nettime – the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::

13 : June : 201729 : December : 2023

Armin Medosch 1962 – 2017

I wanted to write specifically for the blog concerning the shared history with Armin, but all I can manage is to copy (with minor additions) what I sent out to the nettime list. Another nettimer, Felix Stalder wrote some personal and general memories (the thread includes many diverse thoughts from fellow nettimers) and someone put together a pdf on monoskop.

Sharing the experiences of many of you, I can recall numerous encounters with Armin in Helsinki, Riga, Vilnius, Berlin, London, Linz, Hasselt, Amsterdam, and possibly elsewhere, back into the mid-90s. Some good partying, dancing, dinners, and dialogue. Yes, a challenging and idiosyncratic personality, but his extremely wry, dry, and funny humor, his presence, his voice (powerful both sonically and intellectually), and his generosity was a warm and beautiful addition to the many conclaves. Indeed, he was everywhere.

Thanks to the RIXC crew for being a perfect platform in the series of Acoustic Space / Wave editions and exhibitions/meetings that have Armin’s intelligent fingerprints all over them.

I can’t pin-point the last time I spent time with him f2f, I guess it was in 2008 or so, in Netherlands or maybe in London. A raucous dinner somewhere. Oh, no, actually he was at Pixelache 2013 in Helsinki and Tallinn along with a bunch of us Brico people.

He was always to be counted on to turn in a well-considered and passionate commentary when things on brico, spectre, nice, nettime, new-media-curating, idc, and certainly other listservs turned sour or so. In my email archive, I see 495 emails, and smile reading some of them…

As a teacher, he had an instinctual gift to understand the degrees of freedom necessary for learning to proceed. We shared our strategies on how to deal with the institutional frameworks that tended to dull true learning. Back in 2013 he sent me a packet of his (formal) class descriptions (unfortunately, no notes, or other items). I’d be very interested to hear any reminiscences from his former students. Clearly we all learned from him.

I was looking around at items I have in my archive of correspondence with Armin, links and materials he had sent me, and I am wondering if anyone is attempting to collect any written/media traces that are in danger of being lost — I was reading his review of Pixelache from 2007 and there were several interviews he did, but those mp3 links were dead… :-(

I do hope, along with the Stubnitz tapes that there will fall together some of those network fragments. I’d be happy to collect and host anything that folks find that cannot be preserved on some other server…

Echoing Armin speaking about Robert Adrian’s passing just 16 months ago:

“we will always remember you well”

peace,

john

18 : October : 201429 : December : 2023

place: Prescott, Arizona

The Planning Machine

Before designing Project Cybersyn, [Anthony Stafford] Beer used to complain that technology “seems to be leading humanity by the nose.” After his experience in Chile, he decided that something else was to blame. If Silicon Valley, rather than Santiago, has proved to be the capital of management cybernetics, Beer wasn’t wrong to think that Big Data and distributed sensors could be enlisted for a very different social mission. While cybernetic feedback loops do allow us to use scarce resources more effectively, the easy availability of fancy thermostats shouldn’t prevent us from asking if the walls of our houses are too flimsy or if the windows are broken. A bit of causal thinking can go a long way. For all its utopianism and scientism, its algedonic meters and hand-drawn graphs, Project Cybersyn got some aspects of its politics right: it started with the needs of the citizens and went from there. The problem with today’s digital utopianism is that it typically starts with a PowerPoint slide in a venture capitalist’s pitch deck. As citizens in an era of Datafeed, we still haven’t figured out how to manage our way to happiness. But there’s a lot of money to be made in selling us the dials.

Morozov, E., 2014. The Planning Machine: Project Cybersyn and the Origins of the Big Data Nation. The New Yorker.

Morozov’s article is taking heavy flak for allegedly ‘plagiarizing’ the work of Eden Medina who recently wrote a history of Cybersyn: Cybernetic Revolutionaries. Morozov, a presumptive journalist-turned-historian is a recently matriculated PhD student at Harvard. New Yorker articles do not have foot- or end-notes, while in academic historical writing, any/every source is included in minutiae. Historians are furious, journalists shrug, and nettime is atwitter! I’ll have to read Medina’s book, it sounds interesting, and probably adds to the proliferation of recent interest in the roots of cybernetics and systems research of the 50s through 70s — the era that I have researched based on my father’s work.

So, aside from the kerfuffle, the closing paragraph quoted above points to the critical problem that is manifesting itself across many many sub-systems within the techno-social fabric these days. That problem?: the proliferation of feedback as a driving principle of the wide-scaled system. This, a system that is already (and very inefficiently!) consuming huge quantities of energy (and life-time/life-energy) on its fundamental maintenance and projection of global power. The more we depend on big data (feedback), the less energy we have for innovative evolution. I’m not talking about the new hype of ‘disruptive innovation’: much of that is drawn up in the aforementioned VC boardrooms and appears largely as the sterile product of too many tech ‘incubators.’ The evolution of a techno-social system to truly new states of being does not require more information about what is happening or more data that is necessarily about the past. It needs an unregulated space for indeterminate outcomes, those that cannot be modeled, predicted, or simulated regardless of the teraflops of churn available. As I mention in my model of the amplifier*, beyond a certain subjective threshold, feedback begins to sap the vitality of the system that it is meant to optimize. This is a problem!

*as excerpted from my dissertation

21 : November : 20117 : April : 2023

place: Boulder, Colorado

cranking up the heat…

more nettime volleys, feels a bit easier to be pointed and precise, but the problem of establishing a set of base assumptions about reality still dogs the process — with the dominant Cartesian separation needing to be convincingly rejected for a more sane continuous and implicate cosmos…

Mark Stahlman writes in this thread:

So, give up your plans for “radical change of the system we live under” and *just* STOP living under that system (at least for the better half of your life)!

I respond sotto voce, etc:
more “cranking up the heat…”

19 : February : 201114 : November : 2015

place: Prescott, Arizona

conflict

Tapas notes about the Wisconsin pro/anti-union conflict and the Egyptian shift,

Simply unbelievable. I never even suspected that Tahrir Square could echo in the USA.

I reply, sotto voce:

I don’t think it is echoing, except as a media construct, but, really, it’s at least a bit offensive to characterize a whole country as full of fat sleeping slobs, although there are those who are precisely that here (and elsewhere in the corpulent world vs the thin world). There are conscious people here now and in the past. There have been multi-million-person marches in the streets, police rounding up tens of thousands of protesters in JFK Memorial Stadium in Washington, tear gas, shootings, bombings, and so on. While, yes, many in the present population are anesthetized by over-consumption and economic ruin, there remain those who will march and confront the despots in power. It may not be so long before you witness a scale of internecine violence in the US that makes satrap rulers and their suppression of impoverished populations look like a walk in the park. I’d explore the history of this Empire if I were you (or simply reference Tacitus’ “Annals of Imperial Rome” for a start.) This present Empire is fraught with any and all of the possible irruptions known to any comparably-scaled nation-state unit. It was only three generations ago that three percent of the population died in a major internecine war.

Empire does not mimic the provinces, it corrodes from the center out…

23 : October : 201017 : April : 2024

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

the fluidity of leaking

What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.

The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”

27 : October : 200914 : November : 2015

education and standardization

Eduard Freudmann writes on the nettime list:

The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of European Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen university’s economic position and increase their research-dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

sotto voce: Standardization is inexorable as long as the Techno-social system has the energy input to expend on maintaining and propagating ordered sub-systems.

That energy input is, at base, the attention paid to it by the individuals who populate its institutional sub-systems.

When the Techno-social system runs out of energy input, it will gradually gain in disorder and degrees of autonomous freedom.

Learning takes place everywhere all the time. It is a mistake that you expect a state institution, an integral part of the Techno-social system to be a free and open system. It’s best to pay it NO attention and instead take your education fully into your own hands. Take your attention and give it fully to your peers, and you will learn everything you need to know. And at the same time, you will see the Techno-social system weaken as it loses your energy/attention input…

Leaning on/into the State in opposition only strengthens the reified/reifying bulwarks of State.

Walk away on a new self-determinate path and the State falls flat, a crumbled edifice of artifice.

Liquidity and Flow (rather than Solidarity) from Sydney, where the #2 source of GNP to Australia is Corporate/International Education — it’s right behind #1 which is the Extractives/Mining Industries.

Not much difference between the two, somehow. One extracts concentrated energy from the earth, the other extracts concentrated energy from the attention and lives of young people.

30 : November : 200812 : October : 2024

thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
more “thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts”

16 : November : 200830 : November : 2015

place: Prescott, Arizona

nettime reflections

nettime November threads

sotto voce: another short point (belch) I would risk making — I think there is a real danger in this stage of Empire to focus on personalities rather than structural relations of power. That is, the “Office of the Presidency” has changed greatly during the Bush regime, mostly not as a result of Bush himself but because a convergence of forces (okay, Cheney, Rove, embody the forces perhaps.. etc etc) — a convergence of forces that are structurally evolving at this moment in the Empire. Of course, those concentrations of power may simply wane during the Obama regime, or, more likely in my mind, is that they will increase, given the intense desires and energies and attentions projected at (the) Presidency. Given Obama’s awareness of media, this will be a ‘natural.’ But this evolution, whatever happens, will not be THAT closely tied to Obama, IMHO, but simply the trajectory of Empire… I am hopeful for a kinder and more intelligent Empire, but what else is a kinder Empire than one which is on the way down, unable to brutally control the sources of it’s power; add intelligence to kindness, and is that akin to beautifully playing the fiddle while Rome burns? Or simply more intricate and obscured warfare on less suspecting victims? Watch for some interesting machinations of power in the next 4 years… I have decided, personally, that I will have lived during the (first) peak and subsequent decline of the (first) American Empire. All’s to do is to document that life and find some humor among humans.

doh…!

16 : May : 20082 : January : 2020

place: Berlin, Germany

Steve Cisler 1942 – 2008

then get the news that Steve Cisler passed away yesterday. what a bummer. I always read his postings on nettime and a few other lists. Paul Jones has a detailed outline of some of Steve’s many activities. as an update, another blog came online for condolences: https://communitynetworking2008.wordpress.com/.

prepping for the performance tomorrow night. never feeling ready with only half my normal equipment. got the files, but no midi/usb controller nor keyboard. and not even the right software. will be winging it. and who knows about the audience. but whatever the case, Said gives one pathway!

Least of all should an intellectual be there to make his/her audience feel good: the whole point is to be embarrassing, contrary, even unpleasant. — Edward Said

19 : December : 200714 : November : 2015

place: Bedford, New York

the travelog

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

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

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

29 : November : 200526 : February : 2024

place: Prescott, Arizona

response to Lev

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

We Have Never Been Modular…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

5 : November : 200531 : December : 2023

place: Prescott, Arizona

continuum of relation

taking Frieder’s thought-provoking commentary on my proposal draft and grinding through a thought process that in a infinitesimal way is becoming more precise and confident in dealing with the subject material of the thesis. this evening I synthesize the phrase continuum of relation to describe the continuous field of action and dynamic that constitutes our presence in the world. it is the continuum where technology is implemented (apparently) to increase the probability that understanding can be propagated across multiple human subjects, when, at the same time this altruistic goal is promoted, that exact technology injects uncertainty, a degree of attenuation, and a general increase in the complexity of the communicative act! uff! what to do? but I like the phrase continuum of relation — Google it, there are only 26 entries, and none of them in any way overlap in meaning at all. I find that comforting to be obscure. and, perusing the nettime archive, in a discussion with Felix and Geert, I read a 1999 Howard Rheingold article On Innovation and the Amateur Spirit where he quotes the daddy of the WWW:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. — Tim Berners-Lee

4 : October : 200511 : October : 2024

place: Prescott, Arizona

Partial Description of the World

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

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

22 : May : 200531 : December : 2023

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

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

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

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

15 : March : 199912 : June : 2024

place: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

next five minutes 3 review

© Steve Cisler 1999. Non-profit servers and archives may distribute this document, as long as it is not on the same page as annoying banner ads or animated gif files. Others may contact the author. [Ed: sadly, networker and friend Steve passed away in 2008, as this text doesn’t seem to be floating around anywhere else, I decided to extract and revive it from my archive!]

“Tactical media” refers to the use of old and new media to achieve non commercial goals and to emphasize “a plethora of potentially subversive political issues.”

In spite of all the electronic connectivity, there is still a hunger to meet in one place. The more we communicate online, the greater the number of real world conferences and meetings. People realize they still need to get together, no matter how smoothly a video conference or email exchange may be. In March 1999, I took part in a multi-ring circus of activities called Next Five Minutes 3 (N5M3) in Amsterdam. It followed several years of my online participation.

Background

In April of 1996, Bruce Sterling started a discussion topic in the Wired magazine conference on The WELL, an online site where I had been hanging out since it started. The topic was entitled “Goofy leftists sniping at Wired [magazine]” and included a lot of posts from the nettime mailing list that Sterling found amusing or outrageous. I joined nettime (www.nettime.org) the source of most of the pieces and found it was quite a bit more varied and interesting than the wired conference had been. It’s hard to typify the kind of messages you see on nettime, but it includes criticism of the current trends in Internet growth, reports from hot spots in Eastern Europe, innovative art exhibits and experiments, meeting reports, and controversies ranging from the provocative use of new media to the role of George Soros and his Open Society Institute. There are also text experiments and word plays plus weekly calendars and announcements for obscure journals, literary web sites, and new media experiments. The strength of it, the lure of it for me is that many worlds intersect, and through the distributed moderation by people in North America and Europe, just about the right mix of messages reaches the readers who number less than 1000. Originally, many were from Holland, Germany, and eastern Europe. Now, people from Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia take part. more “next five minutes 3 review”

18 : December : 199828 : December : 2023

place: Akureyri, Iceland

hip, cool, and ripped-off

logging into the past. first I drop Loki off at school for a greatly shortened day that seems to be only a special pageant for the entire student body. 90 minutes. I go back home to read several weeks of nettime email. which gets me to this stage of needing to write here. photometry. grammetics. and new media is nothing more than more of the same. networked things – smeckworked things. learning in cyberspace, doing in cyberspace, personal technology begins/continues the inexorable involuted backfire on itself. but only personal technology. something to shoot back with. Corpo-tech, or mili-tech won’t cease. because selling and killing will have a greater field of action in the future. the mistake of all the applied technology hype is that it forgets the original interface — soul/body. where the ether jacks into the meat. all mediated things root in and then fly from this electro-colloidal fertilization-zone. all reason and form and metaphor and absolute can be searched, can be hunted in this zone. can then be copied, pasted into relevant organic categories. that’s it, the Confucian Analects that sends us through a process of searching the perimeter of the soul/body interface.

The men of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that Light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart) ; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.

This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories
— Confucius, from The Great Digest or The Unwobbling Pivot, translated by Ezra Pound

it is possible to consider all things to be simple. complexity is a result of over-thought. over-processing of even the most simple data-set creates sampling artifacts, noise, and confusion. borders fabricate, delta-functions shoot to zero or infinity (the paralysis of alienated polarization), surfaces distort. convolution with questionable concepts creates complete areas of synthetic fabrication replete with discontinuities and false event horizons. forget metaphors, jam poetry, and all cultural production machinery paradigms, swallow language, stop writing. stop beating flesh against time and space barriers that make it hurt. no sex for entertainment: no time-slot filler, no wet commerce. body looks soft for a reason. that reason is coddling. ways of going that treat body/soul interface as a bother, not the crux (what is crux — old ancient forgotten word — is there a new word to fill the spot where this was forgotten and once lodged? maybe the word that fills it is catalytic converter or simm or talk-show). there are so many substitution fonts that language can be forgotten anyway. because people are knowing less and less exactly or even generally what each other is saying. no hearing, no talking. only dumb silence while fingernails grow to stab palms. while genetic receptors are mapped (where’s life?). and while questions are asked that raise a cryogenic boiling fog that dissipates to nothing after awhile. hip. cool. and ripped-off.

29 : July : 199817 : April : 2024

place: Boulder, Colorado

Vanguard

From Jordan on nettime: Maybe we need to EXTEND the market as a network, rather than resist it, developing ways of speaking through it.

Ted wonders what it would be like to assume that the intellectual vanguard “is in fact a reactionary force trying to protect its political patrimony by imposing traditional interpretations and ideals.” We have to be brave enough to realize to what extent this may be the case.

sotto voce: The vanguard is (should be!) that which is not engaged in criticism alone. The vanguard alights where action and word intersect. I was thinking that one measure of the efficacy of a critical point of view would be to see if that point of view could be translated into a way of living to be taught to a child! As an educator, I am seeing the glaring gap between the academic mind-set and the reality outside that students have to deal with and indeed is their milieu. I am not surprised when the answer to the question “what did you learn in the last 12 years of education that you use in your life?” is an uncomfortable silence from a roomful of young adults. They KNOW what they need, in many instances, the skills for humane survival, but they also need something to live for. They don’t get it through the system that built criticism.

Jordan’s observations about the futility and hubris in the thought of re-constructing a new way from parts of the old are quite accurate. That argument seems to be a repeat of those which vainly (in retrospect) dealt with deconstructing the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools. Naming and confronting the enemy simply strengthens it (whatever it is). Best to turn and walk away on a new path.

I hope the critics live for more than the sound of their own and others’ words in their ears and eyes. The network is alive. The vanguard needs to walk the walk at the same time as talking the talk: the walk and the talk must fly in synchronous orbit around a life that is engaged with those around it both in cyber extension and in physical extension. There are people doing this, and have been doing this (quietly) for years as Brad rightly points out.

To quote Saarinen and Taylor (from imagologies: media philosophy):

1. in the praxis-dominated world of ultra-tech, the politics of critique must take a new form.

2. the strength of theory is relative to strategies for action. action must lead, theory must follow. in opposition to mainstream modern western philosophy, theoretical and conceptual reason must serve only an instrumental role and thus give up its previously unchallenged position of supreme value in itself.

3. critique that is restricted to the realm of the literate and remains a literary project is no longer feasible as an effective strategy for action. Argument and objective analysis, pure content, abstract thinking, logic, and evidence, these forces of the word-centered world have lost their creative potential. Literate reason and the literary critic have become relics of the past.

When can we shake this reliance on the weakness of abstract reason and instead forge interactions of dynamic presence and being?

16 : May : 19987 : February : 2022

place: Tornio, Finland

artists vs geeks

sotto voce:

You know, I have a deep unease about the re-posting of MSNBC articles on nettime, especially in their entirety. I can understand editorial excerpting for the purposes of making a point or presenting information, but to presume that the repetition of such writing on the nettime listserv somehow strengthens our community, I just don’t know.”

“I have spent much time and concentration to arrange certain types of filters for incoming information: applying single-frequency filters like *allow anything from Tapio in and read it*, or *check out most things on nettime* or *talk to certain friends on the phone and ponder what they say to me* and as well, MANUAL filtration techniques like *don’t read the Wall Street Journal* (I made this rule after living some years in the Belly of the Multinational Beast (an engineer for a large oil company) consuming the BUSINESS NEWS of the DAY when I was flying First Class to countries where my own operations were to help get the oil, at whatever the local cost)…

I started writing the preceding to nettime a couple weeks ago, noticing that suddenly almost every posting appearing on the list had been lifted from what I would term mainstream media, I never finished, and have since noticed the continuing string of articles. While, granted, I trust the nettime filter system implicitly, I wonder what has occurred with nettime — has anyone else been affected by this shift? Am I paranoid? Has anything really changed? What is going on? Don’t we have voices? Isn’t silence better? (speaking as a networker who only rarely contributes to the listserv side of nettime, but who more often is in individual communications with many of you). I feel like something has slipped, has been lost, some momentum drained. Does Bill Gates’ invitation to us have anything to do with this?

22 : May : 199729 : December : 2023

place: Helsinki, Finland

Beauty and the East

The Beauty and The East event occurs in Ljubljana, Slovenia as an expression of the nettime network. I’m far to the north, but with Nordic connectivity, an IRC session is convened with many of the main players attending. An audio archive is was available at ljudmila.org for the history-minded. Anyone know about the disposition of that these days?

The generation of content is context sensitive, people produce information out of signals, groups define what people can produce, tools make possible what groups can define and vice versa. A critique of the net must include a critical analysis of its ‘matter’ as a social and cultural product. With the rise of the web, the well developed group structures around bbs, moo, mud, usenet became almost invisible. Now, we are told that the web will vanish and only media with broadcasting qualities will survive. I push therefore I am. Surprisingly, the mailing list was always a push media, as successful and cost-effective as e-mail. The coming social information architectures will need a more hybrid, time-based and conceptual working/leisure environment which maps electronic intersubjectivity based on our needs and not the imaginative, inherent will of technique.

It is time that intellectuals rethink the relevance of their tools in a wider radius than linguistics. The apparatus of discourse gets extended today by new networks of power/knowledge which are still, compared with the world of print, very unimportant. This makes place for all kinds of experiments and the renovation of historical concepts. In a mix of historical, empirical, and speculative analysis we will try to map a likely and liked future of ‘online-publishing,’ beyond the static model of the web magazine (or the pre-formatted net-radio on demand). How will our social interface look like and how do we continue with our gift-economy? [from the meeting call]

24 : April : 199731 : December : 2023

place: Akureyri, Iceland

intellectual discourse

Now time moves quickly. Loki and I go swimming in the morning. It is cold and clear. The knife-like Arctic wind comes from the north and fights the relatively warm sun. But this sun is only a shadow of the one that I left in Arizona. And I keep forgetting that it is not summer here yet, although it is bright until late in the evenings. Things are brown and dry at the shore although there is a lot of snow on the mountains. The trees are not even approaching spring revival. My back is still not too good. I am hoping that it will get better in the next week or so. It is difficult to get comfortable to play on the floor with Loki, to pick him up, to sit long in a hard chair. Only when I am in warm water does the pain go away. I embark on an ideological analysis of Lego toys. First noticing the heavy role-influence of the figures and how Loki does not like it when I trade the pirates accouterments for the outlandish wild natives outfit. I wonder where the rigidity comes from. Is it a cultural adjustment or is it simply the way little kids are. Mixing is a sin. He doesn’t realize that he is a half-breed by some Icelandic standards. Legos have nothing to do with all this, they are simply another layering of cultured being over the essential presence of life. there is no Lego, there is no culture, there is only the Void … I also begin to reflect on the measure of cyber-sustenance I partake of from day-to-day. And how the open challenge of nettime, as it lies wholly on the stage of intellect, would fumble and stall if faced with the challenge of instilling its system of being in a child. (nettime is a listserv that I have been interacting with for the last fifteen months or so — it is comprised mainly of critical writers and pundits of culture, technology, and its impact on society.) Intellectual discourse interests me only mildly — far more important are the personal contacts that I have with some of the participants and the networking possibilities that the listserv represents. The discourse seems so pre-positioned and static compared to live conversation. And so impossible to implement in daily life — almost totally unrelated to and removed from the flux of daily life, except for a few of the writers who can write with a style not replete with selective and exclusive historical references. Too many things spoken that exclude the reader unless he or she is a member of the same book club as the writer … The Master texts that all should read (to make sure the hegemony of the Past is promulgated on the Future).

17 : March : 199726 : February : 2024

net.art things? (an excerpt from ZKP4 net.art thread)

What was ZKP4? And, what was the net.art thread?

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 1997
From: hopkins@usa.net

Historians retrospecting on the foggy traces of History are always so tempted to label things as Movements and Periods and such. I find this rather ridiculous. Consider asking someone who is 40 years old how they felt about a situation that happened to them 25 years previous, what impressions, their emotional and intellectual state at the time and a detailed description of the material event, what REALLY happened… Now, aside from a handful of “life-changing” events that normally occur to people over time, they would have a VERY hard time reconstructing anything near the reality of their own past…

Now, when I see a term like Surrealism and Surrealists, I really have to Laugh at the way Art Historians and unfortunately artists too get caught into believing that this is the way things happened at all! I mean, look, are there, out there, to your knowledge, groups of people making Movements now? I would propose that it is not movements but simply the existence of dialogues of greater or lesser potency running between individuals who, depending on how much personal risk they are able to take, influence the lives of each other directly through this dialogue… (Take nettime for example — the perfect example of not a movement, but the accumulation of the various voices who are more or less talking to each other, nothing more nothing less. Ask yourself how much nettime CHANGES your life, and that is a measure of the dialogue…

I find the discussion about Net.Art to be rather pointless unless one is in the process of copyright protection or the rigor-mortise institutionalization of a history that is not even history. What about the International Networking Congress — of mail-artists; I have been part of an organic network and using that word for a long time, yet I don’t feel the need to claim a word to

1) describe the whole of being which generates the material and actual manifestations of my “life work” nor

2) posits some historical claim of legitimacy to what I am doing or how I am being…

I am sorry, but it seems a joke! And I just don’t see the point in dividing things up, what art FORMS are ascendant over another… I believe we all, in every formal sense, face a “hands-on” material world with one foot in the spiritual. Anything that we seek to DO faces the brutal challenge of either forcing material things into new configurations or of speaking/paying attention to another human in the hopes of inspiring them or being inspired… The material struggle that I think people are speaking of here (in terms of video art, net art, painting and so on) are all rather (or totally) similar aspects of that challenge of material transformation… Now, I know the immediate response to this from some is “well, net art isn’t material…” or some such argument, but that is simply not so. Is a computer material, is RAM material, are fiber optics material, copper wires, generators, monitors? I mean, fundamentally, almost all of what we call TECHNOLOGICAL media are material transformations relying solely on the two most abundant materials in the earth’s crust — silicon and oxygen — SiO2 — amorphous silica — glass — which covers — photography (camera-based media), all digital media (chips are made primarily of amorphous silica). Differences in all the manifestations are illusory and a result of the endless hair-splitting of the reductive system of Western science which has lead us only to finer questions of what we either never need to KNOW or what is so essential that we can’t KNOW it anyway… I think questions of quality rather quantity are more important to consider here. (parallel to ideas like a consideration of human obligations vs human rights) Another words for example, discussions of not whether Paul Garrin’s efforts with setting up Autono.net will work or not — but whether he is having a genuine influence on other people’s lives and whether that effect is positive or negative… Of course, that may seem a question to answer historically, but hey, I can answer it based on some near meetings with him, seeing his words, seeing his trail (etched in silicon) and so on… for myself, and express that personal understanding to someone else who would care to listen and share their impressions…

Sometimes I feel acutely the distance we have from each other in the veils of words that swirl around us, that we cloak ourselves in, and I am gratified to have spent some concentrated moments with some of you out there, from time-to-time, and place-to-place, physically unmediated, looking into your eyes, and speaking as direct as possible, or, better yet, silently sharing existence in this material incarnation…

I seize whatever physical means I can, based upon the moment, to express my desires, my life-energies, what difference does it make?

I would quote and amplify from my own take Bob Adrian’s remark “Why should we, as artists struggling to find ways to survive on the tricky edge of a new digital communications environment, be trying to breath new life into the corpse of the traditional art institutions? For the money, fame and glamour?” Giving lip-service to any forms of institutional cultural organization is to give it credit, form, substance, and most dangerously, POWER. NAMING a thing is to call it into existence and invoking it repeatedly will pump it up… Although I would not criticize the actions of those people who seek to understand the workings of cultural/social situations, I think that understanding needs to be weighed — whether the knowledge is needed even — after all, every thing that can be known, do we need to know it, or should we know it? Eating from the Tree of the Knowledge or Good and Evil got us here possibly, mired in a material world that is possibly only a furnace to test our spirits for other things or simply a place to act out our lives here and now… Fame? (I suggest spinning the John Lennon tune of the same name as artfully interpreted by John and David (Bowie) …) Fame! What’s a name? What’s a name? What’s a name…

Date: Wed, 19 Mar 1997
From: hopkins@usa.net

Re: Net art vs. video art ?

Again, speaking on this thread of histories of this technological field of work that many of us are in and responding to Jeremy’s comments…

[…]

If you wanted to strip the existing contemporary history of art down to consist of monographs, exhibition catalogs of major museums, critical writings in major Art publications, you still wouldn’t get anything remotely coherent about the workings of technology-based arts … to speak of misinformation and prejudice is simply not applicable to a body of experience that is primarily personal and not yet even remotely collective … Nettime is (or should be) a prime example not of collective histories happening in the moment, but of the development of dynamic dialogic personal histories that are happening now, while we are alive and kicking.

[…]

I guess where ever I see wrestling with these collective histories — who did what first, who named this or that, I am immediately struck by the futility of the efforts — I suppose perhaps that positions are being taken that confuse personal and collective histories … You could say that personal histories can be known by the individual, but collective histories cannot be known in any definitive way until time has distilled (killed?) the many voices, and even then, the relationship of the collective history to ‘what really happened’ may not be “accurate” …

History is a well, it is full of lessons — and the truism “you don’t know where you’re going unless you know where you’re from” holds some power. But notice that it speaks of the individual rather than the mass; it speaks of individual understanding of personal histories …

I need only read Tacitus’ “The Annals of Imperial Rome” rather than The New York Times to know not only the principles but the substances of the corruption in the US government in Washington! No doubt. When historical distillations reflect principled understanding, that is when they are of the greatest value.

History is written ex-post-mortem.