posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

to Björn Bjarnason

12 August 1995

To the Honorable Björn Bjarnason, Minister of Education and Culture

As I have noted that you have put up some home pages asking for input regarding education in Iceland, I am transmitting this formal letter to you via email. (I apologize for not writing in Icelandic, but I am not very good at it even though I have lived in Iceland for five years…)

I am writing this letter to urge your continued support of the Icelandic Academy of Art.

Following I will present some personal opinions concerning the future of the Academy as well as some concrete suggestions and proposals. These considerations are based in my experience in teaching at MHÍ for the past five years as well as numerous guest-teaching positions at other Universities and Academies in Scandinavia and the US. Currently I am serving as Chair of the US-Iceland Fulbright Educational Commission (until September 1995) and as (Founding) Director of the Electronic Media and Photography program at MHÍ. My opinions are not necessarily those of either MHÍ or the Fulbright Board.

I believe Iceland is at a crossroads where the choices, opportunities, and outcomes will be largely determined by how the issue of a national educational policy is developed. As the post of Minister of Education and Culture determines this policy, I believe it to be the most critical cabinet posting in the entire government.

It is important to the future of Iceland that attention be directed to the building-up of a competitive and well-considered program of education in the arts. The recent confirmation of intent as expressed by the Althingi and the government in support of the official formation of the Icelandic Academy must be followed up by concrete action concerning the financial, physical, and ideological future of the institution.
more “to Björn Bjarnason”

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

pulling plugs

Can you make a harsh illustration about leaving Twitter because of its toxicity?

I finally pulled the plug on Twaddle, aka eX, deleting my account last month. Long overdue, and I would call on anyone else who is still propping up one of the least socially-conscious oligarchs on the planet to cease-and-desist. Meanwhile, I’ll cheer that misfit on to Mars. As for the rest of them, well, let them eat cake.

Back in the ‘aughts’ I routinely early-adopted social media platforms to maintain current experience for my teaching on what was then still called “new media”. A decade into the World-Wide-Web, 2003 or so, Web 2.0 had arrived, signaling the evolution of general ‘interactive’ web platforms that allowed for user-driven and collaborative experiences. Web 2.0 transformed the internet from a generally static platform into a space where users could dynamically create and share content, but its rise also brought about critical (social, behavioral, personal) concerns that I explored in many of my workshops and lectures. This era’s defining features—social media, user-generated content, and algorithms that tailor information, and now AI—have amplified both personal expression and misinformation, often blurring the lines between fact and opinion. While Web 2.0 promised a democratized digital space, it has led to powerful tech companies amassing vast troves of user data, raising privacy issues and consolidating control over information flow, features almost completely unregulated in the US. Surveillance Capitalism anyone? Algorithms designed to maximize engagement have also been criticized for promoting social echo chambers and polarizing content, contributing to social divides. It’s all about eyeballs in the ‘attention economy‘. Through their perversely inverted efforts to be user-centered, the oligarchs of Web fostered a landscape where manipulation, privacy concerns, and misinformation are increasingly prevalent: it’s user-centered alright, but the user is merely the object of extracted wealth.

Yup, here we are. I hadn’t been active on Twaddle for some years aside from attention paid to the CGS work account up until last year, and a very occasional glance at my feed. It was functional for a time, but the ‘new ownership’ indeed sent it to 100% shit, stimulating the departure. The entire arc of evolution completely confirmed my hypothesis how those who control a communications protocol control both the form(s) and content of the communications occurring. Not only that, but the protocol and its ‘owner’ actually tap off a certain amount of power—real social power—from those using the platform. The X possessor is a case in point, and a case that threatens the stability of the social system. I long ago departed from FazeBuch (2010) and mostly from InstaHam (still have an account but don’t post and rarely look at it).

What about BlueSky and Mastodon? They provide more direct user control without a central governing entity. Back to distributed models versus centralized models: a deep conflict that’s been raging since computing began!

Of course, in the end, there is no privacy left in the US social sphere. What you consume—from food to media, everything; where you go; who you communicate with; what you say; what you do; how much money you have; what medical issues you have; where you work; what you studied; your interests and beliefs; your voting history; your criminal and court records; ad infinitum …

Not only that, all those terabytes of data are subpoenable in a court of law: What’s your level of confidence in the justice system in the US these days?

On the related topic of concentration of wealth, that this infographic is more than ten years out of date makes it even more disturbing:

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

web work

I have generally avoided any mixing of work-work with my personal online efforts for a variety of reasons. Together they consume more processing cycles than any other digital or analog activities—any activities at all, including sleep! But a few comments are warranted as the tasks rule my days.

I orchestrated three major roll-overs of the site in the four years I’ve been working there—all with zero down-time. January 2020 was the last and most complex one to an all-new design, new data structure, and ostensibly all-new content. It included logging an extra 250 hours over regular working hours—essentially ten-hours-a-day-every-day between 01 December 2019 and 28 February 2020 to deploy the new online-only Colorado Groundwater Atlas — the Atlas forming about 5% of the wider CGS site. In 2016, when I started the job, I estimated it would take around 10,000 hours to execute a complete site re-authoring, all-new design, and coalescing of the original site which dates back to 2001. It’s been patched and kluged together during the intervening years with only the most basic information organizing strategies: otherwise, it was a mess, especially in the back-end data (non-)structure, the poorly-coded custom WordPress theme, lame design, lack of editing standards, and lo-rez visual content. The range of associated and essential preparatory tasks primarily involved a complete organization of the CGS information space. This started with the physical publications archive which was in total disarray — that’s another story. There were no consistent data/file naming conventions at all, nor was there any but the most rudimentary order to the entire digital server space. With a constant churning of employees, the servers became a free-for-all dumping ground with each person (dis)organizing it according to their own needs. In any group of digital users, like room-mates, there are always hoarders and people who can’t clean up the mess they leave behind. Ugh! All that needed organizing as it formed the root source for all of the online content generation. Crucial to the success of the organization.

With few individual exceptions, there was no systematic process in place at the CGS to capture, organize, and archive visual research material. Management has no interest in imposing any standard workflows to address this: not realizing that the dataspace was the root source of all organizational information- and knowledge-production: those two products being the main reasons for the organization to exist at all.

(Field) geology depends heavily on photographic representation of geo-located earth phenomena. If one is doing field research, and takes a photograph but makes no attempt to geolocate the image, it’s like, why label the axis of a data graph? In earlier times, paper topographic maps and/or aerial photographs combined with orienteering skills located the field geologist within a few tens of meters. Contemporary GPS tools integrated with most digital cameras now provide centimeter accuracy. Along with the location, a description of what has been photographed has to be tied to the image. Again, in earlier times, with analog photography, a field notebook entry would be tied by a point numbering system to the sequence of film images. These days, the application of the essential concept of metadata ensures that human- and machine-readable alphanumeric information is directly tied to the digital image file. The coherence of information transmission requires a dedicated attention to these systems of recording and appending data-about-the-data.

At any rate, the details of this process are probably yawn-inducing for most readers. However, the organization of one’s own information space will directly govern how the effects of one’s life (presence) are projected forward in time and outwards to others: Legacy. It takes time and energy to do this.

I do admit to self that while thoughts dwell Lightly on the propagation of information into the future from time-to-time, it doesn’t matter all that much, as all organized and negentropic configurations go away eventually!

 

posted

Militarizing Cyberspace

In the dreamy 1990s, when the Internet was first popularized, the ruling meme was beautifully and evocatively utopian with that enduring desire in the human imagination for a technology of communication that finally matched the human desire for connectivity and (universal) community finally finding its digital expression in networked communication. Few voices were raised concerning the specter of harsher realities to come, namely the possibility that the Internet was also a powerful vehicle for sophisticated new iterations of ideologies of control as well as for inscribing a new global class structure on the world. To the suggestion that the destiny of the digital future was likely to be the rapid development of a new ruling class, the virtual class, with its leading fragments, whether information specialists, from coders to robotic researchers, or corporate visionaries closely linked–nation by nation, continent by continent, industry by industry–by a common (technocratic) world-view and equally shared interests, the response was just as often that this is purely dystopian conjecture. As the years since the official launch in 9/11 of the counter-revolution in digital matters indicates, the original funding of the Internet by DARPA was truly premonitory, confirming in the contemporary effective militarization of the networked communication that the visionary idea of developing a global form of network connectivity that harvested the most intimate forms of individual consciousness on behalf of swelling data banks was as brilliant in its military foresightedness as it was chilling in its impact.

from the CTheory.net monograph Surveillance Never Sleeps, July 2015, Volume 37, #1.

Red Herring and Wired magazines might have been dreaming of a utopian desire-filling network, but I surely wasn’t. Yeah, there was a tiny window for using the Master’s tools to quasi-autonomously generate disembodied and low-bandwidth connections with other humans remotely, but some of us knew that DARPAs master was the master of the protocols that drove the ‘net. And the maxim that ‘whomever controls the protocols of human connection controls the very human energies that are carried via those protocols’ applied then, applies now. This very much independent of any privacy concerns, as privacy is simply not a characteristic of communications or data storage when someone else is controlling the communications protocol.

posted

godaddy down

Yesterday, this site was down apparently as a result of an Anonymous DOS attack on the godaddy DNS system. It happened, by chance, when I was in a small tutorial session talking about reliability of domain hosting services. This is the first major outage in my experience (with godaddy) in the seven years that I have used them. Not bad, but always a bit disturbing when it happens. Of course, the wider network was reverberating with the attack as godaddy is one of the largest hosting services anywhere.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

waterwheel

I responded to Suzon Fuks’ invitation to join a waterwheel performance this week – Wednesday, 22 August, between 1800 – 2000 MST (time converter here) — the detailed info on the performance as well as the gateway for joining in online is here. As I haven’t had much time to prep and to explore the potentials of the platform, I’m doing a relatively simple improv remix titled “Crossing the Yampa” with video material from Echo Park in Dinosaur National Monument, along tributaries of the Yampa and Green Rivers. Looking up, looking down, looking all around, listening, receiving the immersive flows, it’s about water and the life it supports.

Suzon set up waterwheel as a live/online collaborative performance space:

Exploring water — as a topic and metaphor — Waterwheel is an interactive, collaborative platform for sharing media and ideas, performance and presentation.

Waterwheel investigates and celebrates this constant yet volatile global resource, fundamental element, environmental issue, political dilemma, universal theme and symbol of life. It encourages you to explore and discover, share and collaborate, contribute and participate.

Waterwheel calls on everyone — performers and artists, scientists and environmentalists, students and academics, you and me, anyone and anywhere — to test the water, dive in, make a splash and start a wave. It provides a platform and forum for experience and exchange, expression and experimentation.

Waterwheel draws together different people, practices, places, media and modes of expression. There are no borders or boundaries. Waterwheel flows along its natural course.

posted
  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.

The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”

posted

Freedom in the Cloud

Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Absolutely brilliant talk by Eben Moglen — Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center — at an Internet Society – New York Chapter event back in February of this year.

In these two videos he presents an image of what exactly happened in terms of the internet infrastructure, completely outside the purview of political or wide social awareness which presents extreme danger to the fundamentals of our civil society. Explicit, clear, concise insights into the situation presented by corporate ‘log aggregators’ like Google and Facebook as well as the issues underlying how they threaten YOUR freedom.

posted

fealty to nexus

without framing the precise context, a couple quick notes to Rob, regarding the Internet of Things (IOT) and social pro-activity:

sotto voce: I’m not sure these two concepts — decentralized and protocol — can occupy the same actualization (of the techno-social)… protocols arise through a shake-down/feedback/evolution of social relation which ultimately cannot be distributed: but instead they concentrate at certain crux points along social connectors that may not be ‘central’ in that material sense, but that do form a nexus (Latin, ‘a binding together’) which all participating members must drive their expressions through — as a form of fealty to those protocols. Technically, this is not ‘central,’ but because it is formative to the life-trajectories that the participants live out, it is of the same affectation as any (‘centralizing’) social stricture. It’s only a question of degree, how much or how little it alters that individual trajectory to its own purposes. Essentially it is a question of what is done with the shared energy that collects along a shared (protocol-defined) pathway of life-energy. The norm is such that the energy collected from shared social participation cannot (easily) be utilized for the good of the individual. Instead the energy is used for the good of the collective, or, worst case, for a(n elite) subset of the collective. Thus is is statistically rare that there is general satisfaction by all individuals in a collective as to where their collective energy is expressed. (Except when we are talking military victory — where survival-for-procreation is extended by a time.)

and

sotto voce: Unfortunately, however, the language upon which the computational process (devices as well) is constructed upon has that subject/object stasis built in to it at the most fundamental level of the language(protocol) itself. So, to loose oneself from the deterministic relevancy of that system is perhaps not possible because it pervades the underlying ‘logic’ of the system which a ‘new’ form of computational ‘perception’ can’t escape. One might have to code in Sanskrit … in the heart.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, AU

netart 2009 – VisitorsStudio

The following quick essay was for the last and final edition of the annual netarts awards from the Machida Museum in Tokyo:

Grand Prize for this year, the online platform VisitorsStudio, is not a complete newcomer to the netart scene — it’s been running as a live visual-sonic collaboratory for a few years now. As a playground, it offers many degrees of freedom within what appears at first to be a very restrictive environment. But, isn’t it true that all play-places have limits? Your mother would never let you go off just anywhere and play. Your mother would certainly approve of VisitorsStudio. The limits of VisitorsStudio lie primarily in the intriguing area of file sizes (more on that shortly). The interface is intuitive and straight forward, and does not entail a steep learning curve: anyone can create mesmerizing works in no time.

The most obvious elements in digital ‘mash-up’ play are the text, the image (still and moving), and the sound. Participants in VisitorsStudio may gather these elements themselves and using a rich set of live controls make compelling live mixes. There is an existing database of files to work with, or, you can prepare your own media library to upload and play with. This is where each sound, image, or video file is limited to a 200kb maximum size — you will be surprised at what can be done — the result is absolute proof that great things come in small packages.

VisitorsStudio is available for special performances and makes an ideal platform for educators in all settings who wish to stimulate imaginations with real interactive digital art — it’s not simulated and it’s not eye-candy. As a collaborative tool, it does not aggressively take the foreground in the process, but rather works as a solid and supportive background element for seamless play.

Of course, the best way to enjoy a jam session is with a heavy-duty sound system and a 72-inch plasma screen or a video projector. You will be the resident visual-sonic artist. But intimate small-screen solo play is also very satisfying. The best feature is the possibility for live remote partners and audience. Invite your friends half-way around the world to join you in a jam session!

Technically, VisitorsStudio needs only an internet connection and a browser running the latest version of the Flash plugin. And, hey, if we ask, maybe they will port a Wii controller to VisitorsStudio! Wouldn’t that be fun? Let’s play!

One of the Honorable Mentions for the 2009 netart award is SiTO’s gridcosm project which, if there ever was a primordial interactive play-place online, this is it. Gridcosm was initiated by Ed Stasny way back in 1997 as an outgrowth of SiTO’s live online image mash-up collaborations. That’s in the Precambrian era of internet time! It even has its own Wikipedia entry! But gridcosm clearly tapped into something fundamental — with a fresh and accessible interface design; a solid back-end code; and exuding a rare social sensibility of precisely what it means to collaborate online — there are hundreds of contributors. A dozen years later, the collaborative space is continuously full with a vibrant and evolving palette of personalities and plenty evidence of creative juice spilling out onto the screen. The acronym SiTO originally came from OTIS (Operational Term is Stimulate) which was the motto of the nascent online collective collaboratory back in 1994 or so. So, kudos to gridcosm for sheer staying power and what looks to be a lively future. How many layers does an artwork need to have for it to be classified as cosmologically significant? Visit gridcosm and discover the answer to this profound question! It’s an open project for anyone to jump into — as are all the SiTO collaborative projects — so, check it out!

John Hopkins, Sydney, Australia, 15.Nov.2009

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technological affectation

If film can do this:

Film serves to train human beings in the practice of those apperceptions and reactions required by the frequentation of an apparatus whose role in their daily life ever increases. To make this whole enormous technological apparatus of our time into the object of human interiorization and appropriation [innervation] — that is the historic task in whose service film has its true meaning. — Walter Benjamin

Then is there any reason to doubt a connection between the declining power and influence of the (technocratic mediocracy of the) United States and the implementation of the Internet as-it-is today? Is there any connection between the tendencies of its population to spend their (limited) life-time in tele-communication (and tele-consumption!) and the demise of civil society? People seemingly now avoid confronting the (unknown) Other and rather cluster as mirrored-Selves, with a cumulative effect of breakdown of a (diverse) cultural fabric into a checker-board of self-interest groupings which spend time defending the borders of their squares from the surrounding Evil unknown.

this conclusion proposed in the sense that if film can have that profundity of affectation on human nervous systems (the primary interface with the world-as-mediated-by-body; or the primary EM antenna-structures), then what of all the wide press of technological development seeping into all parts and orifices of perception and reaction?

posted
  • place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

pseudo-settled

grounded. arrive at Devleena’s flat in Marrickville, John is there to meet me. a bit of communication gap with them and it turns out I have the studio only for two weeks, after that it’s been promised to a Kiwi researcher. so, got to put the word back out to the network for another place to live. drat. this place, where Sophea also stayed, would have worked out well aside from the fact that the internet WPA connection isn’t functioning properly (yet), it won’t accept my login, sh… I’ll email her in Delhi to see what the score is.

got a bank account set up with Paul at the ANZ Marrickville branch, went grocery shopping, and hung out in a caf for an espresso and wifi.

palm and eucalyptus trees out the window that overlooks the Cook River (more like a tidal draw) above Botany Bay. it’s warm even for Sydney winter stats, +20C today. sweaty. chilly at night. very much like Santa Monica in the winter. as I thought it would be. air is clear, stars are unknown. winter sun is in the north, in Arizona among other places. clouds and breeze from indeterminate quarters. drifting through. the sounds of the city are not unfamiliar, but are … elusive.

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social networking crit

Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance
Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and
MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic
Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

Study: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_Surveillance_Fuchs.pdf

Background Information: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_E.html

The study recommends that citizens see commercial Internet platforms that store and evaluate personal data generally critically and that by establishing special consumer protection websites it could be documented in the public, which rights in dealing with personal data such platforms obtain by their terms of use and their privacy terms. Christian Fuchs: “There are many examples for how affected citizens try surveilling the surveillors with the help of websites. This can pose a certain degree of protection by making use of public information, but also has limits because the basic problem is that we live in times, in which on the one hand there are strong commercial interests in data collection and data evaluation and on the other hand after 9/11 continuously more political steps have been taken for creating surveillance societies. These are political-economic problems, not technological ones.”

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violence

Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people powered politics to international decision-making.

that from the site avaaz.org sent to me by a friend on account of the petition for stopping yet another wave of Palestinian-Israeli violence.

but I say oh, really?? to the first line: it would seem that technology and the internet has plunked many fat asses down on chairs and completely de-mobilized potential good citizens in an effective reign of (p)assivity where only the fingers move, and the perspectival point-of-view is locked within a few centimeters of the face.

posted
  • place: en route Colorado Springs - Pueblo, Colorado

further south

leave Karen and Ron’s place mid-morning after finishing off the networked book proposal, needed to get that uploaded before Monday, and no likely internet connections before that. head south. big accident on I-25 south of C-Spgs. western gusts rock the truck. huge streamers of snow coming off Pikes Peak. get to Steve and Gaan’s place around 1230 and dump some stuff there. we hang for awhile, catching up, and then the three of us head back to Pueblo West to their restaurant (Puukaow Thai) for a Light and very tasty lunch.

then I head over to Ava’s place for Bill and her’s Christmas dinner party where Chris, Rick and Sally, John, Jimmy and Wendy, Emi, Rob, and some others show up in the very exotic Kona Kai apartment complex. the building, a rectangular complex with a large courtyard in the center was built in the 1970’s. the courtyard was covered completely and landscaped with tropical plants which seem to be thriving mightily thirty years later. a complete surprise when entering the doors, especially given the weather about to happen outside.

always nice to catch some face-time with folks not seen so often.

head back to Steve and Gaan’s place where we hang on the deck and get a spectacular display of Geminid fireballs despite the radiation point in Gemini have a fifteen-year-maximum full moon plunked down in the middle of it. hard to imagine the show without the moon, it was intense.

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thesis proposal :: Background

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. more “thesis proposal :: Background”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

netart 2008 – Conch

I spaced-out posting the netarts 2008 selections last November. here’s my brief jury comments:

This year’s netart award was very difficult to close in on. The absolute volume and traffic of data on the network does not seem to be correlated to its ultimate creative vitality. Can it be that the net has reached the saturation point as a means to realize the creative potential of its creators: that the signal-to-noise ratio has reached an asymptotic limit? Or is it merely an approach to the saturation point of the haplessly consuming audience? Is the net only a flooded communications platform in service of global markets? There is perhaps no particular reason to be overly cynical, although for this tech-no-madic curator the life-changes that accompany each further implementation of technologically-mediated connection seem to lose their appeal more and more quickly. For a creative, though, the question remains — how to be evolutionary when taking on the next tool presented by the Venture Techno-capitalists. Where to find something that avoids the clichés of, for example, the ubiquitously pop Web 2.0? There are the occasionally surprising implementations of the 2.0 paradigm, but they are often revealed as the tired exercises in the viral marketing of venture capital dreams. What inspiring sources are out there in the net? Are there any? Perhaps, but only if we leave the material behind to search for the ghost in the machine.

Where is the immaterial, the trace or evidence of the metaphysical, where is it hidden in the technological network of things? Is it actually hidden at all? Or is it simply not there? Has technology, in the form of global networks, banished those inexplicable essences from itself? Technology does have its obvious formative materialized essence, as it is another thing that presents itself to us in our limited sensibilities. But in the dislocated network, far from our touch, what is the apprehended essence, that attractor that keeps us intently focused on the screen. An attractor so compelling and full of gravitas that we chose to limit any change in our point-of-view and remain instead in a motionless screen-bent gaze, in a stationary orbit?

What draws us with this gravity, what draws us into its field of action? We are fascinated by the Light, sure, but our attention is bound by the gravity. The attractor of the machine lies within itself, not within us. We orbit the gravitational center of our own creation, the dense hubris of code. Without code there is only the material gap into which falls our embodied being, levity left to airs and vapors, (hydro)carbon (a)(e)ffluence and other oxidation-reduction reactions.

The grand prize goes to a work that is elegantly inexplicable, conch by the Japanese designer Ｙoshiyuki Katayama. Four topical and simple interactive works explore code as a means to transform time and space into essential visual essences. We may easily orbit the code while watching its realization. And time passes. Such is life.

The runners-up all seem to find simple interactions between code and presentation, leaving some viewers to perhaps simply shrug and move on. Somehow I like to think that these projects represent a search for the network coding of the koan — the Buddhist meditative tool — where the code is an essential step on the path to enLightenment.

Cloud of Clouds by Miguel Leal and Luís Sarmento keeps the sky open for interpretation as it should be, while Ethan Ham’s work, Self Portrait, leaves the self open for interpretation. And, to disagree with the Internet, as does the Disagreeing Internet well, that leaves our orbit around the gravitas of code very much open for not only interpretation but for fundamental questioning and even outright rejection. No more passive agreement with those Venture Capitalists!

Perhaps, when the last flicker comes from the last flat screen, we will understand that code is a chant to exorcise the machine, leaving the ghost (and us!) free to move on to something else. We shall see.

John Hopkins, Prescott, Arizona, USA, 04.Nov.2008

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

ascending

holiday in Netherlands, Ascension Day. internet goes out. just after figuring things out with the next day’s schedule. meeting tomorrow with Carmin, Rob, Geert and Linda, uff.

several times, friends in Europe have expressed the sentiment that they should be allowed to vote for the next US president. I don’t blame them.

in a cafe. pretending that I am a normal tourist. visiting this place on a week’s break from the job. shaky premise. Chinese tourists, comfortable in their own skins, progressing to world dominance. while Amurika founders in scarce 225 years. street musicians sing “if you’re going to San Francisco, make sure you have some flowers in your hair…” or so. he’s Amurikan, maybe 40 years old. maybe more, maybe less. who knows. age becomes less knowable or even contemplated. as day after day there is yet another blank page let lie, while pretty girls smile and rub their lover’s backs. tattooed arms intertwined. and what of life trajectory, how it goes? year overtaking year. while an older guy sits down at the next table with a baby-fist-sized spherical knob on the top left side of his head. bulbous. the tattooed gal shows the dimple in her lower back to her lover. they kiss. each second of eye contact they have, I age a year. slowly sinking into anonymous senility. nothing to do but stare down the far horizon, if it could be seen at all here in the City, to spot any sign of Death approaching. but there are too many brick buildings framing the space of Rembrandtsplein. more “ascending”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

empyre musings

John von Seggern (on empyre wireless sustainability):

I agree with you, however we shouldn’t confuse the Internet/digital networks in general with the larger techno-social system within which they exist. In point of fact, digital networks perform many tasks much more energy-efficiently than we could do without them (telecommuting vs. actual jet travel for example), so I would expect them to continue to thrive in an energy-constrained future even if many other facets of our society are radically reconfigured.

sotto voce: But in the end, that’s a little like saying how much money I will save by buying a pair of pants at 50% off the regular price. I don’t save anything, I spend money buying the pants.

The Internet as an infrastructure cannot (except theoretically) be excised from the techno-social system that it is embedded within. Energy consumption of that system rises, is rising. Web 2.0 sites brought online huge numbers of energy-consuming server farms which never existed when users did not store social networking data, for example. And the energy usage stats can’t be limited to nation-states, because it’s a global boat we are (apparently) floating in. It’s like saying the US uses far less energy making steel now than it did 50 years ago. What about how much it consumes? And where was the other steel made? The same argument was also used with digital creating “paperless” offices — track paper usage!

Internet helps Americans save more energy every year
sotto voce: Of course, in the process of the engineered evolution of any particular device there will be optimization — that is the goal of engineering. If that wasn’t the case, our system would have never been marginally sustainable from the beginning. Extracting stats on theoretically isolated elements is not valid except for more back-slapping “we’ve done it, we’ve found a way to have and eat our cake”—and it represents no real solution. It is exactly this localized isolation of elements which allows this mentality to persist. Just as with many previous industrial advances where a resource was abundant, any negative affects of the use of that resource was able to be overlooked by the end user who was somehow isolated (usually geographically) from them. That geographic isolation is no longer possible when the effects are global. Think, around the globe, there are no isolated corners to sit anymore.

This is exactly the point that I am making—that unless people realize radical shifts in their/our relationship with the deep and broad techno-social infrastructure, we are not making real reductions in the overall footprint, and it is the size of the cumulative footprint that will spell the difference between sustainability or the alternative which is only dimly making itself known through the fog of naivety. (and believe me, I don’t place myself above the fray, but energy consumption and the reliance on the largely invisible functioning of that globe-spanning infrastructure is a seriously addictive way to go).

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Driven

Marc sends this along, the first product of his and Ruth’s residency at the Banff Center.

Driven- a dilemma of coexistence
by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow

https://diwologue.net/driven/

Two people attempt to resolve a recurring argument. Their conversation is transcribed into 2 frames in a single browser. Lag starts to interfere with the flow of statements and responses.

‘Driven’ can be viewed in most Internet browsers and requires no plugins. It can be accessed in two ways. Either by individuals with personal computers, who can click through the work at their own pace, or projected with sound in public spaces where it has its own tempo.

The first page may take a while to load. Please turn up your volume.

This is the first in a planned series of artworks for DIWOlogue by Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow. During March 2008 Marc Garrett and Ruth Catlow are researching tools and creating collaborative artworks and online events as part of the Liminal Screens Residency Program with the support of the BNMI at the Banff Center.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

info growth

the creative use of digital networks needs to proceed with an understanding of the underlying principle of human relation as the situated potential for the real exchange of energy. I have stated this so many times, in so many variations that I’ve gotten tired of it. is it obvious? or useless?

the following from the introduction to a conference taking place in London at the London School of Economics in April. I’d like to go, but can’t afford it. no scholarships available.

Taken together, these developments establish a new socio-economic environment in which information-based operations, and information goods and services acquire crucial importance. This is clearly shown in the rapid ascent to economic dominance of internet-based companies that demonstrate superior data editing and information management strategies. New commercial possibilities steadily develop around the production, ordering and distribution of information, as data become interoperable across sources and older forms of information (e.g. image, text and sound) are brought to bear upon one another. But information growth has wider social implications as well. The involvement of information in every walk of life redefines the relationship between information and reality, and reshapes the social practices through which information is stored, retrieved, understood, disseminated and remembered. Increasingly, information mediates between humans and reality. In this context, the activities of ordering, making sense, evaluating, navigating and acting upon information step onto the centre-stage of contemporary life, impinging upon skill profiles and personal choices. They often do so under conditions in which the established boundaries between individuals and institutions are rendered shifting and negotiable. — Jannis Kallinikos and Jose-Carlos Mariategui

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Electroboutique

I heavily edited the original English translation of the manifesto for Roman and Alexei back in November, and so, here it is, as unveiled at Transmediale 08…

Electroboutique: Media Art 2.0

Today, when any critical artistic statement is drained of its power within the rigid frameworks of the unilateral capitalist world, a critical artist can no longer create while contemptuously looking down at commercial art and design that is governed exclusively by market laws.

At the same time as it becomes smarter and more refined, capitalism intrudes into most revolutionary, autonomous, and secluded areas of human activity. This is not to suggest that avant-garde art creation always stood in opposition to capitalism. The modernists, taking part in the evolution of design, worked in factories developing furniture and fabrics in order to bring art to the masses. Parallel to the evolution of Dada, the ready-made, and later, pop art, the theory and philosophy of art and culture contemplated the balance between the poles of capitalism and art, unique and mass-produced objects, high and low culture, professional and amateur, practical and dysfunctional. As the newest weapon of capitalism, information technologies dictate new social and cultural contexts and within these, uncover new challenges.

Our answer to the dilemma: Media Art 2.0
more “Electroboutique”

posted
  • place: Bedford, New York

the travelog

catching up with the kids to see how they grow. and plenty of chances to participate in the raptor hunting/feeding events despite the icy snow and such weather that I’m not so used to.

prepping to leap? or to merely stand still, justly, or, perhaps, verily. I do say unto you. all these texts and images. 2007 will be the peak year for the neoscenes travelog. it can’t become a more time-consumptive project, or, god-help-me, it’ll end up nah’ good for da body in this in-car-nation. counting the hours? counting the ROI (return-on-investment)? the social benefits that arise from this work? practically infinite for the first question, practically zero for the last two. and with significant chunks of life-time going in to this, and nothing coming out from it. why-oh-why do I persist? bulldog jaw spasms onto the carotid.

The act of seeing (active) gradually changing in the act of looking (passive) is exactly what modern global capitalism is doing with human mankind. By replacing the means to create a life (rurality, agriculture, self-protecting, autocratic societies) with the means to earn a life (industries, labour, rent, mortgage, salary, funeral insurance), the emphasis slowly drifts from the active sense to the passive sense. This is exemplified by the way the internet developed from a research instrument to an entertainment device. In this process which lasted a surprisingly short time of about ten years, the presence of the web turned from a small interesting peer-to-peer group to a huge beast of millenarian proportions. The monster as the natural companion of a gigantic destroyer. The spider’s web is eyeing the world , the eye lost its vision and is multiplied inwardly on a enormous scale , blinded by its own image like the drowning men filming their own drowning in a drowning world. — A. Andreas (cited from nettime)

posted
  • place: Köln, Germany

netart 2007 – Feraltrade

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich https://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

An honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call:

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany
  • author: Sarah Chung

Sarah Chung

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: https://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
https://www.neoscenes.net
https://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
https://www.pierrebastien.com/
https://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
https://www.mutek.org/
https://www.haamu.com/launau
https://www.colleenplays.org/
https://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

wursts

with the hectic schedule of my hosts, I am able to help out by doing errands and babysitting during the day. meeting Frau Pries, Fritz’s day-care mama, who talks to me as though I understand German fluently. not a bad thing, though I still can’t follow things 100% by any stretch. I do learn she has two brothers who lived in the US — one in Boston, the other in San Diego who recently passed away, dropping dead after getting out of a taxi at a hotel in Chicago. and via a Bluetooth-downloaded email on the share list, a completely different channel for information, apparently huge fires in San Diego as well. more information on that will come when DT supposedly will get the internet installed on Thursday here at the house. we’ll see. unstable infrastructures. compared to stable ones? or simply ones that are more or less unstable. shaking foundations.

back to Frau Pries, yes, juggling the needs of six children under two years old. funny to watch the Brownian motion of a roomful of them. well, partially Brownian, partially magnetic attractors and repellers, part complex harmonic motion, part chaos. the emergent aspect being a social system of chance, whatever that is…

midday stroll to the local butcher’s shop. hot lunch with brats & taters for the Polish guys, Peter, Jan, and Andre, who are doing all the heavy finishing work on the new house. this along with a case of beer every other day, and a bottle of whiskey on Saturdays.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Uni-see

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

The Wild Surmise

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father, a senior Pentagon analyst, sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitoes, and dark star-brilliant skies. more “The Wild Surmise”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

((no))music

mes amis laboiteblanche and Carl.Y at (no)music are running their 10th 24-hour collaborative online sonic streaming project. I decided not to participate this time around for lack of technical infrastructure, but see there are some old faces like androvirus, Jon Eriksen, Bernhard Loibner, & Jerome Joy among 48 others — sure to be a long, interesting day! check it out!

(((NOMUSIC))) wishes to generate improbable duals and gatherings between pairs of participants during one hour at a time in a web audio performance. We make no storage because we think that Internet is a huge database which conveys already a great amount of dead information and we don?t want to pollute it further. We are thus in favor of instant access to a selective event. The mechanism of the programming is not automated; it is relayed manually for 24 hours without any interruption by laboiteblanche and Carl.Y., two real human routers who are at the service of continuous audio stream and who endure technical difficulties and give rapid formation on the technologies of streaming to all the participants.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

FearingS

Annie Abrahams sends out an open invitation to participate in her project FearingS which is a part of:

“Oppera Internettikka – Protection et Sécurité” explores the poetics of a contemporary sound form — live opera as a sound event for the audience in the form of a live internet audio broadcasting. In that way it combines the notion of the world wide web communication protocols and classical artspace — an opera house. Opera is a very strictly coded form of art with a lot of passion, and internet is a lonely place of solitude and intimate communication which is becoming more and more fragile, dangerous and suspicious.
posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

VisitorStudio

Furtherfield subset Furthernoise VisitorsStudio is the place. A Flash-based live-online visual-sonic collaborative platform developed at furtherstudio by Neil Jenkins. Roger Mills organized a test run with nine artists from Europe and US to come together today for a sequence of individual and collaborative performances in preparation for events later in June. Somehow, in the juggling of files in preparation, there are grim traces of current states of mind: in extremis.

Furthernoise is an online platform for the creation, promotion, criticism and archiving of innovative cross genre music and sound art for the information & interaction of the public and artists alike.

Furthernoise encourages new methodologies and practices in creating adventurous music and sound that is not bound by the constraints of historically experimental genres. We showcase artists work through critical reviews & features as well organising performances and events on the internet as well as public venues and galleries.

&

Furtherfield creates imaginative strategies that actively communicate ideas and issues in a range of digital & terrestrial media contexts; featuring works online and organising global, contributory projects, simultaneously on the Internet, the streets and public venues. Furtherfield focuses on network related projects that explore new social contexts that transcend the digital, or offer a subjective voice that communicates beyond the medium. Furtherfield is the collaborative work of artists, programmers, writers, activists, musicians and thinkers who explore beyond traditional remits.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

response to Lev

sotto voce: Some comments (on the nettime post from Lev Manovich, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 – his text snips in yellow)…

We Have Never Been Modular…

but we have agreed-upon standards via political hegemony, pressure of dominant ideas, and participating in the easy consumption of ‘whatever works’. And since standards underlie the concept of modularity, I’m afraid that I disagree unless you are talking about another collective “we” that is represented by the demographic you are addressing and are member of.

Thanks to everybody who commented on my text “Remix and Remixability” (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the excitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am “following the mainstream view” in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture…

And it is worth mentioning that none of those ideas are remotely sourced in digital technologies — they are constructed on the entire precursor socio-technical infrastructure of engineering in general. digital technologies are a ‘final’ product of a long and continuous development process of standardization that started when Empire (or collective social life) was born.

Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other – i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for…

From an engineering point of view, modularity is a subsequent process result following the necessary precursor: the development of standards.

As a simple anecdote, I recall traveling across Europe in the early 80’s. When crossing a border, say, between Italy and Germany, or France and Germany, aside from the ritual rubber-stamping of the passport (and occasional body searches, but that’s another story), one was aware that suddenly, when before the streets were full of Renaults, Citroens, and Peugeots, they were now filled with VWs, Mercedes, and BMWs. To such a degree that if you saw a Citroen Deux Cheveaux puttering around in Bavaria — a car I occasionally had in those days — you would invariably honk and wave (at the ‘hippies’). The currency changed, the language changed (obviously), the places for money exchange shifted, the electric plugs morphed, the telephone rings, cables, and plugs changed. Distance didn’t unless one crossed the Channel where temperature, length, weight, currency divisions, and volume changed to absurdly baffling non-decimal fractions. The socio-political history of the EU (and globalization as well) is mapped over the development of international standards that (have) effectively wiped out those prior social differences.

The history underlying any and all movements towards a pervasive technology (regardless of the geographic extent) is the history of standards development. This precedes any (modular) engineering deployments. (A wonderful USD350 million glitch on a NASA Mars project — when an engineer (collaborating with ESA) forgot to convert between metric and US measurements). Of course, economic (military) hegemony is absolutely connected to this process of standards development. You join in a military alliance and if you are the minor partner, you have to re-bore your cannons to take his caliber of projectile, lest, in the heat of battle, you run out of usable ammunition.

I think a discussion of standardization supersedes the discussion of modularity as most (all!?) characteristics that arise in a description of modularity and its impacts are derived from the ‘textures’ of the socio-technical landscape that are determined by standardization. In a way, collective knowledge as a very broad and general social product is a result of standardization, especially if you are considering, for example, knowledge that spans disparate physical locations. Even with the existence of the basic technology of the Internet, no collective knowledge may be derived without a standardization that transcends the physical restraints on the digital system — a primary one being calibration of time scales, but there are many other calibrations that must take place as well. In the Paul Edwards article quoted below, he points out that there are heavy consequences for detecting global warming because the propagation of measurement standard differences between national and international organizations. An example of the fragility of knowledge building and the importance of standards in collective action.

Strip Latin from biological nomenclature, and international collaboration in the entire discipline is immediately snuffed.

It would seem that the larger the social span of an institution, the greater the built-in desire to establish and propagate standards among its constituents. Maybe remix is the ultimate surrender of the individual to the collective. Standardized idiosyncrasy. Lovely end result.

And at the other extreme, some of the more powerful expressions of artistic creativity take place in a landscape where there is some freedom to deliberately ignore standards (and modularity) and filter lived experience through the idiosyncratic filter of self — re-presenting that lived experience rather than an obsession with filtering someone else’s signal…

I think your mention of musicians sampling published music points to something perhaps more tiresome — related to the instance when rock stars sing about life as a rock star. A simulation of a simulation. TeeVee shows about teevee producers. Escher’s lizard consuming itself. Maybe remix culture will turn out to be so efficient that it will come to that — annihilation by self-consumption of its own mediated worldview…

Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul N. Edwards

Edwards, P.N., 2004. A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology. Science, 304(7 May 2004), pp.827-828.

Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. — Jeff Flowers

Flowers, J., 2004. The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards. Science, 306(19 November 2004), pp.1324-1330.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Partial Description of the World

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. more “Partial Description of the World”

posted

The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor’s note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 that set life on another trajectory.]

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. more “The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

perturbing

VALIS (Vast Active Living Intelligence System): A perturbation in the reality field in which a spontaneous self-monitoring negentropic vortex is formed, tending progressively to subsume and incorporate its environment into arrangements of information. Characterized by quasi-consciousness, purpose, intelligence, growth and an armillary coherence. — Philip K. Dick

that’s no Internet!

posted
  • place: en route Köln, Germany - London, England

busted engine

In relation with. Impending movement. Gotta leave books behind. Finished the incredibly depressing but enLightening book on the Hopi. I had not been aware of the sad history of the Hopi as a people. A view that encompassed the entire world and all of history. Speaking of floods, that we are in the third world, waiting for the conditions to move to the fourth. A major transition that is predicated on the arrival of the true White Brother. The problem of Navajo encroachment on the ancestral land (this augmented by numerous broken treaties and a lack of enforcement by the bureau of Indian Affairs). Will keep all this in mind when in the region shortly. And will pass some of the stories along to Loki during the summer.

Up at 0525. Breakfast, walk-through of the flat to make sure everything is in good order, walked to the bus to the train to the strassenbahn, to the airport. First item of business is to locate the lost & found to see about my sunglasses. No luck. Checked in, waited for the flight. waited, waited, and waited. Something wrong with one engine. No more flying of British Air. Gave them this chance, and the experience has been dismal. I had even planned to keep one of the keys to Volker’s place just in case, but didn’t at the last moment. Otherwise it would be easy to just pop back to the flat for the night. At least the internet connection would have been free. Here at the hotel it’s €4.50 for 30 minutes. Ridiculous. Will go online though, tomorrow morning or this evening to let folks know in London what happened. And will hit BA with a complaint and request for a refund according to the new EU statute covering delays and so on.

So, sitting in an airport Holiday Inn waiting for another flight tomorrow, rather than getting bused around Germany to another airport to squeeze out today, I just gave up. Fortunately no real schedule except to get to Pete’s and check out some experimental video work this evening. But the whole process and how the ground crew handled things was pretty poor service. Quite a few Americans on this flight who were making connections through Heathrow, so their plans are in more disarray than mine, but either way. Funny, though, how conversations start up, when the suspension of movement breaks down, hearing stories, how complex lives are, how rich and adventurous it is to travel. Many dialogues today with many people.

And, re-reading some travelog entries from Dinosaur, talking about auras. Where energy of a ‘thing’ radiates outwards, cannot be restricted to ‘the thing itself’ because the thing itself is not a thing and it is NOT of itself. The edge is only change, it is not difference in materiality, just present noesis. Or so.

Very hard to recap the dullness that ensues when en route. As I denote that always in notebook and travelog. Back in a travel hotel, the pinnacle of bland survival. On the other hand, I did notice a nice-looking gal in the bar on the way up to the room. Good night.

posted
  • place: Marble Mountains, Mojave Desert, California

to the Mojave

this is the winter solstice: no better place to spend it than the Mojave Desert. bumping slowly into a canyon that dead-ends into the Mojave Wilderness area, in a cirque of sorts, nothing like a cirque in the Rockies or the Alps, but still, a surrounding of rough garbled slopes leading upward into what are definitely mountains. Creosote bush (Larrea tridentata), and a variety of small brittle brush plants, sand, rock, desert armor, cryptobiotic soil, and that’s about it. animals are here, but seldom seen. lizards by day, a few insects around sunset, but otherwise it is silent except for the throbbing of blood in ears and the assorted noises of body, movement, and living. machine takes on a massive presence by its sound. stove heating water can be heard 100 meters away, hard drive chattering to itself, an loud insect in a box.

dream of the Mojave on 12-14 September 2001. stripping away the frequent aircraft would be the last hurdle. though the drive to get here illustrated that this area is under assault from every quarter. the air itself is hazy up to 2000 meters or more. this must be auto pollution from eLAy, immediately upwind. there is a huge dust storm that rakes from north to south, near the Cadiz dry lake, along a cutoff that I was going to take, but couldn’t locate the road properly as I hadn’t a copy of that quad map. had to go on west, skirting Joshua Tree National Park, and take Iron Mountain road to the Amboy road and north across the Sheep Rock Mountains and the Amboy dry lake, the Chlorite works, and finally to Amboy, more deserted than it was in 1983 when I first visited. actually quite rundown at this point. east towards Cadiz and the Marble Mountains where I choose a bad gravel road, make a few detours, and finally enter a wide wash right on the perimeter of the Wilderness area. and presumably quite near a Latham Shale outcrop. have to triangulate in the morning, based on some field photos that I found online.

this is the first time I have returned to a place like this since Internet-time has come. it is quite interesting to research a location, using topographic, historic, cultural, and scientific names to find online info about many aspects. for example, a report detailing the eco-recovery of areas that were used by General Patton between 1942-44 for massive armored maneuver practices (over 1,000,000 men!) which destroyed huge swaths of the desert ecology in California, Nevada, and Arizona. thanks George C. Scott!

getting colder already. sunset early, around 1700, and just two hours later, the temperature has dropped 30F. got to go get bed set up in the back of the truck. maybe tomorrow I’ll sleep on the ground. such a rare opportunity that it shouldn’t be passed up.

posted
  • place: Ukiah, California

netart 2004 – Ping Melody

The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:

where is netart?

When invited to join this year’s netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat skeptical that such an exhibition—with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World—would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.

However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded—the information flow personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network—while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: it’s getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.
more “netart 2004 – Ping Melody”

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

the bridge

pedestrian bridge over the Niderelva. can’t seem to find out the actual name of the bridge* via searching on the internet. could go outside and walk over to it, there’s a big sign, but that’s too easy. it’s a beautiful structure with the nearer half on tracks that allow it to retract and open for small ships that occasionally moor up the river.

* Trine later sends me a possible name — Verftsbrua, related to the word ‘wharf,’ or place for building boats.

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

bang gang

a video and reception at the Akureyri Art Museum and a concert by Bang Gang last night is the first social mingling with the local art crowd since arriving, been so busy. incredible how fast the time goes, but slogging on code, servers, files, tags, templates, formats, networks, samples, loops, and clips soaks up time in an infinite do-loop. having a regular schedule does the same, especially the limits on internet access as defined by library opening hours. and the resistance to going to Café Karolina for the ‘free’ access there, ’cause it costs, gotta buy something. but with sugar, chocolate, caffeine, and alcohol off my menu, there is herbal tea left. already hard enough to maintain the avoidance of these ever-present substances in the grocery store, where restless shopping catches me reading labels of things like Pringles to be reminded of the horrible substances hiding in the machine-perfect chips. mono-sodium glutamate: to be avoided. or my favorite cookies, Burton’s Home Blest chocolate-coated digestives, to see if they have suddenly eliminated sugar from the ingredients: fat chance. fruit the only available sweet, or carrots. but going back to apples that are shipped from New Zealand or Washington State, definitely NOT organic, is not pleasant. at least the stores are now open 24-7 in some instances, though I remember from a decade past that there were price differentials of up to 300% between the cheap generic Bónus chain, and the small local 10-11 shops, on the same items. not sure it is so high these days, but prices for very normal food is roughly double the cost of normal organic foods in Boulder, for example. I try not to shop, but when doing so, ignore the prices: depressed starvation would be a direct result.

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavik - Akureyri, Iceland

over the glaciers

After getting away from the Big City on takeoff, we are now moving over a landscape that is familiar at all distances possible—from face pressed into the wet moss to stereoscopic squinting at satellite imagery of rifts, grabens, shield volcanoes, and glaciers. The fascination with geo-morphology never lessens. Hanging out in the International Space Station would definitely be cool. But speaking of chill, on the way to the airport, the ex asks “Why are you doing this residency in a land that you hate?” “Hate? I never said that.” “Yes you did, many times.” Child in the back adsorbs this fragment of the unmanageable dis-reality of being. I drag a suitcase into the domestic terminal, no check-in line for Akureyri, the guy behind me is already pushing at the counter in the moment I step over to heft my suitcase on the scale. Excuuuuse me.

Hrefna meets me at the airport and takes me on a short tour of town to show some of the changes since the last time I was here onto 4 years ago or so. Do some quick shopping, enough to get me through the next few days. No internet access.

posted
  • place: en route Vilnius, Lithuania -- Copenhagen, Denmark

free internet

Wow! free internet access at the Vilnius airport! should have arrived earlier, but the ordered taxi never arrived, so I had to walk to a nearby taxi-stand to catch another one. and had to barter with the guy.

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

ram 6.2

first day of the actual workshop comes and goes. as is always the case, the energy of the situation varies. changes. while the Lithuanian basketball team plays China, Gedimas introduces Geert Lovink for a lecture. the topic, “Critical Internet Culture: Internet Government and Civil Society.” a mapping of the geo-politic of the Internet.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

doctoral meditations

weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.

conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase “ahead of his time” that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web — the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student of mine is hired to do network-based teaching… or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so. argh!

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

proto definitions

The end of this year approaches. I jot down some definitions for class:

Proto definitions:

digital art — artifacts/performances enabled by a digital device

(computer)net art — art(ifacts?) on the net (what’s the net?) Internet? Any network?

web art — specific art(ifact?) for viewing on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that remote dataspace)

networking art — art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human/technological) networks; use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in). the network which is an extension of the socialized being

mediation — the act of standing between; a carrier; that which carries from one to the other. a bridge across/through the sensual world standing between the Self and the Other

media art — artifacts created via (traditional, analog) media devices

multimedia — more than one media

Keeping to several centers, not comatose in any of their distributed flows. Understand that now the up-springing source for the publicly “creative” work is something of a distortion created in the fabric of childhood (listen good parents) — that reverberates in the fractured pattern of shot-gun-fire in a rock canyon, each present de-formation of being expressed across the local social matrix is a hard surface that often will reflect and repel energy of any kind. The curling whine of ricochet as peeled-sheath bullet changes trajectory and spins to a sonic resonance within ear.

posted

ThirdWorld Internet Express

Prescott, Arizona 13 April 2001-04-13

ThirdWorld Internet Express
Dept 255
Denver, Colorado 80271-0255

To whom it may concern:

Enclosed is a final payment for service on the account that I cancelled as of 31 March 2001. The statement I received for 01 Jan – 31 March was incorrect in that it had the amount of 19.95 for March which I was not apprised of before 10 March. I have enclosed a check for USD 15 to cover January – March at the rate of USD 5/month that I was on for the preceeding five years.

I cancelled the account 1) you unilaterally raised my rates by 400% for the month of March (something you happened to mention in an email dated 10 March), and 2) you seemed unable since the middle of last year to deal with the direct debit billing procedure that we used for the preceeding 6 years of service.

Sorry to say it, but I think your customer relations have gone to hell, and I understand it is a result of take-overs and employees not being treated well. And when that happens, the customer gets treated poorly, and in my case, after being a customer all this time, I had to say forget it!

John Hopkins

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

last rolls of Tri-x

staying up late, very late, finally developing film from the last two years. the HC110 developer only just came in at the local camera store. stressful for things to be so last-minute. but I think I will be back here before I have planned — though my plans are not so clear anyway. whether to re-join the private sector in the US, after so many rebuffs from the academic sector here, and with the explosion of Internet-related activities. hmmm. so the doctorate at UIAH may just have to wait.

now have to scan and prep images to retrospectively illustrate this narrative. pointless exercise? perhaps. 13 rolls of Tri-x built up from two years of movement. 440 silver tracings, give-or-take a handful. not many images for so many kilometers, but. there they are. one image for every 440 kilometers, or so.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

~/Connected

massive busy-ness over the weekend with the ~/Connected conference at the Lasipalatsi. Tapio had asked me earlier if I could help out with activities on the ground, and although I was pretty busy anyway, I was around to help, then ended up being quite involved in the discussions, and even made a short public presentation at the end in Bio Rex, dealing with best-practice scenarios for education/learning situations. Polar Circuit was held up as that model in learning situations, along with the idea of open-platform, socially balanced situations.

/~Connected press releases for local and translocal use

Cultural industries and independent media cultural production are of primary importance for Finnish policy development, as a new program, “Content Finland” is being drafted during next year. In each European country, goals of both national and transnational media culture have been met with different strategies. Through /~Connected knowledge and shared experience, it is possible to form models of best practice – and principles for both national and European policy.

The driving force behind this event and series of other meetings prior to it is the ECB, European Cultural Backbone (https://ecb.t0.or.at/, https://monoskop.org/European_Cultural_Backbone [Ed: now only a historical archive on monoskop]). It is a network of media cultural organizations, centers, and active individuals throughout Europe, not only European Union member countries. To quote Dr. Peter Wittmann, Austrian State Secretary for the Arts, “The European Cultural Backbone is the logical extension of this ongoing dialog between cultural practitioners and policy makers regarding strategies of “practice to policy” on both national and European levels.”

The Main organizer of /~Connected, the Lasipalatsi Media Center, also seeks to discuss how European media centers could increasingly collaborate. How to best connect venues of presenting media culture and sites that produce it? Support of networks, bandwidth, mobility, distribution and production are key factors for policy discussion.

Traditionally, in a European democracy, public space has been defined through access to public institutions, freedom to move in city spaces and through the existence of certain democratic instruments such as public libraries and publicly supported broadcast media. New media, Internet in particular, has made it possible to more actively shift content production to smaller units or groups. Creation of public space can mean support for content production and communication that does not focus on a single mass audience, but particular communities (or consumers) and layers within the larger society and the networked world. Major issue for debate is thus to consider, how to best connect various models of best practice and policy that enable cultural production in a networked, changing Europe.

The seminar takes place in the very center of Helsinki, in Lasipalatsi Media Center (https://www.lasipalatsi.fi). Meals during the conference program are provided for by the organizers and there is no attendance fee. We are providing air fare and accommodation for a group of participants that comes from smaller media centers and organizations. We are happy to assist your travel arrangements by providing information on accommodation and flights.

/~CONNECTED brings together practitioners, producers and policy makers within contemporary media culture in Europe. Its attempts to create exchanges of experience and information between organizations and individuals from different fields: media cultural organizations, media centers, policy makers on a local, national and European level, media art organizations, corporate research labs and university researchers.

Following events such as P2P conference in Netherlands and Networking Centers of Innovation in Austria, it explores the ways in which local experiences can be compared, exchanged and rewritten to form models of best practice.

The event will officially launch the ECB, European Cultural Backbone, a network based on trust and a shared interest to promote a rich media cultural practice, which already flourishes in Europe. The network proposes that an Internet Backbone or a set wide bandwidth would be subsidized by the EU in order to enable transnational media production, broadcast transmission of events and inexpensive communications. The ECB acts as an advisory body for the policy makers nationally and within the EU.

/~CONNECTED is very much about the goals of the ECB:

1) Bandwidth for media culture
2) Support for models of best practice
3) Active investigation of what European media culture consists of
4) Enhanced networking between media cultural organizations, individual hubs” and policy makers.

/~CONNECTED refers to the ways in which media cultural local practices and organizations create collaboration, projects, discourse and policy across and partly independent of national borders. Emerging networks, projects and content are no longer international, but translocal by nature, already connected.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Finnish Hallows

All Hallows Eve, as is told in the Midlands, and the Dia de los Muertos in the Sierra Madres. but here, here in Finnish Lapland, just nigh on the Arctic Circle, on the cafeteria tables are plastic Happy Halloween decorations, sheets cut like ghost costumes, and black-and-orange streamers hanging from the ceiling. this IS NOT a Finnish holiday, but it spreads, like Mother’s Day, on the wings of commerce. looking for money in the dead in the last days of fall, before winter comes. how the market overtakes all — it even tries to cheat death and make a profit on it. digitizing videos to send out on the internet. broadcast. streaming dreams.