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
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

pre-CLUI logistics

Prepping for CLUI. Planning the route to get there, looking at Google, marking trajectories, downloading info on the National Forest areas. Bookmarking relevant info. Scanning the weather charts, prepping the vehicle. Fluid top-ups, system checks, gnarly winter tires on (gas mileage goes down, argh). Weather does not look good at all. Late winter travel is never risk-free. Pacific storms can roll in every three or four days around this time of the year — and one of these can paralyze travel for many days at a time, depending on the intensity.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

oblivion

month’s ending. All Hallows. images accruing in a form to share — 1996 (of this travelog) will be augmented first. complications with Berlin logistics, may throw off the November trip. and force a cancellation of Transmediale collaboration, hmmm. recalls the cafe9.net debacle in 1999.

end of the month, Friday.

finished with the DFW immersion. Oblivion is a brilliant set of stories, each one containing numerous positions, layers, points-of-view, (what to call the vantage of his voice/eye?). maybe the term channels applies. he has a multi-tasking eye, picking up information not just at the focal point of optics, but instead, immaculate macular generation. he has the recall, along with synthesis. imagination? springing from impression and spreading out through spaces which have not been mapped in that exact way. an example of voice-declaiming-self’s-model-of-cosmos. with a pivotal crux for the entire collection coming on page 326:

‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.

Wallace, D.F., 2005. Oblivion: stories, New York: Back Bay.

the deeply buried oblivion of our situation, now. everywhere. whenever. a weepy sad sketch of the human conditions. here, now. whenever. and a stiff finger punched into the chest of gloating cultural superiority. it all falls down.

how to push shaped impulse charges out, through the gate of psyche. and while pushing out, receive direct all the more.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Nan Hoover 1931-2008


I am shocked to hear via Raul that Nan Hoover just passed away. I had just talked to her on the telephone back in April she was just back in town after setting up her show in Salzburg, and we were going to get together after not crossing paths for some years. lung cancer and the ensuing chemo took her away in five weeks.

A condolences site is set up.

we first met through a very bizarre coincidence back in 1991 or so. MB and I were traveling in Germany and were up in Düsseldorf for a day, I don’t recall why. we were in the neighborhood of the Academy, so I thought it would be interesting to see this place where Nam June Paik (was teaching) and Joseph Beuys (had taught). the place was empty as we wandered around the halls. at some point I saw a name tag on a door that said Nan Hoover, and I recognized the name as this American video/performance artist. it was the only door with a Light shining out from under, so I knocked. Nan answered the door and I introduced myself mentioning right off that I was from Iceland and was at the Icelandic Academy teaching electronic media. she practically fell over. she and her student assistant, Paschutan Buzari had just at that moment been talking about the trip they were planning to Iceland, and that they didn’t have any direct contacts at the Academy. needless to say, a synchronous event which was a nice start to our connection. I subsequently did much of the ground logistics for the two week trip. the photo above is a group portrait of Nan (with some of her students and Icelandic friends along with MB and Loki (who was at that moment all of 5 days old!)). It was taken on the top of Perlan in Reykjavík. I hosted the student group at the Icelandic Academy where we had a nice collective happening at the end of their visit. and before that some field trips and visions of the Northern Lights among other activities. Nan and the students stayed in a couple flats that the Academy had right behind our house on Holmgardi. I arranged for her to do a screening and public talk at the Nylistasafn in Reykjavík as well. I later went to Düsseldorf a number of times to visit with her classes, as well as meeting her back in Amsterdam a few times.

re-reading the letters I was sending to Nan back then, somewhere packed away in the archive are her letters to me. her work is profoundly energized and a fundamental exploration of Light and change (the video and installation work). I would really like to get to Salzburg to see the show that she is sharing with Bill Viola. I never saw any of her live performance work. time passing. life passing.

A memory of standing in early autumn darkness in Reykjavik, behind my house, watching the Aurora Borealis with Nan and some of her students. Years later, she leaves us, and it occurs to me that through all the ways that she manifest for us, she was explicitly revealing the nature of Light as a process of living and of life. Black absorbs the energy of Light: she spent her life re-radiating that Light in a variety of splendid forms for us to be inspired by. Her vision of Light is profound and it thankfully resonates through all those who encountered her or her work. Thank you Nan for that and for our last phone call.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

hooligans

A long stroll to the Hauptbahnhof for tomorrow’s tickets. End up using the electronic ticket machine which leaves me with exactly no change because it doesn’t take EUR 100 bills. Fortunately I have exactly the cost, EUR 87.50 from Kiel to Aachen. Should have gotten a rail card 4-days/one-month it would have saved me a bit, too late now.

Muttering German phrases, words, repeating to self the texts on signs. Down to the harbor, ever so often, becoming mindful, not enough, but bringing the breathing and the hyper pace down a few levels, and deepening the breathing and shifting the worldview. On the way down there are several conglomerations of police in full riot gear. Apparently a football match between Lübeck and Kiel is taking place today. The police presence is overwhelming, and at the Hauptbahnhof there are at least 100 officers deployed, forming a press to search fans as they get off the train from Lübeck. Some are outfitted in dark green cloth-covered body armor, some are in black. No clear difference between the two uniforms. They mostly are large and imposing figures, a few women among the men. The football fans repeatedly break out in hoarse and echoing chants. The police escort the city buses to the stadium with riot vans, along with officers filming everything on dv-cams.

The sonic ambience is interesting. Getting good use out of the Zoom H4 (Ed: redundant link, now to the H4n-Pro which is way better than the discontinued H4). It seems to get pretty decent sound with the built-in microphones. I have yet to try the external phantom miking possibilities. Now it’s a question of getting the content online, though, I’m way behind on that, when each day is full of in-ma-face email pressures and logistics issues. So it goes!

(00:05:05, stereo audio, 10.5 mb)

Then Björn sends very dramatic footage from the riots in Copenhagen, right from his flat overlooking Sankt Hans Torv. He caught some of the molotov cocktails going off and some rude crowd action until the tear gas forced him to close his window.

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

re-colonization

things have not really started for ISEA’06, but I head down to San Jose on a shake-down run and to see who is around already. the drive and parking logistics are a bit complicated, so it is good to construct an operational head-map without the pressure of schedule. public transportation in central San Jose is revived along with the recent urban renewal that appears to be taking place. a re-colonization by huge shiny-skinned office buildings, no real community thriving are the foot of these gleaming beasts. just restaurants to cater to the convention crowds. food shopping? no chance for that in this infotainment core. immediately outside there are the remains of a pre-existing indigenous community.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

moving on

finally broke down and bought a copy of Geert’s book and was pleased with his working of the New Media Education chapter. trying to ready new material for the Overgaden Sound Festival which I am co-curating with Björn, though I haven’t been too busy. at least with that, more, all the other things coming up in the immediate future — RAM6 in Vilnius, the residency in Akureyri, the Matchmaking Festival workshop in Trondheim, several video festivals to submit the new dvd to, logistics, spring schedules beginning to be made, taxes to be finished, some texts to write, and all the other stuff that is always hanging there, like this web space. as it creeps toward its ten-year anniversary.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

no stars

drawing the window shade at 0030 last night. no stars. the annealed blue of a shotgun barrel reflecting moonLight. no stars. they won’t come back until late July, early August. the whining drone of summer has arrived. only a week more here, time fills up completely with last minute meetings and time spent arranging the ensuing logistics of travel. many will not be seen. until the next passage through this region.

an other day. the birch tree outside the window begins to leave, fully. leaven, lather, laughter of the children playing on the swings and in the sandbox. in the courtyard, under the tree. staying home. saying Bohm in mind and finding more support for dialogue. which takes place in silence and sufferation.

I do not accept any absolute formulas for living. No preconceived code can see ahead to everything that can happen in a person’s life. As we live, we grow and our beliefs change. They must change. So I think we should live with this constant discovery. We should be open to this adventure in heightened awareness of living. We should stake our whole existence on our willingness to explore and experience. — Martin Buber

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

the Elder

We use narratives to impose order on our circumstances, and that will to impose order on reality (instead of discovering order in experience and attempting to conform oneself to that order) is characteristic of modernity. — Bruce Elder

narrative as a form (well, form itself has the explicit ‘meaning’ as an ‘outcome of a human re-configuration of energies,’ an intervention). so, although there are a plethora of po-mo critiques of narrative, and a certain level of critical art-making around/against narrative. even e-narrative and the hyper-text — that free and utopian post-narrative writing environment is fundamentally mired in the same ‘problem’ of having this applied form. it’s the same! Elder’s name comes up, synonymous in my pantheon with Brakhage, partly through formal connections, but also in the energized lived experience of his film work. only frustrating that nothing substantial of his writings are online. so, not available to me here. found a paper copy for sale of a short monograph that he wrote for the epic 42-hour “The Book of All The Dead” film on the occasion of it’s screening at the Anthology Archive in 1988 (a show that I was at and subsequently had coffee with Bruce later at his hotel). would not have missed that, as it was the last installment of the work, the first 19 hours of which he premiered at Boulder one weekend back in 1987. reel after reel, sitting in a small classroom with about 8 other people. transformative experience. a primal inspiration for subsequent duration-related works undertaken. pushing mind and body through many limits. buried in my archive is a copy of that document, it was required reading in one class in 1997 at CU, and I would like to make it available online if Bruce agrees. but that’s another time issue, when there are more pressing things to deal with. like logistics, as usual. most plane tickets are purchased to get me through the summer, but there is still the extant question about teaching in Tallinn before I leave this region; sending out emails about scheduling gigs for the next academic year; participating in an online conference at V2, and in several online events as well; presenting at RAM5 in Riga in a week, and so on.

massaging the database. updating all contact information. what else for the archivist to do? something that has been wanting for years. re-contacting folks, mostly making open distribution channels for current energy.

sun up early. real early, comes in exactly to strike the eyes as it rises over the roof of the quarters opposite ours on the courtyard. that Lightening buzz begins to stir somewhere in the troposphere.

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

nomadology

Slogging through the people database/archive: updating addresses, web sites, emails, along with short are you alive? messages that pulse out into the network. To re-establish long-quiet pathways, to cut dead connections, and to establish new conduits and nodes. And so, run across things, reminders, blips, clicks, and pops, along with re-radiations, re-compilations, and re-mixes. Not sure what the outcome is, but, for the archivist, having an archive that is up-to-date is a critical condition to maintain along the with connecting to the actual people leaving archived traces.

Continuing to gather video material. Running into new material, the old resting in peace, on idling servers.

These nomads chart their course by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics – and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises. — Peter Wilson, TAZ

Dinner last night with Sophea, Teemu, Andrea, and Alison, followed by the usual race for the ferry.

Early bright morning ensues, not much later. Up with the sun, a serious matter in springtime at this latitude. What else to do: Todaze slip in yesterdaze. Time to leave a new pathway into the space of dreams.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Helsinki, Finland

isea press conference

Still on the verge of rolling things over to another server. At the isea2004 press conference this morning. There’s the Helsinki crew. The expense places the event off the map for me coming from the US. Looks like I’ll just be going to Iceland in the fall, on the Akureyri residency, not back to Finland. So. Now begin the logistics of the alternative plan.

After an intense conversation break with Sophea at Corona, dinner at Atabar with Tapio, Minna, Sophea, and a couple Brits who are deploying a “locative media” project for isea.

posted
  • place: en route Berlin - Hamburg - Kiel, Germany

ignoring things

back to Kiel via Hamburg, on the train once again. having also once again not done much there at all except meet intensively with a small group of other humans and speaking, exchanging energies with them. ideas like forms of deep-praxis, life-changing practices, and ways of communicating my ideas in more visceral ways come up. and logistics, and that flow, analog and continuous, of life, forward, and the sensual information that feeds into that.

the music that I encoded at Wolfgang’s is quite electric/eclectic. like listening to KCRW radio. in Santa Monica. where eyes opened to other forms of thinking and being. about as experimental as you can get.

like having the students choose an energy source, and give weekly reports on it to the others. or, as arose in Kiel as well, that image of the two cans with a string between them. communications-at-a-distance.

hearing last night the depth of living under the weight of manifest fears in Bogota. how that goes deeply into re-arranging the body’s energy state. we may stand, consciously apart from the body, but eventually it comes back to connect with that removed consciousness. with a vengeance if it has been ignored too long. saying, DOn’t IGNORE THE LIMITATIONS OF SENSUAL PRESENCE, yep.

passing a massive antenna installation a bit the the north of the rail line. military, and probably extreme long wavelength array for submarine or global communications. a relic of the past? like the landstrasse lined with the Linden trees. and the fallow, wild fields. a higher level of wildness and disorder. than in the former West, still. nice.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

logistics

now the incredibly obnoxious work of arranging flights for my up-coming movements around Iceland-Germany-Switzerland-Finland. always a problem making such arrangements.

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavík - Akureyri, Iceland

floating silence

in the north, a mellow plane flight over a white-on-white landscape. sun rising. always conscious that clock-time is off from sun-time here. humans delegated that GMT rules, when, by global position, high noon comes at 1330. makes the mornings dark and thick in the winter, no doubt. arriving, Helgi meets me at the airport, and straight to school with a cup of coffee, and jump into the delayed workshop. rolling through several topics and introductions. working online afterward, then happen by dinner with Helgi and his family. on to the guest flat which is quite nice, like the one in Tornio. getting significant email done — critical business things crowd in. related to the movement that is about to break on me in 11 days or so. logistics. and in several conversations during the last couple weeks, I understand that I have reached a critical point in creativity. it’s not there! the ability to reflect, meditate, ponder, let the mind float in silence has crept away. not noticed, as I was busy doing other things.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

psychic nomadism

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. finally getting around to exploring the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why real music is inevitably dangerous to readers). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar. more “psychic nomadism”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

logistics again

tomorrow Trondheim. day begins at midnight, looking out at the city, power plant to the south: cloud-factories I call them. belching clouds. work one hour into the new day and then quit. bad night sleep. complications with the schedule in Netherlands in March already. fragile, each little complication threatens to unravel the little security I have achieved lately. and is just a bother when plans go awry. ooooommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm. center, center, breathe, breathe. blow-up. then a long warm embrace.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

logistics

on hold with an airline. the airline I most like to hate: Icelandair. with the most self-righteous monopolistic attitude of any air carrier I have had the misfortune to deal with. grrrrrrrr. travel arrangements in my face already, scarcely two weeks of so-called vacation down.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

cranial UV

Emailing begins to dominate my daily existence — planning the logistics of future movement — 13 plane flights in three weeks or so. I am tired in some ways that must be reflecting the arrival not of spring, but of SUMMER to Colorado. Here, in Lapland, there is something of spring in the Light, but nowhere is there grass to crash onto and stare into the platinum sky glaring with the blue Arctic sun. And besides, the intensity of the ultra-violet radiation of the Arctic is of a kind which drills small, hypodermic-sized holes through my cranium immediately around the edges of the eye-socket of my right eye, where subsequently blue-white-hot Light leaks in or is even injected to burn directly the optic nerve, no mediation through the crystal lens, but direct electromagnetic radiation of raw receptors.