scale of all.

make assignments — for example, journal entries, no less than 40 entries with no spelling errors during the semester. ouch. but they need the discipline side. in Master Printing, I had the manifest tools, process available. with the computer, and the network, more difficult to pinpoint the tool and the process. but the practice, the living praxis, is the core/key.

for example — present the Apple iTunes screen “visual” algorithm. what is the politic of that? who made it? is that person an artist? basic questions to get things started. but on to harder ones. yeah, like pick an inspiring web space and describe why, in 500 words, it moves you. as a journal entry. with no spelling errors.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Mr. Zogs

I was walking with Volker between the buildings of the Kunsthochschule in Kiel, and I see something sitting on the sidewalk, something round, about an inch high and three inches in diameter. I can’t believe it, it is too strange. it is a cake of Mr. Zog’s Sex Wax! surfing days resurrected in my brain, body, right there in Kiel, fifteen years stripped from experience, just thinkin’ of that swallowtail triple-fin board again, bellying up over the small waves out, diving under the big ones, leash tugging on the ankle, keeping the board close enough but not to close to thrash the dayLights outta yer head when you surface after the thrumming pass of water mountain overhead. sand grains get into the wax and leave the un-wet-suited belly a bit raw after a long afternoon of trying to ride six-foot curlers… I write to George, who I haven’t heard from in a coon’s age, he’s too busy trying to beat the definitive NOVEL out before inertia takes over, and teach at the same time. Somehow, he is one of the few people who I feel comfortable writing absolutely ANYTHING to … He knows what language can do, and I guess he cringes sometimes at my linguistic ineptness, but at least I think he enjoys a twist or two…

sotto voce: People stare at you when you walk around, and they keep staring at you right up to the point that in some cultures they will smile and say hello, how-ya-doin? in other cultures they will shoot you at that point, no questions asked, in others yet they will not look at all, or their kids will steal from yer pockets, here they stare right up to that point, then look quickly away at the ground. You are not an enemy, but you are dangerous, they can see your feet this way, NO FUNNY STUFF, MUTHA (they mouth deep in their heads in another language, in a totally different paradigm of expression, I can only imagine that I could translate it so). so it goes.

After putting a book down (I am reading a book!) in the pile of to-dos (I have to mail it to Terhi later in the week), finished, I put on little Sony earphones that are plugged into the laptop A POWERBOOK which, in turn, is plugged into a 10Mb line out into the wide buff gray ether out there, where I have tuned in internet radio gogaga from Boulder … good ole Joe and Joel keep it comin’! and check email to keep myself from concentrating on anything more close at hand, like dealing with a class plan for 13 Finnish students that threaten to blow my head away after it has been wrapped around a cocktail of students from too many cultures, too many mentalities, too many personalities, like I would enjoy flat middle-class middle-Amurikan dolts instead, for a change, the kids here are too fucking whatever, in a good way! Here I am. Let’s talk about creativity! Dig into it, and then do it! I know they’ll rise to the occasion!

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

time and space

Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of fluid memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My rough mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project.

The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?

At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
— Pierre Birot

And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.