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

7 : March : 20247 : March : 2024

place: Cedaredge, Colorado
enclosure: https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/20080503-Magnus_and_Rod.mp3 46305252 audio/mpeg

Enginn Gleypir Sólina

The English translation of this is Nobody Swallows the Sun, and it’s the title of a release of a couple of sound-art compositions by my friend, Icelandic artist, Magnús Pálsson. Adam Buffington started the label Mumbling Eye in 2021 featuring some of Magnus’ work: check out Enginn Gleypir Sólina on Bandcamp along with a second release, Gapassipi. And, back when I made a couple documentations of both he and Rod prepping in Maastricht for a performance in Berlin: a remix of that complexity.

(18:59, stereo audio, 46.3 mb)

The next step is for art to become mere smell or sound, phenomena which are visible or visual within the mind all the same. In this way, sound has a form and is an image. – Magnús Pálsson

Now a month after leaving the ‘regular’ job, conversations ensue within the personal network—Athens, Weimar, Helsinki, Vihti, Benin, Catania, Reykjavík, Forsbach, Bremen, Kiel, Maastricht, Salmon Arms, Vancouver, Boulder, Durango, Santa Fe, Denver—old friends, collaborators, former students, family. I am a bit surprised—and humbled—at how easy the dialogues pick up and seamlessly continue with the strong energies that they were long-rooted in from other times and places. It is deeply gratifying to have a confirmation of network dynamics as demonstrated by these wonderful Others: many more dialogues to come. Already learning much, and catching up on lives.

— an aside from the NY Times: the Anthropocene will remain an unofficial tag on our short-lived and messy presence: the geoscience community voted it down (more details in an article in Nature). In many ways it seemed to be yet another human conceit, naming an epoch after us, but, this is certainly not the end of the term in the popular hive-mind.

— and, finally, a ~~bird’s~~ drone’s eye view on location after one of the few Light snowfalls this winter. The smooth areas are the result of many days of weed-whacking throughout last year’s long and prolific weed-growing season. That’s the one advantage of drought, even the weeds are handicapped. Last year’s relatively heavy precipitation brought a profusion of chest-high invasives across the entire 13+ acre property that I could not successfully battle without access to full-on farming equipment. That level of capital I don’t have, I subsequently gave up.

The Surface Creek Road property, Cedaredge, Colorado, January ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes. — The center of the Surface Creek Road property, Cedaredge, Colorado, January ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.

17 : January : 201624 : March : 2024

place: online and Prescott, Arizona
enclosure: https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/20160116-arts_birthday_stream.mp3 303110338 audio/mpeg

the 2016 Art’s Birthday stream

Went live/online a bit before noon (GMT-7), with a few folks hanging out — I had suggested it as an event for the Milagro Art Center — with an accompanying talk on Fluxus, but for some reason it wasn’t compelling enough for them. The IRC channel was quiet except for a few pings from naisa — probably more evidence how ‘social media’ has sucked the oxygen from online conversations (speaking as a FB non-participant). Twitter hosted some activity.

The stream was an improv mix from more than 400 files on a ten-track mix* quasi-organized with random/blind files mixed in. Listen to the archive broadcast in its entirety:

(02:06:17, stereo audio, 303.1 mb)

* the improv mix refers to balance and volume on each of the ten tracks being selectively altered during the performance. All of the hundreds of files were unmanipulated field recordings from my personal archive.

5 : October : 201513 : August : 2022

place: Prescott, Arizona

diversity-ness

Having seen/heard many different arguments for and against diversity, especially in the post-politically-correct thought-police era, I was struck with the idea that a debate on diversity presumes the existence of a context for the concept. This is a faulty presumption. Without community, diversity remains an untethered theoretical. Community evolves at the speed of life, and once a distributed network of sharing humans is established (as a community), diversity is an evolutionary product as a transformative collective life-praxis. Otherwise the concept is merely a hollow administrative (hierarchic) tool driving the standardized metrics of social inequality.

11 : March : 201511 : June : 2023

place: Prescott, Arizona

Entropy and the shaping of landscape by water

The south side of the house with the drainage coming from the neighbor’s yard is the site of experimentation with the principle of entropy applied to surface water flow. Creating more turbulence is a way of dissipating the energy of gravitationally-induced water flow. Small scale to larger scale, by interrupting the laminar flow of water across a system, the energy is effectively diffused back into the local environment in a way that is not as destructive (though as I write those words, it occurs to me that the absolute energy content of the water — as a falling mass, minus frictions and surface-tension coefficients — is a constant). It’s only a question of at what scale one chooses to work at to diffuse the energy — giant rocks, big waterfalls; smaller rocks, smaller waterfalls, tiny pebbles, tiny waterfalls. These versus smoothly finished surfaces that transmit the maximum amount of inertial energy to the folks downstream.

We have given an overview of some energetic and thermodynamic principles that have been applied to hydrology. We note there are currently two distinct analogies, though we suspect they should ultimately be related. The first principle states that a fluvial system may be considered as an engine driven by the supply of water at high elevation flowing to low elevation. In this sense elevation, or hydraulic head, is a direct analogue of temperature for a heat engine. Secondly, the configuration of a river network can be described by certain statistical properties, notably an entropy. The notion of minimum energy expenditure in the network should then correspond to the principle of minimum entropy production, where the prescribed boundary conditions do not allow for much flexibility. However, since much of the dissipation of energy in river networks is related to turbulence, Maximum Entropy Production should also be applicable, although the detailed application is not clear and needs further investigations.

If the thermodynamic background to the hydrological shaping of the landscape becomes sufficiently understood, practical applications may be developed. In particular, statistical properties of hydrologic networks may provide quantitative means of classifying networks and thereby understanding the geomorphological processes by which they formed. The relationship of the observed ‘maturity’ of a river system with the Gibbs’ parameter (i.e., network temperature) may be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.

Finally, we note that exploring the thermodynamic concepts of fluvial geomorphology also appear useful for shoreline processes. Their generality may make these ideas quite fruitful for investigating networks on other planetary bodies, where the specific mechanisms and working substances may be different from Earth, but the aggregate effects are similar.

Miyamoto, H., Lorenz, R.D. & Baker, V.R., 2005. Entropy and the Shaping of the Landscape by Water. In Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth, and Beyond. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

6 : March : 201526 : February : 2020

place: Berlin, Germany

Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas: done

(pdf download)

So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!

Those errors aside, Migrating Art Academies is a brilliant program, period.

Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100

Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.

Best,
Mindaugas

Displace
A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8

Download preview @
https://www.migaa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MigAA-Displace_preview.pdf

This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.

The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.

In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.

The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

// Migrating Art Academies https://www.migaa.eu
// https://www.migaa.eu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/migaa

18 : June : 201328 : April : 2014

place: Berlin-Kreuzberg, Germany

radio0n

Rinus invites me to join their radio program this evening, in his words: “We talk/interview/drink wine.” No way to avoid this one! 2200 CET LISTEN LIVE. I think they make podcasts too, if not I’ll record something (studio live recording without the constant sonic remix that actually went out on air … that appears here):

(02:47:58, stereo audio, 400 mb)

24 : April : 20137 : February : 2022

Deep Resonant Networking panel

How do you know when something or someone is affecting you?

There are many ways of describing or modeling the dynamics of human encounter and collaborative relationship. The concept of resonance is a powerful tool for understanding the qualities that relate us to each other and to the world. Resonance is an intuitive (pre-)cognition where something, “when stimulated, spontaneously responds according to the natural guidelines on the particular phases of vital energy engendered in itself and active in the situation.”[1] Resonance is a ‘natural’ extension of a creative praxis: “Resonance allows the universe (or any of its parts) to influence a human being”.[2] One intention in creative collaboration, given that “[t]hings ‘energize’ each other,” is to propagate a resonance between the Self and the Other. While this is a very uncertain undertaking, it is one that in any instance has almost unlimited potentials.

This panel seeks to open a space for sharing and exploring experiences of resonance while helping define what it might mean to rely on such an intuitive feeling. In the context of the Bricolabs network, differences — location, culture, language, social background, and others — that are the realities of distributed creative action, often seen otherwise as divisive challenges, are overcome through ways of relating that transcend surface materialism. This transcendence might be framed as a deep resonant networking where energized participants establish trusting relationships based on a more ethereal vibe: maybe it’s about mojo! Join the conversation and let’s see if we find some resonant frequencies on which to groove.

[1] Roth, H.D., 1991. Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51(2), pp.599-650.
[2] Kaptchuk, T.J., 2000. The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.

6 : December : 201211 : October : 2024

place: Boulder, Colorado

MiT: privacy (and reflecting on presence)

Drop in on Diane’s MiT class this morning in the large ATLS100 lecture room — she’s covering privacy issues. Huge class — I think she’s got more than 100 students enrolled. Quite different than my section of 38.

Surveillance, privacy, monitoring, searching, tracing, 1984, algorithmic filtering and screening of dataspace (face recognition, etc), Mugshots; the students had an assignment to do a name-search on a partner to find out as much as possible. Sitting near the back of the room, a majority of students are paying almost no attention to Diane — instead doing the usual retinue of screen-based tasks — other homework, Facebooking, shopping, and so on. This is disappointing in that it highLights the contemporary situation where even a highly-rated (entertaining!) university teacher is not really engaging the students. In a class of one hundred, filled with mediating screens, what should one expect. Human engagement between teacher and student has been lost in the shuffle of money/power that has become US academia.

Presence is projected out from the Self in a variety of ways — mediated and unmediated, well, always mediated by something: body heat by air (as thermal energy arising from energized interactions, catalyses, and transformations within the body). Presence is more and more being pushed (expressed) into what may be called technological networks. Distributed into more and more finely atomized (digitized!) fragments, and more and more widely distributed in both space and time. Coded, derived, lost in the data-space. When presence is so diffused into that space, we lose what we have here, now. Gone. No chance for an energized encounter when Selves are all pointed away from each other and thoroughly atomized…

28 : November : 20126 : April : 2023

place: Boulder, Colorado

pendulum new music

Drop into another on-campus cultural event, this time over into the College of Music sphere of influence to sample the pendulum new music — Cole Ingraham of glitch lich runs a collaborative networked music performance on a self-authored Super-Collider collab platform (working with folks from the Bournemouth program that Armin helped set up). The rest of the show is more traditionally experimental, mining accepted paradigms.

11 : September : 2012

godaddy down

Yesterday, this site was down apparently as a result of an Anonymous DOS attack on the godaddy DNS system. It happened, by chance, when I was in a small tutorial session talking about reliability of domain hosting services. This is the first major outage in my experience (with godaddy) in the seven years that I have used them. Not bad, but always a bit disturbing when it happens. Of course, the wider network was reverberating with the attack as godaddy is one of the largest hosting services anywhere.

21 : March : 201228 : December : 2023

cutting room floor

The cumulative fabric of the social system evolves through a constantly shifting, hybrid, and continuous field of change, affected by all flows: we might call it simply a net/archy. The differences arise largely as an effect of the varying degrees of freedom that available or potential protocols apply to the nodal/human relations. The sourcing and dynamic evolution of the protocols that govern energy-flow pathways between participants are crucial metrics of the evolving qualities of relation. This field of change is expressed simultaneously as a participatory site of tension, simmering conflict, dynamic encounter, and the vital renewal that is necessary for any viable system.[1] Control vies with autonomy at all scales from the deeply embodied to the global.

[1] As an example, Václav Havel’s well-known essay “The Power of the Powerless” contains a profound exploration of the nature of power in an extremely hierarchically-controlled social system near the end of its existence. It is a system that “for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures” (1985). It is the application of power via protocol which exerts the control and eliminates (as that exertion becomes more and more intense) any spaces for autonomy to exist. But these systems reach a saturation point where the control (and feedback) system, a necessary structural part of it, begins to absorb all the energy available to the system overall—destroying it from the ‘inside.’

Havel, V., 1985. The Power of the Powerless: citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

17 : August : 201125 : April : 2013

place: Prescott, Arizona

silence of the blog: abyssus abyssum invocat

usual or unusual translocations arising and coming-to-be, a different state of be-ing is the chief outcome. no base except the network. as usual, complicated questions, multi-plex answers. yee-haw!

7 : May : 201130 : November : 2015

place: Preston, VIC, Australia

back to B&B

Martin Buber and David Bohm — German-speaking Hasidim Jew phil-theo-logist/sopher and Anglo, McCarthy-black-listed quantum physicist. Unlikely combination, but in my practice, my pathway, they elicit a resonance unlike any others, although there are Legion sources of energized engagement that have made my trajectory a rich experience. All those Others who share the way(s). But I will work with these two as they both resonate. Simple, complex. One provoking an imaged-cosmos where there are no things, but only activated orders of manifestation, and this condition of being directly informing the way of interaction and relation between the Self and the Other. And the other thinker, sketching a cosmos which itself comes-to-be in the reality of relationship: within the encounter lies the source of all things.

Both these worldviews are highly idiosyncratic visions of the cosmos and also, consequentially, of human relation, but neither of them are mutually exclusive of the other. I find my own worldview shares at least this characteristic with both of them. But there are other ways in which our models overlap, and it is these pathways of flow which will stimulate the thesis.

The image of humans and their view of the cosmos that I always describe in a classroom setting is: (this after getting to know the students at least a bit) — “it’s as though we are dancing around the Void, each of us, in groups, pairs, alone, catching glances out of the corners of our eyes of it, calling out what is looks like in throat-tones frantic with fear, joy, and wonder. Sometimes a whole group will shout out in unison, the agreed-upon vision. Others stay to speaking the wind. Occasionally we turn to face it on, or are rudely pulled by the shoulder by another who is straying close to the edge. It has no name, yet we all insist on calling It something. Even when we turn our backs directly to it, we can feel it, perhaps even more than when facing it.”

So, idiosyncrasy is a way of movement (as point-of-view needs change), which leads to a clear, albeit self-relative, experience (impression) and the consequent expressions while regarding, receiving, that. Springing from these two pathways (im- and ex-pression) is a third which dictates, in part, the motion of the point-of-view. It is a feedback mechanism which generates, gradually or quickly, a worldview that touches on the Void if only by discrimination against what cannot be directly named.

Okay, working (or “working”) in the office much of the week and weekend, not too effective, but I think I did finally begin to imagine a framework to hang all these words on. And it feels like one that will work. Norie gave me a couple other theses of former students of hers — very interesting works. My intuition about her seems well-placed. And it’s a funny expression of the morphing social network that I’ve participated in the last 20 years. Connected.

And swimming. Hope to hit 100 km/3 months by the time I move on. That’s attainable, easily if I take care of things.

17 : April : 201118 : June : 2015

place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

teaching, and prayers

jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.

by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.

25 : March : 201114 : November : 2015

modeling / simulation

The modeling approach has an advantage of any mathematical model; it can predict situations that cannot be reached experimentally. If quantitative data obtained from a well designed experiment allow a model to be constructed, the functionality of which is tested by comparison with experiments, the model can serve to investigate an infinite number of different situations such as those caused by mutagenesis, changes in activity of the elements of the system, etc. The model allows the dynamics of the process and the terminal states of the system to be investigated. It can bypass experimental limitations and thus explore biological situations currently restricted by experimental accessibility. It also brings deeper understanding of the nature of the whole process. The simulation capabilities are unlimited and can provide a check on the intuitive understanding of a process. — Vohradsky, J., 2001. Neural Model of the Genetic Network. THE JOURNAL OF BIOLOGICAL CHEMISTRY, 276(39), p. 36173.

19 : February : 201114 : November : 2015

more from Mr. Moglen

In January, investors were said to have put a value of about $50 billion on Facebook, the social network founded by Mark Zuckerberg. If revolutions for freedom rest on the shoulders of Facebook, Mr. Moglen said, the revolutionaries will have to count on individuals who have huge stakes in keeping the powerful happy.

“It is not hard, when everybody is just in one big database controlled by Mr. Zuckerberg, to decapitate a revolution by sending an order to Mr. Zuckerberg that he cannot afford to refuse,” Mr. Moglen said.

By contrast, with tens of thousands of individual encrypted servers, there would be no one place where a repressive government could find out who was publishing or reading “subversive” material. — Jim Dwyer, NYT article

31 : January : 201114 : November : 2015

place: Prescott, Arizona

I left FaceBook last week …

Emile writes to the point:

I left facebook last week
by EZ

tired of the mirrors, noise and eyes.

tired of prickly, intimate and fleshy human relationships being flattened into ‘friend’-nodes, the erasure of myth by constant visibility and exhausting availability.

what kind of network society do i want to support? a closed compound of willingly data-mined crayons or an open net of chance and unpredictability? more…

I am of the same mind, and had decided a couple months ago to do the same — at the end of February. I have found it most instructive that since I put this status up:

Capped by the Goldman-Sacks pseudo-IPO for the wealthy, and in light of the massive data-harvesting of everything posted here, I am leaving FB as of 01 March 2011 — if you are interested in staying in touch, email me chazhop at gmail dot com with your contact info before that time…

I’ve gotten all of ~~four~~ five responses in the last month and only one at the suggested email address — of around 500 ‘friends.’ It appears that the concept of ‘friend’ in the FaceBook space is quite completely divergent from that of my own conception of friend-ship. There is a bloated vacuity in the expressed presence that the applied protocol of FB requires as a condition of participation. I hate to pop your bubble.

12 : December : 201011 : June : 2023

place: Whanganui, New Zealand

endings – Day 11 – eNZed

I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.

There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.

Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.

It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.

The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.

Can’t wait to get another dose of NZ!

9 : December : 201012 : October : 2024

place: Whanganui, New Zealand

Energy, Creative Action, and Sustainable Systems Workshop – Day 8 – eNZed

The official blurb for the workshop:

This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:

(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.

**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit

3 : December : 201026 : February : 2024

place: Whanganui, New Zealand

The Green Bench – Day 2 – eNZed

Today is completely packed and busy: cleaning, organizing, and installing the show at the Greenbench for the gallery opening this evening. The title of the show is BURN and the show is obliquely or directly about hydrocarbons — plastics, production, consumption, distribution. Julian had tracked down a collection of oil samples from an early and now spent New Zealand (oil) field nearby (name?). I am surprised, oil — with the tectonic regime here, the foreshore of a plate boundary subduction zone. Ah, maybe the heat flow is actually lower when considering that because the immediate crust is double thickness with the subducting plate, so there is a lower heat gradient from the mantle. Shallow oil, guess I’d never thought of the genesis of such plays.

I use embodied energy to organize and clean the gallery kitchen for the opening, along with having numerous conversations with folks introduced from Julian’s extensive local network. He asks me if I will talk at the opening sharing some anecdotes about working in the oil business. Completely impromptu, though I had a minute to sit with a piece of paper before and write a five- or six-point list of things to remember to talk about. I am not the best story-teller, especially in such a situation, but folks politely listen to a few minutes of my rambling.

Later in the evening, raucous preparations over wine precede delicious dinner back at the house. Definitely some good cooks around!

The question for me becomes — how to keep track of the dialogues, and the warm humans encountered? Julian mentions there is an artist-residency possibility in town. It would be great to hang here for a time. Somehow, it reminds me distantly of Tornio, in Lapland, half-way ’round the world, literally, in the sense of it being a littoral backwater along a river in a small country, but the community here seems quite activated, and the differences between Finns/Lapps and Kiwis/Maori are complex and significant. Similarities do exist — it would be good to have the time to explore. It looks like there will not be any spare time in these 11 days for much autonomous explorations, although this is okay, as the people immediately surrounding Julian and Sophie’s lives provide a rich environment for encounter. And a site for the exchange of inspiration.

19 : November : 20108 : October : 2014

place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Statement of Multi-Cultural Experience and Practice

With 20 years of experience with students from more than 40 countries and with educational organizations in 25 countries, I have a deep appreciation of the issues involved in multi- or trans-cultural education. My own practice as an educator looks at multi-cultural learning from both a pragmatic and a positive point of view. Pragmatically, for example, all of my classes in the past years are composed of students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. This simple fact brings to the fore in every situation the difficulties of language, and the cultural expressions that are deeply formed by language. Most often working under second-language conditions, I have honed my sensitivities to the relative speeds of comprehension and expression that second-language imposes and to the contingencies of difference that surface. Because difference is such a core creative source, I make it a practice in my workshops that students engage each other so as to open the potential pathways for creative collaboration.

It is tremendously important that a learning/creative situation is relevant to each particular student and that they feel comfortable enough to evolve and take on an experience that reflects a personal, internal source. Teaching in up to 20 different linguistic and cultural situations each year I have developed an appreciation for what is possible, what each distinct viewpoint opens up in a collective learning experience, and how personally relevant work may be seen as an inspiring source for peers. This kind of movement through radically different domains requires me to have a flexibility to engage and facilitate under widely varying conditions. While this is a constant challenge, it is one that I seek out for its richness, liveliness, and the consequential open space that arises when learners, myself included, are faced with the unknown — both inside the Self and inside the Other that they face. Because a fundamental concept of my creative work as well as my seminars and workshops is the facilitation of distributed (that is, non-hierarchic) network systems, I specifically deal with this human-to-human dynamic both in the conceptual/theoretical content as well as the lived practices that I stimulate in the classroom.

17 : November : 201029 : December : 2023

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog (Eric Kluitenberg)

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.

more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog (Eric Kluitenberg)”

14 : November : 20106 : August : 2013

place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

ethernet orchestra

meander down to Roger and Neil’s place in Marrickville to observe the live Ethernet Orchestra network music collab that Roger is doing as a part of his thesis research. Neil whips up a delicious meal beforehand.

11 : October : 20105 : August : 2015

Freedom in the Cloud

Freedom in the Cloud: Software Freedom, Privacy and Security for Web 2.0 and Cloud Computing

Absolutely brilliant talk by Eben Moglen — Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University, and founder, Director-Counsel and Chairman of the Software Freedom Law Center — at an Internet Society – New York Chapter event back in February of this year.

In these two videos he presents an image of what exactly happened in terms of the internet infrastructure, completely outside the purview of political or wide social awareness which presents extreme danger to the fundamentals of our civil society. Explicit, clear, concise insights into the situation presented by corporate ‘log aggregators’ like Google and Facebook as well as the issues underlying how they threaten YOUR freedom.

10 : October : 201014 : November : 2015

Migrating: Art: Academies: done

(pdf download)

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers! more “Migrating: Art: Academies: done”

10 : October : 201029 : December : 2023

The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming

ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Because of the heavy-duty editorial tasks, I otherwise didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even secret pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

This volume Migrating:Art:Academies: represents yet another step on the (linguistic) migration from nation to nation, academy to academy, culture to culture, friend to friend, order to order, life through life. As with the first volume, Migrating Realities, any impossible contortions of English are this editor’s responsibility, and given the time constraints for this latest MigAA tome, there are sure to be some short-comings. But then, of all the movements within the social, language migrates the most of all. It is never static. Nor should it be, especially as it accompanies the learning process — a process which is essentially about encountering and naming that which is not (yet) known. more “The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming”

28 : September : 201011 : June : 2023

place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

(How to Sit) Zazen

It’s a good example of the affect of mediation on socially-generated practices of any sort [this came into mind when I saw a poster advertising a IEEE conference here in Sydney. The posted contained all the recognized and standardized functions of conferences anywhere on any subject. The cocktail evening cruises on the ________ (fill in the blank) river/harbor/lake. The hospitality suites in the _________ (fill in the blank) hotel. The keynotes by famous personages. The plenaries, the break-outs, the posters, workshops, and seminars. yadda, yadda. Don’t people get tired of this endless repetition of heavily coded social protocols?]

The following was downloaded from the UM (University of Minnesota) original Gopher online text retrieval system sometime in the winter of 1991-92. I think it’s the first document (extant) that I downloaded via that new networked document system — the direct precursor of the WWW. Coming around in a very long, very wide circle, from the roots of the digital coming-to-being in the last millennium, breathe deeply:

1. Sit on the forward third of a chair or cushion.
more “(How to Sit) Zazen”

7 : February : 201014 : November : 2015

musings before a roadtrip

Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.

Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.

… back to the road …

The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!

The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.

The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

5 : February : 201029 : December : 2023

network power

Ran across this book a few days ago, and it imbued me with a sense of urgency in the effort to get more succinct ideas on paper. Grewal begins to make a connection between social systems, protocols (standards), and individual human participation in those social systems. He does not approach it from an energy/flow point-of-view, but rather a traditional materialist one.

Using the examples of the gold standard and the English language to drive his argument, he frames in detail the relation between the individual and the inevitable social network (system) that the individual is embedded in, looking at the dynamic feedback mechanism that occurs between the evolving social system (and the protocols which are its substrate) and human choice.

His analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic values for protocols (and standards) that define network power flows are spot on — along with direct and indirect forces which motivate the adoption of a standard — his framework goes a long way in circumscribing the dynamic between individual and collective and the politics of globalization. Network power arises through the concentrating affect that protocols apply to the various energy flows available to the techno-social system

Grewal, D. S., 2008. Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven.

22 : November : 200912 : November : 2024

place: Millers Point, NSW, AU

netart 2009 – VisitorsStudio

The following quick essay was for the last and final edition of the annual netarts awards from the Machida Museum in Tokyo:

Grand Prize for this year, the online platform VisitorsStudio, is not a complete newcomer to the netart scene — it’s been running as a live visual-sonic collaboratory for a few years now. As a playground, it offers many degrees of freedom within what appears at first to be a very restrictive environment. But, isn’t it true that all play-places have limits? Your mother would never let you go off just anywhere and play. Your mother would certainly approve of VisitorsStudio. The limits of VisitorsStudio lie primarily in the intriguing area of file sizes (more on that shortly). The interface is intuitive and straight forward, and does not entail a steep learning curve: anyone can create mesmerizing works in no time.

The most obvious elements in digital ‘mash-up’ play are the text, the image (still and moving), and the sound. Participants in VisitorsStudio may gather these elements themselves and using a rich set of live controls make compelling live mixes. There is an existing database of files to work with, or, you can prepare your own media library to upload and play with. This is where each sound, image, or video file is limited to a 200kb maximum size — you will be surprised at what can be done — the result is absolute proof that great things come in small packages.

VisitorsStudio is available for special performances and makes an ideal platform for educators in all settings who wish to stimulate imaginations with real interactive digital art — it’s not simulated and it’s not eye-candy. As a collaborative tool, it does not aggressively take the foreground in the process, but rather works as a solid and supportive background element for seamless play.

Of course, the best way to enjoy a jam session is with a heavy-duty sound system and a 72-inch plasma screen or a video projector. You will be the resident visual-sonic artist. But intimate small-screen solo play is also very satisfying. The best feature is the possibility for live remote partners and audience. Invite your friends half-way around the world to join you in a jam session!

Technically, VisitorsStudio needs only an internet connection and a browser running the latest version of the Flash plugin. And, hey, if we ask, maybe they will port a Wii controller to VisitorsStudio! Wouldn’t that be fun? Let’s play!

One of the Honorable Mentions for the 2009 netart award is SiTO’s gridcosm project which, if there ever was a primordial interactive play-place online, this is it. Gridcosm was initiated by Ed Stasny way back in 1997 as an outgrowth of SiTO’s live online image mash-up collaborations. That’s in the Precambrian era of internet time! It even has its own Wikipedia entry! But gridcosm clearly tapped into something fundamental — with a fresh and accessible interface design; a solid back-end code; and exuding a rare social sensibility of precisely what it means to collaborate online — there are hundreds of contributors. A dozen years later, the collaborative space is continuously full with a vibrant and evolving palette of personalities and plenty evidence of creative juice spilling out onto the screen. The acronym SiTO originally came from OTIS (Operational Term is Stimulate) which was the motto of the nascent online collective collaboratory back in 1994 or so. So, kudos to gridcosm for sheer staying power and what looks to be a lively future. How many layers does an artwork need to have for it to be classified as cosmologically significant? Visit gridcosm and discover the answer to this profound question! It’s an open project for anyone to jump into — as are all the SiTO collaborative projects — so, check it out!

John Hopkins, Sydney, Australia, 15.Nov.2009

21 : October : 200924 : December : 2016

ant(s)

Latour’s network(s) of relations (in ANT) are complexifying descriptors for a multiplicity of flows where each actor in the network are the origin and recipient of various flows. Or, they are merely the nodal locales of concentrated flow (as conscripted by the social structures). Again, back to the observation that the structure of the social is the prescription that forces flows into rarefied and concentrated zones or pathways. Each attenuation (measured in relief to a ‘natural’ background flow) becomes an actor in full, constant, and distributed relation to at least some other points in the field. The theory, the image of a multiplicity of flows, taken to a near-infinite limit, a beyond-multiplicity, an infinity of nodes would then approximate “reality.” If the network is functioning properly — that is, constructing a plausible account of real social systems — the network will be “an expression to check how much energy, movement and specificity our own reports are able to capture.” (Latour) Those reports, though, are always reductive and incomplete. A map locating the nodes and noting the flows across each one is not the lived territory in time, nor does it accurately express the character of the flows, which in the end are more important than the nodal points.

Is this blog a report? If so, the question becomes how it might more accurately invoke the territory of inquiry. [indeterminacy, trans-disciplinary (discipline being “mortification by scourging oneself”, yikes!), without genesis or terminus, and sampling as many strands of lived-impression (not just screen-mediated living) as possible.]

If network is an accurate description of a situation then a consideration of the order that the network imposes on the situation is called for. Network and order, (including Latour’s actor-network) is about the application of a decodable order applied to a diversity of actors within the object of study. It implies reduction, though hints at an ever-expanding point-of-view. It is couched in language (report, correspondance, academic paper, speech, communications) which is problematic, but this limit is applied to practically anything social. Order is rooted in the negentropic tendencies of life in opposition to the entropic character of all non-life. (Depends — is an accretionary disk of stellar matter, through gravity, rising as anisotropic presence of order as the star forms negentropic, or not — is there any fundamental (ordered) difference between varying (relative and Cartesian) densities of energized matter?) The biggest problem with most current usages of network is that very often the nodes are well-defined (to a fault), as are the geometries of connection, but not so much the qualities of the flows between. I’ll have to pay attention to that lack as I troll the literature. There is the (network) engineering efficiency approach which examines the issues around signal transmission and reception including power usage and signal/noise ratios — which are inextricably linked to amplification issues.. But the efficiency is determined after the fact of the signal being strictly defined by existing protocols.

ack! my usage plunges into a cesspool. the Jekyll and Hyde of free-style and efficient. faggeddabouddit!

17 : October : 200922 : August : 2015

what is language?

(a title: On The False Invariance of Text)

Writing is oscillation, it is frequency, it is tone and overtone. It is directed at a hundred thousand invisible targets some not yet alive, most dying, some dead. It is all-encompassed by the infinite flux of be-ing at the same time as being uncircumscribable. Resonance drives the text. Without resonance, the text is more than dead, it is simply not. Null, less-than-zero. Silent. While speaking in tongues, interfacing with one another, we tack meanings to the words, sounds, making them become for a moment, a surfacing out of a wider flow of dis-connection. Or merely happenstance accretion, coagulation, a resulting (sepsis-in-mind) of something (quelque chose), making: turbid agglomeration becomes acculturation.

The whole engagement with the idea of doing the doctorate arises from a combination of pragmatics and desire. The pragmatic considerations are real to the degree that the author understands the social value of ideas that are formally exposed, independent of format, and that the Other takes up, paying life-time and attention to. This is a basic premise. Desire enters the process where there is the need to be recognized, this, not on a social scale, but on a simple and uncorrupted personal scale. There is the deep risk that both these motivations are hollow and base-less. To defeat that potential, the process will be open and open-ended, unending. It will not begin and end with bound covers and stitched bindings. It will mimic life that came from who-knows-where and is going elsewhen.

One point of this blog is to de-stabilize the general process of writing to the degree of opening up expressive possibility. It is not here to be a blog, with endless sifting through and cross-referencing of network sludge. It is an armature on which to hang the infinity of idiosyncratic individual inputs and some limited external inputs into the process flow.

14 : October : 200911 : October : 2024

Angel Place

Angel Place, one of those darkish urban voids produced by vertical development and poor planning, is host to the Forgotten Songs installation as part of the Hidden Networks program. Sounds of extinct and near-extinct species that once filled this very ground before colonization. The bird (sounds) are in cages. What brilliant human-applied alterations of flow does (temporarily) to natural systems: when’s a mass equilibrating event gonna happen?

7 : October : 200929 : December : 2023

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

(in) no time

Willie Wagtails (Rhipidura leucophrys), Minors (Manorina melanocephala) …

that entry stopped there. no time to observe and note things when constantly consuming texts and coping with the daily movements. it is highly inefficient to commute for this kind of work. research is 90% online, and moving between home and the office sucks up at least 1.5 hours a day. strange that it is able to absorb so much time when it’s just a short distance away. walking takes about 40 minutes each way, though, and waiting for the bus and the slow crawl down George Street is tedious. I find that the mind-space that I take on when in that mode is very unproductive and deadening. I observe, while hearing is constantly assaulted, occasionally some energizing encounters, but the locally dominant Asian sense of personal space I find deeply conflicting with my own. and the reflexive sensory protocols I developed through the time in the desert and mountains has been thoroughly destroyed — no stars to see, not even planets, and it is only in the 16th-floor office that its really possible to watch the weather develop albeit through heavy windows that cannot be opened and are filthy on the exterior (I cleaned the large inside pane of the window immediately over my desk, much to the amusement of several of the other grad students). optical clarity — if I’m forced to look at the world through a glass filter, it’s got to be clean!
more “(in) no time”

23 : September : 200921 : March : 2020

code and money

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list:

I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social protocol and the infrastructure it is embedded within.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

17 : September : 20098 : May : 2024

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

open dialogue

What of the experience of an opening, an open, dialogue? Re-creating that experience of presenting the Self to a random collection of Others. Or to a single Other. I keep thinking of identifying, finding an Other who would be willing to have a series of dialogues that would be re-produced for the purpose of mapping out the initial space wherein the model (as script) is to be constructed. The script being a primary resource for a 60-80 hour workshop (which would never be used because the workshops are open systems and have to leave a script behind soon after starting). It would merely point in the direction for certain issues (resourcing them), giving a framework that is an optional (inspirational) component for the process. As a multi-modal hypertextual object within a social networking space, it would imitate/mimic the knowledge-flow features of a more traditional teacher (and little or nothing else — memesis of a teacher being a fundamentally antithetical concept regarding outcomes of learning!). Fundamentally, the workshops are about attentive presence, that crucial realized, actualized, and embodied facilitation process. You had to be there. (So, back to the conundrum of being and not-being when documenting, re-producing life.)

Memory — especially the memory of human encounter — is the tangible, real resonance between the Self and Other, arising through the movement of energies. Memory is a re-configuration of the energy-field that is called body; it is a dynamically persistent re-configuration of the Self. This re-configuration requires the movement of energy between the Self and the Other. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. That is the minimum requirement, and, perhaps is the only requirement, as it is the essence of the process of encounter. It is the encounter, and the flows that are the event of encounter (the Light coming from the body of the Other, the sounds emanating from them, their cumulative presence) which precipitate change in the Self. The only further commentary might come from a qualitative exploration of the flows, and the possible blocks to flow that are ever-present in relation. This view of communications does not fall easily into the traditional phenomenological tradition of communication theory. And indeed, most theories of communication that I have run across are tightly focused on language and meaning rather than any acknowledgment of a real and tangible exchange of energies that occurs in any human encounter (even when subject to the relative intensities of mediation which, in fact, are simply the presences of different forms of energy pathways imposed by cultural conditions (both internal and external to the encounter)). [ED: burbling parenthetic expression, uff]

26 : August : 20095 : May : 2024

place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

structural organization

Structural organization. Weaving this space of inquiry, exposé, or a web of deceit. A fabric of cloaking, or a dust cover for an old arm chair.

Van Leeuwen’s overview (in Multimodal Discourse) of an expressive situation that he labels semiotic production frames first a (situated) discourse which is then subject to design (to shape the delivery mechanism) which is materially formed in the production process followed by distribution (one-to-many propagation). These conceptual and actual stages are closely bound to a semiotics-based view which is rooted in the abstracted space of language and representation. This, despite the fact that the expressive action is indeed a real, tangible movement of energies from the producer to the receiver/consumer — it is not abstract. It is in this space between the models built in the abstracted semiotic space and the real executions that Dialogue, in the extended definition that I propose, occurs. It does not preclude any (most) semiotic models, but is sets the limits of their applicability that arise from the abstraction process that is inherent in language. The Dialogue model looks at these processes, steps in semiotic production as a continua of socially applied protocols which guide (provide a pathway for) energized expression from the Self to the Other — so that semiotic production is clearly not the thing itself, but an abstraction of it. (Van Leeuwen notes this when reflecting on the separation from embodiment that written language imposed on this abstraction process).
more “structural organization”

8 : August : 200922 : November : 2024

place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

bzzzzzzz

a week into August already. more than two weeks in Oz, a number to go. haven’t made any images at all except the occasional telephone lo-rez abstraction. so that goes. this may be the way the travelog goes in the next months. as there are so many other things to get done now. teaching heavily underway, research cranking up, and networking. as well. essential life starts to make its way forward.

plenty of sound recording though. on aporee maps. and a few photos from around the house.

24 : July : 200921 : June : 2014

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

quick observations

tea and concrete in the morning and off for a full day of meetings and paperwork, prepping for teaching and research.

a visit to the library is disappointing, many books are in terrible condition, shabby, out-dated. hmmmm. what’s with that? evidence of zealous and active use? or small library budgets. in the technology section, so many were completely outdated and should have been consigned to basement stacks long ago.

profiling. black clad, stylishly-coiffed young Asian students with thick-rimmed Dior specs dominate the downtown city streets that I’ve frequented so far. haven’t gotten to the regular business district and will likely not unless there is a compelling reason.

bureaucracy. and catch-22’s loom out of the composition of days spent meeting people. technological infrastructure is problematic as well. regular network access simply does not work, and the help desk could not help. yet I can access a new WPA network constructed for iPhones and such.

23 : July : 200911 : June : 2023

place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

pseudo-settled

grounded. arrive at Devleena’s flat in Marrickville, John is there to meet me. a bit of communication gap with them and it turns out I have the studio only for two weeks, after that it’s been promised to a Kiwi researcher. so, got to put the word back out to the network for another place to live. drat. this place, where Sophea also stayed, would have worked out well aside from the fact that the internet WPA connection isn’t functioning properly (yet), it won’t accept my login, sh… I’ll email her in Delhi to see what the score is.

got a bank account set up with Paul at the ANZ Marrickville branch, went grocery shopping, and hung out in a caf for an espresso and wifi.

palm and eucalyptus trees out the window that overlooks the Cook River (more like a tidal draw) above Botany Bay. it’s warm even for Sydney winter stats, +20C today. sweaty. chilly at night. very much like Santa Monica in the winter. as I thought it would be. air is clear, stars are unknown. winter sun is in the north, in Arizona among other places. clouds and breeze from indeterminate quarters. drifting through. the sounds of the city are not unfamiliar, but are … elusive.

14 : March : 200923 : May : 2021

place: Columbia, Missouri

tools to thrive

spend the afternoon at a meeting with a group of about 15 enthusiastic Mizzou students who are interested in fundamental issues around sustainability and social activism. the meeting (Open Sustainability Network Mid-Missouri, under the title Tools to Thrive. hosted by Richard Schulte, one of the founders of the Mid-Missouri group (which is connected to the umbrella Open Sustainability Network). OSN-MM is also the initiator of the Columbia Missouri Exchange Circle. Lonny Grafman, the featured presenter, is a lecturer at Humboldt State University and is the founder of Appropedia Foundation, the self-proclaimed sustainability wiki which provides a public platform for information on sustainable community practices along with pertinent knowledge-sets for implementation. Lonny is also the Executive Editor of International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering (IJSLE). He introduced some of his work in the form of a presentation Democracy Unlimited Humboldt County Rainwater: A Case Study in Open Source Community Action for Sustainability which explored community activism in deployment of sustainable (in this case, domestic rainwater gathering) systems. words: creation of human networks … the search for a deliverable … starts with a sonic ambient exploration a rainstorm … examples of rainwater sequestering … Bechtel in Bolivia … anthropocentric impurities … a lesson in rainwater catchments: free … local infrastructures generate independence / autonomy. Too many details at first. without the principles of appropriate technology use — public perception, policy situation, know-how, resources, initiative, currency in Humboldt … hemp paper, soy inks … Temporary Autonomous Zone break-out groups: creation and organization of more and better public art; bike-powered something; CSPAN (Columbia Sustainability Policy Action Network); local economy (in general); moving from thought to action; facilitating dialogue; sustainable creative activism; expanding the sustainability community; empathy and interconnectedness; rooftop gardens where possible on campus; community networking club celebrations, gardening; organizing / participating in one implementation workshop for a physically appropriate technology setup; less plastic use, healthy local food, teaching sustainability to children … sorry no more detailed notes, I had to leave right after the break-out sessions to meet Nick and Deb to look at houses. I cycle across downtown from campus to the Walgreens where I lock the bike and go in to buy a snack. when I come out I wander across the parking lot looking for Deb’s car. a chubby white woman gets out of a sedan and asks me if I need a ride. she says she normally doesn’t do that, but I looked like I wasn’t a killer and that she’d be happy to help me out. I say no, no thanks, I’m just waiting for friends to pick me up. mid-western courtesy? I’m wearing a black leather biker’s jacket, black jeans, black half-gloves and a baseball cap from Germany, and dark brown sunglasses. who’s she kidding? she must have been one of those mild-mannered mid-western serial killers. just then Deb pulls up. saved! Nick stayed with the kids, so we drive into the countryside to some small towns looking at houses. the area is really depressed, many empty storefronts on Main Street. and this area is relatively affluent compared to much of the rest of the state. it would be very interesting to travel through these areas and document what is happening. sustainability? indeed. things are not sustained here. help is needed.

19 : February : 20097 : February : 2022

place: Prescott, Arizona

iDC dregs

iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.

sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.

21 : January : 200911 : October : 2024

social networking crit

Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance
Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and
MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic
Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

Study: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_Surveillance_Fuchs.pdf

Background Information: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_E.html

The study recommends that citizens see commercial Internet platforms that store and evaluate personal data generally critically and that by establishing special consumer protection websites it could be documented in the public, which rights in dealing with personal data such platforms obtain by their terms of use and their privacy terms. Christian Fuchs: “There are many examples for how affected citizens try surveilling the surveillors with the help of websites. This can pose a certain degree of protection by making use of public information, but also has limits because the basic problem is that we live in times, in which on the one hand there are strong commercial interests in data collection and data evaluation and on the other hand after 9/11 continuously more political steps have been taken for creating surveillance societies. These are political-economic problems, not technological ones.”

16 : January : 20097 : February : 2022

arts birthday tomorrow

This year I didn’t manage to jump into the fray with a live stream, but many other folks did — the party has already started in some places, you can browse the schedule of events here… and at ORF Kunstradio

“Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.

He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Modest beginnings, but look at us now.

Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.

After Filliou’s death in 1987, some artists began to celebrate Art’s Birthday with mail art, fax and slow scan TV events in the spirit of his concept of “The Eternal Network” or “La Fête permanente”. The birthday parties took place in different cities across the world and artists were asked to bring birthday presents for Art — works that could be shared over the network.

Art’s Birthday Party has never been a formal event, but was always organized on an ad hoc basis through the network. Every participating location (and they are different every year) organizes its own party — from a few friends in a private studio to a performance evening in a museum or gallery. Filliou’s invention of Art’s Birthday is wonderfully absurd and humorous in the typical Fluxus tradition of serious fun. So the global birthday party for art has always tried to be fun while paying homage to Robert Filliou’s dream of The Eternal Network. — Robert Adrian

15 : January : 200918 : May : 2014

nokilling.org

oh, and this from John as well…

sheesh. waiting life away whilst attacking the TM09 issues — networks, people, and subjects.

11 : January : 200914 : November : 2015

violence

Technology and the internet have allowed citizens to connect and mobilize like never before. The rise of a new model of internet-driven, people-powered politics is changing countries from Australia to the Philippines to the United States. Avaaz takes this model global, connecting people across borders to bring people powered politics to international decision-making.

that from the site avaaz.org sent to me by a friend on account of the petition for stopping yet another wave of Palestinian-Israeli violence.

but I say oh, really?? to the first line: it would seem that technology and the internet has plunked many fat asses down on chairs and completely de-mobilized potential good citizens in an effective reign of (p)assivity where only the fingers move, and the perspectival point-of-view is locked within a few centimeters of the face.

19 : December : 20086 : March : 2024

place: Prescott, Arizona

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

https://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980’s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

https://neoscenes.net/blog/cv-resume

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT more “Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)”

13 : December : 200822 : November : 2024

place: en route Colorado Springs - Pueblo, Colorado

further south

leave Karen and Ron’s place mid-morning after finishing off the networked book proposal, needed to get that uploaded before Monday, and no likely internet connections before that. head south. big accident on I-25 south of C-Spgs. western gusts rock the truck. huge streamers of snow coming off Pikes Peak. get to Steve and Gaan’s place around 1230 and dump some stuff there. we hang for awhile, catching up, and then the three of us head back to Pueblo West to their restaurant (Puukaow Thai) for a Light and very tasty lunch.

then I head over to Ava’s place for Bill and her’s Christmas dinner party where Chris, Rick and Sally, John, Jimmy and Wendy, Emi, Rob, and some others show up in the very exotic Kona Kai apartment complex. the building, a rectangular complex with a large courtyard in the center was built in the 1970’s. the courtyard was covered completely and landscaped with tropical plants which seem to be thriving mightily thirty years later. a complete surprise when entering the doors, especially given the weather about to happen outside.

always nice to catch some face-time with folks not seen so often.

head back to Steve and Gaan’s place where we hang on the deck and get a spectacular display of Geminid fireballs despite the radiation point in Gemini have a fifteen-year-maximum full moon plunked down in the middle of it. hard to imagine the show without the moon, it was intense.

5 : December : 200824 : January : 2024

place: Denver, Colorado

dorkbot303

Jane also organizes a nice Denver dorkbot event along with the Denver Open Media crew live broadcast on community cable channel 57 and on KGNU. she invites me to do an hour talk/presentation on whatever—networking, projects, community activism—live. interesting dynamic, I’ll get a copy of it at some point. Mark Hosler from negativland does the hour after mine. later there is a small party upstairs.

A chaotic night, as it was also Dona’s photo exhibition opening at Sliding Door Gallery, only a block away. Very strange coincidence as I practically never had any engagements in Denver, ever. It was a First Friday street night, and the neighborhood was packed. Very nice to see such civil activities like that in the US, maybe there is a cultural renaissance about to fire up. Maybe in response to the collapse of consumer capitalism in the developed world. Folks had consumed enough of all that consumer crap on credit on loan on mortgage on plastic (now, is that hydrocarbon plastic we’re talking about?).

Dona had some photographic print work along with Camilla Briggs and her organic textile set-pieces. Dona’s images of the Dalai Lama which impressed themselves into works about Light were distracting, perhaps because of his iconic status, but more basically, to have a human form entering the field of radiative holy-ness of Light, well, either redundant or simply not necessary. Or maybe too obvious. Dunno, precise problem can’t be circumscribed without seeing all the images again. Were these stills from a movie? Why not. Fluid seeing. It seemed to miss the regularity of decisive format choices — sizing and positioning. A smaller panoramic cloud sequence, while not astonishing for those of us humans who fling ourselves about in metal tubes high in the air, was moving in its internal brilliance. Abstraction helps to refine expression of aesthetic. Unless the figuration is more personal — the opposite of iconic. Any body would do. Any body is holy enough for Light to play with.

Camilla’s wax-sealed rose petals needed intimacy, something played out right there in the middle of this civilian crowd. they needed to be touched, to be touching the participating humans in the room. the patio behind the gallery was funky.

And, otherwise, I especially enjoyed the DOM folks, lead by Directrice Ann Theis, and their real passion for what they were doing. Haven’t run across that too often—the last time, in Latvia, at the Cultural/Historical Museum dance party in 2001—and especially not among US cultural-industry sector folks. Usually there is a desperation and even irritated defiance in the air.

I was too distracted by observing the social scene and having rather intensive conversations and interactions with others. Very dynamic evening. Enjoyable.

Bravo!

30 : November : 200812 : December : 2015

thesis proposal :: Basics

Title

Sonic Presence Within The Networked Regime of Amplification

This research explores the relationship of (sonic)energy to social be-ing, technology, and the consequent possibilities for creative action.

Subject

Sound is energy, sound carries energy. Sonic energy is a product and a by-product of life. It forms one expression of organismic presence. It is one particular energized expression of our band-limited life that developed its particular characteristics through evolutionary processes. These processes are essentially structured around variations in the (spatial and temporal) concentrations and availabilities of energy. As one such expression, sound is employed as one means through which humans enhance their survivability. Amplification represents a particular model for what is essentially a life-process that operates on various energy flows, modulating their basic characteristics. How human collectives generate and interact with sonic energy governs a wide swath of their consequent techno-social interactions. This research is a distributed exploration of sound as a carrier of energy between the Self and the Other — as it is mediated through the globe-spanning network of techno-social amplification systems. Specifically, it will be a critical exploration of our contemporary techno-social terrain through the application of this model in a variety of creatively energized situations.

Outcomes

Formally, outcomes will include the dissertation, live/online performances, workshops, a blog, festival participation, and conference presentations. Through developing an energy-based model that amplification provides an armature for, it is my hope that this research will generate a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamic affects of technological systems on creative human engagement at all scales. This knowledge will be applied to facilitate actual situations for this engagement to be explored.

Keywords

amplification, sound, (sonic) energy, power, technology, techno-social systems, networks, continuum of relation, dialogue, collaboration, presence, sustainable creativity, social action, entropy, thermodynamics