The third brico-conclave for exploring some ideas and plans for pixelache 2013 in May between Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia…
deep resonant networks & anti-disciplinary collaboration
A brico-conclave for exploring some ideas and plans for pixelache 2013 in May between Helsinki, Finland and Tallinn, Estonia.
technoshamanism
V2
tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.
sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors — image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging – PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a Cartesian system. Mcluhan’s suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer’s time. so, scaling causes the development of a “whole new media”… new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then surveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics — based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. “as much data as we want.”
the parallel irc discussion (see below) leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm. but it works within the attention economy.
from dental faugh! to FLOSS
Heading to the dentist this morning after 36 hours of pain. Disgusted with my previous two dentists in the US who didn’t listen to my suggestions that there were problems with a crown that was made by one of them.
Anna, the dentist here in Helsinki listened and agreed with my diagnosis, examined the problem and corrected it (with the hope that the symptom had not developed to the point to require a root canal after her intervention).
At any rate, she reduced the lateral occlusion to such a degree that it should slowly reduce the irritation caused to the root, crossed fingers, got to get some ibuprofen to deal with the dull pain, though. Back home on the now-crowded ferry. School children by the hundreds on outings to the island, met by actors dressed in period costumes: “history-come-alive!”
Now, on to the FLOSS meeting online at V2 in Netherlands, remotely.
Geert (introducing): Rishab Ayer Gosh — intro to code culture and economics — code as society; collaborative production is not a new concept generally but economics of collaborative production is new; is there a difference between an idea and the embodied ‘result’ of the idea’s implementation? how does the ultimate use affect the process of the tool creation. If all remains in the space of ideas (i.e. no real outcome, is it necessary to be concerned about the economic structure? Raytheon. parity with .com world? something more? just free, just open? design?
My notes degenerate into noize.
There were few real opportunities for interaction from the audience, and less so for the few who attended on IRC / streaming. The one question I did manage to address to Rishab had a surprising answer:
13:06: jhopkins: talking about code is talking in a fully enclosed symbolic system of representation — what is the relationship between the real (physical!) world and the world of intellectual activity and ideas — where does the interface occur?
13:06: jhopkins: not sure if that is clear, but…
13:06: jhopkins: same as economics as being an abstracted symbolic system representing the ‘real’ physical world…
13:07: jhopkins: we live in both, and both are intertwined, but what are the characteristics of that intertwining…
13:07: FLOSSer: in terms of actual time+activity?
13:07: jhopkins: yeah, actual lived experience…
13:08: jhopkins: or lived be-ing
13:08: jhopkins: the economics presented here seems a bit isolated from the real…
Rishab basically said there was no difference between the two — between the symbolic representation and the thing itself. Same issue I run up against in other situations (the empyre list most often) where this is a basal unquestioned/unconsidered assumption. Why is this such a dogmatic position?
moving from anyware to randomsystem
anyware went down last night, IRC and all, but it was not a very satisfactory event from my impaired vantage despite the high level of network activity. I should not have joined in without a better understanding of the arrangements: I didn’t have access to enough of the program information until very late. and when I started delving around, I couldn’t figure out how I could jump in. still learning how to be a participant: another one of those things where I will not appear in the program credits, the paper propaganda, or banner headlines: despite ‘being there’. perfect deployment of tactical media in networks: avoid PR whenever possible. made it as far as to edit the wiki pages, though it ended up that my time-frame, being the most easterly of participants, except for someone in Tokyo, and having an early flight to Oslo and Kim’s randomsystem workshop in the morning, I couldn’t reasonably be online streaming when NYC prime-time hit. bummer. the shareNY crew was having fun, though, would have been nice to be there. a solo node in the network is often compromised unless network connections are strong.
was thinking this morning on the way into town on the early ferry that I function best when there is a clear understanding of the particular social framework within which a particular event will be operating. not that there is a need to actually operate inside that framework or even respect it, it just gives a more comfortable starting point. a bit like what happens when one has not been yet introduced to a stranger, and the specific opportunity for a self-made introduction passes, there are those awkward moments of disconnected collective dynamic. an unbalanced flywheel, hlaup, hlaup, hlaup. this principle inserts itself into many diverse situations. object making: knowing the film and developer (paper developer, paper, and enlarger); knowing the duration for a time-based medium; knowing the network architecture, connection speeds, firewall configurations, and available bandwidth. I tend to set those most base parameters, then leap into the project, feeling free to proceed intuitively and creatively.
these thoughts deserve more exploration, but I now have to read the article Open Content and Value Creation that was suggested in preparation for Kim’s workshop. seems like he is not ‘just a musician,’ but is into some good hard-core social criticism AND mapping out alternative ways of going.
Bjarne meets me at the hotel and we go to the new Atelier Nord offices to meet Atle. good to catch up with him. been a long time since being in Norway, and now he’s the Atelier Nord director.
evening performances at Blå alog and Next Life, around the corner from NOTAM, finally find Alexander, the festival-meister.
gray-white and Light
after a brilliant sunny day yesterday, today is wet. (snowing!) good for washing the long winter accumulation of ground-up road and sidewalk gravel dust away. still in bed at 1000, reading, and writing. determined to flog away on thesis things, alternately, each minute, feeling empowered, and feeling lost. strange process. looking for a structural framework that makes sense, and somehow gives cues as to how to limit the scope of the discussion so it doesn’t get totally out of hand.
delve, ponder, organize, shuffle. and run across the field of Light
There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure Light of a representational discourse. — Michel Foucault
hmmmmm. woulda neva started this thing here, if I had read that nine years ago. or woulda tatooed meself from head to toe and enlisted in the merchant marine. wholly Madre de Dios! nada mas.
okay, ready and set up for the son(net) stream / performance. crossing fingers after setting up in my normal office space, and both ethernet jacks were dead. talk about stress, I ran to the other side of Gallery Augusta, the long low building that NIFCA uses for offices to check to see if the network connection was working in the main offices. weewsh. race back, rip everything down (two dv cams, two powerbooks with the accompanying 400 meters of cabling), drag it over to the office, set up. only 20 minutes before the sound check.
so it goes. performance over. after a testing connection earlier in the week with Josephine via irc, and then later she sends a nice video of the performance.
\An’a*tom”ic\
The \An’a*tom”ic\ crew gets together online to hash out concepts. A gathering in the Teatrum Anatomicum at de Waag, in central Amsterdam, is streamed out on QuickTime for remote participants and we remote beings talk back via irc:
DEAF03 – Interfacing / Radiotopia / Keyworx
Dutch Electronic Art Festival :: Interfacing / Radiotopia / Keyworx
Interfacing/Radiotopia/KeyWorx consists of one space that has no images and has only sound, and one space that has no sound and only images. They are connected both physically and via the Internet. The sound in the audio space is mixed live by musicians and is then converted into images in the other space. Artists from all over the world were asked to send in material to fill up a database that will be manipulated live by artists who are present at DEAF03 and by artists participating on line. Interfacing/Radiotopia/KeyWorx will be presented as a live performance.
my stream from Boulder to Rotterdam…
and the looong logfile with August, Steve, Sophea and myself gabbing…
August invites me to join in this intersection of his radiotopia (Rupert Huber, August Black, Norbert Math) along with the Waag keyworx crew (Lodewijk Loos, Isabelle Jenniches, Michelle Teran, Rupert Huber, Eric Redlinger, Arjen Keesmaat, Dan Vatsky). Steve Bradley and Sophea Lerner, both long-time network sound collaborators joined me in sending streams in from Germany and Finland respectively (although Sophea ended up having some tech issues).
bed-in for peace
![screenshot, bed-in for peace, 19 October 1998, [Joensuu, Finland]](https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2001/10/1000/20011019-01.jpg "screenshot, bed-in for peace, 19 October 1998, [Joensuu, Finland]")
snow. several chunks of corn snow came with the wind from the north of Siberia, across the Barents Sea. shredded clouds, with sun in between, took all the leaves down without touching them once. from far away, tele-presence. so far, invisible.
meeting with Mindaugas, first, early in the week, on IRC, while we were both streaming video to each other, then, later in the week on iVisit during a performance that Andy and Amy were doing from New Zealand — a bed-in for peace. after spending much of the week exploring some technologies that are not implemented on this site, and poking around the site making needed corrections (mostly in the code).
expand!
expand happens! the culmination of a year of discussions and network-building, at the Meteori Cafe (now mbari) in the Lasipalatsi across the street from Kiasma in central Helsinki. it’s a party!
netculture irc collab
netculture comes together for their first taste of remote collaborative text generation in the Doom networked playroom deep in the bowels of UIAH’s Media Lab.
Nadja’s birthday
over, and out. expressing various messages across various means. nso2 rumbles on. through the energy that I lost. thankfully, the workshop is not totally dependent on my energy, otherwise it would fail. the students are enthusiastically picking up the lead and carrying things along with zest. it is all I can do to spend four or five hours each afternoon up at school helping mostly with technical problems. not how I had envisioned things running, but I simply did not envision my energy state to be as diffused as it is. Nadja has her birthday party this evening live and online in the dorm basement party room.
possib(ilities)/(ly)
the cafe9 project seems to be coming in to its own condition. there is an inherent flow moving me towards some kind of stability in Helsinki. if I can keep my energies in a state of alignment, this has become the absolute question. keeping surface explosions, well, holding onto the long enough that they dissipate and do not throw bad energy off at other people. heightening the awareness of others’ energy so that the flow and movement of the combined intersection is balanced and positive (when that is the needed condition). helping Harri on his thesis for an hour or so, I am rushed. cycling over to the pool, fast, the attendant is not in the cash cage to take my turquoise-blue 10 FIM coupon that I buy at the college cashier, the normal price is 25 FIM. good deal. but nobody is in the cage, and it is before eight. I wander around and one of the lifeguards comes over to help. I am a little surprised that his English is so good, as I have frequently had some trouble communicating with local people here. he takes care of things, and so I race in to the locker room, change and get into the water, thrashing a quick kilometer before the 2030 closing time. cycling home across the pedestrian bridge, I watch the ice on the river. it is disappearing rapidly. it will be all gone in two days.
the pointproject crew in Trondheim collab with Annie Abrahams to perform the I have only my name? irc event, I act as a facilitator (they have no background with IRC) and participant.
The Continuing Adventures of Prince and Xena
I’ve got this crazy group of students for this class — anttipee, LilPrince, Zeppari, jose, elisa_1, aRISe, cke, Chalk, jj, and _jones2 — they lead, I follow. It’s collaborative story-telling time on the #kuva IRC channel today.
intertwinedness
no sleep again. the full moon, the arriving solstice, and the stresses of movement. last night was a curious experience. in an arena where energies were so mis-spent, mis-directed, and un-perceived. experienced, but un-commented upon, imposed and not resisted, and on into the morning. missed train connection, so I will arrived later in Budapest than scheduled which will impinge on my abilities to prepare for tonight’s lecture at the Center for Creative Communications. I am so tired in the morning that I actually get on the wrong train, and head for Salzburg rather than Vienna. this shocks me a lot, and is totally unlike me, it reflects the state I am in. fortunately I am able to get off the train in Wels, only fifteen minutes from Linz, and board another train heading for Vienna. which should happen with considerable more grace than last night. there would have been… is the beginning of a retrospective on the event. or there could have been… energy and power was simply lost in the space that was NOT created. no intertwinedness happening. talk about the oppressive power of language. but it doesn’t really matter, what each individual experienced is simply that. an experience that they walk away with. no gleaming successes, but just a quiet continuation of the voice that is hard to hear in the crowd. no phantasm of world domination follows me.
world-wide simultaneous dance
![screenshot, World-Wide Simultaneous Dance, 07 June 1998, [Kiel, Germany]](https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/1998/06/1000/19980607-01ss.jpg "screenshot, World-Wide Simultaneous Dance, 07 June 1998, [Kiel, Germany]")
The World-Wide Simultaneous Dance project takes place (see article in Leonardo by the initiator, Laura Knott) so I gather some students to participate as best we can with no web-cam, or even microphone, in the very limited Muthesius computer lab. We instead use the iVisit chat channel to send instructions (as mhk, mhk2, mhk3, and muthe) to some of the dancers, while chatting with the other participating nodes.
World Wide Simultaneous Dance was not the first live, global, on-line performance event. Since 1984, groups such as The Electronic Café International have presented live, sometimes participatory, networked events. It was, to my knowledge, the first such event in the dance world. … As Internet enthusiasts unceasingly observe, the on-line environment creates a new option for “being there” in the accomplishment of many tasks. If we view the on-line environment as a place, these tasks can then include making art readable only in this original spatial context. Such a view has the potential to give back to the practice of site specific artmaking the strength of its original conception. — Laura Knott
The technological medium disappeared and we were left with the sensation of dance—people doing it, people writing about it, people witnessing. Live performances all over the world pushed through the disembodied sense of technology and left us with the collective art experience. I was thrilled. — Jennifer Hall, Director, Do While Studio, Boston
Intertwinedness: prep dialogue
later, definitively off-line, Sanna and I sneak off for a sauna at the place where she is house-sitting.
Intertwinedness: prep dialogue
Beauty and the East
The Beauty and The East event occurs in Ljubljana, Slovenia as an expression of the nettime network. I’m far to the north, but with Nordic connectivity, an IRC session is convened with many of the main players attending. An audio archive is was available at ljudmila.org for the history-minded. Anyone know about the disposition of that these days?
The generation of content is context sensitive, people produce information out of signals, groups define what people can produce, tools make possible what groups can define and vice versa. A critique of the net must include a critical analysis of its ‘matter’ as a social and cultural product. With the rise of the web, the well developed group structures around bbs, moo, mud, usenet became almost invisible. Now, we are told that the web will vanish and only media with broadcasting qualities will survive. I push therefore I am. Surprisingly, the mailing list was always a push media, as successful and cost-effective as e-mail. The coming social information architectures will need a more hybrid, time-based and conceptual working/leisure environment which maps electronic intersubjectivity based on our needs and not the imaginative, inherent will of technique.
It is time that intellectuals rethink the relevance of their tools in a wider radius than linguistics. The apparatus of discourse gets extended today by new networks of power/knowledge which are still, compared with the world of print, very unimportant. This makes place for all kinds of experiments and the renovation of historical concepts. In a mix of historical, empirical, and speculative analysis we will try to map a likely and liked future of ‘online-publishing,’ beyond the static model of the web magazine (or the pre-formatted net-radio on demand). How will our social interface look like and how do we continue with our gift-economy? [from the meeting call]
Dialogue 8
dialogue with Terhi Penttila.
smart show online
Jason has put up some photos of Trey on a new web site (ed – no longer valid). Daze later. Working full tilt all the rest of the week. Saturday night. I joined in an online IRC conversation this morning at 0400 with people from the Finnish Artists Association MUU at a function at the Academy of Fine Art — the SMART SHOW OnLine — from on board the Silja Symphony cruise ship. It tore me out of deep sleep waking up at that hour, and then staying up for two hours talking on the keyboard and then on back to bed for a short nap before getting up and heading back into work.
Dialogue 7
dialogue with Willa Cline.
Dialogue 6
dialogue with Lily Diaz.
Dialogue 5
dialogue with George Saunders.
Dialogue 4
dialogue with Joy McManus.
Dialogue 3
The third Dialogue for PORT MIT, this one with Leslee Broersma, was supposed to have taken place today. Technical difficulties precluded it from happening in the form that I had planned.
Dialogue 2
dialogue with Josephine Bosma.
Dialogue 1
dialogue with Alexandra Thurman.
eight dialogues starts
The intro IRC test session was interesting. Willa showed up on her lunch break, Robbin, one of the PORT curators dropped in, and Terhi, from Helsinki appeared. There were some minor technical hiccups, but generally thing worked out. Josephine had some trouble, but it ended up that she was on the wrong network, and so couldn’t find us.
I stay indoors all day. Why is it that I don’t want to go out. I should. But IceLand has made me completely abhor being cold. Now, if it was 75F or hotter, I would be out. Shirt off, hat on. Sun screen on my poor over-exposed nose. But it is chilly out, and I can’t make myself go out. Whatever. I had dreams again last night, but they are lost in the brilliance of the sun rising up over Mingus Mountain across the valley. It is especially bright because of all the snow. Flagstaff, to the north got up to 40 inches of snow and is still held in that slow powdery embrace. Now I watch the Simpsons. What am I doing this for? My back is trashed sitting in the lab, I don’t have a good chair in there, and I think that is the main problem with my back. And so it goes. Fragments from public television:
His body is strong, and he loves it
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones
Adrianne posts me this excerpt of a review she has written about Blast for January’s Intelligent Agent — it includes:
_John Hopkins_, photographer and writer, proves an active theorist/theory activist as an artist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented – creating an empty space between one participant and the other which, in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art.
I am grateful that she takes the time and energy to not only support my work, but to actively frame it in within the context of her prodigious and ongoing experience in the arts.