Ed: For new subscribers, selecting the red dot in the middle of the map will start the audio sample which can then be controlled using the play-bar and volume/mute (speaker) icon.
crickets and photovoltaic drone
storm and swamp cooler
storm in the microwave vent
pressure cooker cooling
Chinook chopper
power transfer station
along bike path
running the rototiller
irrigation pump
artesian well head
thermos drying
dishwasher
router in bathroom
roofing guys next door
tourist choppers
Skyline Type Foundry
Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification
Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):
The Regime of Amplification
Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!
*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.
pruning a giant cottonwood
pruning a giant cottonwood
cleaning the sewer
sewer work
laundry machine
the shredder
The Agrarian Standard
The way of industrialism is the way of the machine. To the industrial mind, a machine is not merely an instrument for doing work or amusing ourselves or making war; it is an explanation of the world and of life. Because industrialism cannot understand living things except as machines, and can grant them no value that is not utilitarian, it conceives of farming and forestry as forms of mining; it cannot use the land without abusing it.
Industrialism prescribes an economy that is placeless and displacing. It does not distinguish one place from another. It applies its methods and technologies indiscriminately in the American East and the American West, in the United States and in India. It thus continues the economy of colonialism. The shift of colonial power from European monarchy to global corporation is perhaps the dominant theme of modern history. All along, it has been the same story of the gathering of an exploitive economic power into the hands of a few people who are alien to the places and the people they exploit. Such an economy is bound to destroy locally adapted agrarian economies everywhere it goes, simply because it is too ignorant not to do so. And it has succeeded precisely to the extent that it has been able to inculcate the same ignorance in workers and consumers.
Berry, W., 2002. The Agrarian Standard, Orion.
the printer
generator under I-70
Backup Disposition [redundant]
1 jhopkins – 63 Gb MAMBO K
2 jhopkins – MORAL (Time Machine) K
T2 jhopkins – 63 Gb G4 MUTANT K
3 jhopkins – 63 Gb G4 MARVIN K
3 jhopkins – 63 Gb MORAL K
950 / 700 GB
1 sounds&musik – 800 Gb METHUSELAH K
2 sounds&musik – 800 Gb MOCKERY K
3 sounds&musik – 800 Gb K
4 sounds&musik – 800 Gb MALRAUX K
2 all_dv_tapes – 685 Gb MOOG K
3 all_dv_tapes – 685 Gb MERCY K
1 all_dv_tapes – 685 Gb MARXIST K
4 all_dv_tapes – 685 Gb MANDALAY X
466 GB
1 archive_jh – 440 Gb MALTESE K
1 archive_jh – 440 Gb MATANUSKA K
2 archive_jh – 440 Gb MADDOG K
3 archive_jh – 440 Gb MORPHEUS K
4 archive_jh – 440 Gb MORAL K
1 projects – 301 Gb MALTESE K
1 projects – 301 Gb MATANUSKA K
2 projects – 301 Gb MADDOG K
3 projects – 301 Gb MARBLE
T4 projects – 301 Gb MUTANT K
233 GB
1 full_rez_video_archive – 211 Gb K
1 full_rez_video_archive – 211 Gb MATANUSKA K
2 full_rez_video_archive – 211 Gb MALRAUX K
T3 full_rez_video_archive – 211 Gb MIXTURE K
4 full_rez_video_archive – 211 Gb NEOSCENES_6 K
1 archive_akm – 180 Gb MODESTY
2 archive_akm – 180 Gb MUFTIE K
3 archive_akm – 180 Gb NEOSCENES_4 K
4 archive_akm – 180 Gb NEOSCENES_5 K
1 Hi8 – 168 Gb MOOG K
2 Hi8 – 168 Gb MODESTY K
3 Hi8 – 168 Gb MUFTIE K
4 Hi8 – 168 Gb MORTAL K
3 Hi8 – 168 Gb MADDOG K
152 / 114 GB
1 JAH video – 150 Gb NEOSCENES_2 K
2 JAH video – 150 Gb K MAXWELL K
3 JAH video – 150 Gb MORAL K
4 JAH video – 150 Gb MORTAL K
1 performance_material – 77 Gb MORTAL K
1 performance_material – 77 Gb MUTANT K
2 performance_material – 77 Gb MODESTY K
3 performance_material – 77 Gb MARBLE K
4 performance_material – 77 Gb NEOSCENES_1 K
1 nv_trip – 43 Gb – MODESTY K
2 nv_trip – 43 Gb – MUFTIE K
3 nv_trip – 43 Gb – MANIAC
3 nv_trip – 43 Gb – MUTANT K
1 installer – 38 Gb MAXWELL K
2 installer – 38 Gb MARBLE K
2 installer – 38 Gb MAMBO K
3 installer – 38 Gb NEOSCENES_5 K
4 installer – 38 Gb NEOSCENES_1 K
1 pal – 33.5 Gb MIXTURE K
1 pal – 33.5 Gb MOOG K
2 pal – 33.5 Gb MARBLE K
3 pal – 33.5 Gb K
4 pal – 33.5 Gb NEOSCENES_4 K
1 in-progress file – 20 Gb MALTESE K
1 in-progress file – 20 Gb MATANUSKA K
2 in-progress file – 20 Gb MALRAUX K
3 in-progress file – 20 Gb MIXTURE K
4 in-progress file – 20 Gb NEOSCENES_6 K
5 in-progress file – 20 Gb NEOSCENES_5 K
T1 ntsc – 9.72 Gb MIXTURE K
1 ntsc – 9.72 Gb MOOG K
1 ntsc – 9.72 Gb MODESTY K
2 ntsc – 9.72 Gb MARXIST K
4 ntsc – 9.72 Gb MALRAUX K
4 ntsc – 9.72 Gb NEOSCENES_4 K
escalator in Market Street Station
rail(road) work
refilling front tire
coal train and cars
coal train loading
barley in pressure cooker
coal train brakes (again)
another coal train
cleaning the sewer
hmmm?
Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:
Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.
sotto voce: If you want to dig (no pun intended) into this more, I’d highly recommend this audio/video panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:
https://csis.org/event/rare-earth-elements
It’s a good in-depth intro to this issue by a panel of three experts who look at the contemporary situation with rare earth elements (which do not include niobium and tantalum from coltan deposits). But it is basically the same idea/situation — in the sense of there being a rare resource, in demand by a multiplicity of large forces/powers, in places where local people are considered to be disposable commodities.
(I am not promoting their opinions, but they do describe the situation well from their point of view, both historical and today’s view)…
I believe it is worth it to consider the principle, not the details, in these areas of activism, as EVERY material that the techno-social system uses for re-forming matter causes a similar distortion of localized systems: That is, look around your home, what’s made out of metal, plastic, chemicals, paper, wood… etc etc, it all requires machines to make which require more metals, plastics, chemicals, etc. etc… which make necessary the entire range of the global extractives industry which is closely allied to WAR (of every kind — both aggressive overt weapons war as well as slow and equally deadly environmental degradation warfare).
Humans do this. It is not avoidable. The only factor that we have the power to influence is *how much* we use — of course, this *how much* does imply choosing one type of device over another. It also places the choice directly in our power. We can make choices, we can influence others to make choices. But as long as this discussion proceeds here on this (telecom-based) mailing list, we are being somewhat hypocritical. Of course, educating each other is paramount, but the best teaching methodology is to ‘practice what one preaches.’ Which puts us squarely in a very problematic position of having to implement radical change in our tele- lived lives or else continue to support large portions of this global system.
If you want to stop mining, then you have to stop telecommunications. You have to go back to an industrial base before rare earths and coltan were discovered and rendered fit for use. (1800 were the first discoveries, but little use came before the beginning of the 20th Century).
Otherwise, this process will simply continue and expand, along with demand, and along with all the horrific effects that the human struggle for control of resources entails everywhere…
hmmm. god that sounds bleak. sorry, but from this materialist approach to global problems, there are no solutions. It would seem that a Buddhist approach which posits that *all is change* and to try to grasp and manipulate or put off change is a futile process. We must simply move through this incarnation and while treating each other as best as we can, not get caught up in the grasping at illusion…
I don’t know. (I type on my laptop and stare at the letters string themselves across the screen…)
Puke Ariki – Day 4 – eNZed
Julian, Gregers , Heidi, and I do the drive up to New Plymouth to check out the Puke Ariki exhibition/library and museum complex in New Plymouth, on the north west coast. There is a street festival and some electronic media installations as well.
We meet Ian Clothier eventually for a beer and a tour of the data-installation connected to one of the Museum installations in Pukekura Park. He’s teaching at the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki
On the way back, Mount Taranaki is wreathed in a morphing cloud hat. We take a bit of time to drive to the Egmont National Park visitor’s center halfway up the east flank, and take a short walk into the forest. Marvelous vibe under the trees. The exotic feel comes from the strange vegetation.
The drive crosses mostly land that was originally forested, but is now stripped dairy farm land, the product of which is shipped to China and elsewhere. There are milk-trains crossing the land every few minutes. The Fonterra dairy factory is reputed to be the largest of its kind in the world.
Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3
February 18
L.A. notes, again . . . one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article . . . test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert . . . but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends don’t work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won’t make it . . . especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York . . . the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end—of anything.
Thompson, H.S., 1991. Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American dream, New York, NY: Pocket Books.
The narrative elsewhere in this blog lacks the edge that Thompson eventuated in his published works. Compact bursts of driving prose—the energy of which does not rely on the gonzo subject material—but instead brings directly to life the internal processes of be-ing and places them in direct juxtaposition with the madness of what’s out there. This is the trick: and it is precisely this trick, when the two flows are brought together, synthesized, and ultimately exposed to oxygen to be reduced and transformed into a sustenance for the human spirit.
That spirit is then taken to places it needs to go—not where the mutations of socialized comparison point it to, not where material consumption takes it, not where fear in all its phantasmal coloration deLights to compress the soul into. The soul needs to be able to expand, not contract. And it should have within itself a means to source for this infinite expansion. Should, would, could. For the infinite, there are no means, there is only the denominated will of the spirit—which, in the end, forces a division by zero.
And that’s an illegitimate operation. As is Gonzo generally.
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”
twiddling thumbs for the Knighthood
In art and literature the problem is different. On the one hand, freedom is more possible, because the authorities are not asked to provide expensive apparatus. But on the other hand merit is much more difficult to estimate. The older generation of artists and writers is almost invariably mistaken as to the younger generation: the pundits almost always condemn new men who are subsequently judged to have outstanding merit. For this reason such bodies as the French Academy or the Royal Academy are useless, if not harmful. There is no conceivable method by which the community can recognize the artist until he is old and most of his work is done. The community can only give opportunity and toleration. It can hardly be expected that the community should license every man who says he means to paint, and should support him for his daubs however execrable they may be. I think the only solution is that the artist should support himself by work other than his art, until such time as he gets a knighthood. He should seek ill-paid half-time employment, live austerely, and do his creative work in his spare time. Sometimes less arduous solutions are possible: a dramatist can be an actor, a composer can be a performer. But in any case the artist or writer must, while he is young, keep his creative work outside the economic machine and make his living by work of which the value is obvious to the authorities. For if his creative work affords his official means of livelihood, it will be hampered and impaired by the ignorant censorship of the authorities. The most that can be hoped — and this is much — is that a man who does good work will not be punished for it. — Bertrand Russel (1968, p. 66-67)
Russell, B., 1968. The Impact of Science on Society, New York: AMS Press, Inc.
Thanks for that positive, pragmatic, and ultimately true statement of current affairs. Fifty years later. We can only hope.
playing with the words
An engineer who has given us the entire…
Un-named engineers …
Engineer as a causative agent…
From Middle English engin < Old French engin (“skill”, “cleverness”, “war machine’”) < Latin ingenium (“innate or natural quality, nature, genius, a genius, an invention, in LL. a war-engine, battering-ram”) < ingenitum, past participle of ingignere (“to instil by birth, implant, produce in”); see ingenious. Engine originally meant ‘ingenuity, cunning’ which eventually developed into meaning ‘the product of ingenuity, a plot or snare’ and ‘tool, weapon’.
From The Regime of Amplification to The Road
[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]
Abstract
The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.
Introduction
The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.
The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”
CLUI: Day Twenty-Seven
The platoon practices having their fixed machine-gun and observation emplacement attacked from a line of tamarisk bushes about 100 meters north towards the rail line and the interstate. Overhead, fighters prowl and engage. The heavy machine gun shakes the windows. The assault rifles sound like small fire-crackers in comparison.
heavy machine-guns
CLUI: Day Thirteen
A long cycle ride south from South Base, the (doh!) southern part of the airbase. Into the region down-range of the heavy machine-gun target range and where fragments of mock-up Little Boy bombs (prepped with high explosives, not nukes) may be found along with tens of thousands of rounds of oxidized-green-sheathed bullets scattered everywhere on the surface of the playa. The cycling is a bit surreal when surrounded by mountains floating on silver lakes. Lots of effort into the wind, but otherwise, it’s a flat out ride. Slight differences in the surface texture, and then the human altered areas — the dikes and drainage berms of the saline concentrating solar evaporation ponds.
Then there are the bunkers and V-1 test area. Matt said the casinos use a couple bunkers for records storage, as does the city of Wendover. The Simparch-designed CLUI South Base Clean Livin’ center is a cool space — completely self-contained with a PV electricity system, gray water recycling system, and a composting toilet. Along with the refurbished Quonset hut it makes for a homey post-nuclear space for quiet meditation.
Clui: Day Five — tangential contact
In the sonic realm, this part of the western desert (the spatial extent defined by precipitation at least) seems, at first, quiet. Stepping out of the car after a bruising day of fighting the wheel, ah, only the susurration of blood pumping in the ears. But, despite this initial impression, human intrusion in the western desert is never silent. The ambient pre-human sonic domain is defined by a few animals making occasional signals “I am here.” Ravens and coyotes are perhaps the noisiest, with others following in a rapidly declining decibel range. Wind is mostly, literally, in the ear of the beholder as a register of turbulent flow around the aural orifice but occasionally one is in a place where the wind makes some secondary sound (in a riparian regime, in seasonal leaves, or whistling around a certain rock formation, but these are rare and difficult to record without exceptional and expensive equipment). Otherwise, then, there is only the human incursion. This incursion is typically related to the movement of those intrusive humans through the domain as few have the desire to stop and actually hear silence. The few who volunteer or are forced to stop for a longer time are not necessarily prone to sonic disturbances, though that group, as a whole, are dominated by willing or unwilling participants in the military-industrial machine. The balance, a small remainder, are likely seeking the silence. The members of the machine make plenty of noise via everything from weapon systems testing to mining to toxic waste incineration, but access to these secretive sonic sources are for the select, not the transitory rabble.
Those engaged in field recording are left with the experience of tangential contact. That is, functioning as a stationary point, recording the arrival and departure of a nearby transport vector — trains, planes, and cars. Given the proper conditions, especially the lack of wind, these can make interesting (and startling) recordings. Trucks may be heard many miles away and render an impossibly slow Doppler shifting that is also modulated by differential density and velocity metrics of the intervening air. Planes are often more difficult as the most dramatic contact is with the low-flying fighter aircraft which will show up practically without warning and are so loud that recording is impossible. The db peak of that tangential contact pegs the meter. Before the air-to-ground missiles are launched at you, the target, and field incursions become moot.
So, what to do? Muddle along. Hit the casinos. Though I’ve been tossed out of those in the distant past for making photographs, the H4 Zoom looks suspicious, so I think it also will attract attention from security for sure. Ach.
innovation
Fundamental innovations almost always seem to come from outside the established market leaders, who suffer ‘path dependency.’ Established firms are usually too committed to a particular conception of what their product is. This commitment is embedded in its manufacturing process and endemic in the thinking of its managers. When a major innovation appears, a leading firm understands the technology, but remains committed to its product and its production system.
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Nye, David E., MIT Press, Boston, 2006.
Technology, at base, may be defined as a means or pathway to gather and concentrate the (productive) energies of individuals in a social grouping. The difference between inventions lost in the detritus of history and those that become widely integrated in a social system is not necessarily related to the efficiency of the technology itself. The primary difference lies in the efficiency with which the broader social system uses the technological pathway as an effective means of tapping into the individual energies of the population. The broader social system is usually controlled by a subset of people, elites, who impose the pathway on the whole (and who tap off a surplus of energy from the pathway). It is controlled by those who define the pathway of flow. Set pathways have come into being to benefit those who are accessing the concentrated powers they provide. When a pathway is set, it has a built-in inertia which more-or-less resists alteration. This inertia is a mapping of a (counter-(r)evolutionary) resistance of human systems to change. The resistance comes from the relationship of energy flow that the pathway is defining. Individuals participating in either giving and receiving energy are reluctant to change the architecture of that relationship: it is a symbiotic relationship. There can be no receivers without those willing to give their life-energy and attentions to the receivers. Change comes hard. Innovation, the tendency to seek (newer and more) optimal pathways, is always negatively affected by this resistance to some degree. A(ny) technological pathway, once fixed upon, is adapted to and becomes the norm. (The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster is a nice fictional sketch of this from 1900.)
Nye addresses many other topics aside from innovation, so I’ll be picking through his book in the next days.
temporary suspension
(this was the final posting to the travelog on the hybrid php/html platform p-machine pro before the tech-no-mad blog was initiated)
apologies for the lack. you have no-doubt noticed the dearth of entries here. no travel, no entries, no kangaroos. all energy goes into the tech-no-mad blog at this point in support of the doctoral research. you may tune in there for tidbits and fragments sampled from the wide range of inputs sliced through. here will remain dormant for a time, methinks. besides that, reflecting back on prior situations also dominated by remoteness. how there is no solution in distance. face-to-face has to ensue. sooner than later. (b)logging miles to return home where ever that place (of heart) might be. or not. e.e.cummings comes to mind, or so, while the Western Slope recedes from same. but without stretching abilities, formative pathways, expressive outputs, little will come. the ecology of words is not sustainable. whilst closing in on 2 million hits to this project (since 2004), gawd knows the total since inception in 1994!