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  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

All things

I had this lined up as part of a draft for Rocktalk, but with only a week left at the j-o-b, I’ll use it here:

Nature will be reported. All things are engaged in writing their history. The planet, the pebble, goes attended by its shadow. The rolling rock leaves its scratches on the mountain; the river, its channel in the soil; the animal, its bones in the stratum; the fern and leaf their modest epitaph in the coal. The falling drop makes its sculpture in the sand or the stone. Not a foot steps into the snow, or along the ground, but prints in characters more or less lasting, a map of its march. Every act of the man inscribes itself in the memories of his fellows and in his own manners and face. The air is full of sounds; the sky, of tokens; the ground is all memoranda and signatures; and every object covered over with hints, which speak to the intelligent …. In nature, this self-registration is incessant, and the narrative is the print of the seal.

The complete works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Representative Men [Vol. 4] Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 1803-1882., Emerson, Edward Waldo, 1844-1930.
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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

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.

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The Value of Nothing

Consider this example: My cell phone company gives me a free handset, bristling with features, so I become a regular contract subscriber or buyer of pay-as-you-go minutes. I am pleased, not least because I can now navigate through the city without having to remember where I am, and I have the pleasure of palming the latest little gadget. In order for those features to work, I’ll have to pay a little bit more, to buy either an app or bandwidth. Clearly, many people think it’s worth it. Indeed, there’s a cell phone arms race, in which increasingly swanky phones become socially necessary. These new phones come with new applications and uses that, again, become socially indispensable for the user, and the permanent sources of revenue for the provider. In the United States in 2007, cell phone expenditure per customer reached six hundred dollars per year (surpassing that of a landline for the first time). That’s a lot of cash, which gets divided out fairly unevenly. more “The Value of Nothing”

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  • place: en route Carrizo Plains National Monument - Lava Bed Mountains, Mojave Desert, California

Christmas fault

morning fog retreats north, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California, December 2010

dislocated, and wind-blown to another place (in the night). retrospecting from a great distance. not a travelog, but a long narrative story in pieces. a different kind of writing, but not too different: carrying some mapping of the movements imposed by life as it is/was. question: would all the fragments, displayed, end up having a meaning? or would they remain fragmented, and infinitely far from the lived life? can the flow that one feels while passing through this immediate temporal region be truly experienced by an Other, or not.

the San Andreas Fault dominates the feel of this place, though it is only a scarp of low hills cut by displaced drainage washes. I didn’t get to a focal point of the flat valley floor, a complicated outcrop with a sizable pictograph/petroglyph wall up near the entrance to the Monument. it has restricted access, and was closed when I came into the valley. but today, head further south to the southern exit from the valley, where the dirt track parallels the fault scarp a hundred meters to the east. the displaced gullies cannot be immediately decoded by their odd shapes — where the topography is shifting north/south 33-to-37 mm per year. ya’ gotta run to keep up!

Follow the fault scarp east-south-east across the Grapevine and down into the Mojave near Victorville, and end up in a very isolated area of the near Mojave — up at altitude, so it’s very cold and very windy, though that’s nothing new in the High Mojave in December. Simply unload the back of the truck enough to curl up and sleep.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

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.

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  • 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”

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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”

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On The Poetics of Protocol

How to transcend the rigidity of extant and defined protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is an emetic for it; or at least poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol. Or simply turning away to create a new protocol. But this threatens social viability. This is a critical issue as protocol underlies all techno-social deployments. All. And the affect of protocol, its genesis, its makers, its purview, all contribute to the formation of a (dominant) worldview that it imposes a(n arbitrary) frame of reference upon the participant in the particular techno-social system. On the other hand, life without protocols: an impossible situation for social animals (or any animal, for that matter — a protocol may be thought of as a way of going, whether self-directed or directed by innate sense and following the line of maximized entropy production).

This conundrum applies to all (socially) evolved protocols, no matter the genesis. It means that this pervades and saturates, all experiences of being (except perhaps for the pre-human, or over-human). On The Poetics of Protocol, a working title moving towards a core thematic. Using the metaphor of a sliding scale, at one end, chaotic ways of going, at the other, completely prescribed ways of going, life falls somewhere in between.

Having to jump between several points-of-view — the tremendous volume of applicable writing on the range of subjects; a strong, principled, and unifying overview tied to idiosyncratic personal experiences; and, finally, the mental focus required to tie all this jetsam together — the jump has to be transformed into a creatively complied micro-narrative. But looking around at the plethora of source materials is always discouraging — in form and content. The inability to structure my own content into a form consistent with the material that I consume is disturbing, though idiosyncratic expression is one of the goals for PhD research. (Inconsistency has potential to uncover innovative spaces and may be used as a strategic tool or approach.) So this can be viewed as a strategic advantage in the creative interpretation and packaging of the material. Content-wise, I am confident of the presence of something to say, as well as a subsequent pathway-of-action reflecting what is said. Daunting task none-the-less, from any vantage.

Seeing from more than one point-of-view requires motion or at least movement between points of stasis. Does the establishment of a point-of-view require a cessation of movement? (Motion of course is completely relative regarding point-of-view: life is never static so point-of-view never absolutely static.)

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affects and intentions

The idea comes that I can place different narratives and sonifications in the aporee context, making a global mapping of ideas mixed with sounds mixed with voices. But somehow this seems flat. Not that the platform lacks some aesthetic appeal, but the tendency would be to continue the same old process of archive-building (with the same old criteria of acquisition of material). Or, I thought about making a performative series in the Speakers Corner in the Domain. Still, the best idea to this moment is the one where I would simply engage with this material with one Other, expanding on it, presenting it in a dialogic setting, and reproducing that. Or this dialogic situation as a live performative undertaking with an audience.
more “affects and intentions”

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  • place: Columbia, Missouri

Randy Olson

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attend a screening last night of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos at the RagTag Cinema in Columbia. he was in attendance. and again this morning, he gave a presentation for science academics at the university as a part of their Darwin Days (where the Chair of the Life Sciences Department pointed out they were not allowed to say “celebration” but rather “commemoration”). the film’s premise was to map out the way both sides of the evolution/creationist divide are communicating and presenting their POV to the public. scientists are shown to be poor communicators, creationists shown to be poor communicators except for some who know the value of style and appearance (the Discovery Institute being the chief antagonists posing as a non-partisan think-tank). they are the ones leading the issues. in the same way Republicans have been successful in constructing the narratives guiding the story-following population to the conservative Nirvana. Olson, a former Harvard PhD biologist transitioned to Hollywood via a degree at USC’s film school. he now tells stories that bridge the divide between science and the general public. but the leap from stories to action — stories that form a context for action — well, there is generally a passivity that is a condition of listening/watching a story recitation. listening to stories has to stop at some point. so, the story has to have a transitional mechanism leading to action. how does that work? telling a story and have action arise out of the exchange of energies. the attentive focus of absorbing a story transforming into world-changing action. in the evening Nick and I catch the screening of Sizzle also by Olson. overheard today:

mass media is directed at the pelvic floor, but what about having Kegels for Consciousness…?

later a repaired drum appears, as does a Tibetan singing bowl, and a basket full of instruments. resonant sound-making ensues.

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  • place: Columbia, Missouri

more stories

the festival ends with a long eye-vibrating day — War Against the Weak, Crude, and Burma VJ. I babysit the kids (and watch Lord of the Rings with them way too late for a school night, but don’t tell anyone!) while Nick and Deb go out to the closing party. documentary film is a bit foreign to my mind, after years of work in non-narrative experimental moving images. intriguing to be presented with stories, those basic forms of human communication versus the chaotic release of non-linear stimulation. perhaps there is a dialectic in this — juxtaposing a need to have (socially) structured and chronological sensory input versus flows that are not really predictable (though safe in the sense that they are only optical/aural inputs and not full sensory inputs). different people have different capacities for absorbing change and facing the unknown. is it merely that we have been conditioned as media consumers to the form of the filmic story? or is there some core stimulus that compels us to remain attached to the trajectory traced by the story-teller?

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Studs Turkel 1912 – 2008

A consummate sonic artist and Chicagoan, Studs Turkel moved on to other narratives yesterday. if you have the time, delve into some of the audio archives of his interviews with everyday folks as well as famous people as he illuminated the stories that together weave the history of the US.

a small observation with an important caveat:

I’ve always felt, in all my books, that there’s a deep decency in the American people and a native intelligence — providing they have the facts, providing they have the information. — Studs Turkel

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

High School & the Élites

finally done with getting 430 images from my senior year at Gaithersburg High School. I was the Photography Editor for the yearbook, and had originally wanted to get all the images up and running for the 30-year reunion, but never made that deadline. the scanning followed by the retouching work was mind-numbing and has been on my To-Do list for these two years as an escape from more important work, yet it never seemed to get finished until last weekend, after getting a nice email from Renee who had stumbled on the images that I did have up, I was determined to finish the damn project.

when do personal histories become interesting? scandal, documentation of publicly shared events, the historical record, curiosity, obsession. where the volume of material becomes overwhelming. nah. it is the compelling character of the narrative. story-telling. no stories here, only images. and notes rattled off after things seen. (guess what I saw?)

and BTW, George has this nice riff in the New Yorker (that, of course, only Élites read, so, hmmm, how’s that?) But he asks the all-important policy questions (largely ignored as we float down the main stream): Do you know the difference between me and a Hockey Mom who has forgot her lipstick?

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

Hearts, Lungs and Minds

A half-hour ‘composed documentary’ for radio by John Wynne on Between the Ears, BBC Radio 3, June 21 at 8:30pm BST. the original broadcast is over, but until 28 June you can listen to this very fine mix somewhere between documentary and sonic art.

Sound artist John Wynne and photographer Tim Wainwright were artists-in-residence for one year at Harefield Hospital, one of the world’s leading centers for heart and lung transplants. They listened to patients, to the devices they’re attached to or have implanted in them, and to the hospital itself.

Hearts, Lungs and Minds explores the experiences of transplant patients and the extraordinary issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure. It weaves intensely personal narratives, often recorded at the bedside, with the sounds of the hospital environment, which can have an enormous effect on patients, shifting unpredictably from comforting to irritating, from reassuring to alarming.

All of the people whose voices you will hear have had a heart or lung transplant — or both — or else were waiting for one when they were recorded. Some have died, most are doing well. All of the sounds originated in the hospital; sometimes they are abstracted as the piece explores the boundaries between documentary and radio art.

To listen online https://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/betweentheears/

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

after the full moon

This was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

And, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

sotto voce (to brainstorms): A quick thought popped up as I struggle with some texts, sitting here in my sublet flat in east Berlin. As a person, I like to have the last word. What a lousy habit! In the learning situation, I consciously ask for someone, at the end of a class, to have the last word. I am thinking I will incorporate this more formally — to the degree that I pose the question (either to a volunteer or not) “S_, How about if you make a short (one minute) statement that you consider to be the last words for our session?”

When I’ve been doing this very informally, the reactions are quite interesting, with people vying for a last word a bit (people being anxious to leave and such), and then suddenly a consensus forms and the class ends. I think I’ll have to play with that idea/dynamic. I have the feeling it could be a powerful tool to impress (literally) the learning session into the self.

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Simon’s Bar Mitzvah

head hanging, I have the distinct mis-pleasure of missing my godson’s Bar Mitzvah this coming weekend. hmmmm. lack of disposable income to increase carbon foot-print-stamp and head East. that’ll come shortly perhaps. but in the meanwhile, Andrea (Simon’s mum) shares her script for the evening (mind you, the photo above post-dates the beginning of this narrative a couple years — around the Buttinsky-Hoppy-Top & Armpit Dancing Era), that’s dad, Bill with big bro Zander along with Simon in his mother’s arms, lil’ sis Maxie is still in the oven):

Simon Arthur gracefully slid into the world on May 2, 1994. He had a powerful set of lungs, but he didn’t get much chance to talk those first few years. Zander was his big brother, and rarely missed an opportunity to speak on Simon’s behalf. Simon had to learn other ways to capture an audience. Silent, sly, comical ways. He innately understood the power of nudity to gain the spotlight, and used it regularly. It was the rare gathering in our house, or anyone elses house for that matter, that Simon did not make the scene if not fully undressed, then in his tiny little briefs. Whether it was his stunningly fast Ninja moves — which often had the unintended result of landing him on his own back — or his oddly endearing Armpit dance, Simon relished entertaining the crowd his way.
more “Simon’s Bar Mitzvah”

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  • place: San Jose, California

May Day at Cadre

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Head down to San Jose State University Art & Design Department to the Cadre Laboratory for New Media run by Joel Slayton for a seminar in their Speaker Salon presented by two of the principles of Neighborhood Public Radio, Lee Montgomery, and Jon Brumit.

Immediately prior to that I checked out some of the MFA exhibitions that were happening around the art building. Ran across some work by Wendy McDermott which was quite nice — refined metal objects dealing with narrative, stories, and her personal network.

Afterward, a small group of us retire to the Excelsior Hotel in downtown for expensive* drinks. Good to get some face time with this crew!

* (after I find the $51 parking ticket on the windshield of Nancy’s car, damn!)

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  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

crossings

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to an electric dance performance Anatomica#3 at the Korzo Theater by expatriate Canadian choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that Sher is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

vholoce

another Furtherfield review:

All phenomenon have the potential of being converted into infinite data-streams which become an archive of knowledge through which it is possible to organize social behavior.

Vholoce is one project in a long line of projects which seeks to creatively engage the ubiquitous data-streams that are flooding our virtual world. The rising flood of data is useless without sensible display. Visual (and sonic) display of digital data is a fundamental contemporary issue. But what is sensible display? Using a data stream as a basically random source for visual display is one way to play with the stream. The syntax of visual display (possibly) becomes the site for expression by the creative producer. The data-stream source, the method of (and reason for) display, and the overall creative process need to be interrogated in order to find the basis for type of digital engagement.
more “vholoce”

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Bruce Elder

blast not having a digital copy of this essay, but as it is one that I use in teaching on occasion, and one that brilliantly explores the spiritual dimension of the alienation of the age we are stepping through — so I type it by hand from the catalog printed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York on the occasion of a screening of Elder’s Book of All the Dead in November 1988. I was not present at that screening, but was at the prior premiere of the first 18 hours of the 40+ hour cycle which happened in the Film Studies building at CU-Boulder. there were just three of us who sat through the whole weekend event in an ancient classroom in the now-razed Film Studies Building. a handful of others made parts of the reel-after-reel intensity. it was a transformative experience — from the simple physical immersion that 18 hours of film induced, but also the visual energy from the work itself, and the intellectual rigor that was embedded into the narrative and visual contents. it has resonated for years as a source. neoscenes dreaming and the performative visual-sonic works that came around that impulse owe something deep and intangible to the Book of All the Dead. I was deLighted that Bruce assented to my hosting of the essay, adding to the small collection of ‘third-party‘ essays replicated for interest and convenience.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

gridcosm & slacker

it’s been ages since I’ve spent time checking out gridcosm — a SiTO project initiated by net amigos Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast pushing a decade ago already. it’s getting very active again, as a new generation of SiTO artists have at it. I’m quite sure it’s the oldest and longest-running collaborative visual network project around. a singularly deep (literally!) visual essay on the past decade of network pop-being. or so. explore it! Jon and Ed are brilliant networkers and an inspiration to me over the years with their easy-going attitudes and intuitive insights into distributed creativity. last time I saw those guys in meat-space was in Montreal at the 1996 ISEA. Keep up the great work!

then, watching Slacker on DVD by Richard Linklater, appreciate the smoothness of film-making and a fluid and spontaneous anti-narrative:

… When young we mourn for one woman … as we grow old, for women in general. The tragedy of life is that man is never free yet strives for what can never be. The thing most feared in secret always happens. My life, my loves, what are they now? But the more the pain grows, the more this instinct for life somehow asserts itself. The necessary beauty in life is in giving yourself to it completely. — Joseph Jones, Slacker actor

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

no man’s land

Finally starting to gather work for no man’s land, a collaborative online project organized by Varsha Nair and Katherine Olston of womanifesto international art exchange based in Bangkok, Thailand. (photo by Manit Sriwanichpoom)

Consider this territorially imagined line — the border, its powers of inclusion and exclusion, and its ability to simultaneously promote both unity and conflict. Borders also contain/define/give rise to our sense of nationalism, and related historical and current cultural practices and narratives that are perpetuated in a variety of ways help to define ones sense of nation-hood and ownership.

Consider, also, the ‘no man’s land’ itself; it is at once, the in-between space of the border, the border-less scape of cyber space, and the place within us that cannot so easily be explained by the nationality on our passport. The no man’s land, in all its diversity is a relevant space that is the reality of many in the globalized world of today.

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  • place: San Jose, California

seeing hearing feeling

spend the morning with Sally Jane, checking out some of the exhibitions including a personal walk-through of the Animalia project with producers Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (more kiwis!). then on to the ART MUSEUM to see THE SHOW curated by Steve Deitz. some amazing works, leading off with the elegant live-chat-based piece.

lunch with Ken at La Victoria Taqueria, better burritos than Macho Taco which was inexplicably closed at lunch-time.

also happen upon the npr (neighborhood public radio) broadcast studio at the downtown cineplex in an unused ticket booth. was wondering where they were broadcasting from — last night I happened to tune them in at 88.9 on the car radio on the commute back to the ‘burbs. so, met Jon Brumit and

hard to begin and end the day with a rattling vibrating swervy commute that lasts about an hour, door-to-door.

some overviews on the conference:

yadda-yadda-yadda; blah-blah-blah.

so many words, so many moving images, so much sound, talking heads, and spectacle. along with nice personal encounters. the monumental, the hierarchic voices along with the personal, networked, and confidential/private.

San Jose is interesting clash of urban-renewal towers of glass and corrosion-resistant metals: ringed some hard-core barrio Victorian bungalow scene, interlaced with the chronic homeless scattered between the shining spaces and conventioneers.

organized networks are interested in new institutional forms. tactical media has come to a stage of confronting itself. question of scalar transformation, (vs) networked organizations. democracy and networks are antithetical. bunk.

prototypes: sarai, iDC, srishdi school of art and media, indy media, etc

end up going to see a Mike Figgis remix of his film Time Code. a pseudo-press guy is giving away a couple tickets, so I snag one. he explains that he’s not really press, but a writer, and is trying to write a history of media art starting with the worldview of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose he very well might be a better writer that explainer. the film is a disappointment — the subject of the narrative is hermetically sealed in Hollywood and lacks any compelling visual or story elements. Mike is there, verily, and does a live “remix” which consists of rewinding the tape(!) and fading in/out the 4 different screen audio tracks. in form — the four frames which simultaneously inhabit the main screen that were recorded in four single simultaneous takes starting at the same time — there is an extremely interesting potential, especially as the overall resolution of video systems for shooting, recording, editing, and playback are gradually increasing. but the possibilities of the form seem completely wasted by the insipid narrative and visual void. is it a joke maybe?

head back to Livermore on the 87-280-680-84 pilgrimage route. not really liking that violent traverse of the land. though one segment moves across the Calaveras Valley which is still unpopulated and sports the rolling amber hills with huge live oaks scattered at stellar intervals.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

The GenerativeCollager

As a test-review for furtherfield neoscenes reviews a random online project by Sandra Crisp:

Hmmmm. Recalling a review I did some years back for kunstnet in Oslo, it seemed interesting to pretend for a moment I was a novice user who had just received a URL of interest from a good friend who’s critical opinion I trusted.

A novice user perhaps wouldn’t be using FireFox on a Mac, that’s clear. More likely Safari. When I attempt to go to the project from the introduction page, as the Java applet loads, waiting, waiting, until finally I get an error window with the following text:

WORKING VARIABLES NEEDED FUNCTIONS ***************************************************
// SET UP ALL THE VARIABLES FOR THE IMAGE BLISTERING void setup() { // CREATE THE TIMERS AND IMAGE COLLAGERS size(WIDTH,HEIGHT); t = new Texter(width,height); timer = new Timer(500); collager = new Collager(); collageCount = new Counter(3); // <- CHANGE IMAGES PER TIMER COUNT //load a sound and loop it soundA = loadSound(“SURSHLOOP.Wav”); //this loads the sound soundA.Loop(); …Snip… Timer.SetTarget(floor(random(500,1500))); // <- CHANGE IMAGE DROP TIME } // TELL THE COLLAGER TO PUT A RANDOM PICTURE ON THE SCREEN collager.Paint(); // MAKE IT ALL NICE AND SMOOTH smooth(); } loadPixels(); performDblBuff(dblBuff, pixels); updatePixels(); t.Paint(); //updatePixels(); } / ******************************************************

Somehow I want to add the e.E.Cummings text:

this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
this is the way the world ends,
not with a bang, but with a whimper. more “The GenerativeCollager”

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

paint-by-number

Finally got around to reading The Dancing Wu Li Masters by Gary Zukav, an overview of the New Physics. It’s somewhat dated, but still carries a nice historical narrative with observations on the uncertainty of the whole thing that is being dealt with. Watching a video (produced in Japan), on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Speaking with the Dalai Lama and others. All of whom were dying. Phone call from Nick, catching up. Possible travel plans to Missouri. Also talked to Greg, possible travel to Seattle and BC or Moab. Proposals off to NIFCA for a curators position, and waiting on the doctoral proposal. Reading more than I have in the last years, on average: wider, and deeper, note-taking, resonating with stylistic text forms across academia, science, philosophy, technology, engineering, and esoterica. But unemployed at the same time. Dog-sitting, using the riding-mower to cut some of the lawn; joined the YMCA since the college pool is closed now. Getting used to a different regimen. Lifting in the cybex room. Sore today. Getting my sunglasses replaced finally, ebay for a pair of artcraft round gold frames since they no longer make them. Gotta call Kate at IBM to see about her open source connection. What else? Weeding, and many emails to Europe for a fall tour. And the need to get back out to the desert on the moonless nights.

paint-by-number. Reminds me of summers at Aunt Mary’s house, she loved doing paint-by-number kits. Now she is an decent painter, starting to free-style after retiring to Florida.

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: Denver, Colorado

life

Audio Player
Vm
P
d

how science frames it’s subject of inquiry, and subsequently presents that narrative to the public.

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: Prescott, Arizona

mind the gap

many miles, kilometers gone now. through the center of the universe, and more. movements, with different tools, different minds. trying to relax, but always the pressure of production. and realizing that I AM producing things, energies, situations, but it seems never enough in the proper form. the closest angel, an image made last month, in the last moments of Lappish Light. yeah, okay, this is a big gap, huge gap, like some recent others that have crept into this narrative. but I have no excuses, just that time moves.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Green Hour

tipsy, riding home (a relative term) from Mari and Esko’s place, after a sauna and dinner and some wine (Chilean and Spanish), it is a white night. midnight, the sun only just below the horizon, no wind, the clouds and rain of the day gone, but it is cold, only 6C. piss behind the oil-fired power plant, must be a 10 megawatt station. overtake a body doing a drunken side-step on the bike path. and children standing in a playground, standing looking mute, expecting a parley with the drunk, but that is some minutes and eons off into a future that is made certain by the lack of wind and in the moment of the Green Hour. L’heure verte, Green Hour, it came and here it is, jumping into a loose narrative that leaves being and presence far behind and instead wobbles into an uncertain future in a nowhere locus. silent, except for the drunks, furtive night-day children who are learning to be drunken and hidden at the same time. running in packs, or desperate pairs, no, at least threesomes. the river as high as it has been in 30 years. at the one meter mark on the bridge pylon. I theorize what the construction standards are for those same structures. deep seated– all the way to the glacial bedrock?

La fée verte, at L’heure verte, from the times in France when the consumption of the brilliant green and bitter drink Absinthe made from wormwood (Artemisia absinthium). but also when the air stills, in the northlands, and the color of day wanes, sun dropping into the red of humid sunset. a state of being.

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

rearriving

back to Kiel briefly. eating a bag of M&M’s in the train. crossing through Wittenberge in the former East, there is still a complete awareness of the divided society here. derelict buildings everywhere in the East, wild undergrowth, a bit of chaos. my English is suffering — so many spelling mistakes as I write, I can hardly deal with it. retyping things constantly, back-spacing, returning to a crime-scene and fixing the evidence, this text exists in many forms that are changed sometimes months, sometimes years later. in flux. Theresa and Wolfgang will leave tomorrow for Trondheim for the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Art that Theresa has curated.

note from Anthony:

REMARKABLE
trANSPOSITION
FROM SANTA BARBARA
THROUGH SUPERLATIVE ANGELES FOREST
REARRIVING AT MOHAVE KELSO DUNES
here this northern sky
sinks a sliding drop
surprise
a gliding sustain
stretches in suspension
firedrip gamos meteor gift

Zorak graciously fetches me from the train, direct to the Forum, and then I go out shopping when Jennifer calls me about the Content Coordination situation with cafe9.net. it seems to be degenerating as a result of both Heikki and I stepping away. I am really thinking I need to write a parody of European cultural cooperation. it is such a joke. but the idea of writing a narrative account of it seems a waste of time. rather try to continue digging further into the network. later in the evening, I make a garlic-pasta (ail del’olio?), a favorite recipe of mine. easy to prepare, and unless folks don’t like garlic at all, it goes over well, with some Romano cheese, a good salad dressing, some vino tinto. late evening. some strange drinks, and so on …

posted
  • place: Rosräth, Germany

Devi

A quick visit with Nils at the Media Academy in Köln yesterday, and happen to run into Irit Batsry who is running a video course there. I gush a little about the work of hers that I saw back in Montreal in 1995 — one of the single most powerful videos that I have ever seen. Walking between buildings, across Walter Peltzer Platz, Nils points out the two Golden Nica Award statues sitting in the window of the Knowbotic Research offices. later Volker and I go to a Kölsch brauerei for a bit of dinner.

She is Light itself and transcendent Emanating from Her body are rays in thousands — two thousand, a hundred thousand, tens of millions, a hundred million — there is no counting their numbers. It is by and through Her that all things are moving and motionless shine. It is by the Light of this goddess, this Devi, that all things become manifest. — Bhairava Yamala

Meet with Udo at dom.de to check into what he has been doing in the last three years. His current work explores relational data bases and how to construct complex navigational interfaces for interacting with the database — using it to construct a hyper-spatial narratives collaboratively. That is the key word — collaboratively — where the work evolves from a collective inter-dialogue which covers many aspects of everyone’s lives. A network constructed by a network! Along with some older experiments in data-basing of chats that are then reconfigured on the fly in further chat conversations between bots and humans. Very interesting stuff. The work produced for the equator project was one of the first tests. I hope to get him to provide such a space for neoscene occupation people to work in.

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

rainbows

Meanwhile, the immediate things force their way into my attention. Loki is still sick. I noticed before we went to the hospital yesterday that he had some red spots on his abdomen that looked like the beginnings of chicken pox which he already had three years ago. The doctor said that it was just atypical something-or-other from a viral infection that was going around. The doctor advised nothing could be done, that the virus would have to run its course. Loki has not wanted to eat or do much of anything except listen to story cassettes or watch the 30 minutes of children’s teevee offered by state television each evening. He was doing better last evening, but this morning he went back to bed after breakfast. I listen to Turkish music, read an anthology of Black women writers and poets from the US, continue preparing laser-prints for the exhibition, organize my papers, and mull over the situation.

This afternoon we wander downtown, just a five-minute walk from home, where there are a variety of street entertainers and activities to while away the warmest afternoon yet of the summer. And tomorrow will be warmer. It is probably over 70F in the sun. I suddenly notice how many young girls there are with babies — there are babies everywhere, children underfoot, everybody has babies! Iceland has, I believe, one of the highest birthrates of any developed country, and it shows. Somehow this seems absurd and incongruous with a modern western culture. Like in Amerika, as a middle class person, I was taught that uncontrolled birthrates were synonymous with underdeveloped countries. I know that in the three years of teaching at CU-Boulder, I had one student who had a child. Here, more often than not, my students have children. What does it mean? I dunno. Culture is different cream on different cakes. Musing on this and eating the Batman ice cream that Loki picked out but didn’t like, I can barely walk back up to the house, my sciatic nerve is firing like a blow-torch and there are grinding sensations deep in my spine. I realize that this defect has so colored my year thus far that I am hardly the person I was last year at this time — healthy, energetic, active compared to grouchy, slow, easily-fatigued, lacking any spark. Gees. I pause to consider this narrative to be dead in the water. As a matter of fact, I will stop it here, July 12th, near midnight, for the foreseeable future until I radically change my energy state or until I find something seriously better to engage in online. Please note yet another change in URL for my main web site: the new URL is https://neoscenes.net/index.php. Anyway … The rainbows seen from Hrísey last Monday reminded me of this passage that I have been reading to Loki from time-to-time.

Saw the rainbow in the heaven In the eastern sky the rainbow Whispered, “What is that, Nokomis?” And the good Nokomis answered: “‘Tis the heaven of flowers you see there; All the wild-flowers of the forest, All the lilies of the prairie, When on the earth they fade and perish, Blossom in that heaven above us. — Longfellow

posted
  • place: en route McLean, Virginia - Clarksburg, Maryland - Lebanon, Pennsylvania

landscape of childhood

The drive up here from Virginia starts with a short detour past the house where I lived from 1965-76. The landscape of my childhood in winter. So it was, although much of the nearby farmland has been butchered in the wake of suburbia that is burgeoning and multiplying as Legion. The road that our family house is on has changed little. The houses are still small, the trees bigger, many of the same people live along it, as I saw on the mailboxes. But the house. Well. Other people live in it. Maybe I will stop by on the way back south and ask if I can walk through the yard to the pond in the woods behind down the hill — to show Loki. And to make some photographs. To fix in Silver the volume of time that has moved through my senses. I am feeling not old, but as one who has lived long. A certain richness has moved into my experience. The layers of time and space and experience have grown to be a fertile loam where groves of narrative being can erupt in a single evening, in a single conversation. Sparked to life by the intersection of life-energies. Old friends, new friends. So it goes. We are staying with my oldest friend, Gary, his wife Ellen, and their daughter Sarah who is the same age as Vika. We speak in memories, where each phrase has a resonance unobtainable in new friendships. That resonance of historical experience, built up over time and time again, multiplied and divided.