posted
  • 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.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

more on control and autonomy

A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”

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projection of control

Okay, so in the process of simplifying last week’s posting — 08 Jan — I’ve got to take yet another look at how control is projected by an organism. Or maybe that should be a question — does an organism exert control over its environment? Or does it merely synergize with the flows that are available to it? What affect does the neurophysiological field of action of a particular organism exert on the localized situation? Primitive neuro-systems read gradients or difference that ‘matter’ to their existence. Quantifying these existing gradients of energy relates to an organism’s ability to find the energy sources through which it survives to prolong its life and procreate. This is the fundamental means by which life has prolonged itself on the planet continuously since it began. The existence and control of thermal (heat) energy gradients are also extremely important in the regulation of internal physiological systems through direct biochemical reaction-rate regulation. The surface or edge of an organism is clearly ‘signified’ in thermodynamic and physical terms; the maintenance of internal gradients might be called ‘control’ where the control is a function of defining the primary limit of the organism’s field of action. hmmm.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

at the edges of the envelope of power projection

When approaching the edge of a protocol-driven projection of power, the first thing noted is that the edge is in flux, constantly. Depending on the metric flow of the power, and the metric flow(s) of the countervailing chaos, the edge will shift at any temporal and spatial scale. The juxtaposition of controlled and un-controlled situations represents a more-or-less steep gradient from directed to random (or directed to countervailing directed) flows. A good example to consider is the two polarized and hegemonic forces of the Cold War compared to highly ordered (Imperial) military systems being projected into poorly organized social systems.

The edges of hegemonic Cold War projections of power were often located in social spaces of great chaos. But these points-of-contact generally did not impinge on the monumental and rigid structures (enabling ideological rigidity) at the core of Empire. Empire shielded itself with layers of decreasingly ordered spaces. The borders as projected closest to the two primary centers of power were defined by rigidly controlled edges across which there were few incursions or expressions of chaos. Natural borders represent a special case of intervening ‘natural’ chaotic systems which provide a temporary or long-term barrier to impingement. However, a power nexus has to deal with that chaotic border itself to maintain reasonable order there for its own population.

The space containing a vacuum of power is quickly filled whenever there is a localized energy source of a great enough magnitude to fill that space. It is more slowly filled when there is no localized concentrations of power. Again, the maintenance of an ‘edge’ is really about the maintenance of a gradient of order with a certain steepness.

An Imperial power will be more strongly be drawn into vacuums merely by the steep gradient between its highly organized (military) system and that vacuum.

The protocols of nation-statehood (currently) define geographic boundaries of power projections. However, it is clear that these boundaries and the protocols themselves are constantly in flux and themselves are finally defined by balances of power-projection on both sides. (Consider a con-federation versus a republic.) The border on chaos is a border that is under the greatest threat of alteration (because of that steep gradient mentioned previously).

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indices of control

The issues around the control of techno-social systems, the projection of protocol across spatial and temporal regions, directly relates to thermodynamics, but what are the implications of that relationship? Is it simply the direct connection between order and the energy required to maintain order? Or are there more subtle and complex? Of course the fundamentals of thermo cannot be ignored, and therefore any discussion of these issues has to be rooted in those basics. But are there, for example, psycho-social factors that will influence control?

I would argue (at present with only intuition supporting me) that all factors will be traced to the fundamentals. This is because life is at base a counter-intuitive phenomena when thermo is considered.

posted
  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.

The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”

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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”

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

leaving and heading south

leaving Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

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”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge

Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):

Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.
more “The uncontrolled gesture: go to your edge”

posted
  • 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”

posted
  • 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 …

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

burp (gun)

An army marches on its stomach. — Napoleon

as if this is enough to justify the concept of energy usage and amplification: it is precisely these fundamentals which directly illustrate the connection between collective energy resource regimes and, in this case, the amplified energy projection potential of militaristic social structures. the balance between the starvation of the general population and the full bellies of soldiers is a core decision of those controlling a nation-state. think North Korea, think Soviet Union, think any state.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Infinite Jest: Kinds Of Light

Kim proposes a new microsound project, making sound tracks for the experimental films of David F. Wallace’s fictional character James O. Incadenza in the book Infinite Jest. I pick Kinds of Light as it immediately strikes a resonance and subsequently patch together an obsessive piece in 24 hours (4,444 frame splices on a multi-track of a water performance in Pool Creek Canyon (changing the course of history)), shatter-welded with audio from video footage of standing at a confluence in the West Elk Wilderness entranced by the Pele’s hair of water coming from the sun). definite sonic hyper-retinality.

(stereo audio, 7.4 mb)

I missed Wallace during my North Amurikan vacancy of the last 20 years. surprised I hadn’t run across him randomly, though, given the households that I have ramble through on the nomadic way. George knew him and speaks highly of his character. sadly for all of us, another victim of the intensity of be-ing. I plow through Oblivion, and a couple other books that I managed to recall at the library. extremely dense. the first short story I read drove me, half-way through, into a delirious sleep from which I woke ten minutes later, not knowing where I was. jittery, caffeine-fueled, precise jewels. you see the faceting process, the cutting of the entire glittering crystal, a tedium of focus, the high-speed grind with diamond grit, a rocking, polishing movement across the charged wheel. spun tales. fiber glass. each brittle thread opening a bloodless wound which nano-gapes at the whole fuckin’ world, all at once. he would be Brakhage’s cinematographer if Brakhage was blind and able only to see the inside of his eyelids.

“Kinds Of Light” – B.S. Meniscus Films, Ltd. No cast; 16 mm; 3 minutes; color; silent. 4,444 individual frames, each of which photo depicts lights of different source, wavelength, and candle power, each reflected off the same unpolished tin plate and rendered disorienting at normal projection speeds by the hyper-retinal speed at which they pass. CELLULOID, LIMITED METROPOLITAN BOSTON RELEASE, REQUIRES PROJECTION AT .25 NORMAL SPROCKET DRIVE

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

mega-equinox

Late monsoon storm rolls by Granite Mountain, seen from the deck.

Equinox spent in a mega-church, The Heights Church or a church aspiring to be one. dot.com. Which suggests the necessity for threading through the complex layering of cultural, social, and political detritus. A guy walks in ahead of us with an NRA tee-shirt on and a giant insulated travel-mug of coffee in hand.

Al always sits in the front and center of the large industrial sanctuary space. One row back from the front row. His eyesight is pretty bad, macular degeneration, and likewise, his hearing is attenuated to whatever narrow frequency band that his hearing aids provide.

I have my shit-kickers on, the dressiest items available for church at this point. Can’t find my Colorado School of Mines belt-buckle with the hand-tooled leather belt. The bronze buckle in the form of the school seal cast in a metallurgy class with an ancient prof, forgotten his name. Proof of Western citizenship.

There on the stage — one of those portable raised prefab affairs for concerts and political spectacles — is a miked drum-set, a bass and amp, a Rhodes with vocalists mike, a set of congas (not timbales!), and a guitar on a stand. No podium, dais, but plenty of microphones. On either side, two very large video projection screens.

Club scene? Will there be a concert? The Rhodes is the most prominent object, at the front edge near the center of the stage. later the preacher uses it to as a place for his notes and Bible.

It’s the eight o’clock service. Al tells me that there are usually around three hundred people at this, this first of four services. The 300? We are early.

As the service starts out, it’s clear that I should have brought earplugs to attenuate the 100 db blast from the sound system.

Somehow I can imagine doing a visual-sonic performance here. good sound and video system, focused audience, yeah, a good venue overall. More notes on this later.

posted
  • place: Berlin-Charlottenburg, Germany

blackbird sings

Nan’s funeral in Charlottenburg. I see a number of people that I have not seen in some time. Kathy Rae is there from Manchester, and Sandro, one of the students who came to Iceland all those years ago.

The funeral is moving, standing room only. In the room with the casket, a video tape interview with Nan running silently, along with a projection of one of her Light-water videos. Flowers, candles. Friends in black. Stories from a few folks.

After the service, Sandro mentions that he has a photograph from the Iceland trip, which he then pulls from an envelope. I am moved when I see that it is one of my postcards that I sent him after the trip. I think I sent each of the students that I had addresses for a copy, if I remember right. I immediately notice that it is on resin-coated paper, ach, but that was a time when I could use nothing else as I had only the college lab which could hardly be called a lab even. I worked with what I had. He said he would send me a high-rez scan of it. It underlines that old idea I had to gather up all the postcards that I have ever sent and put on an exhibition. What fun that would be. Especially if each of the people would attend the show.

It is very nice to let memories of Nan float up, especially her work which is essentially about Light. And her presence as a mentor, teacher, friend, her art. generosity. And the community she supported.

And memories of her Armani suit and her fondness for good cognac.

Avalon from Roxy Music plays in one interlude. and I make this small tribute — blackbird sings…

(00:10:13, stereo audio, 19.6 mb)

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany
  • author: Sarah Chung

Sarah Chung

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: https://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
https://www.neoscenes.net
https://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
https://www.pierrebastien.com/
https://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
https://www.mutek.org/
https://www.haamu.com/launau
https://www.colleenplays.org/
https://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

crossings

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to an electric dance performance Anatomica#3 at the Korzo Theater by expatriate Canadian choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that Sher is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.

posted
  • place: San Diego, California

share San Diego

Gary and I head out towards Balboa Park, but don’t actually make it. I wanted to get online for a couple hours of work, so he takes me to a cybercafe in North Park where the PowerBook exhibits it’s intransigent side — something that comes up about 2% of the time when connecting to a wifi node — it can see the node, says it’s connected, but refuses to actually establish a viable connection. grrrrr. the usual spate of re-starts, config changes, etc, to no avail. Gary puts up with my whining, then calls an acquaintance nearby, Christian Michaels, a professional photographer who happened to have a wifi network at his studio. we head south on Ray Street, a funky neighborhood to the beautiful studio built in a former sign-manufacturers space. he’s got a huge video projector with a 25×25-foot projection area at one end of the main studio. as we chat, turns out that he is hosting a share event in the evening! we have a good laugh that I am the share-nomad node. synchronicity! have lunch at a taqueria around the corner, and head back to spend the afternoon with Andrea and Ryan. then Gary comes by to fetch me for the evening happening. end up meeting Morgan Sully of share-San Diego and others. there is a screening of Metropolis, and I do a short VDMX improv. nice!

posted
  • place: Brooklyn, New York

Brooklyn meetings

walking down Bedford Street I meet the lady with the lime green brolly heel-toeing it briskly to the wine shop, kitty-cat in a tote bag, and stories about winning over the boys in the community garden. dinner with Amanda and Stephanie, at Amanda’s place in Brooklyn. along with Mr. Tiger, Amanda’s new cat who seemed easy-going and sociable despite battle scars from street life in Brooklyn.

earlier I was able to get together with Eric, a sharedj activist among his many other talents. at a cave-like cafe in Brooklyn he showed me some of his keyworx-based work which immediately brought to mind Stan Brakhage’s aesthetic which could easily be described as the precursor to much vj work in the present time (including my own). although my contact with Brakhage was, on a film-production level, limited, the discussions, and more importantly the simple exposure to his vision through screenings of his and other’s work was moving and formative to the inner eye. he had his little cubby-hole office next to and half the size of mine when I was a grad student, so we got to know each other better through informal chats — life is short art is long…

Imagine an eye un-ruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, and eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of ‘Green’? How many rainbows can light create for the untutored eye? How aware of variations in heat waves can that eye be? Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word.’ — Stan Brakhage

anyway, back to Eric’s output — he also collaborates as a tenor and lutenist on an entirely different plane in Asteria, a Medieval/Renaissance music duo. he passed on a copy of Soyes Loyal, their latest album featuring Burgundian chansons of courting and love from the 14th century. Eric’s divergent interests and skills are incongruous on the surface but stand as a strong example of how personal energy transmission does not have to be closely tied to form but rather to the efficiency with which one finds the projection of such energy through a chosen material mediation. Eric is attentive, concentrated, skilled, and definitely efficient transforming his energy into a variety of forms of inspiration.

you can test track their two albums at magnatune.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

archive fires

The destruction of the correspondance, print, and book archive begins. Too many things to carry onward: it’s all been lugged for thousands of kilometers across the US and Europe. Not much to show from it either. Enough is enough. So, better to heat the house with same. Pounds and pounds of stuff that can no longer be sustained with a cyborg’s spine.

An autopoietic machine is a machine organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components which: (i) through their interactions and transformations continuously regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (ii) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in space in which they (the components) exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network.
…
The space defined by an autopoietic system is self-contained and cannot be described by using dimensions that define another space. When we refer to our interactions with a concrete autopoietic system, however, we project this system on the space of our manipulations and make a description of this projection. — H. Maturana & F. Varela, 1980

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

on lawns

mowing lawns, in the expanse of time that is the summer of childhood. the noise, wonder deafness isn’t a factor these days, the smell, well, the smell of cut grass. it is the smell of summer. that and watermelon in the lightning-bug twiLight. but the mowing, the lawn. this projection on nature, this habitus of class, measure of English rectitude. social status determined by the status of greenery around the house. manor or tract suburbia. essence of control. and with this control of the landscape comes subtle and not-so-subtle shifts. consider, for example, as environments shift to ever more homogeneous conceptualized ideals, species which are more adaptable to that particular ideal explode in number, while more specialized species are squeezed out. this is why there is a proliferation of ‘pest’ species — deer, raccoons, starlings, Canada geese — the so-called “Wal-Mart” effect. all the fuel, time, and effort used in primping lawns would be better used for (at least) simply defining (controlling) a small area of the total available land used for housing clusters, with the rest used as natural environmental buffers. developers generally hate this concept. rather using 1-2 acre lot grids evenly spaced over the entire available land. ah well, seems there is no limit to the greed and avarice of said developers, so, what to do? so far, if what I have seen in the West in the last 30 years is any measure. it’s hopeless. more humans, more pressure on the environment. period.

posted
  • place: Rösrath, Germany

fearlessness

the speed of religious innovation. words to wake up with from a sleep of a thousand dreams and groping around for the pathway. these two thoughts come to me: the despair I face is of my own making; and fearlessness is paramount. it is always this internal relation to the world, where change is framed as something accomplished by introspection, not in relation with the surrounding presence of spirit. although there should be no distinction between the internal spirit and the external spirit. they are One. but connection to that dynamic flow remains elusive and transitory in the confusing rush of noise that the social brings. (how this sounds an anti-social position, but this is not the case, merely to recognize the effect of social structures (as they enhance material survivability) on the individual.)

interstitial awareness, and Brakhage’s rise to the surface of my consciousness through meeting certain Others. the sheer animated viscerality of his expressions that so activated my fascination. the further individual creative expressions/projections can be stripped of the restrictions of abstracted and impressed social channeling, the closer the impulse comes to pure energy.

The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity cannot adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those fog-bound in shared illusion. The individual’s point of view must prevail over false collective participation. In total self-possession, reach society with the tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything, starting with yourself. The reversal of perspective is what is positive in negativity, the fruit which will burst out of the old world’s bud. — Raoul Vaneigem

posted
  • place: Riga, Latvia

after-ram

the workshop ends with another club evening in a former worker’s hall in Pardaugava, replete with a red star over the proscenium. much conversation, until the music got too loud. started off with a drum’n’bagpipe acoustic set with vid projection and moved to an over-amped hip-hop scene. beat a retreat around 0100 for a long walk back to the hotel past empty overgrown factories and wooden row houses re-integrating asymmetric with the deep Daugava sand. our Danish room-mates only stopped by the hotel to grab their bags at 0530 for a taxi to the airport.

wander over to a closed rix-c, but at least pick up the wifi sitting on the steps. then over to John Lemon cafe to meet Derek and Sara, along with Mara and Sophea for breakfast.

Formula 1 on the box. one of three channels sailing through stuffy spectral airs.

posted
  • place: Grand Junction, Colorado

sand storm

F/A-18 Super Hornet overflight. sitting in a lounge chair by the pool, after a slow workout, on the deck, the air changes consistency, clarity. a dust storm fills the northern sky, far away in front of Book Cliffs and growing rapidly, vaporous, after the second F/A-18 overflight, landing gear down, visibility drops until the cottonwoods beyond the far side of the pool become only barely shadow-box projections in the taupe fog. it passes, eyes gritty and stinging. then the outdoor megaphone/speakers, tuned to a local pop music radio station, blare out the civil defense warning signal, followed by a severe thunderstorm warning for the area. some people are listening, but most are not. I stand to leave, a young man, a lifeguard asks a rhetorical question. what was that? we have a short conversation. I can barely understand his English, and when I say something, he also has a hard time understanding me. he starts telling how he was dirt-biking yesterday and his girlfriend was blown off her ATV by the wind. I cycle away on the shimmering asphalt.

the artist as presence. why shouldn’t it be that way alone. presence spilling itself around in doses or continuous flows of richness. direct and unmediated. and mediated. without considering both, and the conditions and movements that bring all to present being, nothing good comes. a visit to Tree and Pascal’s place in Glade Park, about to build a straw-bale house on a 40-acre parcel west of the Colorado National Monument area. artists. sitting outside their trailer under the ramada: heat from the sky and ice tea of roasted barley. a breeze keeps everything tolerable. (I pop up a memory of breaking out the manual type writer on a picnic table in very late fall, at the Sand Dunes picnic area, a crusty snow on the ground, air shimmering with heat waves off anything dark colored, Anthony and I on one of our passages through the West. I cycle infinity signs in the snow of the empty parking lot. and curse nothing. celebrating life. and complete presence.)

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

fractions

fractions of lives. shivering in the wide-ness of being. running into Timo, his wife is in a coma, it happened suddenly three weeks ago. and in the pool, swimming, I realize that my own being tends to be sucked into the energy fields of those who are not sensitive of their projection into the world. sounds convoluted. it is convoluted. but, upon sensing that someone is not acutely tuned to their surroundings (as if I ever was), it is my tendency to project myself into their projected space of insensitivity. blah. paradox, or just mind-filler.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

-20C

Sanna misses the ferry. -20C today, with some wind and that special crystalline fog/snow blowing all around at ground level with the sky overhead a pale steel blue. the harbor is so packed with ice that the ferry grinds to a halt almost — stops processing the VR data projection that tells us we are traveling through a crowded harbor outside of the iced-over windows. already the telephone becomes a more active techno-tool in my life (can I remember when I started email?) getting calls, making calls. from wherever to wherever. how will this alter relation and presence? Café Soucis for lunch, walking around is a brisk event that holds a bit of seriousness in it — will I make it to the next warm point? checking into Finnish tax situations. filing in many countries this year, with MB’s help in Iceland.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

days days days

only one day, days later there is nothing to tell to relate only to flush to excrete to deliver to produce to make to create no telling: telling is this other process that I can’t remember about because I am forgetting about people the Other and not exercising that which is a projection a placement a possibility of being the Other at least to have sympathy and empathy. losing faith losing faith in the lack of success and sparkling wit and creative brilliance and humane living. why is this a problem, why not? Looking out at the world and seeing is enough a portal a sluice pouring liquid Light into the soul but the garish social lights the small the scrape of things dear god forming on the lips and vanity that brings the clouds to press close to the ground attraction of mass and Light like Simone Weil talked about gravity and Light being the ruling forces of the universe that soak all with a roar hum and rush susseration again back to blood in the ears where is the self in all this? whirr blush hrrrrummmmm click shoulders crunching silently to collect the neck muscles in a tight knot basket carry the head away to cyber land with glass fibers to make a web hammock sleep baby sleep.