the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::
traces pathways and actions encountered and undertaken
Asking questions.
There are several ways to do this, perhaps more.
The first way is to assuage individual (personal ignorance) asking about things that you don’t understand
The second way is to ask questions that may reveal what you observe others not understanding
The third way is to ask questions that the teacher/facilitator doesn’t understand
The fourth way is to ask questions that you do not understand
I am sure there are other ways.
500 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile flying
250 grams of carbon dioxide per passenger-mile driving
These are very approximate/average numbers and are affected by the type of plane/vehicle and its relative efficiency.
We are changing the course of nature. Or, more precisely, without life on this planet, nature would be different. We are life in this place. Or we are life, as life is a perturbation of basal flows. An always-inchoate flow, but never completely still. This is all we are, a way for the cosmos to increase entropy, perhaps, as some believe, the best way for the cosmos to increase entropy, to wind down, into a cold and silent nothing.
But it’s all in the language, isn’t it? And even the language needs to get shucked, ripped from its stalk, tossed away to reveal and remind of the truth that the word is not the phenomena that it de-scribes …
Back to:
All Roads Lead To Rome.
as principle.
The questions are, What is Rome, and What is a Road?
et cetera
Nine km. in three days, not bad — it’s actually getting easy — I need to do more sprinting and drills, but just moving faster is best, feeling the greater resistance of the water and consequent speed. That and watching the sky and listening to the birds on the walk from my office to the pool. The sky was exceptionally dark and clear last night, it got down to maybe 40F, pretty cool. Totally dreaming about being in the bush, as they say here, in the back-country, the wilds, the wilderness. To watch the stars sink right to the black edge of the world. Squatting, eyes tearing in the chill condensate of mid-night. The Southern Cross is practically at Zenith now which seems strange, but at a similar latitude as in the north in winter, Polaris also reaches quite close to Zenith. Pity no chance of catching a good sky on this tour. Now too many folks to visit with before possible departure, too many things to do, including whether not to leave again.
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”
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”
CLUI residency looms within a completely different tectonic regime. Travel to that point will traverse no zenith, instead will follow flat-lying salt-pans after The Canyon and other intense impingements on the eyeballs. While the volcano simmers on Fimmvörthuháls, Ice Land.
He adds understanding a star’s formation may someday help astronomers understand the formation of our galaxy. “How did we get here, and where are we going? That’s what we are trying to understand.”
Seems to be a basic couple of questions. Both which eliminate religion from view when religion posits irrefutable answers to both, without exception. And which suggests the social role of science (what else is there?) approaching the same role as religion. The feigned disentangled observer in science is immersed in such wide pursuit while playing with little bits of material: traces of answer to those questions. Or merely caught in the race that dominates this time—that between religion and science. One proceeding from apparent Truth, the other converging on it.
This is the result of our trajectory, what we have done to this point, how we have proceeded: or is our trajectory a result of this? The cumulative affect we have as a form of life on this place. With the messy convolutions of relation that accumulate, stratigraphically, on be-ing. No flat-lying sediment with seasonal and measured pulse. Glacial, tectonic, up-heaving fossil be-ing exposed as scarified, reified tissue. How to excise, erode, release, revive once fluid dreams from these frozen remains. Or is it impossible that once laid down from embodied flow, these traces contain only the form of life gone, drained of all strength, all presence, and any forward driving impulse.
Feigning indifference when chunks of life are covered over, awaiting the slow micro-crystallization of silica replacement. Rendering to glass all that came before. Glass to look at, to look through, and to see refracted life; to see the myriad pretty and terrible colors of it all.
If one constructs a tool, what is one doing, and why is one doing it? How will one do it?
How to control of flows around oneself? And what does this control mean? Where does the desire to control arise from? Is it simply about evolutionary (survival/procreative) pressures? Is there anything about control that is altruistic (or simply outside of the broadly evolutionary imperative)?
The divide between life-forms that make tools and ones that don’t is fundamental, but it may be ignored when regarding the smooth continuum framing life as a system(?) that alters the flows of energy around it generally to its advantage (or to its need to continue — life is about life needing to continue life). The divide then appears to arise only when one considers how (from a mechanistic p.o.v.) that control is exerted.
This divide seems especially arbitrary when the body itself may be seen as a tool. The mechanical relations between bone structures, for example, or the magnifying ability of the lens in the eye. And, extending the definition of tool beyond the purely mechanical to, say, chemical, the body is a clearly a refinery in the exact same sense as a petroleum refinery. It conducts a wide-ranging set of thermodynamically driven reactions to access and distribute concentrated energy sources that it has introduced to its system. While there is a material dividing plane, the skin, which historically looms largely absolute in determining many classifications of relation and order, that plane may also be seen as arbitrary. The surface tissues — including the entire gut and lungs — are highly permeable surfaces which are constantly interchanging matter and energy with the environment they are in. In an optimal sense, at a particular time, this interchange process does not degrade the general order of the biotic system, but it does precipitate localized and systemic change. Also to be considered are the millions of microscopic organisms which synergize with the larger human body system — without which that system would likely not survive.
Are there, then, distinctions to be made based on body-as-tool and the ‘external’ tool that the body/mind system synthesizes? Or are these distinctions merely artifacts of the entire mechanistic p.o.v.?
It would seem so. If one considers, again, the relations within the body between , say, limb or organ, where a part may be seen as having a particular function which benefits or affects another part. A particular part has a function (as any tool also has) which aids in the performance of the body-system and interacts with other specific mechanisms in the body. In a living body-system these inter-relations are both necessary and sufficient if one includes the those moving between the body and the external. The body is seen as an indivisible whole, but without the constant interactions with the external environment, it would, for practical purposes, dis-integrate immediately.
The point of this short meditation is to emphasize the process which a tool, by definition, precipitates. That process is the fundamental alteration of the energy flows to which the tool is applied. This process unites the purpose of both internal and external systems for energy flow change which may be seen as a tool. The body is a technology as much as anything external to it which causes an alteration of extant energy flows. (Uff, this suggests that life itself be defined as a technology as it always alters the flows around it — we are life, we alter the flows around us, we are a technology.)
The division between tool-makers and those organisms which do not make tools may then be seen as a somewhat arbitrary one. Both organisms are needful of altering the surrounding flows to survive, they actualize that need via evolved mechanisms as they relate with those particular flows. The ultimate point for both internal and external tool use is the optimized continuance of life.
Fundamental innovations almost always seem to come from outside the established market leaders, who suffer ‘path dependency.’ Established firms are usually too committed to a particular conception of what their product is. This commitment is embedded in its manufacturing process and endemic in the thinking of its managers. When a major innovation appears, a leading firm understands the technology, but remains committed to its product and its production system.
Technology Matters: Questions to Live With, Nye, David E., MIT Press, Boston, 2006.
Technology, at base, may be defined as a means or pathway to gather and concentrate the (productive) energies of individuals in a social grouping. The difference between inventions lost in the detritus of history and those that become widely integrated in a social system is not necessarily related to the efficiency of the technology itself. The primary difference lies in the efficiency with which the broader social system uses the technological pathway as an effective means of tapping into the individual energies of the population. The broader social system is usually controlled by a subset of people, elites, who impose the pathway on the whole (and who tap off a surplus of energy from the pathway). It is controlled by those who define the pathway of flow. Set pathways have come into being to benefit those who are accessing the concentrated powers they provide. When a pathway is set, it has a built-in inertia which more-or-less resists alteration. This inertia is a mapping of a (counter-(r)evolutionary) resistance of human systems to change. The resistance comes from the relationship of energy flow that the pathway is defining. Individuals participating in either giving and receiving energy are reluctant to change the architecture of that relationship: it is a symbiotic relationship. There can be no receivers without those willing to give their life-energy and attentions to the receivers. Change comes hard. Innovation, the tendency to seek (newer and more) optimal pathways, is always negatively affected by this resistance to some degree. A(ny) technological pathway, once fixed upon, is adapted to and becomes the norm. (The Machine Stops, by E. M. Forster is a nice fictional sketch of this from 1900.)
Nye addresses many other topics aside from innovation, so I’ll be picking through his book in the next days.
David Brooks, columnist at the New York Times writes in this commentary on New Years Day:
Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.
I have always enjoyed his pragmatism and basic awareness of a wider historical context. It frames the American Way as (merely another) expression of a global continuum of human presence on the planet. And he seems largely to avoid the hybridized reli(geo)-political Destiny’s Child(ish) mentality that so pervades the fragmentary remnants of mediated public discourse in this declining nation-state. more “the American Dream is only to survive”
(but wait a minute, LIFE is, by definition, a redirecting of the flows of energy in a natural system — a redirecting that is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of living systems — according to basic non-equilibrium thermodynamics of living systems.)
However, there is a scalar difference between humans and other living entities where some humans attempt this kind of control on wide scales, with others re-directing those same energies to completely different configurations, some only images of what their ‘original’ pattern of flow once were. (it’s a question of degree?)
more “Redirecting the Flows of Energy in Natural Systems”
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 …
Golden High School graduation at Brooks Field on the School of Mines campus on what starts off as a dreary and chilly morning with uncharacteristic clouds sticking to the foothills. Holly is the Valedictorian. the weather clears up by the end when Montse and I head back to the house for final party preparations. I take the opportunity to get the whole Williamson Clan together for a group portrait.
fourteen hours later, celebrations finally end with a round of toasts for the graduate.
Dear Holly. What a pleasure to be here to celebrate this time with you! The teacher who spoke at graduation is precisely right that whenever two humans cross pathways they are both changed in ways that are not (always) immediately apparent. This is a powerful principle of life: when we realize and take to heart that this occurs, we may intensify the outcomes of these encounters through open, honest, and unfettered engagement. This engagement should be attentive, concentrated, and focused. Through this, any other human encountered becomes a collaborative partner in a dynamic creative process that is the essence of life. As is taught, the next person you encounter may be the Buddha, and thus, how you engage governs the potential for enLightenment. I wish you all the best in your near and far future; that the pathways you walk will be full of those transformative encounters; and that the transformations bring the breath-taking inspiration that makes life joyous. Life is a phenomena! You are phenomenal! At any point you have questions, answers, observations, or discoveries to share, I am happy to give you my attention. Thank you for being you! oxoxox jh
Memories. how to surface, how to frame, how to recreate. images, in the process of uncovering three decades of work primarily unseen. thousands of images of friends, places, strangers, objects, situations, events. a very small percentage are so far away in mind that what, who they are, is now unknown. so, looking through the external sources, the calendar, the email archive, other images, the travelog. to set a location. but some cannot be deduced. where was I? who are those people? what’s going on?
And then the questions, are the images interesting, compelling, usable?
and to the Wordsworth reference:
The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe’d horn. — William Wordsworth
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”
finally done with getting 430 images from my senior year at Gaithersburg High School. I was the Photography Editor for the yearbook, and had originally wanted to get all the images up and running for the 30-year reunion, but never made that deadline. the scanning followed by the retouching work was mind-numbing and has been on my To-Do list for these two years as an escape from more important work, yet it never seemed to get finished until last weekend, after getting a nice email from Renee who had stumbled on the images that I did have up, I was determined to finish the damn project.
when do personal histories become interesting? scandal, documentation of publicly shared events, the historical record, curiosity, obsession. where the volume of material becomes overwhelming. nah. it is the compelling character of the narrative. story-telling. no stories here, only images. and notes rattled off after things seen. (guess what I saw?)
and BTW, George has this nice riff in the New Yorker (that, of course, only Élites read, so, hmmm, how’s that?) But he asks the all-important policy questions (largely ignored as we float down the main stream): Do you know the difference between me and a Hockey Mom who has forgot her lipstick?
day starts with French toast, frisbee a bit later, things that Loki and I share over the history of sporadic presence. cut my hair off last night, making a pile in the middle of the living room floor. clean it up. clean up the kitchen, and other details. so it goes.
make a museum tour as well to the National Museum to see the new Steina Vasulka installation which is monumental and fits the space perfectly. then on to the Kjarval and the Hafnarhusid as I discovered as of February this year they are free to the public. the Martha Schwartz I Hate nature / ‘Aluminati’ installation in the courtyard of the Kjarval is a nice critic of the horrid environmental degradation happening at the hands of Alcoa and corrupt government officials who are selling the landscape to make aluminum smelters and the dams which are necessary to power them.
(00:06:43, stereo audio, 12.9 mb)
also wander down to the harbor to take some photos. observing with irony that the whale-watching ships are docked immediately across the pier from the whaling ships — a fact which no doubt escapes most tourists as the signage is not easily interpretable. anyone from Greenpeace would know. (heh, Simmi tells the joke, my favorite meal is whale meat with green peas…)
managed to get over to Seltjarnarnes to visit with Edda, Stefan’s mum, who now has a flat in the same place that Jón and Helga lived some years back.
not much interesting to write about here. haven’t gotten many of the sound files that I have picked up over the couple weeks online yet. as usual, behind the flowing times. months, years behind on all this — picking up, accreting material observations, when to start the reverse process to dis-engage with this acquisition obsession? rhetorical questions. to scatter into a text of frequent error and mis-apprehension.
The IFKiK seminar ends in two side-steps which confirm the un-sustainability of that particular track of teaching—the holding to a(ny) model. It is a direct outcome of facilitating that the participants actually mutiny and go off on their own, rejecting authority and (s)lack, along with strong expressions of independence and a desire to find relevant subject areas for inquiry. When will this happen on a larger scale, across larger swaths of so-called learning spaces? There are clear limits to tolerance, this demonstrates, but can those limits be prescribed and stretched without pre-tension? Or does any pre-tension doom the process from moving into at least an abandoned form of random encounter, instead into mere buffoonery.
Well before the end it was already impossible to sustain a track, so that option fell by the way-side. At the same time, dialogues were undertaken with a ferocious concentration. This had the effect of gradually loosening any vestige of authority-in-relation in addition to any privileging of knowledge or know-ing. Dramatic developments. And as the (post)authoritarian protocol became internally incoherent, evolving too many possible interpretations, efforts focused on relinquishing traces of control that the protocol demanded and instead the formation of a new protocol exclusive of the facilitator. Did not compile the questions, such as they were. Relevancy appeared to be attained, but through a desire to move back to traditional models of relation (the text). Very interesting development. Will have to re-think that framework. Of all the thousands of possibly inspiring texts to consume, which will be the right combination? hmmm. A cook book might be the best starting point.
A little awkward with the stylized ending, but as a sample in the extreme spectrum of idiosyncratic confabulation, very interesting!, or … not.
Cycling across town to Charlottenburg is fascinating, exhilarating, memorized now: the transitions, the corners, the sounds, the traffic. The tourists, the police, the Park, the City. The images and sounds are building up to something.
Head to Lichtenberg for Barbara and Susanne’s birthday party, in a green garden shaded by an enormous and very healthy apple tree, late into the slightly chilly evening, a fire of large pieces of timber that clearly were formerly from houses. 25×25 cm cross-section, pieces several meters long, with nails in them. Rafters from destroyed buildings. War relics. Or reliquaries. Incredible food and a Russian accordionist.
Mari has her opening here in Berlin and in Helsinki simultaneously — the Field Gallery here and at Maa-tila in Helsinki. it’s about mysterious mega…
old networker-friend, Paul Rutkovsky (of floridada) and I have some nodes in common in Lithuania of all places. he was just there and here in Berlin as well. he sends this invitation from a recent show of drawings on paper that he had in Vilnius.
suspended ambronesia, the whole week gets screwed up. and what do I have to show for it? nada. started off good at the Institute meeting on Monday, giving a short presentation to students on the block seminar that I’ll be doing in early June Sustainable Creative Presence :: Distributed Be-ing. have a few conversations afterward with some interested students. then a brief faculty meeting that is conducted mostly in English to my astonishment (for my sake).
Technology arises from human systems, but what is the nature of that genesis? Is technological advance increasing the possibilities of or increasing the limitations on creative activities?
As techno-social systems continue to evolve and become more pervasive, their effects begin to dominate all aspects of the social and cultural landscape. These evolving forms radically alter the possibilities of human presence as well as the range of social controls on that presence. It is human presence — and especially human presence in collaborative and vital relation — that is the basis of creative action. A deep understanding of this continuum of relation brings exceptional power to a sustainable creative process.
This seminar will ask many questions about where we are in this moment — a willingness to engage with others in open and honest discussion is most important. With open dialogue among the participants, the answers will be relevant and life-changing.
The approach will be decidedly interdisciplinary: students from different backgrounds are welcome.
faugh! still on those get-to-know-the-neighborhood rambles when I get tired of thrashing letters around on the screen. today, I discover the Schwimm- und Sprunghalle im Europapark a mere 200 meters from the flat. with not one, but TWO 25×50 meter pools and a third 21×25 meter therapy pool, kids pools, and a whole slew of diving platforms up to 10 meters. yes! reduced rates before 0800 and after 2000. very cool. first trip will be on Thursday. it’s right next to a velodrome — the round and square structures in the picture. I have to do some squinting and ask some stumbling questions at the cashiers to get a picture of the situation. and, looking up more info online, I discover the Swimmers Guide which has a bit of other info in English. along with a site that elaborates a subject dear to my heart, lap etiquette. if only this existed in German. pools here are always a bit of a challenge, though the Europapark one appears to at least have lane markers, that’s a start. speed designations on the lanes would be best, but I am not expecting them. rumor has it there are kick-boards and pull-buoys available. yes! it’s been four months since I’ve been swimming. I can’t believe it! that’s easily the longest time I have been out of the water during my adult life. I can already feel the shredded shoulders of the day after, and I’m sure not to be able to make a simple 1K. a 50-meter pool is the toughest workout, especially to start off with.
chilling out, some waiting, planning the spring which seems to be falling in place (nicely). a second teaching gig comes up, et al. as well, some other future teaching possibilities. falling into some order and potential, although the bigger questions remain unanswered. the discipline and focus to create in textual realms remains the greatest challenge.
so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:
The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.
Wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance? When one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. Though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. How can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? The web of dependencies is both wide and deep. Can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? Can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? Or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. There is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon, hardly. That baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. Beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. Even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.
The dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this (GPS-based) selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. A dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. It consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.
How can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? It is a relative issue. Clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to the protocols of that system. It is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. Social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. From covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. It is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the self in relation to the system.
Iceland pops into mind again, as I was implementing a ‘new media’ and photo program at the National Art Academy in R’vík in the early-mid-90s, where, with a user-base of under 30K people, Iceland demanded a translated OS from Apple *and* Microsoft. Terms were collectively translated or ‘determined’ by public discussion — I had instances like that happen in my classes, where, teaching in English, and mentioning a technical photographic term, the class would erupt in an animated conversation in Icelandic as to the correct translation of the term. Their cultural autonomy lay (lies) in a collective collaborative resistance to the imposition of ‘out-land-ish’ protocols.
In the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct (likely) created by a subset of the military-industrial complex. But trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. This is where the self engages the other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of ‘what’s out there’. Trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other is critical in setting a metric of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. Sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway that trust must follow to be realized. What is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous others. What does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?
every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.
more on this in future rants…
Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.
Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.
and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.
so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…
questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:
Why are you looking for a unified theory?
What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?
How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?
Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?
How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?
How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?
What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?
If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?
Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?
Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?
Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?
Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?
Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!
Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.
sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father, a senior Pentagon analyst, sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitoes, and dark star-brilliant skies. more “The Wild Surmise”
Inane story on NPR, dancing around the hype of ubiquitous computing (still?) — With the installation of a network of sensors on house plants that will send wifi info to their owner about their condition.
Who sets up this network? Who maintains it? Who interacts with it? When and why is it interacted with? Under what conditions is it necessary to interact with it? Or is it ever necessary to interact with it? Those people who are so interested in spreading digital networks somehow forget the necessity of manufacturing, deployment, installation, configuration, and, especially, maintenance. Not to mention the actual (life-)time necessary to interact with the data being gathered, tweaking it if necessary (or even possible) into a form that is understandable and usable to the idiosyncratic self, NOT the generic Everyman (who is the Grail of the data collectors).
These questions point back to the cultural (d)evolution which mandates a rolling over of systems from localized individual control to a centralized social command-and-control. Now, a big argument used by the ubicomp community is that the existence of these networks liberates the localized Everyman from the drudgery of some localized chore or another. Watering house plants, in this case. But there is a hidden factor — the subsequent reliance of the individual on the centralized system of production and (standardized control) — which creates and deploys these devices. It costs money to have these devices. And the greater the deployment, the larger the social infrastructure necessary to produce and deploy these devices and systems. Think, for example, of the mining and basic industry that provides the raw materials that go into the construction of the machines used to make and deliver the devices. The individual consequently must be participating in this larger system in order to receive the device. To participate in that system requires a payment of (life-)time (converted in the grind of social production to cash). So the (life-)time freed-up by the device is more than consumed by the (life-)time drawn from the individual in this general participatory process. Think of working at a long-term job so that you have the long-term income to pay for the apartment where you have the house plants. Stability is a core value here to consider here as well — without long-term stability (a stable environment), exotic house plants are imperiled. To have house plants assumes this long-term stability (which the social system relies on!). So not only is this further reliance on the deployed ubicomp system NOT about liberation — it is the opposite — it is about a subtle enslavement to a greater social system for which instability is anathema. The drawing-off of the lifetime (and life energy) of the individual into that social system is the primary source of power for the centralized social system.
All of this is on a sliding scale. But assuming that condition, there likely is a certain tipping point where one might go too far and not have the possibility of retrieving individual autonomy. Where is this point? Have we reached it? Clearly it is different in different social systems, despite the healthy state of global systems which draw their energy from widely-dispersed humans. Tolerance for autonomy is different in different socio-cultural systems. Intolerance for instability is generally higher in more organized systems (which came first, the need for organization or the intolerance for instability and dis-order?)
rising too early again, out to Turku with a few hard-cores to tour the exhibition Digitally Yours that Andy Best had curated. not enough sleep. even our tireless Pixelache host, Juha, was unable to roll out of bed in time for the train, so it ended up there were only five of us who actually made the trip, but it was well worth it.
begin to get a migraine after seeing the show at the Ars Nova museum — most of the artists were there, so we were able to interact with them directly. I recorded several of the talks, so, hope to get that online shortly. great also to have a bit of time to spend with Mukul and Manu with their deLightful boy.
Digitally Yours examines the relationship between technology and humanity. The exhibition maps out how everyday life and art have changed over the period when digital technologies have become commonplace. The artists in the exhibition all use digital technologies but their relationship to it is critical. They consider the relationship between man and machine, the dreams and promises, the realities and threats. The works in the exhibition ponder the fundamental questions of humanity in this globalized information networked world, while building on a new type of collaboration between the artist and the viewer.
Animaatiokone Industries (FI); Laura Beloff (FI) & Erich Berger (AT); Elina Mitrunen (FI); Chris Burden (US); Anita Fontaine (AU/US); Phil Coy (UK); Ed Burton (UK) & Zachary Lieberman (US); Juha Huuskonen (FI) & Tuomo Tammenpää (FI); Manu Luksch (AT/UK) Christian Nold (UK); Stanza (UK); Soda (UK); Markus Renvall (FI); Åsa Ståhl (SE) & Kristina Lindström (SE); Pia Tikka (FI)
on the way back, I get off before Helsinki to have dinner with David and Maria at their new place in the countryside. unfortunately, my head it really done in by then, so, I’m hardly good company. David drives me to Linnunlaulu where I finish packing. the migraine dissipates somewhat and I am able to go to the closing party for an hour to say goodbye to folks. then off to crash for another even earlier rise and 26 hours of travel torture.
our arts birthday stream goes down smoothly, though I never did succeed in tapping into the actual European Broadcasting System satellite output feed of the event. August recorded our output stream file on his Linux box:
(00:12:30, stereo audio, 12.3 mb)
Later, Wes invites me to jump into what turned out to be an excellent evening — cycled down to fishbon (see their blog) — a weekly salon for an eclectic group of cultural activists in Santa Barbara. the evening starts with a demo of the Wii by a local teen, then a Kung Fu demo advertising the establishment of some special courses starting in the fishbon space. Wes and a friend do a MAX/jitter visual/sonic performance, and after that I do a very short 15-minute improv with VDMX.
and shortly, my talk in the IHC:
tech-no-madic pathways: networks and sonic energy
This talk, framed in observations from 20 years in the Cultural-Industry Sector of Europe and North America, will look at the energetic intersection of body and sound in the midst of chaotic social systems and restless movement. It will doubtfully answer the following questions among a thousand others: What does it mean to be a sound artist? What is a sustainable creative practice? What are we doing here? How did it end up this way? Afterward, let’s talk!
reading Stephen Brookfield’s two recent books on teaching — The Skillful Teacher, On Technique, Trust, and Responsiveness in the Classroom and The Power of Critical Theory, Liberating Adult Learning and Teaching along with Parker Palmer’s essays on education as a spiritual journey, To Know As We Are Known. might as well be girding for the rest of a career in education while job hunting. weak areas include the feedback process, especially the short-term-feedback processes to gauge how students are coping with the course at different levels. this doesn’t apply to the 2-week intensive workshops which have a constant level of dynamic feedback running the entire time. but the idea of having two online forum log-in ID’s for each student — one an assigned user ID (or self-selected user name) and the second being anonymously assigned (pull the user/password slip out of a hat at the beginning of the course) and used for posting reactions to the class situation. this can include both posed questions from myself as well as ad hoc discussions on subject material, procedures, processes, expectations, and outcomes.
part of me likes this idea, while part of me sees it as just another way of artificially coping with the chasm that has evolved over the years where the teacher and student start off their relationship not from a position of mutual trust, but of adversarial suspicion and imbalance. this largely because of the (de)formative pressures of the social system that sees education as a key element in the hegemonic production of consumables. nothing more. many now see ‘higher’ education as a mechanistic successor of primary education — where primary education was the social mechanism needed to produce people literate enough to perform as a worker in the industrial ‘revolution;’ higher education merely fills the role of producing ‘line’ workers for the information ‘revolution.’ uff!
Popular escapist fiction enchants adult readers without challenging them to be educated for critical consciousness. — bell hooks
long day in the city. starting in the United Nations Plaza which is, definitely a coagulation of spirits. first scenario visiting the eye on regaining ground-level from the Civic Center BART station is that of a seagull in the process of eviscerating a live pigeon. by the time I film, the pigeon is dead. the second scenario: to kill time, I drop in at the Asian Art Museum where the guards start to check everything in my backpack and begin to recite a mantra of all the things that cannot be brought in or used or done (or thought!) in the Museum. I stop them, and say that I am not interested in participating in their particular little corner of the social system, pack my bag and walk out. and head back along streets brimming with urine-reek, the displaced homeless, flophouse hotels, and so on. at a stop Light, a woman standing next to me asks the world in general how can I restart my career? I look at her and say I was going to ask you the same thing! it is clear that social empowerment is at an extreme low here in the center of San Francisco.
lunch with Casey, and on to a rendezvous with Sophea and Amanda. a double espresso puts an edge on the afternoon. on the way, evidence of a TAZ is spotted: a good omen! although the juxtaposition with other street scenes previously experienced in the day raises many questions about the way a TAZ might be expressed in this time, in this socio-political system.
on to Whole Foods for breakfast provisions, Casey goes home to study, we head back to Amanda’s place to prep for the trans-national breakfast with the Sydney
and Adelaide crews at 1630 local time. the breakfast — French Toast, fruit compote, pashed (!) potatoes, and champagne is streamed and rebroadcast on free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY as part of the live_feed: Breakfast Radio streaming project. the overall performance was initiated by Andrew Burrell and the Hybrid Radio Research Group as part of the Aural Degustation: Tasty Bites to Feed the Ears exhibition at the SCA Galleries at the SCA in Sydney, Australia. participants included: (in Adelaide): Mimi Kelly, Sasha Grbich, Jen Brazier, Heidi Angove, and Tamara Baille ; (in San Francisco): Amanda Hendricks, Sophea Lerner, and John Hopkins; (in San Diego – special telematic drop in): Amanda MacDonald-Crowley; (in Sydney): Lia Smith, Amber Moloney, Clara Chow, Bjel Bakker, Belle Brooks, Heidi Abraham, Sach Catts, Alli Barnard, and last-but-not-least, Andrew Burrell.
our audio:
(02:05:00, stereo audio, 121 mb)
Learn sorrowfully from the network (from Karen (T.)) of another passing. John Wester was a great friend from junior and senior high days. we maintained contact after the college diaspora and when we were both living in Los Angeles after college (he doing his law degree, me finishing my tenure with corporate oil) and later through email, thinking that at one point we would cross paths. an obituary is a terse framework that little shows the life, only the social situation. I’ll add some words and, if I can find some, photos soon. Karen calls — the first time we have spoken in, what, maybe 30 years? nah, a few less than that. it is strange and nice to hear a voice that slowly stirs older memories — of those humid summer days down at the North Shore dock of what was a not very large lake in one of the first planned communities of the 1970’s, Montgomery Village. I would cycle down Brink Road from home to the Village on occasional summer days before a drivers license made more of the world available. At the dock, John, Richard, Taryn, Karen, Mark, Gary, Bruce, Sharon, and others would hang out — some of them working (boat rentals), some like myself, just hunting for summer friendship. more “John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006”
body morphology. body symmetry. of course, beauty is (scientifically) proven to be related to facial and body symmetry among other parameters of length, size, girth, curves, color, and other transitory features that lay upon us in the quick passing ether to being to ether. and there is dysmorphophobia, the fear of body shape being somehow wrong. imperfect. hmm.
spend the evening trashing a 3-inch high pile of class evaluations from my CU teaching days. noting both positive and negative comments in all the dross and three-decimal-place statistical analysis of the results. but feeling quite good about the quite good ratings overall. scanning selected records. uff! why carry it around: why not conflagurate? makes a nice fire to heat the house at least. along with those evaluations, papers a bit more problematic to dispose of — the daily role sheets — aka, Question of the Day (as a .pdf page). a literal project in network facilitation. a form where one student is chosen at random every day to pose the question of the day at the top of the page, and the rest of the class has to write in their name, and along with that, in a box, an answer to the question of the day. these played a very interesting role in the class — they would generally circulate during the entire 3-hour studio class period, between filling out the questions, and subsequent interest in the answers. sometimes they got quite elaborate (What was your most recent and vivid dream?), sometimes basic (what’s your favorite breakfast food?). they were always filled out religiously with an attention to detail and careful thought on everyone’s part — interesting fallout from such a basic exercise. and they served that boring function to keep attendance records. ugh. I often thought that I should somehow make this an interactive web project — for someone to transcribe the answers into a large grid that would be a record of the grouping of the class, but there never seemed to be the time to do it. so, a transitory, functional communications tool which broke down the barriers between peers. and a snapshot of the attentions of young college students in Amurika at the dawn of the millennium. so I heat the room for a couple hours.
From Armin Medosch in a call for papers to WAVES – electromagnetic waves as material and medium of art (Acoustic Space Issue #6)
Pantha Rei – everything flows
Radio waves occur naturally. Society puts the biggest emphasis on the ability of waves to carry signals. Radio, television and mobile telephony are some of the most widely used applications. The worlds fixation on content and its socio-political implications makes us forget the waves themselves. The proposed exhibition takes a look at the physical properties of waves. Waves are considered to be ‘immaterial’ from the point of view of visual art. However, light is just a specific band in the spectrum of electromagnetic waves. Some of the properties of waves change according to their frequency and wavelength. It is worthwhile looking at those properties and exploring their implications for art. Wave-like phenomena play an important role in various aspects of reality, from the physical consistency of the world (audio-, air-, water-waves) to Kondratiev-cycles and the carbon-cycle (the storage and release of CO2 by oceans and forests).
more “what burns?”
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”
The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:
where is netart?
When invited to join this year’s netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat skeptical that such an exhibition—with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World—would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.
However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded—the information flow personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network—while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: it’s getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.
more “netart 2004 – Ping Melody”
the script for a performance I did
title: drawing technologies into a sustainable human practice: open source living
1.0 — Presence
if you cannot hear, you must come close
more “presentation”
ram6 starts. Breakfast brings many familiar folks out from closed hotel doors. Nomeda said that we are the only people checked into the hotel for the duration—it gives the feeling of a large house. Soaked on the walk up the hill to the Contemporary Arts Center. Find Kim working so we go have lunch until the opening session where the workshop presenters introduce our respective plans to let attendees know what they can choose from. As usual my speaking is a bit cryptic, but there is a line of people afterward asking good sharp questions and it ends up I have an overflow. A bit wishing to be an attendee only, though, to catch Kim’s, or Sara and Derek’s workshop, for my own selfish reasons. And with thoughts to tomorrow, making the core decision to follow praxis by theory, rather than the other way around, at the beginning of the workshop tomorrow morning. Simple risk, though taking risks in a teaching situation is something that is more than less difficult, relatively: already the deep risks inherent in many previous workshops prove the worth of each step in the direction a distributed and autonomous learning. Facilitator, not teacher, or so.
Also was thinking I have to improve the content of the travelog photos. They seem stale. I don’t do many portraits because the medium of digital snapshots seems so … unstable. And unsatisfactory—primarily because of the delay, the ponderous e-lapse from the time the shutter release is depressed and when the electronic shutter activates. Impossible, so I stick with architecture and static life.
the workshop ends, too short, but seems to move forward. questions are slow in coming, but do arise, from important places. language is a dominant issue, as usual, along with previous educational experiences.
Estonia is starting English education in the first grade now, though, which seems somehow extreme, compared to other places, and for what reasons? to catch up with some perceived lack or slackness? or purely pragmatic synergistics with global capitalism?
a fast tour of the sports shop deep in the mall, but the prices are as high as the US. with throb-annoy EuroClubTrash muzak blaring. outta there. the vibe in the whole place is something of a desperation that shopping will provide an existential answer to the emptiness of ideological allegiance forcefully handed over to the various historical Unions that Estonia is subsumed by.
the guy is laying face down on the variegated green marble floor with a few people standing around. there is a wheel chair next to him, he is speaking, turns his head and looks up, below his face is a pool of blood, and his nose is split. he is a paraplegic, from the looks of his legs which are lying on the floor like inside forgotten pants. his glasses are folded closed in the blood, reminds me of Lennon’s bloody lenses on the window sill. one young guy is calling on a phone, but I can’t tell what’s the progress. a couple waitresses come up with napkins, one holds a hand in front of her face, and turns her head away. no one actually wants to touch him it seems. I am a prisoner of language, thinking that if I spoke the language I would immediately jump in. it’s happened before. the blood is a source of concern, infection, but otherwise, being careful, at least get him turned over, moving his limp legs. he has heavy winter gloves on, to operate the wheelchair. the security guards, all of 18 years old outside the grocery store fingering the ID tag chains around their necks while they stare blankly at passers-by aren’t around now. everybody seems young and confused. drawn from shopping and hanging-out to this microscopic happening.
the indoor mall is a monster in the center of town, just outside the Old Town east gate, other glass and steel monsters are rising all around the neighborhood. surely the Art Academy building will be razed soon. progress. global capitalism rooting out the remaining evil of anything old, authentic, or unmarketable.
anyware went down last night, IRC and all, but it was not a very satisfactory event from my impaired vantage despite the high level of network activity. I should not have joined in without a better understanding of the arrangements: I didn’t have access to enough of the program information until very late. and when I started delving around, I couldn’t figure out how I could jump in. still learning how to be a participant: another one of those things where I will not appear in the program credits, the paper propaganda, or banner headlines: despite ‘being there’. perfect deployment of tactical media in networks: avoid PR whenever possible. made it as far as to edit the wiki pages, though it ended up that my time-frame, being the most easterly of participants, except for someone in Tokyo, and having an early flight to Oslo and Kim’s randomsystem workshop in the morning, I couldn’t reasonably be online streaming when NYC prime-time hit. bummer. the shareNY crew was having fun, though, would have been nice to be there. a solo node in the network is often compromised unless network connections are strong.
was thinking this morning on the way into town on the early ferry that I function best when there is a clear understanding of the particular social framework within which a particular event will be operating. not that there is a need to actually operate inside that framework or even respect it, it just gives a more comfortable starting point. a bit like what happens when one has not been yet introduced to a stranger, and the specific opportunity for a self-made introduction passes, there are those awkward moments of disconnected collective dynamic. an unbalanced flywheel, hlaup, hlaup, hlaup. this principle inserts itself into many diverse situations. object making: knowing the film and developer (paper developer, paper, and enlarger); knowing the duration for a time-based medium; knowing the network architecture, connection speeds, firewall configurations, and available bandwidth. I tend to set those most base parameters, then leap into the project, feeling free to proceed intuitively and creatively.
these thoughts deserve more exploration, but I now have to read the article Open Content and Value Creation that was suggested in preparation for Kim’s workshop. seems like he is not ‘just a musician,’ but is into some good hard-core social criticism AND mapping out alternative ways of going.
Bjarne meets me at the hotel and we go to the new Atelier Nord offices to meet Atle. good to catch up with him. been a long time since being in Norway, and now he’s the Atelier Nord director.
evening performances at Blå alog and Next Life, around the corner from NOTAM, finally find Alexander, the festival-meister.
spent much of yesterday online, remote. talking with the https://archive.reboot.fm crew during their collaborative re-streaming project from Berlin. Thomax from the old orang.orang radiostadt project was there as irc host, and many net-amigos dropped in during the course of the 12-hour stream. by day’s end. though, I was wondering about the effect of a full day online, again. the price you pay’s a very general and deep issue regarding technological implementations, technological consumptions, technological deployments anywhere, anytime, anyhow. the cost (in life-time and life-energy) that is extracted from the individual and collective psyche is always there, this is a principle. as soon as one begins to make a re-configuring of the natural conditions of flow, that re-configuration itself, because at least part of it is contrary to the flow, costs in that the self has to expend internal energies, or, to get Others to do the same. huge discussion to try to launch into here, now. part of that greater schema that I have been promoting on a granular lever in teaching.
more “the next solar cycle”the month ending. all hallows eve. only seven more weeks around Colorado. yesterday hot and dry, huge flames lick at the final hogback between the Rockies and Boulder. today ice coats everything. clouds cling so close that there is no town, no mountains. fire chills.
parting. so concentrating on seeing people, because I feel like this departure from Colorado will be more long-term than I can imagine. maybe, maybe not. strange to even be typing that, but it might be in the words. hmmmmm. with my in-box now brimming at around a constant 130 emails, after the application of 70 filters and spam removed and all the answers and questions each day going out. scandals at Media Lab, territory grabs, and in the US government. nothing new.
Teaching with technology conference. Concepts swimming at the popular surface of the sea. Little diving to the basal bentholithic ground. Why the ascendancy of the text? (and David Abram’s critique of written language as the initial wedge driven between lived/immersive experience in the sensual world and the new rational sentient be-ing.) Hearing things from the keynote speaker, intelligent, that I have dealt with and modeled in my teaching already. hmmmm. Stating the obvious. And keeping to the center. not comatose. (my presentation: Convergent Practice: Networking and Creativity)
Deep in production states, the initial 2-hour DVD burned for the installation coming up in a couple weeks. First time in artifact production for public show since the installation at Deiglan in Akureyri in 2000. Tested the plasma screen today, some sizing glitches, but otherwise, it seems to look/sound good. Second iteration will happen this week, perhaps a third after that.
So little writing done here, reflections seem to be submerged by influx, hinted knowings (tongue on 9-volt battery, citrus), secretions of saliva. pressure of hearing, adsorbing.
Open source, middleware, centralization, privacy, (the idea of standards, or the principle behind, actually directly decreases possibilities of innovation!) so, when standards come from open source communities of use, vs a central corporate monolith, you get different results. mandated innovation … hah.
Technology, arts, media. ‘talk the talk,’ but where’s ‘walk the walk.’ The focus on a particular level of technology to implement in a teaching situation. There is no correlation between deployment of technology and the quality of the learning experience (period).
Paragraphs. delineating breaks of time. illustrating the discontinuous nature of re-creating, re-production.
lost the life of language, the usage that does not spark, no internal voice. where the internal voice spends breathless hours; questions itself.
my primary work when one calls it that, is the work in fundamental critique of the (meta)structure(s) that we are embedded in, in this sensual reality. it is not about the exigencies of work. It is mounted not in opposition, but in simple meeting-along-the-road. confronting that which manifests in the daily movement of life in life.
and I am astonished to discover that some of my students can’t read basic texts without simply quitting and saying “that was a terrible paper, I couldn’t understand it.”
I was WAY TOO EASY on the students I had this term. just not wanting to push them too hard. and that seems a big mistake. that they do not positively thrive on taking reign of their own progress, education, and enLightenment. not near rigorous enough. no toughness. but do they really need it? is this a condition? is it related to the social structure in which they are immersed? one where many of the human relations are mapped into incredibly convoluted and warped pathways. being graded. a scientific method, and a supreme lack of genuine dialogues. balanced flows. but is it worth it to try to change those flows? there are the hints of value. bright value, value that will float above knowledge, be a Lightness in life, perhaps. but the risk and inertia to overcome seems irresistible.
I mean, who IS the prophet in this time? Lennon has passed, Coltrane, Davis, Marley, and a hundred others, from all places and ways. but all on the same pathway. is it inside of time or outside? if not inside, then it is everywhere perhaps, or concentrated in one place. concentrations raw enough for the human to sense. and delve into. that we are not able to see the scale of all.
make assignments — for example, journal entries, no less than 40 entries with no spelling errors during the semester. ouch. but they need the discipline side. in Master Printing, I had the manifest tools, process available. with the computer, and the network, more difficult to pinpoint the tool and the process. but the practice, the living praxis, is the core/key.
for example — present the Apple iTunes screen “visual” algorithm. what is the politic of that? who made it? is that person an artist? basic questions to get things started. but on to harder ones. yeah, like pick an inspiring web space and describe why, in 500 words, it moves you. as a journal entry. with no spelling errors.
A brutal long day with nine hours of flying broken in two halves. On the road again for another intensive springtime. and then summer will come. and what next? Big questions come up. As usual.Cobbling together a pathway. And too much listening to other people, and not finding the heart is speaking loud enough (taught not to listen, I guess). Intelligence is no great advantage in this world unless it is combined with fortitude and concentration and the ability to focus attention. Going to see if Willa would be game to share her java scripting from her journal pages to restructure this site. Talks with Janet about her massive genealogical work motivates me even more to be more inclusive and extensive with the web space. Linking all content into a more cohesive whole. Or at least creating a deep cross-referencing system.
flash fire, morose carving up of temporal remains. moving and moving. Helsinki for some hours on Saturday, enough to have breakfast at Fazer with Sanna, then drop by Tapio’s place to leave some material offal. then back to the airport to head to Copenhagen, landing a kilometer from the Oresund Bridge that threatens to bind Denmark and southern Sweden in (un)holy matrimony. faced the sad fact of the total sum of money that I have spent carting around about 3 cubic meters of belongings since 1989. first from Colorado to the East Coast, then by boat to Iceland, then, five years later, shipping it back to NYC with almost the same stuff, putting it in storage in Newton, New Jersey for five years (at U$D40/month), and now, finally (?!?) driving it all back to Prescott, Arizona to reposition it there to cook in the desert heat. basically don’t even know what is in the boxes, but with the sum total of the money invested in it, damn well ought to be valuable! but likely not. just stuff. weight, mass, to be acted upon by gravity and the entropic effects of time. the storage unit in Jersey is marginally exposed to rain water, and combined with the humid and hot summer climate, I have the feeling that everything is at least partly consumed with some form of microbial critter. decay, rotting stink.
but anyway, Loki and I take a visit to the cockpit of the B757-200 for some time. wow! the pilot is quite friendly for my moderately intelligent questions. the view is intense, a strange feeling of vertigo, but not vertigo, realizing that to be in the front of the plane has something to do with whether the thing will stay up in the air. feeling the power of the outsides, as we sail over Goose Bay. ain’t see no geese up here! Light snow on the ground, in patches, but nothing serious, it’s warm in Gander. 20C the pilot says. while NYC is only about 13C. stormy on the whole East Coast, I am hoping this doesn’t mean anything serious about the landing situation.
An energized lecture at the Academy. It was the last of a series that Raitis has organized for students there. He tells me that there were many non-students in attendance as well — people that he did not even know. There were many probing and challenging questions and so on. The sun is out before it starts, when I am on the way from the cafe down the street, fortified with espresso energy. It is cloudy when we finally leave the Academy three hours later. So it goes. A quick snack with Raitis, then Rasa and I go to meet the USIS people to present the Media Lab concept to them.
done. moved out. strange not to be back in Helsinki for such a long time. probably the longest time in some years. although, technically, I will be jumping through on return flights for over-night or same-day transfers. the wind is still from Russia. last night when dropping some bags off for storage in the basement at Susanna and Tapio’s place, there is a broadcast, a documentary about the nearest Russian nuclear reactor. a map of Europe flashes on the screen with a radiation symbol in the middle of a huge green circle, apparently illustrating a what-if situation of the order of magnitude of Chernobyl. hoboy. wondering in the night, it is a questions of energies. in the same moment scientists claim to have reduced the most primitive form of life to it’s minimum set of genetic code, gradually removing useless DNA sequences to see if the organism dies, as though they are standing on the brink of becoming gods that can take a pot of that minimum chain, and make life. I pity their ignorance. and fear for the future.
up at 0600, but awoken at 0410 by somebody opening a door in the house, then, an hour later, the black cat — who I met yesterday first on the front steps, then, later, sprawled on the (heated) bathroom floor — jumps in the window. in bed at 0100. then, here at the airport, the plane in canceled, the next one also, and I have to transfer to an SAS flight an hour later. on the way over to Tone’s place for fish soup dinner, I stop to call Hilde, and at the same moment, Sanna calls, multi-tracking. and still the questions of what to do in the spring, after the holidays, causes me tight-chested breathing, and sleep deprivation. this is very unusual for me. so it is something to work with my breathing on, my concentration, my future. more offers to do workshops, this time back in Bergen in the spring. Cafe9 got another boost from this visit, very interesting intersections. for old times’ sake, I wander over to see Johan, who was teaching in the Institute of Photography at the Art and Design school when I was a guest lecturer back in 1992. or was it 1993?
Monday morning. radio today? burning man, KGB, salsa, insect infestations, terrorism in Moscow, and so it goes. ready to deal with. where am I? questions of presence and other states. on the raydeeoh with Steven and Alexander. they have a program “dictaphon” every Monday evening on the NTNU student radio station. trying to reconfigure things there to do a RealAudio remix from the net into their program, technically, things are too much of a mess, so, we give up and just improv the show. after, over beer, the discussion dances around pre-tensions, spontaneity, and action. pre-tense, pretense, pretension, all seem to be forms of barrier to spontaneous movement of creative energies.
logging into the past. first I drop Loki off at school for a greatly shortened day that seems to be only a special pageant for the entire student body. 90 minutes. I go back home to read several weeks of nettime email. which gets me to this stage of needing to write here. photometry. grammetics. and new media is nothing more than more of the same. networked things – smeckworked things. learning in cyberspace, doing in cyberspace, personal technology begins/continues the inexorable involuted backfire on itself. but only personal technology. something to shoot back with. Corpo-tech, or mili-tech won’t cease. because selling and killing will have a greater field of action in the future. the mistake of all the applied technology hype is that it forgets the original interface — soul/body. where the ether jacks into the meat. all mediated things root in and then fly from this electro-colloidal fertilization-zone. all reason and form and metaphor and absolute can be searched, can be hunted in this zone. can then be copied, pasted into relevant organic categories. that’s it, the Confucian Analects that sends us through a process of searching the perimeter of the soul/body interface.
The men of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that Light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart) ; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.
This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories
— Confucius, from The Great Digest or The Unwobbling Pivot, translated by Ezra Pound
it is possible to consider all things to be simple. complexity is a result of over-thought. over-processing of even the most simple data-set creates sampling artifacts, noise, and confusion. borders fabricate, delta-functions shoot to zero or infinity (the paralysis of alienated polarization), surfaces distort. convolution with questionable concepts creates complete areas of synthetic fabrication replete with discontinuities and false event horizons. forget metaphors, jam poetry, and all cultural production machinery paradigms, swallow language, stop writing. stop beating flesh against time and space barriers that make it hurt. no sex for entertainment: no time-slot filler, no wet commerce. body looks soft for a reason. that reason is coddling. ways of going that treat body/soul interface as a bother, not the crux (what is crux — old ancient forgotten word — is there a new word to fill the spot where this was forgotten and once lodged? maybe the word that fills it is catalytic converter or simm or talk-show). there are so many substitution fonts that language can be forgotten anyway. because people are knowing less and less exactly or even generally what each other is saying. no hearing, no talking. only dumb silence while fingernails grow to stab palms. while genetic receptors are mapped (where’s life?). and while questions are asked that raise a cryogenic boiling fog that dissipates to nothing after awhile. hip. cool. and ripped-off.
