place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Peter Lamborn Wilson 1945 – 2022

Dammit. Another passing. Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey. Got this news and the following remembrance today from friend Konrad Becker, founder of Public NetBase in Vienna.

Peter Lamborn Wilson died in his apartment in Saugerties in upstate New York last night, reportedly from a heart attack.

A “Cyberguru” in the nineties he had no email address and wrote his pieces by hand, or on an old typewriter. With 70+ books and titles like Pirate Utopia, he inspired several generations. However, his visceral abhorrence of digital media was softened by his clever use of resources in a digitally savvy environment. As the author of Temporary Autonomous Zone he was guest at the inauguration of Public Netbase and a regular visitor here in Vienna.

Sadly, despite his personal integrity, his fame and colorful queer identity also triggered offending smears and innuendo hard to oppose. In his last months he spoke self-deprecatingly of himself as an old hippy, maybe he was, I just wish there were more of this kind. While many drift into senility in their early forties, he was bright as a button until his last day and had more clever things to say about the electronic media realm than most of the new media experts I ever met.

Following up on his contribution to the book “Digital Unconscious – Nervous Systems and Uncanny Predictions!” and with the support of Autonomedia, Felix Stalder and I ventured into a series of deeper inquiries into the fabric of media un/consciousness.

There is a general narrowing and flattening of the imagination due to the global spread of consumerism and the increasing abstraction and quantification through which the social world is constructed. PLWs work can be understood as an exploration of alternative ways of being in the world that could offer escape routes.

We, by way of Jim Flemming and Fred Barney Taylor, conducted the last interview just a few days ago. In his last interviews he liked to talk of the end of the world which he defined as an ongoing process. His lucid analysis of what went wrong in the last few thousand years was never defeatist rather it was a call to arms.

As he liked to say: Even if you are going to die tomorrow, plant a tree today. The rebellious spirit of PLW and his alter ego Hakim Bey will be immensely missed.

His essay T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism condensed and articulated some core essences of my learning facilitation and media arts praxis while simultaneously atomizing it into a negentropic flow. I ran across it as I began to engage in the European context of media criticism and activism in the early 90s. The Anarchist Library has a wide selection of his other writings well worth perusing. A second fave selection is Overcoming Tourism which strips away the hollow shell of elite migrations of consumption, leaving the displacement of the soul as the core value of movement. Its modest goal … is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism. Thank god!

Knowing there were thinkers and writers, articulators like Wilson out there formed a supportive web of like-minds when the difficult situations arose in the facilitation of open systems, autonomous zones, wherein spontaneous creative action was not simply welcome, it was the essence of be-ing in such a zone. A few of my own reflections on the TAZ along the way.

8 : August : 20208 : August : 2020

place: Golden, Colorado

latter day musing

Teaching is not a behavioral product. It is a lived praxis. (How many times have I used that phrase in this blog? lived praxis). But how to explain a failure, a collapse, an implosion in the learning process? What are these manifestations in life? Recovery from collapse is certainly a learned skill with an ultimate value in life. But irruption or, worse, a slow, tired, wheezing descent into nullification: now that’s some bad shit to deal with.

Taking on a learning situation as an open system—open to change and influence—as a temporally circumscribed instance in a long continuity of flows, of life, this is a singular process to face.

Isn’t it such that knowledge comes from the lived process of experientially reduced and filtered sensual input? Failure loses any negative connotation when considered simply as one path in the infinitely variable flux of sensual experience.

This text started out as a brief meditation on past instances of perceived failure to imbue knowledge — or, to simply imbue lived experience. It surfaced in the context of the widespread, forced turn to remote learning as other forms of proximal human presence become untenable for viral risk. As long as the alienating loss that is implicit in the mediatory technology is recognized and qualified, the remote presence+absence, taken together, may at least sustain some human connection. The loss, however, has profound affect on life.

Lacking the mental focus to continue along that line of musing, I instead jump to the present: which hides and reveals itself. Possible trajectories, once solid, shimmer and vanish: fata morgana, fata americana, fata mondial, fata cosmologica. Other trajectories suddenly loom, darkening, from root chakra, muladhara. And yet others take on material forms: structures, potentials, spaces, and energized flows: water, air, and earth. Eyes open to another spectral zone, seeing mind in things.

The oracle will be cast, commentaries and interpretations will follow, those with ears will hear, eyes will read, if subscribed!

8 : February : 201918 : February : 2024

place: Golden, Colorado

Application: Anthropocene Resonance: Interdisciplinary Approaches

Our present geologic era, the Anthropocene, has already mobilized transversal and hybridized research approaches by calling attention to the patchy assemblages of our environmental encounters. This symposium celebrates and encourages such cross-pollination, and invites ecologists, technoscientists, environmental humanities scholars, biologists, data scientists, creative practitioners, green economists, ecofeminists, policy scholars, environmental designers, ethicists, and others to explore shared articulations of researching and visualizing the Anthropocene, and to develop concrete modes of working together on common problems.

Specifically, the symposium will engage scholarly and creative approaches to making climate change tangible, whether through data visualization, mapping, media, science communication, art installation, sonification, or other methods. The symposium will consist of short paper presentations, followed by working groups which will concretely address the challenges of working interdisciplinarily.

Submitted abstracts should be 300-500 words, and may address the following questions, among others:

* How can the environment be documented, visualized, communicated, or presented in ways which are accurate, nuanced, and emotionally resonant?
* In what ways has environmental change been documented, visualized, communicated, or presented historically?
* How has the environment and environmental change been presented in mainstream media, and what are the effects of these approaches?
* How can counter strategies be deployed to address existing problems in environmental depiction, visualization, or communication?
* What are strategies for facilitating interdisciplinary work between researchers in science and technology and creative practitioners?

Changing the Course of Nature

This presentation circumscribes a personal creative praxis rooted in a vision of both Nature *and* the nature of reality as a dynamic configuration of energy flows. Guiding visual-sonic explorations of elemental energy flows, the author suggests that the human organism’s impact on its proximal and distal environment—expressed through the techno-social system—may be better understood using the scientific model of thermodynamics and entropy as a creative starting point. One simple, ongoing performance series “Changing the Course of Nature” demonstrates, onsite in the desert West of the US, how life at all levels expends the energy it consumes and thus changes … everything. A brief sketch covering a ‘natural history’ of sound is included.

John Hopkins is a media artist and learning facilitator. He holds a transdisciplinary creative practices PhD from La Trobe University/University of Technology Sydney; an MFA from the University of Colorado Boulder (where he studied with renown experimental film-maker, Stan Brakhage); and a BSc in Geophysical Engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. His collaborative trans-disciplinary research and teaching explores issues surrounding sustainable creative practices, ‘big-picture’ system views, networked and tactical media, distributed and community-based DIY & DIWO processes, and Temporary Autonomous Zones. His international media arts practice explores the role of energy in techno-social systems and the effects of technology on energized human encounter. He has taught across more than 20 countries and 60 higher education situations. He is currently organizing the data space of the Colorado Geological Survey while solving the challenges of transforming geo-scientific data into knowledge that the wider public might engage. You may track his processes at https://neoscenes.net/blog/.

Online Resources:
CV/Resumé

energy (research sketches around energy/thermodynamics)
CLUI Residency (a recent residency with the Center for Land Use Interpretation)

An ongoing sonic (field recording) performance series Changing the Course of Nature

31 : December : 201626 : February : 2024

place: Golden, Colorado

cryptic and incomplete 2016 review

I think 2016 started with the thought that it couldn’t be more challenging than 2015. If change is a challenge, 2016 definitely was that.

It started out slowly, ensconced in the modest house I bought in Prescott in 2014 that contained my full art-media-production studio and archive in Prescott, Arizona. As the art-scene in Prescott consists mostly of bronze cowboys, turquoise-and-silver jewelry, and paintings of blue-eyed Indian children, my work had to be virtual and remote: Patrick of framework:afield invites a piece for his internationally syndicated weekly program on field recording; Arts Birthday; AudioBlast; Reveil 2016; continuing contributions to aporee::maps; and, later, Radiophrenia (Glasgow). Portrait work continues but I haven’t really put any new landscape images online for awhile.

One local exception came when Tom, the director of the Natural History Institute invited me to do a public lecture and workshop on ‘acoustic ecology’ titled “A Natural History of Sound” in March.

April saw something of a (Plotner) family conclave for Al’s interment at the Antelope Hills cemetery. I was the sole representative from the Hopkins/MacKenzie side of the family. Good to see those folks again, might be awhile before the next family-type conclave.

I spent significant time the past couple years on a conceptual re-development of the Ecosa Institute‘s ‘regenerative design’ curriculum with a small group of folks along with volunteer work at the nascent Milagro Art Center. more “cryptic and incomplete 2016 review”

1 : December : 20152 : January : 2020

place: Prescott, Arizona

workflow, capital, and creative action

Then there is the concept of “workflow” in digital production: it refers to the establishment of an input-processing-output sequence that navigates the many competing and conflicting variables introduced by the various hardwares/softwares involved. Some variables may be constrained with capital, others only with repetitive experience and feedback loops. Most variables are the effect of widely imposed standards introduced by corporate entities. more “workflow, capital, and creative action”

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.

9 : May : 201513 : June : 2024

place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

15 : March : 20152 : January : 2020

place: Wheatridge, Colorado

Robert E.D. ‘Gene’ Woolsey 1936 – 2015

Dr. Woolsey was, as anyone who knew him would likely agree, a real character. Real in the sense that he understood and practiced an idiosyncratic form of pragmatic realism: as an effective and sophisticated problem-solver. He also was an inspiring teacher who enthusiastically transmitted his pithy methodologies as a holistic life-approach to the complex tasks of ethical engineering.

Robert E.D. ‘Gene’ Woolsey of Wheat Ridge, Colo., died March 16, 2015. Born in 1936, he received his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in mathematics and his PhD in mechanical engineering. Gene came to Mines in 1969. Under his leadership, the Operations Research/ Management Science Program became one of only five U.S. programs designated by the U.S. Army for educating its officers in this field. He also held teaching appointments at seven colleges and universities in four countries: the United States, South Africa, Mexico, and Canada. In 1986, Gene was the first recipient of the Harold Larnder Prize for Distinguished International Achievement in Operations Research, awarded by The Canadian Operational Research Society. In 1999, he received the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS) Award for the Teaching of OR/ MS Practice. In 2002, he was named one of 113 in the world to receive the INFORMS Fellow Award. The U.S. Department of the Army awarded Gene the Commander’s Medal, the Outstanding Civilian Service Medal, and the Distinguished Civilian Service Medal, which is the highest U.S. civilian decoration. In 2003, he retired from Mines and became a professor emeritus. In 1987, he was made an honorary member of the Mines Alumni Association.

The three courses I took from Dr. Woolsey made the greatest total impact on my thinking, far more than any of the others I took at Mines. He had an engaging anecdote-laced delivery that we as students could easily see was utterly ‘real-world’ and illustrated the application of an incredible intellect that tolerated *no* bullshit. Given that we perceived a healthy chunk of the rest of our education at Mines was laced with busy-work and somewhat ungrounded and untested noise, Dr. Woolsey’s classes were a fresh challenge to we engineers-in-the-making. Looking back, his greatest gift was communicating a sense that to engage as engineers and pro-active citizens we had to first be observers of the world around us. As a nascent photographer in those days, I was completely taken by his abilities to stand back and absorb the widest context of a particular (engineering) problem — always observing before ever suggesting solutions. He was the epitome of a systems thinker and do-er.

My conclusions, years later: for the Engineer to be considered as engaged in an ethical praxis, a critical metric is the demonstrated approach towards the asymptotic limit of an awareness of everything in the immediate and far surrounds of that praxis.

Anything less will contain the seed of the unethical. Of course, being human *is* being fallible, such that any engineered situation is ultimately imperfect. Any sales pitch that suggests otherwise is … a lie. Dr. Woolsey called out liars, fools, and charlatans with a knowledgable grin, plenty of infectious deLight, along with a substantial dose of somewhat evil glee — all seasoned with some righteous and downright pompous superiority.

For a distilled sense of his personality and brilliance, check out some of his numerous contributions to Interfaces, the journal of the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences (INFORMS). They also posted a comprehensive obituary along with often humorous remembrances that confirm his powerful legacy and wide influence among colleagues, students, and pretty much anyone he met.

9 : June : 201424 : December : 2024

place: Cornwall, Pennsylvania

long dialogues: alexithymia: interhemispheric transfer deficit

Conversations range through histories, futures, thoughts, and dreams. Nothing like spending time with old friends: with my oldest friend this week. Junior High, seventh grade, we shared all seven class periods each day, 40+ years ago. How histories recede: resonant memories tend to be supplanted; revivifying them in active recollection makes them last a bit longer, fills them out from another perspective, another memory system. Until our outward form sinks into the background (dis)order of the cosmos. There, the memories persist as slowly devolving trajectories of activated, materialized energy.

Gary’s evolution and sustained presence inspires so many of the people who are around him including myself. What to think about this? Do we ever really evolve, or do the changes we experience along the way in life impose merely small surficial modifications of our root character? And of this root character, what may be said? Is it the outcome of a chain of incarnations, is it an alignment of planets, the arrangement of molecular spirals? Inspiration from Day One? Predetermined be-ing? Can we change ourselves?

This particular trip takes the form of yet another pilgrimage, a soft confrontation of what the word ’empathy’ is in lived praxis among the network of friends. Finding empathy’s place, there is no pre-existing internal road-map. Its locus is within sight, reach, and touch, but it cannot be accessed directly except through thoroughly unpretentious and purely expressed action (not merely words). Embodied, in motion, moving towards. Up to this point, there are only fleeting instances where empathy as a defined characteristic is questioned. Having it, not having it seem to be questions that do not touch its real nature.

Then come the questions: Is it possible to attain an empathetic state where none existed before? If not, what becomes? Is life for some a desert of hollow resonance, disconnected from any Other? I don’t know, I don’t know, (pushing through gray curtains of neural absence). Into the Light, or, at least, looking for the Light.

18 : November : 201322 : March : 2016

place: Prescott, Arizona

the slavish shore

Some chapters back, one Bulkington was spoken of, a tall, new-landed mariner, encountered in New Bedford at the inn.

When on that shivering winter’s night, the Pequod thrust her vindictive bows into the cold malicious waves, who should I see standing at her helm but Bulkington! I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in mid-winter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term. The land seemed scorching to his feet. Wonderfullest things are ever the unmentionable; deep memories yield no epitaphs; this six-inch chapter is the stoneless grave of Bulkington. Let me only say that it fared with him as with the storm-tossed ship, that miserably drives along the leeward land. The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities. But in that gale, the port, the land, is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe! Know ye, now, Bulkington? Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore? But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God –so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety! For worm-like, then, oh! who would craven crawl to land! Terrors of the terrible! is all this agony so vain? Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing –straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Melville, H., 2012. Moby-Dick, or, The Whale, London, England: Penguin.

Striving to keep to that wild, shoreless, and indeterminate sea? The KickStarter gig isn’t doing it for me. I simply do not know how to exist, competitive, within this system. I know of the art I make, and its source is not hidden randomly from my mind. Yet to make the conversion to capitalist cash seems to elude what mental focus I might focus on the task. I can make the imaginative images, observations of the passing world, but what then?

27 : August : 20125 : August : 2015

place: Boulder, Colorado

Trans-disciplinary Dialogue and Holistic Knowledge Generation

At its core, trans-disciplinary collaboration is chiefly a test of how to find the words, and within the words, the cumulative meanings that might span what is often a wide gulf in understandings. In general, the use of language in a transdisciplinary space is a particular challenge that, to a significant degree, determines the successful outcome of the attempt to bridge, fuse, or simply transcend disciplinary spaces altogether. Of course, beyond the words, there is the imperative for energized and embodied collaborative action, Freire’s ‘praxis'(1): change is the presumptive goal of the trans-disciplinary encounter. However, what I call the ‘meta-conditions’ of the human encounter are as or even more important than strictly linguistic exchanges. Meta-conditions deeply impress the qualities and potentialities of the human encounter that are the core of learning and change. In this White Paper I will reflect on these meta-conditions necessary to facilitate trans-disciplinary communication and collaboration. I will do this as a former engineer, a practicing ‘media’ artist, and in the context of 25 years of experience(2) teaching across art, design, engineering, and technology. The instance of my own current planning and facilitating of a (pre-existing) course I was invited to teach in the Fall of 2012 will function as an armature for the reflections. A former student of mine, Director of the TAM (Technology, Arts, and Media (3)) Program, that is hosted within the ATLAS Institute (Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society(4)), offered me one section of “The Meaning of Information Technology”(5) course at the University of Colorado – Boulder.(6) Among other threads, my reflections will touch on re-defining the term ‘technology’ in such a way that allows more powerful critical access to that often-self-obscured aspect of our social existence, regardless of disciplinary background. I will also make some critical observations about what I understand as the deep and problematic assumptions under-girding much of contemporary education.

—————–

1) Freire, P., 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.
2) https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/
3) https://tam.colorado.edu/
4) https://atlas.colorado.edu/
5) https://tam.colorado.edu/teaching.php (general program requirements for the course)
6) https://colorado.edu

14 : August : 20122 : February : 2019

Trans-disciplinary Dialogue and Holistic Knowledge Generation

[Rejected proposal for NSEAD white paper]

At its core, trans-disciplinary collaboration is chiefly a test of how to find the words, and within the words, the cumulative meanings that might span what is often a wide gulf in understandings. In general, the use of language in a trans-disciplinary space is a particular challenge that, to a significant degree, determines the successful outcome of the attempt to bridge, fuse, or simply transcend disciplinary spaces altogether. Of course, beyond the words, there is the imperative for energized and embodied collaborative action, Freire’s ‘praxis'(1): change is the presumptive goal of the trans-disciplinary encounter. However, what I call the ‘meta-conditions’ of the human encounter are as or even more important than strictly linguistic exchanges. Meta-conditions deeply impress the qualities and potentialities of the human encounter that are the core of learning and change. In this White Paper I will reflect on these meta-conditions necessary to facilitate trans-disciplinary communication and collaboration. I will do this as a former engineer, a practicing ‘media’ artist, and in the context of 25 years of experience (2) teaching across art, design, engineering, and technology. The instance of my own current planning and facilitating of a (pre-existing) course I was invited to teach in the Fall of 2012 will function as an armature for the reflections. A former student of mine, Director of the TAM (Technology, Arts, and Media (3)) Program, that is hosted within the ATLAS Institute (Alliance for Technology, Learning, and Society (4)), offered me one section of “The Meaning of Information Technology” (5) course at the University of Colorado – Boulder (6). Among other threads, my reflections will touch on re-defining the term ‘technology’ in such a way that allows more powerful critical access to that often-self-obscured aspect of our social existence, regardless of disciplinary background. I will also make some critical observations about what I understand as the deep and problematic assumptions undergirding much of contemporary education.

John Hopkins Boulder, Colorado 14 August 2012

1 Freire, P., 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum.
2 https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/
3 https://tam.colorado.edu/
4 https://atlas.colorado.edu/
5 https://tam.colorado.edu/teaching.php (general program requirements for the course)
6 https://colorado.edu

18 : March : 201111 : October : 2024

place: Preston, VIC, Australia

interview with Niina: art & technology

Niina has been researching art and technology for some years now. We met when I was teaching my old netculture class at the Media Lab in the University of Art and Design Helsinki back in 2000. I participated in her research for her PhD then, and … now

Ei Niina — this is all I could manage, it’s impromptu, but honest, with a bit of humor mixed in… a little complicated, as there’s no time to write an essay about what world-view lies behind the answers. You might want to reference https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/pixel.html an article I wrote for Pixelache in Helsinki in 2007 — the same year I did a workshop there too https://www.neoscenes.net/projects/pixel/index.php

you could also check out:

https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and search on
https://neoscenes.net/blog/?s=network
or so…
even
https://neoscenes.net/blog/date/2001/11

> 1.What changes have happened in your work and practices as an artist during the
> last ten years? Do you think your relationship with technology / or the way you
> use technology /has changed during this time?

My practice has widened intensively to take on a tough challenge of the entire techno-social system we are embedded within, are part of. Yes, this includes my relationship AND my understanding of the relationship between all flows that are the substance of technology. This also includes all aspects of life governed by techno-social protocol. When I use (a) technology I understand what I will both lose and gain when using that particular protocol. Using a technology is in fact, a changing of flows of energy that we are embedded in, part of. We are not separate in any way from everything else!

more “interview with Niina: art & technology”

10 : December : 201031 : December : 2023

place: Whanganui, New Zealand

workshop – Day 9 – eNZed

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. more “workshop – Day 9 – eNZed”

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.

8 : November : 201014 : December : 2019

place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

work, labor, action

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active lif, that is: ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself). These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic. The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.
more “work, labor, action”

6 : November : 201014 : November : 2015

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

this and that

Yeno (Hui-neng, 638-713) writes:

The Bodhi* is not like the tree;
The mirror bright is nowhere shining:
As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust itself collect?

This was written in answer to a stanza composed by another Zen monk who claimed to have understood the faith in its purity. His lines run thus:

This body is the Bodhi-tree;
The soul is like the mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean,
And let no dust collect upon it.

A nice example of the conflict between knowledge and knowing of a logical sort, and the wisdom of be-ing which Zen produces in a practitioner. The latter is business-as-usual, mega-churches, and MacDonalds; the former is living, spirit-in-motion, and sustenance.

* True Wisdom

19 : October : 201014 : November : 2015

mobile focus

Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently — one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses become full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they’re less definite. … Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we’re missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life’s smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere — to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit — following footsteps on the ground — quickly matured into an avocation. … I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks. — Hannah Nyala (from Point Last Seen).

12 : October : 201030 : January : 2025

From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

8 : October : 201029 : December : 2023

etc…

The holistic energy-based model is necessary for sense, harmony, and accuracy (in accordance with observed phenomena). However, the entire point is to frame a (creative) praxis that has a broader awareness of the complex inter-relations of things (beyond things, well into flows!). This suggests a constant critique of the status quo, a presumption that life is not proceeding with enough creativity or enough vis viva. When is enough enough? (Too much is never enough!). But are these volumetric quantities anyway? Spatial, Cartesian? Nah! Creativity is a flow, non-localized (it affects all): it is characterized by temporary states, transitory awareness, evolutionary phase changes. It is continuous and indeterminate, available always in the interstitial actions which lie outside the control of the social system.

14 : May : 201012 : June : 2024

place: enroute - Dinosaur National Monument - Grand Junction - Glade Park, Colorado

leaving and heading south

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…
more “leaving and heading south”

11 : May : 201011 : October : 2024

place: Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

western terminus Yampa Bench

Sleep difficult, not sure why, whether simple discomfort, though the back of the truck seems very comfortable in the immediate impression, warm, soft enough, but body cannot find a comfortable position, side to side, somehow, problems. Could be that yoga hasn’t been happening in the last days. Hiking is a challenge for the body as well.

Drive up to the head of Sand Canyon, intent on doing a hike, but what looks like bad weather coming in, a heavy front across the whole west, sends me back after a short recon along the Bench Road. It seems doable as an alternative escape route, if this end is the worst, though, in wet conditions, forget it. And it totals thirty miles to Elk Springs, not just the three miles I did on recon. Almost all of it is in the red and yellow (bentonite) clay-sandstone alluvium, and this is precisely this same stuff which sits at the top of the Echo Park Road — from the 2000-foot displacement on the Mitten Park Fault, so, no real solution in heavy and widespread rain. However, this doesn’t seem the case — the rain is sporadic, fast-moving, and interspersed with bright sunshine and the roads are basically still dry after two days of ‘winter storm,’ so fretting about it is a waste of energy. Either I get out on Friday or I don’t and have to wait a few days. Plenty of water, fuel, and food, so that is no problem. The only locked-in point is the flight next Wednesday evening to Portland. But I’d still hate to miss the yurt-raising in Glade Park at Collin and Marisa’s this weekend! more “western terminus Yampa Bench”

6 : May : 201011 : October : 2024

place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI residency — Energy of Situation

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).

Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”

8 : April : 201029 : August : 2014

CLUI: Day Six — intention

The psychical framing of intention within the making/creating of a reductive tracing of the phenomenal world would seem to be critical. What is the intention of an image, for example? Is it as fundamental as the intention of God in the creation of the world? Or can it be explained away as merely an artifactual process of the techno-social system that one happens to be embedded within? Clearly one intention is to use the artifact to say “Look what I saw!” And, so, the process should never be undertaken when there are others around, as they are already experiencing the phenomenal world, albeit from another point of view. Although this suggests that the artifact is used in the presentation and validation of one point of view with an other. (This presentation process and its outcome may also fast-forward root into the resonances arising from the juxtaposition of those two differing POV’s). Is this the sole, core reason? Or is there something else? Is there more to it? This juxtaposition (though more complex and intertwined than that word suggests) is a form of dialogue in that extended sense of the energized interaction of the Self and the Other. hmmm.

4 : April : 20108 : October : 2014

CLUI: Day Two

Get out to the grocery store, the only one in town, and a slow drive through town. It does seem like a differential planet. The Latino population is about 80% — workers in the casinos, and the rest are the owners and operators. An obvious imbalance. A majority of housing is either single- or double-wides, or, on the (impoverished-for-lack-of-casinos) Utah side, shacks surrounded by the flotsam of personal disorder — a metric of the desirability of energy expenditure on arrangement. Some of the lots approach the structure of middens in this. Middens are primarily defensive in function, shielding the inhabitant from predatory intrusion. Matt showed me one example here on the airbase, of an old man whose place was beyond being a junkyard, it was an accretionary gravitational field for (all) matter. But since his recent death, an increasing level of disorder was applied. Clearly, there is the possibility to distinguish between an active and an abandoned midden.

Otherwise, listening to the space, and, through the now sparkling south windows, watching the heavy weather rip through. Snow, sleet, hail, wind.

Cleaning, cleaning, cleaning. Watch the (Hollywood) movie Above and Beyond about Paul Tibbets, the pilot of the B-29, Enola Gay, that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. “Gripping mellerdramer!” as my father would say, wandering through the teevee room on his way to his workshop or darkroom or outside to work on the car or the yard.

26 : March : 201011 : July : 2024

place: Prescott, Arizona

Aether9 performance stream

Mari invites me to join the Aether9 crew for a live improv video feed for Camp Pixelache @ Pixelache at the Kerava Art Museum in Kervo, Finland on a cold day in March 2010. I got up extra early and sent a live sunrise feed from Prescott, Arizona to the exhibition half-way ’round the world.

26 : January : 201021 : June : 2014

watcher/watched

Selling individual vision to an Other: convincing, forming mental models that will allow compelling suasion; pressing opinions, argument, elegant frameworks; all constructed with language, words, characters, academic form, journalistic style, flaccid prose, basic text, with footnotes or hyperlinks; bibliographic references to other words, other texts: but where is a praxis? Praxis weakens to a barely-lived presence fighting to become in a dominant social structure of insipid spectacle that maintains the attentions of a vast majority of the population. Those being watched increase in number to challenge that of the passive watchers. In many cases the passive watchers are the watched, and vice-versa. The consumption of the passive watchers is expansive, limitless, a whorish gaping maw willing to not just taste, but to gorge on anything that is mediocre, maudlin, bland, and self-serving; safe, pre-digested, pureed, and acceptable. Worked over. ‘urrrrp’

Indigestible fodder, poison, anathema, bloating farce, and gaseous prophesy.

The world is drowning in verbiage.

All protocols lead to artifice.

8 : December : 200911 : October : 2024

devoir: a re-naming

Further, deeper, wider, (more iconoclastic), what is research? Merely to search again? The broadening of a socially-sanctioned knowledge-base? A connecting-of-threads to historic tradition? A discovery of what’s been before? A following of a pre-existing trajectory (but with more fuel for a higher, further flight)? What about re-sensing instead of re-searching? Immersing senses in a situation again (related to German entgegen ‘opposite’). Sensually immersive: sensing difference again (from another situation), and reflecting on that. Or, better yet, riding the gradient of that difference, and using that potential, that power, that source, to express from.

Re-search — to circle again, more intensively — but to remain detached. Neither academic detachment nor technological objectivity are the way that is needed now. We need immersive, connected, aware, and sensual be-ing. In order to apprehend what the world needs of us. An empathetic engagement with all expressions of life-energy. more “devoir: a re-naming”

7 : November : 200914 : December : 2019

place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

on participation, part one

I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
more “on participation, part one”

6 : November : 200931 : December : 2023

place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

a multi-modal life

If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

4 : November : 200912 : December : 2015

elevator pitch

Establish (via dancing around) the fundamentals of the cosmos; establish (by chanting a framework for apprehending those fundamentals) what individual presence seems to be; establish (by tracing lived experience) what the dynamic of interactions of human engagement are; situate (humanely) those encounters in the wider social system (or continuum of relation); examine the impact/role of technology on/in all of this; frame a creative praxis that might transcend the limits of those impacts while taking into account an energized world view, and, indeed, lessen those impacts in a sustainable way; open an empowered pathway to decode what is happening along this moment in history. These are the primary goals of the work.

27 : October : 200914 : November : 2015

education and standardization

Eduard Freudmann writes on the nettime list:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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”

22 : September : 200926 : February : 2024

place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Finally getting down to some David Bohm texts that I’ve been wanting to absorb for years but never had the time or access. I had a short correspondence with his widow some years back for the purpose of responding to the Dialogue essay and subsequently hosting it on the neoscenes third-party texts area. After Buber, Bohm was the first to show up as a source on my dialogue radar, an influential one at that, when a contemporary concept of dialogue-praxis is examined. Bohm has a powerful and holistic approach, literally, grounded in a worldview based on his interpretation of Quantum, the development of which he was an integral player. I am more than encouraged — inspired would be the correct word — by his approach, rigor, and mapping of a powerful foundational approach to human relation both with the cosmos and with each Other.

Also crucial to his view is the problematic nature of language as it exists (English, specifically), suggesting that the (tyranny) of subject-verb-object be replaced with a structure that emphasizes the verb — emphasizing action over thing (reflecting back to ancient Hebrew as did David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World where the written language included only the consonants, and vowels—which necessarily need expiration, a projection of the spirit to say—were introduced by the spoken reader, infusing the word with the life-spirit of breath.

The shifting of English that Bohm suggests illustrates how language informs/forms ones worldview as Benjamin Whorf promoted with his concept of linguistic relativity (which has always seemed obvious to me, an awareness perhaps brought about through the process of photographic abstraction of the world).

Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm, David, Routledge, London, 2002

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world. — Wilhelm von Humboldt

Then the question of how to deal with all these books at once? Where to read them, how to take notes, how much to read in any one at a time, and such. Reading in the evening before sleeping isn’t very good, although restful. Mid-afternoon is optimal, but carving out several hours from the daily to-do grind makes that difficult. Having a space in the CMAI office is very helpful now, as there are more comfortable chairs. The collective grad offices are too noisy and busy. Dislocating to Bronte or a cafe elsewhere is possible, but not time-effective if only for reading. Ach!, the questions of methodology …

19 : June : 200912 : December : 2020

place: Coal Creek, Colorado

changing the course of nature

26 : February : 200914 : November : 2015

place: Columbia, Missouri

mid-west

following a day en route. Prescott, Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri. meet Deb in Denver, then in Kansas City. driving from there eastbound, on that strip of hydrocarbon excreta, Interstate-70. eye-seventy. recalling the towns reeling backwards from that usual west-bound drive from Clarksburg, Maryland to Golden, Colorado, all those years ago. the 32-hour road trips. arrive at the house. Nick doing laundry, the kids in bed. dialogue continues. sleep in. and continue the dialogue that started yesterday with Deb. mirrors of situations reflect, catalyze, frame possible practices, pathways, ways to go.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it easier to define this ideal that to give practical instructions for bringing it about. — William James, Principles of Psychology

30 : November : 200812 : October : 2024

thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

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

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

29 : March : 200817 : April : 2024

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”

7 : March : 20088 : December : 2024

place: Berlin, Germany

migrating reality

Miga asked if I would participate in these two projects, in the first as redactor, in the second as a presenter and as a performance artist. should be interesting. especially as it is occurring at the same time as the conference in Savannah. of necessity, I will appear in Savannah virtually, and in person here in Berlin. that’s the easiest option!

we meet down at the Galerie der Künste to scope out the situation.

Migrating is reality. Reality is migrating.

The “Migrating Reality Project” organized between 04-05 April 2008 at the Galerie der Künste (Berlin), Potsdamer Str. 93, is a live platform to discuss the mixing and remixing of art forms and digital data flows within the context of the current worldwide reality of migration.

From 01 March in cooperation with the online ‘zine balsas.cc for media and technology we are initiating a focused look at the migration between reality, media, technologies, art, spaces, disciplines, politics, and networks. Migration interests us in cultural and technological aspects as well as in aspects of the movement of different objects and subjects. Balsas.cc has been publishing online in Lithuanian and English from Vilnius, Lithuania since 2005. Every fourth month it announces a new topic and as of now “Migrating Reality” is open for your interpretation.

We invite the submission of texts, sounds, and visuals (photo, video, etc) which will help us to delve deeper into the subject during the Berlin project. Balsas.cc is stimulating interest in the generation and publishing of ideas online — the most important of which will be published in the printed catalog at the end of 2008. We are looking for not only pure texts but also in migrating formats, interdisciplinary discussions, interviews, and the meetings of artists and theoreticians. Please submit texts in English, German, and Lithuanian to balsas@vilma.cc. The rolling submission and publication period is from 01 March to 01 June.

Editorial Board: Vytautas Michelkevicius, Mindaugas Gapsevicius, Zilvinas Lilas, and John Hopkins

Migrating Reality

The conference and exhibition Migrating Reality is organised by >top – Verein zur Förderung kultureller Praxis e.V. in Berlin and KHM – Kunsthochschule für Medien in Köln. It is also generously supported by the Embassy of Lithuania in Germany within the framework of the German-Baltic Year 2008.

The event focuses on the Baltic nation of Lithuania. In the last fifteen years, more than ten percent of Lithuania’s population has emigrated, among them numerous individuals engaged in the cultural sector. Others, while still living in Lithuania, are deeply engaged with the subject of migration. Selected individuals from both these groups will present their work at the conference and exhibition.

Migrating Reality deals specifically with the realities of migration and migrating realities that are independent of global structural changes and economic or cultural processes and are opening unique opportunities for creative exchange.

Electronic and digital cultures generate completely new forms of migration. In the creative arts, new phenomena related to migration and the synergies of disparate systems are emerging. Artistic products evolve from traditional forms to hybrid digital forms. Analogue products are being digitized; data spaces are trans-located from one data storage system to another; existing sounds, images, and texts are re-mixed and fused into new data sets.

The emergent processes of migration generate temporary autonomous zones where socio-political actions occur without the interference of formal control mechanisms. These zones and enclaves appear in physical space as well as in virtual space. By integrating these into available structures and temporarily interconnecting them, new trajectories and ideas are created.

Migration is reality and reality is migrating. This dialectic, appearing as a banal topic in everyday politico-economic debate, includes inarticulate issues which, by their fragmented nature have to be dealt with through creative multidisciplinary means. Only occasionally do components of the migrating global situation surface in the mass media, within individual mediums of expression, or in exhibitions as documentation and artwork. This is likely because dealing with the realities of migration in an explicitly European context means accepting the potential for conflict.

This trans-cultural German-Lithuanian event will take on the risk in highlighting certain fragments of the discourse. Participants will be invited to piece together aspects of this inexorable global mobility on the one hand and of retrograde power relations on the other.

15 : November : 200729 : December : 2023

place: Köln, Germany

netart 2007 – Feraltrade

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich https://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

An honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call:

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

12 : October : 20072 : February : 2016

place: Bremen, Germany

meta/data

in the midst of Frieder’s piles of books and papers to-be-dealt-with (meticulously organized, to be sure), is a copy of Mark’s new book on MIT Press, meta/data. a remix auto-biography of his last 15 years or so.

comparing/contrasting to my own traces is a strange flux of feelings. where practice is sampled (how, what, and into what form) and translated (re-mediated) into another form. it is only the form of the mediation that determines the relative fed-back social efficacy of the individual (or social sustainability of the individual’s praxis). the books points to, alludes to, hints at, expands upon, posits, and invents a praxis, part of which is the reflexive re-creation of a praxis. but does it engage in an authentic praxis that is not about pragmatism and social role-playing?

it is clear that it is the choice of propagation channels that ultimately determines how the Self is or is not rewarded by the larger social system. it is also clear that these choices will also have a profound affect on the human relationships that ensue.

how to select those forms? Mark’s book and documented practice seems optimized, pragmatic, and formal (that is, formed to optimally integrate into an existing social reward system). the question of form returns again and again. along with the embedded-ness within a social system that has strictly limited pathways for reward and punishment.

I understand the principle, but choose to engage in the praxis which supersedes the documentation of the praxis. although I continue to write, make images, sound and video works, and so on — none of which garner any attention whatsoever.

the presence of the personal network of a handful of deep supporters is the only plus to the path of the praxis. otherwise, might as well be living on the streets. or simply finished off with the whole thing.

7 : March : 200715 : December : 2024

place: en route Brussels Midi, Belgium - Maastricht, Netherlands

more meetings

Bad night’s sleep again, not sure where that is coming from. Feng shui of hotel rooms. Don’t like hotels. Open window too noisy to sleep; closed, nose imitates room and stuffs. Maybe caffeine. Some small cups of coffee during meetings, not just to be polite, but it smells so good. So, wake up before alarm, force the obligatory liter of water down, gradually clear head. body drags along behind. pack, and hobble down to breakfast and wifi access to at least consume croissants and Eudora. And some Firefox. Though belly is fat and getting fatter. Can’t wait for a swim, cycle, something aerobic. But Dirk has made a tight schedule of luxurious 2-3 hour meetings with such an interesting variety of people. And so, this morning, he comes to breakfast a bit after Thomas Laureyssens comes tentatively to my table.

Excellent generation of ideas, intuitive connections, and pathways, dynamically evolving possibility. Thomas is working on a social networking project which aims to create a functional gateway for Belgian new media initiatives.

Brussels as the background. some good food, some short visions, hardly any time to catch the tourist scene, and no photographs made. Nothing missed on that account. Previous visits, the most recent was in 2000 for the closing cafe9.net meeting which ended up in the scandalous shouting match among participants at a Chinese restaurant. So much for European solidarity.

Dirk and Thomas head off after Angelo Vermeulen arrives for a short meeting before I have to catch the train to Maastricht.

Angelo illustrates my dialogue-based worldview with several direct anecdotes which counterpoint his prodigious and stimulating formal creative output. And reminds me a bit painfully the lack of a PhD is a deterrent to social viability. That or a book. So that story haunts again in the background. Text trumps lived praxis, title trumps actual presence. sheesh.

We have lunch at the Brasserie Falstaff with a nice interior where “you can admire the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” and the staff looking like they should be in a Paris bistro. And the pay toilets governed by a wrinkled old lady. Just the way it used to be. Mais oui! Typically touristic, with a complete backwards look to the future. Tourists would never distinguish that this is not real. Maybe tourists are so conditioned by looking at the world via tele-vision, that when confronted by the real thing, they cannot tell when it is a simulation of something else authentic. Like Disneyland. Seems like a great place to actualize physical presence in the ‘world’ when compared to prime-time teevee. uff!

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Over to Maastricht, train to bus to Rod and Lizbet’s place. Nine years since last time. Catching up on years of remote art, music, books, Iceland gossip. Talk about getting more of Rod’s work online aside from the wiki page that a friend has done—he’s a networker, and a singular one of that breed, a networker’s networker. No time to worry about publicity, the market, promotion. The work and the network are all that counts, matters, all that provides life reason. His output into that network is prodigious, profound, and humane. His archive is priceless, marvelous!

4 : September : 200622 : November : 2024

place: en route - Prescott, Arizona - Durango, Colorado

road-trip

still mulling Marc Tuter’s article in Leonardo; mulling how the praxis model for supra-academic success entails generating texts that fit into book-forms; mulling rhetoric; mulling spin; mulling at the inertia which keeps social institutions functional. as long as individuals are willing to place life energy in representative forms.

when co-option takes place — it is often (always) from a form of exhaustion of the self to resist the social inertia of a situation. peer pressure in a vastly more brutal and subtle way. although one powerful solution to this creeping anti-autonomy is to have a sustainable/sustained lived praxis that is authentic — with spiritual presence and active engagement.

social inertia keeps me on the road on the long drive across the reservation to Durango.

Maps are power. Either you will map or you will be mapped. — Nietschmann

14 : August : 20064 : November : 2015

place: Livermore, California

after isea

a job possibility slips through fingers greased with imaginations of freedom and non-heirarchic relation. no, slips because the structure of relation is, in the case of that particular institution, not flexible or mutable enough to value my praxis. and under-developed skills of institutional negotiation. c’est comme ça. it’s a bit of a come-down and unfortunate for the committee who invited me to apply some weeks ago, but when one door close, another one open, as Fela Kuti would say.

and the iDC list blows up with a critique of ISEA. hard to know where to start with that. knowing so many of the artists involved, but also feeling a bit puzzled about some of the extreme juxtapositions at the symposium and exhibitions and around town. the term interactive city seems most problematic. at one end of the scale, the project Moveable Types and Instant Spaces which had a direct impact on locals, especially the enthusiastic kids playing in the fountain in Ceasar Chavez Park.

and maybe it’s just that city self-promotion in the US these days — an integral part of the ISEA / Zero-One event — is a shrill and aggressive process that is driven by the same ilk of developers and profiteers who have raped the rest of the land into submission.

a blissful 2 kilometers in the outdoor pool. after a week of imbibing in intellectual stimulation, stretching the body a bit in a turquoise 25 meter x 3-meter-deep pool is an absolute luxury.

15 : June : 200622 : June : 2014

place: Prescott, Arizona

demise

house empties steadily of evidences of former existence, leaving echoing rooms and sighs behind. tired of family things, baggage, power struggles, gender clashes, legal crap, bogus relations and expressions. completely. will be glad to be done with all this noise and leave it behind. respect is something I now realize I should never expect within the slowly decaying framework of this human grouping. simply because it never was present in the constellation of relationships that was the arbitrary biological unit termed “family” in this case. with religion composed primarily of Word disconnected from perceptible Action, and a pointless abyss in application between outward appearance (church every Sunday), and actual outcomes that carried weight (praxis-based). there were enough off-balances represented within individuals to finally disperse it. good riddance. fiercely.

19 : January : 200611 : December : 2024

place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Kevin Karl Burger 1957 – 2006

Kevin passes away this morning after a three-year fight with brain cancer. A brilliant painter, the source of much pointed insight and incisive wry wit, a good story-teller, and all-around warm and lively friend. His embodied presence, removed, now transforms to empty space, but, certainly, no vacuum. We met way back during the infamous Conrans-Habitat catalog shooting that Bill was doing in the summer of 1990. Kevin was working for the Conrans crew, I was an assistant for Bill. Hot summer day after hot summer day, on location in Peters Valley for the first half of the shoot, a sense of humor was necessary. Then Kevin and I drove a U-haul truck full of furniture and location gear all the way to Acadia National Park, ME. Many stories to tell about that adventure. Nothing like shooting a four-poster bed on the top of Cadillac Mountain at dawn. It was an auspicious starting point for many friendships: I think it was all the lobster (lobstah) consumed in Bar Harbor (Bahhabba) with the crew. On the way back, we filled a huge cooler with lobsters and dry ice, and had a big dinner at John and Laurel’s place back in PV.

more “Kevin Karl Burger 1957 – 2006”

10 : December : 200522 : August : 2015

place: Prescott, Arizona

revolution

Outi, a former student sends this link https://www.liveherring.org, a project she’s been working on.

and more iDC mailing list commentary

sotto voce: some comments on the latest threads… probably been said before elsewhere on this or other lists, but when the question of WHAT TO DO? is posed so poignantly on the list. well, hell, I’ve got an answer that I have tested in many situations against many incomplete ideas ;-))

(unfortunately, it cannot be fully transmitted via this particular medium which apportions attention into too-small bits to allow coherence. if anybody is interested in skyping, phoning, irc-ing, or otherwise synchronizing for a couple hours at a pass, I’d be totally willing to engage at that level).

while I have great respect for people who choose resistance as a model for political expression, I believe that more often than not, resistance simply acts as a counter-balancing prop that holds up that-which-is-being-resisted. as a simple anecdote from the distant Reagan era: it appeared that Reagan would take some action — declare a covert war, make an attack on alternative culture, or simply say something stupid — and there would be a flood of artists who would ‘make art’ about that action. this is the definition of (a) reactionary. it seemed, with the original “Teflon” president, that critical actions and expressions, no matter how intelligent or caustic simply built up Reagan’s power. that the repetition of his name in song, discussion, and print only served as a constructive support not for the resistance, but for sustaining the regime. reactionary art. easy to find inspiration (in the embodiment of that-which-is-to-be-resisted), no need to hunt. somehow comforting to have a daily dose of Reagan (or Bush) to get the fires stoked.

revolution, on the other hand, seeks the unknown. it does not seek to form and replicate itself through impressive contact with a dominant social system. if anything, it leans on the void.

a revolutionary praxis is a pathway that is not mapped before moving along it. it is sustained by a desire to face the unknown and to change with the flux of life. it does not advertise its presence except by the wake arising from the actions that transmit its energy to the surrounding milieu.

a revolutionary praxis is by definition sustainable, albeit unstable and indeterminate. it does not seek to capture defined social pathways for its expression. it leaks energy into the immediate surroundings through its presence. leakage is the same as idiosyncratic expression — expression that may not be immediately recognizable to those standing around it because of the idiosyncrasy.

participating in revolutionary praxis demands no allegiance. it demands acquiescence to flows that are greater than any political/social system. it does not shout. it moves always. it cannot be a target because when aimed at, it’s gone. everything is possible.

the site of revolution is the minimal system necessary for change. this system is the exchange that happens between two beings. broadband, unpredictable. without the Self opening freely to an Other who reciprocates, there is no possibility for revolution when revolution is defined by constant movement and change. revolution cannot be posited to happen ‘out there’ in an abstracted social system.

technology is that which mediates between the Self and the Other. IT is just another mediation. when revolution sits on a base of human-to-human connection, the level of mediation can be quite variable, as long as it allows the movement of enough energy to maintain connection. this level is different for different people.

etc, etc.

25 : October : 20057 : February : 2022

place: Chino Valley, Arizona

reflections on the classroom

to the IDC list

sotto voce: Although, as a University educator — I agree with John’s appraisal of the condition of the contemporary educational institution (having taught in around 50 institutions in Europe and the US), there is this critical area to consider: yes, the classroom has not undergone a physical re-design, but perhaps it doesn’t need one. When the door closes, it has the potential to be a space for transcendent encounters between the participants IF the oppressive effects of the fear that is instilled by the dominant educational system in both student and teacher — the fear of nonconformity, the fear of personal idiosyncrasies, and the fear of the unknown — if the fear is mitigated. I believe this fear is a result of the accumulation of pathological (unbalanced) relationships that are mandated between humans when operating in hierarchic situations. If, as a facilitator more “reflections on the classroom”

19 : August : 200517 : April : 2024

[spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

John Hopkins hopkins at isnm.de Fri Aug 19 00:19:37 CEST 2005

Previous message: [spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing? Next message: [spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?

some meandering thoughts on institution (pardon if the quoting is not working right!):

>>A pattern that reverses the 1990s institutional expansion of media culture and media art?”
>>Possibly, and if so, to whose benefit? What were institutions hoping to gain from this
>>expansion in the first place, and did they? Might they have become unwillfully blinkered,
>>self-perpetuating autarkies? Would it be blasphemous to imagine that institutions run
>>by and for humans are endowed with life-spans, and that one generation of institutions/ more “[spectre] ART iT article: Is the ICC (Tokyo) closing?”

22 : May : 200531 : December : 2023

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

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

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

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