posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

language musing

Language arose as a crucial ‘technology’ in the milieu of the social. To connect with an Other requires a protocol—a common expressive pathway shared by the Self and the Other—in dialogue. This is an old idea.

glyph, Golden, Colorado, March ©2020 hopkins/neoscenes.
glyph, Golden, Colorado, March ©2020 hopkins/neoscenes.

The sharing and its deep compulsion arises in the context of momentary, memorable, and activated Life combined with the desire to communicate. (Noting the strange paradigm that ‘not communicating’ or silence is also communication in that social context.) The greater the desire to ‘connect,’ the more adaptable and flexible the two must be in their attempts to understand one another.

This is where the question of wider social viability enters the process. The more idiosyncratic ones choice of communications protocol (language usage or even which language itself) the smaller the potential receiver-base.

For example—formulaic as a genre—romance novels strike me as suffering from a simplistic extreme within such a paradigm. From the limited sampling that I’ve done, the contained language (English) and its usage is banal and bland: mealy-mouthed. As is the ultimate canned banality of the overarching ‘message’ that is being communicated: it’s more than enough to read the liner notes, look at the cover, or note where the book is shelved in the bookstore or library. Predictability allows for wider dissemination, a wider audience, and, thus, in a capitalist system, a better cash flow.

Some of the most striking texts I’ve encountered are the most complex, non-standard, idiosyncratic, dated—and yet are the most profound for their internal reach. Listening to the Other, receiving such texts requires an empathy for and open-ness to the Other that is rarely easy. Within a hunger for knowledge, enlightenment, or basic insight, these texts are sought out in the stead of couldn’t-put-it-down casual time-filling, time-killing reading.

It’s all about numbers. You may have a secret protocol that you use with only one Other in the cosmos: wonderful, as the carrier of idiosyncratic energies between the Self and the Other, it likely allows for exchanges incomprehensible and unreachable to any third-party.

This text has a meta-message: a dearth of readers indicates that it is unreadable: dour, boring, poorly structured, usage too garbled, or merely not relevant. Reaching relevancy through other means (protocols)—sonic or visual—to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the Self and the Other—also remains a challenge. Disciplined understanding and the application of more widely used protocols would be the growth-oriented marketing strategy in the attention economy. So would identifying and filling a particular need of the Other. Those needs are apparently filled by the oligarchs of the current social milieu. Besides, I can’t manage the level of discipline when faced by the fact that the species may not exist in another 2000 years. Transcribing what needs to appear on the screen in the moment is the most I can do in this transitory social incarnation.

posted

Dialogue and Learning

My educational philosophy is built on the existence of a simple phenomena that I observe on a daily basis while moving through life. It is this — where two people can come together and have an encounter. If this encounter is at least somewhat free of conventional social strictures, and the two individuals are able to find an open path for the sharing of their life-times and energies, there arises a special situation. Following this encounter the two might step away from this encounter, both are inspired, both with an excess of energy circulating within themselves, both at a higher energy level than when they arrived an the instance of the encounter.

It is this excess of energy arising from the situation that becomes a source of creative action.

This is a fundamental in learning: To face the unknown Other, to find an open pathway for an exchange of energies, and experience the potential of energy exchange.

The degree of openness in the encounter is heavily influenced by the techno-social system that the two individuals are embedded within and the meta-conditions of their encounter.

Moving away to a wider perspective, a classroom is a multiplicity of these dialogues that have the potential to generate absolutely relevant knowledge and experience sets for/among all participants in the encounter process.

As an educator and facilitator, it is my role to change the characteristic of the space/conditions for the encounter such that there are more possibilities for it to find or create open pathways. One primary task is to be aware of and push back at least a subset of the imposed social relations/protocols that govern the encounter in order to uncover possible alternative pathways for creative collaboration.

posted
  • 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)”

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

student protest

The workshop begins erratically. Thirty minutes late, time already runs down. The first impression is, wow, mostly young ladies attending — somehow a bit of a (nice) surprise, given the techiness of the subject.

We end up at a rather raucous student march through the city, well, not raucous, maybe noisy, around five hundred students. They marched from the Parliament to the University where they push their way into the administration building and barricaded the university professors in their offices. This for the fact that the professors did not oppose governmental changes to the free education system. I believe it all stems back to the Bologna Accord which seems to bring much harm to the system. Although as we later talked about, the system of standardization can bring systems lower than the standard up to a higher standard. It’s all relative. In general it appears that the Lithuanian system is a bit at a bottleneck, with younger students expecting more than their professors can offer in terms of open-ness and progressive thinking. And, following the lead of the Accord that is bringing all schools into a bachelors-masters-PhD sequence like the US, so the neoliberal ideology of the US is perhaps bleeding into these newly reconstituted and impressionable states.

Will reactions to the Bologna Accord finally bring back some serious student activism in opposition to its blatantly globalist/capitalist view on education? It’s not clear, forty years after the ’68 movement. They need a more effective theoretical platform to work from in terms of the broader view of what education should be, compared to what it actually is. so it goes.

In the evening we are brought to a hot gallery opening — clearly a scene, to be seen, to see. Brazen and blatant art market-ism at it’s very pretentious worst. I won’t even repeat the name of the gallery or the curator, for to name is to bring more attention to the blighters than they deserve. And clearly the local art/culture consumers are mesmerized by the imagination of London come to Vilnius. uff. This can only have a negative effect on the local cultural community.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Art and Teaching Philosophy

ART

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged and immersive pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated and directed by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a humane seeking: to engage in a dialogue of energies with an Other. Finding a proper pathway for those energies—transmitting: simultaneously receiving the expressions of the Other—this is the moving act of creativity. Creativity is the charged flow of energies between and through the Self and the Other over relative spaces and times.

These two proto-definitions are the basis of my art and teaching praxis. more “Art and Teaching Philosophy”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the gift of attention

in the days preceding the material frenzy that so characterizes the holiday in the consuming world, I ponder my own relation to the holiday. what could be nicer than receiving a gift? something usable in the course of survival or something completely use-less except for the aesthetic energy it slow-releases to the eye or ear over time. or something that touches on the architecture of the relationship of giver to receiver.

for me the highest gift in the sped-up road-warrior world of 21st century amurika would be the gift of attention. now, I’m not talking about the obsessively sought attention of media-to-star, the ego-centric attraction of appearances, of shiny and slick surfaces, of painted-over cardboard facades, of glimmering particles that exert the false-attraction of material desires. nor the gloming and needy self-centered-ness that requires vampiric sustenance.

but more the binary and reciprocated exchange of attentive presence where the floating self might turn full-faced to the other and in Light and in Gravity — making Light, making Gravity — the two beings take up temporary residence in each others field-of-attraction and field-of-reflection. this is the gift of life, lived life-time shared. attentively shared, focused, concentrated. a gift without value, except for the value of life-time passed. a commodity in limited supply for each, such as the Moirae decree. no higher value of gift except for the giving of life to save a life.

but what is the essence of this gift of attention? in the exchange, sharing of life-time, the self is open, and in that open-ness, adsorbs the be-ing of the other. in this, the self is changed, evolves, realizes the absolute character of other-ness, and what a precious gift it is — to provide the opportunity of change. and between this change, and the apprehension of difference, occurring in an unstable space of the not-knowing, creative spark flashes. and we become more than we previously were.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

[microsound]

the [microsound] list is discussing what some judge to be a severe lack of quality among those who write reviews of electronic art endeavors (in this case, sonic/music things), following are some comments:

sotto voce: I think there are several ways to go with the concept of reviewing (speaking as someone who once had a music column AGES ago in my university paper — mostly to get back-stage concert passes with the local promoter in Denver)… :-\\

— reviewing is a process of reducing the energy of a performance into a linguistic re-presentation for others to read and presumably ‘get something’ of the original performance.

— the principle behind this is to take evolutionary advantage of the experience of an Other in order to optimize Self-survival. relying on Other’s eyes and ears so as not to become hopelessly obsolete or even lunch meat. to remain viable in a social system one is forced more-or-less to heed this second-hand info as a part of socialization.
more “[microsound]”

posted
  • place: Riga, Latvia

ram5 – day 3

quick series of presentations covering software, performative situations, and … in the morning. non-keywords: collective and playful, revealing, (bob him say, “they materialize their every wish. everywhere is war.”), (the possibility for personal data/info re-vealing confused with an open-ness for change as stimulated by the Other). two trees linked via data feeds, one in the north of Sweden, in (natural) situ, and another in Stockholm and elsewhere with a life-support system that mimics the limited quantitative data parameters.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

re:sorb

a long day and the end of a long electric week that ends up behind the Bahnhof, downtown, underground, a throbbing d’n’b scene. with the informatik posse re:sorb doing the vj-ing. I’m the guest. groove. so many grooves grooved upon, grooved through, in the last decades. but it’s the same, different, each time, the focus, the concentration, the groove. it makes something happen. here and there. in a groove. to be taken very seriously. loud pictures and all.

and windows open on future praxis. embodied mind praxis the most important route.

the workshop is incredibly successful, thanks to the dedication and open-ness of the crew. again, a series of in-spiring tableau. free-wheeling conversations, the efficacy of the dialogue assignments are clearly demonstrated. optimal situation. Frieder’s facilitates a true trans-disciplinary program — experimental even though it’s at one of Germany’s most liberal universities — drawing an eclectic group of students who are able to care for themselves in a way that those embedded in the US system may no longer.

posted
  • place: Fishers Towers, Utah

desert moon

another place.

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright Light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the deLight of morning.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert Light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms.

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

***

Dehydration: the desert air sucks moisture from every pore. I take a drink from the canvas water-bag dangling near my head, the water cooled by evaporation. Noontime here is like a drug. The Light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. To me the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting; I feel no temptation to sleep or to relax into occult dreams but rather the opposite effect which sharpens and heightens vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. Each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity that is undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm. Claritas, integritas, veritas. Only the sunLight holds things together. Noon is the crucial hour: the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence. — Edward Abbey

Abbey, E., 1971. Desert solitaire: a season in the wilderness, New York: Ballantine Books.
posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

grounding

what I hope will be the last visit to Iceland for a long time. bone-tired of the movement to get here. feel like being grounded. allowing the electricity of life pass through the body and on into the earth. grounded. in all its suggested meanings. flighty. with the wind blowing outside. and non-sense of the isolation of the interior. the protected sensual field of action. band-limited, spectrally-defined cut and pass. and all that. filtration. that the process of being tends in the direction of shutting down than opening up. but that is my own perception. realizing that possibly some others tend to open-ness as a base condition. open to life and living. what a concept. I have to fight to achieve that state of being. but maybe it is the fight that stands in the way.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

psychic nomadism

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

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

Kiasma

Perttu, the curator of Media at the Museum of Contemporary Art (KIASMA) here graciously meets me today and I get a tour of the fabulous new facility that is about to open in the center of Helsinki, across from the Parliament building. The building, designed by the American architect Steven Holl, is, well, overwhelming. It is so wired one can feel the movement of energy through the walls and floors. constantly vibrating. Is my open-ness in meeting new Others merely a state of artifice, or is it a natural state of sincerity, where the Other is greeted in a spirit of synergistic sympathy? Meeting, there are always the instantaneous developments, the chemistry. I have been traveling and meeting people for years now, a trail passing out behind me scattered with the forgotten ones, the ones with whom is sustained the cryptic line of connection in the long-ness of our Cartesian moments. Swirling wet snow today made the city streets a mess. it is here now, that which is needed.

A change of mind? When Gladys Stourfelt, at 21, inherited her grandfather’s modest fortune, several suitors proposed. She got as far as the altar on three occasions, but always changed her mind at the last minute. Gladys postponed her decision year after year, until finally, flat broke at 40, she agreed to marry her last and most devoted admirer. He had waited almost twenty years to marry his impoverished heiress, and died soon thereafter. We suspect you’ll find a mere 3-minute wait for Caffrey’s far less frustrating and far more rewarding… –from a Caffrey’s Irish Ale ad

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

the traveler

Met with Mark this afternoon. After my Friday afternoon Critical Thinking class. One of the significant reverberations of Open-X was his presence and our meeting and subsequent dialogues which developed, are developing. He is an artist who has made transitions from medium-to-medium, and has come away with a depth of experiential insight that is among the most principled-understanding data-sets I have run across in my networking experience. Our sentiments seem to align in similar directions, probably because of my leanings to the written word, and his to networking and Web-based possibilities. An over-simplification. How energies align is rather something of a mystery for me. How last week at ARS, there was a massive alignment of human essences, bipolar networking molecules, magnetic bio-phage dipoles, whatever. In rare dis-position against the cult of the object that still dominates the cultural industry sector. Definitely the unit for alignment is the individual. Networking. The minimum unit of human interaction is…

Somehow, I feel like I am still traveling, though I can root here in Colorado for three more months. There came a realization last week that I am a member of a sub-group of artist-educator-networkers who are mobile (by choice and by force in recombinant measure), transient, and have this in common. But this common thread is far more powerful than would be immediately evident. As buried in each of these folks is an essential open-ness to the Other. Travelers almost always have this trait. A natural curiosity about the Others met on the road. Combined with a creative spirit, these people can be fiery teachers, not beholden to local institutions, allegiances, or structures. Speaking a tongue unwarped by local political dialects and desires, expressing what is beyond the seen (what is over the horizon), moving, constantly in paced motion, blurring edges and leaping barriers with presence of will.

The ignorant are tied to their native land, the mediocre consider themselves citizens of the world, but only the wise realize that they are a stranger everywhere. — Motto of Los Straniero journal

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

creative potential

0300 and I am just thinking of going to bed. So I do, and now it is 1300, and I am in the middle of shaking down the AVID video system, preparing to do some video work this evening when the sun moves to the north. Unfortunately the studios are on the west side of the building and they have not installed window shades yet in the new building, so things are awkward for serious work. I feel as though in an electronic haze. Like these machines that I am surrounded with are sucking the life out of me, despite the “creative potential” that they represent. I am rather desperate to get something done, but this phantom of doing rather than being seems appropriately distant and immaterial. Discussions take place within the context of the spectacular array of equipment available to us here at the college. This is a familiar sight in, Finland — colleges and university (and, for that matter, high schools) swimming in a sea of technology that would make folks at most other universities salivate profusely. For a student base of under 200 students, many of which are involved in other areas of study, there are four AVID production studios, several analogue video editing suites (Betacam included), numerous large MAC and PC-based studios and facilities totaling around 70 machines, full-blown TV and sound recording studios, cameras of every variety, totally new buildings wired with high-speed LANs, servers for the internet, and so on… The downside of this is the problem of getting qualified and creative instruction for the students. At every institution that I have either visited or lectured at, I hear the same complaints from faculty and students — that there is a shortage of funding for getting teachers in to these same schools. I will probably do a tour here in the spring, doing short teaching gigs at about six different schools scattered across the country. For me it is a good opportunity to teach in good facilities and with eager students, and for the schools, the exposure to outside influence seems essential. Those of us who are here for the Polar Circuit project are constantly amazed at the open-ness shown here — the project itself is a miracle of conditions that would be difficult or impossible anywhere else. A bunch of crazy artists given carte blanche to use a fantastic array of tools that would otherwise lie dormant all summer, and the school opens its doors completely to us, offering everything including an enthusiastic handful of students who are taking good care of us.