posted
  • place: Copenhagen, Denmark

thresh-kjeld

what is important. morning sun. friends. health. peace. and when these run out, and Job’s curses start to fill the head, there is always a way to go.

I loved the desert, dried orchards, faded shops and tepid drinks. I dragged myself through stinking alleys and, eyes closed, I gave myself to the sun, God of fire. “General, if on your ruined ramparts an old cannon remains, bombard us with lumps of mud. — On the mirrors of magnificent shops! in drawing-rooms! Make the city eat its dust. Oxidize the water-spouts. Fill boudoirs with the burning powder of rubies… — Rimbaud

Yeah, well, I couldn’t resist this tortured nail-scrape across the board, shivering me awake, but only for the time of reading it. all evaporated the moment the mulling of the words crossed the thresh-kjeld, leaving crushed corns for rising bread; mind-brain, this complex of meat behind the eye. it showed me that Words, for all they are, are nothing. would rather shout in tongues I have no dream about. carve a language that DOES SOME GOOD, rather than lead us closer to just another hell of being. nah. not so bad. life is good, no hell now. the plans the plans the plans. mapping the control of the future. we are falling forward into it anyway, just fall and feel the accelerating gravity rather than brake and feel only the velocity.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

Lahti

Lahti is the sister city of Akureyri in Iceland, although it is several times larger in population. It sits on a lake (as do most (all?) cities, towns, and villages in Finland), and claims to be a Business Center in the country. It is also known for its ski jumping towers. The morning and evening are spent taking care of paperwork, correspondance, and some planning for the course here, as well as settling into my room which is actually in the school building itself, right across from the main office. I will be here for four weeks — almost the entire month of February — not counting weekend forays into Helsinki to visit friends, network, and shop (hah!). I write to Kate in Ann Arbor:

sotto voce: Much has gone down, much goes down, and much will be going down, until all is down, dirty, and done, then all will rise, not for the judge, but for the Judgment of what has gone down before the time arrives for it to be judged. like, something strikes the FAN. and other things are simply passed over. the good, the bad, and that which is neither — the contents of time-bound life and living.

When I arrive in Lahti last night, I am met by two Spanish exchange students who find a cab to take me to the school. They were waiting for a compatriot to arrive, but he is apparently delayed at the airport and was not on the same bus as I. All this reminds me of the incredible opportunities young people who are studying have in Europe at the moment. One wonders where the constant exchanging of these intelligent adventurers will lead in a Europe that has seen few decades of peace in its entire history. Most of the art academies have a transient population that is steady at 15-20 percent of the student body, and a majority of students will take studies for at least a half-year at another institution before graduating. The ERASMUS and NORDPlus consortium exchange programs include students all across greater Europe, and frequently institutions have multiple contacts on every continent. This mixing forms strong and intimate bonds across cultural borders — something I have been a proponent of for years. In my class I will have four Spaniards, a Belgian, and six Finns. Nice. I have a theory that email and these exchange programs will have a fundamental effect on the cultural life of Europe. Not only do the students have the opportunity to make contacts, but they have the tool to maintain dynamic collaborative situations. This also has the effect of leveling regional cultural differences, but allows for new forms and identities to arise. It turns out that my old friend Terhi is actually attending school at the Institute, and she is here when I arrive — it is a very pleasant surprise, as I had not heard from her for a few months since we worked together on net.sauna at Ars Electronica last September. She is working towards a continuing education BA diploma after some years of not studying. In the frigid temperatures, after a quick tour of the whole school, we head to the closest bar that serves Guinness. Back in, Finland! This time in winter. Full winter, though not as dark at all as expected, guess that was lived out between Arizona and Iceland. During the last few days I have had several instants where I will shift into a state of concentration and observations begin to flow. I am hoping to harness these energies in the next days to begin, well, to continue work on something of substance here.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

red noise

I make it no further in that diatribe, forcing me to realize that it was not soul-full, only a cover of verbiage to the rather removed state of energies that is my presence here. I am seduced into symbiotic relationship with a machine, a network, and technology in general. In my head then, two forces press, push at each other, brain matter being heaved, grabbed at, hacked, pocketed, consumed, stolen, wired. The forces are not at war, that is, if you consider that our presence here, now, is a peaceful idyll of simple pleasures following one after another from birth to death. We are in the midst of a savage conflict whose outcome is the dispensation of the soul. Melodrama. I have to laugh, I see silly tinges of Gothic and English drama in my words, and I have to drop the seriousness because of the absurdity of the movement — words in the face of the wholeness being, pressing the senses without remission. Like the pumping heart, that does not stop in Life. Maybe that throbbing is sole reminder of who we are, that streaming rush through tympanum that gives the ear a base of red noise — it is behind all we hear, like the pulsing seen when eyesight drifts to a non-focused state against the sky, the granularity of Seeing. The skin-over-skin of touch, un-melding with the touched, shielded from simultaneous being. And smell and taste, how they are pushed hard into the flesh, yet can hardly be found at times. Didn’t take me nowhere. Still the outside is there. Window, the ever-present silicon dioxide shield. Today keeping chill wind out. South wind, some from the east, too. Only a two days hard-pushed travel by foot to Mother Russia. Over there, things are different.

posted
  • place: Tallahassee, Florida

moonburn

group portrait, heading to the Wacissa River, Tallahassee, Florida, October 1996

Time spins more and more. Now here as visiting artist at FSU, courtesy of net-worker Paul Rutkovsky. Last night Robert, one of the faculty, had organized a group moonLight canoe trip on the Wacissa River, about 20 miles from Tallahassee. The moon was full, and there were about 20 folks, mostly students, two to a canoe, some with flashLights. We put in with a guide, Fred, at a small parking lot on the river and slowly paddled down the river a few miles to a side-stream that ended up in a 50-meter-wide underwater sink-hole which was the source of the stream. Sink-holes are earth-surface phenomena — where the ground waters under a place have eaten holes in the rock — in this case, limestone, which is very soluble in water — and occasionally these holes are so large that the very ground above them collapses and caves in … Leaving holes that can be many tens of meters across and sometimes hundreds of meters deep. There are instances where houses have been swallowed whole by one of these beasts… In the case of the sink-hole on the river, it is fully immersed and actually is a spring source with a large volume of water welling up from the hole which is connected through underground channels to a lake about ten miles away. The water is about 20°C (70°F), chilly by local standards, but in the middle of the circular pool, someone had moored a small floating platform. Being the mad fool that I am, I had to go swimming — despite not having a swim suit or towel. I tried to talk some of the others into it, but they were too shy … ach, these Amurikans … So, I hopped out of the canoe and undressed on the platform and dove in. Moonburn! OOoooooo. Cold, but totally refreshing! Magic. All tiredness left my body.

moonLight, Wacissa River, Tallahassee, Florida, October 1996

It reminded me of a personal motto that I used to frequently quote to my friends — along the lines of:

I’ll do anything twice, three times if I like it.

I mean, trying something new once will never give a real taste of the undertaking, so twice at least allows the possibility to saturate the self. And, hey, if it is fun, than that third time, well … and I don’t mean that I necessarily stop at number three … But maybe that would be an interesting path to follow, stopping — so that one does not become too attached to the material process of pleasure gratification… It is marvelous, the power of the natural world. Despite all the mediation that is a daily fact of the world that I inhabit, despite the critique of the romantic vision of the natural world, despite all that, there is still massive healing power within the synergistic interaction with the physical world … My body and my eyes were totally relaxed by the water and the moonlit darkness. I cannot explain these things otherwise than to attribute them to the power of that natural physical force. Winter is miles away from my thoughts, here in this tropical locale. Kati sends me a fragment of E. E. Cummings, the English poet. She’s in Finland, so it has heavier meaning for her (and will for me when I head back north in a few days)…

autumn has gone: will winter never come?
o come, terrible anonymity; enfold phantom me with the murdering minus of cold – open this ghost with millinery knives of wind scatter his nothing all over what angry skies and gently (very whiteness:absolute peace, never imaginable mystery) descend

I get chills, sitting here in the Mac Lab in the Visual Arts Department. memories of Finnish winter… Air conditioning. It’s warm outside, and here my eyes are burning from the dry chill of conditioning and the blast of charged electrons in my face. Where are we in this mediation?

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen, Denmark - Malmö, Sweden - Stockholm

control freaking

Another long day. This morning Björn and I were up at 7:30 to catch a bus to the hydrofoil to Malmö, and then another short bus ride to the Academy. The hydrofoil took only 45 minutes and cost an astonishingly miniscule 15 DKK (= 3 USD). Competition in action. The Malmö Academy has exceptional facilities in an entirely new building. Everything was highly organized and secure with locks on all door except for the bathrooms. I was scheduled to give a lecture at 13:00 and I indeed did do just this. They have a decent lecture room with a video projector and assorted techno-goodies except for the fact that one amp channel and speaker had been fried, so I had to play video and audio works on one channel. Such is techno-life. My host, the Academy Principle, Gertrud Sandqvist I had met last year at the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Art and Technology in Helsinki. At the lecture she sat in the front row, not particularly unusual until the question-answer session at the end — she mediated between me and the students, choosing students, modifying their questions, and ”interpreting’ my answers for the students. More than odd, it was quite an show of the psychology of control. She seemed unable to allow the students to interact without her dominance. Sad for them. I understand now her reputation which is not great, on this very issue of control-freak. Oh well. Björn meanwhile was meeting some former students. We ended up taking different trains — I had the First Class EurailPass, and could ride in style, though flat broke.

At the moment I am sitting comfortably on another one of these new high-speed European trains. This one the X2000 from Malmö to Stockholm. First class, they even serve a dinner. Not bad. I sat across from a senior Quality Control engineer from Eriksson, Inc., one of the largest companies in Sweden dealing in telecommunications. We had an interesting conversation about technological developments in Scandinavia and Europe, as well as photography. Already here in Scandinavia things have a feeling of organized and peaceful order, with a level of social wealth that is simply not available further south in Europe. There is far more competition in the telecom business which is bringing (for example) good internet and telephone services at reasonable rates. Education is well-funded (though conservative) without the need for academics to be constantly begging for national resources.

posted
  • place: Peters Valley Arts Center, New Jersey

Peters Valley Arts Center / The Photograph: Dialogue in Seeing :: June.89

group portrait, workshop participants, Peters Valley Arts Center, Peters Valley, New Jersey, June 1989

THE PHOTOGRAPH: DIALOGUE IN SEEING

A workshop presented at the Peters Valley Center, Layton, New Jersey, 17-19 June, 1989.

Two full days of intensive exploration into the photograph as a means of personal communication. The workshop will involve see-ing, image-making, and dialogue. Serious students are encouraged to bring a current portfolio and literature that has influenced their see-ing.

My notes:

Materials:
Slide projector & carousel
Polaroid film & processor
writing paper
readings
bibliography
camera
more “Peters Valley Arts Center / The Photograph: Dialogue in Seeing :: June.89”