integrity – the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::

19 : May : 201414 : November : 2015

we’re talking final causes here…

[C]urrently espoused, ecosystem management is a magical theory (see Ludwig 1993) that promises the impossible — that we can have our cake and eat it too. Worse, however, it addresses only the symptoms of the problem and not the problem itself. The problem is not how to maintain current levels of resource output while also maintaining ecosystem integrity; the problem is how to control population growth and constrain resource consumption. And the solution to the problem is not anthropocentric-based ecosystem management, it is rejection of the doctrine of final causes. Humanity must begin to view itself as part of nature rather than the master of nature. It must reject the belief that nature is ours to use and control. Once this is accomplished, we can accept that the land has limits, and that to live within those limits we must halt population growth and reduce consumption. I believe this rejection of the doctrine of final causes is at the very heart of the biocentric view of ecosystem management (see Noss & Cooperrider 1994). Unfortunately, the “seismic shift” in the mindset of humans (Grumbine 1994) required by this
view of ecosystem management may never occur and, if it does, it will be a slow process that may come too late.

Stanley, T.R., 1995. Ecosystem Management and the Arrogance of Humanism. Conservation Biology, 9(2), pp.255–262.

25 : April : 20142 : February : 2016

place: Prescott, Arizona

Humour

LOR. Go to, you are a prodigal, and self-willed fool.
Nay, never look at me, it’s I that speak,
Take’t as you will, I’ll not flatter you.
What? have you not means enow to waste
That which your friends have left you, but you must
Go cast away your money on a Buzzard,
And know not how to keep it when you have done?
Oh, it’s brave, this will make you a gentleman,
Well, cousin, well, I see you are e’en past hope
Of all reclaim; ay, so, now you are told on it, you
look another way.

STEP. What would you have me do, trow?

LOR. What would I have you do? marry,
Learn to be wise, and practise how to thrive,
That I would have you do, and not to spend
Your crowns on every one that humours you:
I would not have you to intrude yourself
In every gentleman’s society,
Till their affections or your own dessert,
Do worthily invite you to the place.
For he that’s so respectless in his courses,
Oft sells his reputation vile and cheap.
Let not your carriage and behaviour taste
Of affectation, lest while you pretend
To make a blaze of gentry to the world
A little puff of scorn extinguish it,
And you be left like an unsavoury snuff,
Whose property is only to offend.
Cousin, lay by such superficial forms,
And entertain a perfect real substance;
Stand not so much on your gentility,
But moderate your expenses (now at first)
As you may keep the same proportion still:
Bear a low sail.

Jonson Ben, 2003. Every Man In His Humour, Gutenberg ebook.

23 : July : 20132 : February : 2016

place: Glade Park, Colorado

the dorsal turn

As readily as one accepts the status of artistic creation, as a paradigm for human production, in terms of a terrestrial afterlife — the desire to leave something behind — so might we insist that the artifact functions as archive and memory bank. And the same might be said of technological invention in general, for, as has often been pointed out, the word tekhne was used in Greek as much for what was produced as art as what was manufactured; it stands for the artisanal all the way from art to industry. Although the relation to memory and to archivation might not be immediately apparent in the case of a rudimentary tool, it can be understood that whatever is produced as nonorganic or “nonbiodegradable” remainder will necessarily constitute some form of memorial trace. And it is an obvious fact that artifactual technologies such as language, especially via writing, consist precisely in what Bernard Stiegler refers to as the exteriorization of memory, and that the contemporary technologies of information amount to a veritable “industrialization of memory.” If technology is a matter of exteriorization, of the human reaching outside itself (but, as was argued regarding corticalization and the upright stance, in a way that calls into question the integrity of any interiority), then it is also a matter of archivation: what is created outside the human remains as a matter of record and increasingly becomes the very record or archive, the artificial or exterior memory itself. The production of an artifact is the production of an archive; it means depositing in the present- in some “present” — an object, which, as it inserts and catalogs itself in the past, will become available for a future retrieval.

In reaching outside itself, the human therefore reaches both forward and back; in seeming to turn away from the past, it leaves the artificial that will have it forever referring back to that constructed past as the trace of its memory, as promise of artificial memory and promise or threat, eventually, of artificial intelligence. Memory might be called, after all, the first artificial intelligence, and it comes to be recognized explicitly as such once Freud discovers the unconscious like some self-produced biochip that controls (and derails), as if from behind, the conscious. The life of memory, its status as alive or dead, internal or external, real or artificial, draws the fault line along which the question of technology is still debated, from the desirability of “replacing” mental functions by machines (oral histories by writing, arithmetic by calculators, spelling by word processors, to begin with) all the way to nanoscientific cerebral implants and the manipulation of genetic memory systems.

Wills, D., 2008. Dorsality: thinking back through technology and politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

1 : January : 201318 : August : 2024

place: Boulder, Colorado

stasis, spectacle and speed? unh-unh!

I just ran across this excerpt from Geert’s first internet-oriented book—way back in 2003—in the chapter on “tactical education” entitled “The Battle over New Media Art Education.” This is a section of that chapter titled Neoscenes Pedagogy:

The Digital Bauhaus concept may be a fata morgana amidst a never-ending institutional nightmare. The new-media subject appears at the end of a long global crisis in the education industry. Decades of constant restructuring, declining standards and budget cuts have led to an overall decline of the .edu sector. There are debates not only about fees, cutbacks in staff and privatization but also about the role of the teacher. For a long time the classic top-down knowledge delivery methods of the classroom situation have been under fire. In a response to the education crisis, the American-Scandinavian John Hopkins calls for a cultural shift towards alternative pedagogies. His pedagogy, close to that of Paolo Freire, is based on a combination of face-to-face and networked communication, keeping up a “flow of energies from node to node.” Hopkins, who calls himself an “autonomous teaching agent,” has roamed between Northern European universities and new-media initiatives and currently teaches in Boulder, Colorado. His spiritual-scientific worldview might not match mine, but he is certainly my favorite when it comes to a radical education approach. Hopkins prefers the person-to-person as a “tactical” expression of networking, avoiding “centralized media and PR-related activities wherever possible.” Hopkins’ “neoscenes” networks are “a vehicle for learning, creating and sharing that does not seek stasis, spectacle and speed.”

In a few instances, Hopkins’ “distributed Socratic teaching strategy” has culminated in 24-hour techno parties with a big online component to make room for remote participation and exchange. The challenge with the live remix streams was to find out collectively “how exactly to facilitate autonomy and spontaneity.” For Hopkins teaching is a “life practice,” an action that embodies “art as a way-of-doing.” He calls his style “verbose and densely grown (not necessarily meaningful either ;-). but I do try to say what I am thinking and practicing … ” Hopkins tries not to make a distinction between learning, teaching and being taught. “It is critical that I myself am transformed by the entire engaged experience.” As a visiting artist, and usually not a member of the “local academic politburo,” Hopkins can build up personal connections within a local structure, free to “catalyze a flexible response that is immediately relevant,” while maintaining a creative integrity that is based in praxis.

. . .

John Hopkins: “I start my workshops with a sketching of some absolute fundamentals of human presence and being in the phenomenal world. This beginning point immediately becomes a source of deep crisis for some students precisely because they are expecting the vocational top-down educational experience of learning a specific software platform and making traditional artifacts.” John finds people who focus on software platforms “incredibly boring. It’s like amateur photo-club members comparing the length of their telephoto lenses or having conversations about national sports. It’s a code system for communication that is often mindless and banal. While at some level, my students are forced to confront the digital device. I encourage them to be aware of how they are interacting with the machine, what is comfortable and what is not.”

. . .

John Hopkins compares Scandinavia and the USA, places he knows well. “Because of a well-funded cultural industry sector in Scandinavia, artists who are potential teachers are not forced into teaching as happens in the US. This has kept the stagnation of the tenure-track system, something that dogs US higher education, out of the way. In the US, artists who have any desire to live by working in some way in their medium are more often than not forced into academia because there is no other social context for them. They may or may not be teachers in any sense. There tend to be more permeable and productive interchanges between the ‘art world’ and ‘academia’ in Scandinavia and northern Europe, realized by cycling a larger number of idiosyncratic individual teacher/artists into contact with students.” Isolated campus life. slow and complicated bureaucracies, and the politically correct atmosphere at US universities are not ideal circumstances for a hybrid “trans-disciplinary” program to thrive. However, the campus setup does help to reduce distractions, once students know what they want and the resources are in place.

Lovink, G., 2003. My First Recession, Rotterdam, NL: V2-NAi Publishers.

26 : July : 201112 : October : 2024

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”

9 : May : 20117 : February : 2022

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”

23 : October : 201017 : April : 2024

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

the fluidity of leaking

What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.

The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”

16 : January : 201011 : June : 2023

technology fails

20100116 The latch handles on both the driver- and passenger-side door are broken. There is a certain geometry on the plastic lever-arm which, over time of repeated lifting motions, fails. So I have to replace them. The truck is relatively old, compared to the average age of vehicles on the road. I call the Toyota dealer nearby, and they want almost USD100 for each replacement handle. This is called an OEM part — Original Equipment Manufactured — a part which carries some of the branded weight of the maker and its record of quality along with a premium price (including a substantial markup to underwrite the existence of the dealer distribution system). Too much! I knew this would be the case before I called, but I wanted to set a ceiling price before looking elsewhere, online. This particular vehicle model was globally a widely-distributed frame, body, and engine combination and so there turns out to be a substantial non-OEM parts market. The only question is one of quality. Non-OEM parts online appear to be both Mainland Chinese- and Taiwanese-made with what seems to be a substantial US distribution presence in the form of highly discounted warehouses designed for online mail-order sales (with Ebay, Amazon, and their own web sales presence). I find the parts, in several styles (chromed plastic and black) for a small fraction of the OEM cost, USD 20 with free shipping. more “technology fails”

12 : November : 200931 : December : 2023

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

holding space and antinodes

Non-doing defines doing. Sitting in stillness invites people to move. Getting out of the way allows people to fill space with their passion. Letting go of expectations leaves room for responsibility to come forth. All of this is integrity. Every piece of doing requires the strong presence of non-doing to anchor it.

Stifling every impulse to intervene, to give directions and orders leaves space for others to design their lives. You can create a container and then stand by and watch it fill and teem with life. You don’t resist the natural movements of groups of people co-creating their futures. Instead you work on your own inability to be still, to want to own the outcomes, to want to invest your ego.

This is not your show. You are holding space, embodying space and being empty and full at the same time. If they thank you in the closing circle, you have not done enough. — The Tao of Holding Space, Chris Corrigan

and a side note on one of the seven marvelous students in the Ways of Listening course I taught this term at UTS. Ash undertook a fine project Antinode, you can check out the process-documentation blog that she set up. nothing like be-ing in the analog world! her experiences definitely fed back into the overall success of the class. auspicious start to teaching in Oz!

22 : August : 200811 : October : 2024

place: Bedford, New York

butter :: knife

what’s a sharp knife for? I like toasted bread, toast, with a variety of toppings including butter. definitely not margarine. butter comes either frozen, chilled, or at room temperature. frozen or chilled it’s hard as heck to cut a slice of and especially to spread around most toasts, depending on the bread that is being used. the spreading process can dent, squash, or even shred the toast, seriously degrading the aesthetic experience. I prefer to have chilled butter and an extremely sharp thin-bladed carbon steel knife. (my Opinel serves the role well). this allows the butter to be sliced so thin that spreading is not necessary: multiple thin slices may simply be laid across the surface of the toast. the thin slices will melt quickly, prepping the toast for the next layer of topping and avoiding the problem of un-melted butter chunks getting moved around by, say, the cold tangerine marmalade or thick Nutella which comes next. thin slices of butter have the advantage of getting the butter flavor evenly distributed around the surface of the toast without having to use excessive amounts of the stuff or seriously affecting the structural integrity of the bread. the worst possible scenario is frozen butter, fluffy white bread, and a dull knife — the bread gets completely crushed, but not after large quantities of butter are smashed into the air cavities. the result is something of a distinctly English culinary experience. I prefer dense German multi-grain breads which can withstand pretty much anything you can throw on them, and provide a robust snack.

a caveat on the sharp knife is that one should not use a ceramic butter dish as that rapidly dulls the knife. it is common, when first attempting to cut thin slices from fridge-hardened butter that the knife slips and smacks the plate rather hard. this will render the knife useless for smooth tomato and vegetable slicing later. a plastic dish it is — and one that is disposable as in the end, the plastic will be destroyed through the repeated slipping of this trusty blade. a lid from a yogurt container functions well for this purpose.

who designed the butter knife, anyway? the one which was around my parents home was a fat stainless steel affair from the 1960’s with not just a dull blade — actually it was so dull as to defer the designation of blade — it was about as good for slicing butter as a chopstick. certainly nothing to pass onto for the grand-kids! non-functional. I’ve seen some older ones, carbon-steel-and-silver affairs which are thin-bladed like regular table knives of the same era — say, late 1800’s.

12 : June : 200811 : October : 2024

place: Berlin, Germany

The Regime of Amplification: A Primer

[ED: This text is essentially an extremely preliminary draft—written in Berlin, Germany in 2007-08—of my dissertation The Regime of Amplification.]

I decided to release this text in advance of any hard-copy publication, with another chapter nearing its final stages, and several intermediate chapters forming more concretely. The following is the original ‘final’ text, although there will be a significantly improved one in the years to come.

This speculative essay addresses the process of amplification which expresses itself at a wide range of scales and affects and which models a fundamental aspect of all human presence. It opens with a brief description of a prototypical amplifier, then frames life as the coherent self-organizing expression of energy embedded in a universal field of energy flows. It examines simple biological models of amplification and suggests possible reasons for amplification processes to exist. Narrowing its focus, it looks first at the human species, then the body, and then the collective social system as an operative field of amplification. It subsequently explores the Regime of Amplification as a general manifestation of the prototypical TSS (techno-social system) — a system whose goal is to maintain the viability of localized sub-sets of the species in the face of competition as well as continuous and universal change. Two specific examples — the radio and the military — are presented to simply illustrate the principles suggested. The conclusion reiterates the affects of techno-social amplification on individual be-ing as well as on the entire continuum of relation that the individual is a part of. It suggests some fundamental pathways of action which have an immediate detrimental affect on the hierarchic flows of the Regime.

This essay is built on the subject of one chapter in a book-in-progress titled “Energy of Being :: Dialogue of Creativity” which explores in greater depth many of the issues that are danced only Lightly around here.

KEY TERMS

TSS (techno-social system), Regime of Amplification, energy, amplification, attenuation, flow, continuum of relation, life-energy, life-time, evolutionary development, natural selection, self-organizing, radio, military systems, resonance, social energy bank, life-time=energy=life; attention=life-energy=life-time, feed-forward system, biochemical amplification, concentration, rarefaction, command-and-control … (to be continued)
more “The Regime of Amplification: A Primer”

10 : November : 200514 : November : 2015

place: Prescott, Arizona

tai chi

uff, begining Tai Chi. after all these years wanting to start that practice. a life-long pursuit, for sure. and starting in the condition I’m in is at the same time more difficult, and easier. difficult on the body, much more difficult than using the Cybex weight machines or the various treadmill-like devices. easy in that it strikes to the core of the vital parts of the body, parts that need the flow to heal. musing on the effect of the titanium in the spine on the flow of chi. later, Frieder mentions that he just was watching a film about Varela. this results in a Google-session that reaches to Varela’s collaborator:

Man knows and his capacity to know depends on his biological integrity; furthermore, he knows that he knows. As a basic psychological and, hence, biological function cognition guides his handling of the universe and knowledge gives certainty to his acts; objective knowledge seems possible and through objective knowledge the universe appears systematic and predictable. Yet knowledge as an experience is something personal and private that cannot be transferred, and that which one believes to be transferable, objective knowledge, must always be created by the listener: the listener understands, and objective knowledge appears transferred, only if he is prepared to understand. Thus cognition as a biological function is such that the answer to the question, ‘What is cognition?’ must arise from understanding knowledge and the knower through the latter’s capacity to know. — Humberto Maturana

1 : July : 200511 : October : 2024

place: Prescott, Arizona

descent into purgatory

1.2 GHz G4 Powerbook, my mainstay for mobility and the core machine of an array of three other machines dies today. ignominious, blanked gray screen demanding a restart that will not take place. stupidly take it in to the local authorized (and monopoly) Mac repair place, Argosy West, run by Gary Beverly, one of the most arrogant and disagreeable persons that I’ve had the misfortune to run across. seldom anything but a condescending comment. last I’ll see of it for more than three weeks and $1.5K later.

hadn’t made a primary backup since before leaving for California three weeks ago. whups. so the data on the drive along with the drives integrity suddenly leaps to the foreground. older data is backed-up with triple redundancy. after the two historical drive crashes (1996 and 1999), aside from having alternative off-site storage for a third rotating backup, I am religious about regular backups. period.

the month starts. hottest temps, dry. and a fire on the southern horizon that occasionally resembles a volcanic eruption. it’s threatening to become the largest in Arizona history. no danger here, but as always, people start to get nervous with dry grass and tinder all around the area. just takes a cretinous smoker or off-roader driving without a spark-arresting muffler. instant conflagration. the party weekend looms.

13 : March : 20032 : January : 2020

James S. “Stan” Brakhage 1933 – 2003

Avant-garde filmmaker and Distinguished Professor Emeritus James S. “Stan” Brakhage of film studies at CU-Boulder died Sunday in Victoria, British Columbia, after an eight-year battle with cancer. He was 70.

Mr. Brakhage was born on Jan. 14, 1933, in Kansas City, Mo., and moved to Denver at age 8.

His foray into the world of avant-garde cinema began in Colorado in the late 1940s and early 1950s at South High School in Denver. He graduated from South High School, but dropped out of Dartmouth College to make films. He went on to make nearly 400 films and was honored with numerous awards. more “James S. “Stan” Brakhage 1933 – 2003″

26 : January : 200123 : June : 2014

place: Reykjavík, Iceland

postur

it appears that the Icelandic Postal Service has lost the package containing my Eurail pass! it left the US on Monday evening, and nothing here! crazy — the one time I have something sent registered, insured, and express — and it’s gone! I’m taking it as a sign — so many things have now stood in the way of this trip — I had to file for Finnish temporary residency and working permission yesterday, got photos made for a visa, had serious trouble getting a plane flight out of here, hoboy.

later that day, the package arrived via TNT express from the Customs people who had held it for three days without any record of where it was or anything. and TNT does not have any legal right to be delivering it as it is supposed to be tracked directly by the postal service. a phone call to the postal people to let them know I finally got it, and to point out that it seems their system is out of whack for not being able to track such a high-security package. this information is met with TOTAL indifference. an example of the high degree of internal friction that limits Icelandic productivity. people can’t deal with even the most oblique criticism of their system — somehow it is understood as a direct threat to their social integrity.

2 : September : 199917 : April : 2024

place: Helsinki, Finland

entry drugs

it also occurred to me that I have always been so into remote presence that it represents a real threat to my psychological integrity. (see above). each day these days I hesitate calling what few people here I would call friends. and then I understand that I have few here. few anywhere, because I am always elsewhere. and age is a factor. more difficult to make new friends. there is always something missing — that depth of time-passed that is wrapped into old friendships. and everybody seems, at this ending/beginning time, to be buried in their respective places, nothing but survival on mind, and media in eye. and a curious nonchalant dread of the future. “email is the entry drug” Volker quotes the head of CISCO systems as saying. he is more than right.