posted

Afterword: R.M.R. in memoriam

You honored what is heaviest. You knew
the pull of earth; and you were pulled apart
by the dark angel’s voice that seemed as though
it called from somewhere outside your own heart.
You chose the tao of suffering, which led
past every common joy, past the humane
fulfillments, and delivered you instead
to cancer, in a Nessus’-shirt of pain.

Now, breathless, weightless, you can only fall
into yourself: the invisible, unheard
center that you sang. Ahead of all
parting, you might lean back against your chair
and see a sun-lit garden path. A bird
might whistle through you, in the cool morning air.

afterword by translator Stephen Mitchell, 1989. in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. New York, NY: Vintage Books.

posted

memory and the digital: re-membering

No surprises here. Schema of reliance does not include scenario of catastrophic failure of external memory storage system, etc.

Reliance on digital devices, and the trust we place in them, can resemble a human relationship. The feelings are established in the same way—through experience. Repeated experience with a reliable individual builds a ‘schema’ or association for that individual in our memory, telling us that this person can be depended on. If a digital device is continually reliable then we will build that into our schema of that device.

Dr Kathryn Mills, UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London

…

Remembering, it seems, is a double-edged sword. Research in humans and animals points to the pivotal role of retrieval in shaping and stabilizing memories. However, the remembering process also induces forgetting of other memories that hinder the retrieval of the memory that we seek. It has been hypothesized that this surprising dark side of remembering is caused by an inhibitory control mechanism that suppresses competing memories and causes forgetting; this putative process is adaptive because it limits current and future distraction from competitors. However, no study has ever directly observed memories as they are suppressed by this hypothesized inhibitory control mechanism. Behavioral methods are, by their nature, blind to the internal processes unfolding during retrieval, and neuroscience has lacked methods capable of isolating neural activity associated with individual memories. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we tested for the existence of the hypothesized adaptive forgetting process by developing a template-based pattern-tracking approach that quantifies the neural activation state of single memory traces. Thus, we tracked the fate of behaviorally invisible traces, providing a window into the suppression process thought to underlie adaptive forgetting in the human brain.

Wimber, M. et al., 2015. Retrieval induces adaptive forgetting of competing memories via cortical pattern suppression. Nature Neuroscience, 18(4), pp.582–589.

posted

manifestations of thought

Instead
of getting lost and bewildered in separate identity of things,
we must view their integral
interrelationships and significance.
If we consider,
the construction of a television
set and its astounding ability
of processing the endless set of images
and their interplay toward reproduction
of scenes and events and occurrences;
of transmission and reception
of an ad-hoc arbitrary signal,
of weaving the waves into picture after picture. more “manifestations of thought”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

diversity-ness

Having seen/heard many different arguments for and against diversity, especially in the post-politically-correct thought-police era, I was struck with the idea that a debate on diversity presumes the existence of a context for the concept. This is a faulty presumption. Without community, diversity remains an untethered theoretical. Community evolves at the speed of life, and once a distributed network of sharing humans is established (as a community), diversity is an evolutionary product as a transformative collective life-praxis. Otherwise the concept is merely a hollow administrative (hierarchic) tool driving the standardized metrics of social inequality.

posted

Francis, bara að segja

[…] The misuse and destruction of the environment are also accompanied by a relentless process of exclusion. In effect, a selfish and boundless thirst for power and material prosperity leads both to the misuse of available natural resources and to the exclusion of the weak and disadvantaged, either because they are differently abled (handicapped), or because they lack adequate information and technical expertise, or are incapable of decisive political action. Economic and social exclusion is a complete denial of human fraternity and a grave offense against human rights and the environment. The poorest are those who suffer most from such offenses, for three serious reasons: they are cast off by society, forced to live off what is discarded and suffer unjustly from the abuse of the environment. They are part of today’s widespread and quietly growing “culture of waste”. […]

Pope Francis, 2015. Pope Francis’ Remarks to the United Nations General Assembly. The New York Times. Available at: https://tinyurl.com/qdmyswf [Accessed September 25, 2015].

posted

IoT dystopias

We are diverted while foundations are being re-molded by the current generation of ‘captains of cybernetics’. Nothing new: technological change forms the techno-social system in the image of those who control the protocols that are being deployed. [ed: my emphasis below]

And in the legacy of the cyberneticians, the purveyors of “smart” technologies promise a form of perfectly predictable interaction between individual and environment, in which nothing needs to be said along the way.

But there is another, less frequently articulated reason why Silicon Valley wants to replace speech. One characteristic of verbal languages is that nobody can own them. Meanwhile, emoji characters are copyrighted, and software can be patented. The machinic capacity to measure emotions via the face or tone of voice is in the possession of businesses, and currently being rapidly capitalized by private-equity investment. Industrial capitalism privatized the means of production. Digital capitalism seeks to privatize the means of communication.

But somebody—a human being—still needs to decide what counts as “happy” or “want” before a machine can be programmed to identify and transmit those concepts. Zuckerberg’s “ultimate communication,” uncluttered by culture or metaphor, would still be mediated by something, designed according to the cultural assumptions of the scientist or programmer. The telepathic fantasy— which is also the ideal of “smartness”— is of a world so wonderfully accommodating to our needs that we never even need to ask for anything. Purveyors of this silent future promise absolute intimacy between self and world—but feelings and desires in their purest form, unencumbered by the messiness of language, will still be filtered through someone else’s lens.

Davies, W., 2015. Mark Zuckerberg and the End of Language. The Atlantic. [Accessed September 15, 2015].

posted
  • place: Vienna, Austria

Robert Adrian X 1935 – 2015

TOWARD A DEFINITION OF RADIO ART

Radio art is the use of radio as a medium for art.

Radio happens in the place it is heard and not in the production studio.

Sound quality is secondary to conceptual originality.

Radio is almost always heard combined with other sounds – domestic, traffic, tv, phone calls, playing children etc.

Radio art is not sound art – nor is it music. Radio art is radio.

Sound art and music are not radio art just because they are broadcast on the radio.

Radio space is all the places where radio is heard.

Radio art is composed of sound objects experienced in radio space.

The radio of every listener determines the sound quality of a radio work.

Each listener hears their own final version of a work for radio combined with the ambient sound of their own space.

The radio artist knows that there is no way to control the experience of a radio work.

Radio art is not a combination of radio and art. Radio art is radio by artists.

death

Robert and I got into contact via the Eternal Network more than twenty years ago. He was a networker, and an inspiring telecommunications and radio artist: or as Ars Electronica writes “artist, leading-edge thinker, media art pioneer, telecommunications artist, painter and sculptor.” His partner, Heidi Grundmann, is the founder of KunstRadio on Austrian National Radio.

posted

the territory of ignorance

Michael Smithson, a social scientist at Australian National University who co-taught an online course on ignorance this summer, uses this analogy: The larger the island of knowledge grows, the longer the shoreline — where knowledge meets ignorance — extends. The more we know, the more we can ask. Questions don’t give way to answers so much as the two proliferate together. Answers breed questions. Curiosity isn’t merely a static disposition but rather a passion of the mind that is ceaselessly earned and nurtured.

Mapping the coast of the island of knowledge, to continue the metaphor, requires a grasp of the psychology of ambiguity. The ever-expanding shoreline, where questions are born of answers, is terrain characterized by vague and conflicting information. The resulting state of uncertainty, psychologists have shown, intensifies our emotions: not only exhilaration and surprise, but also confusion and frustration.

The borderland between known and unknown is also where we strive against our preconceptions to acknowledge and investigate anomalous data, a struggle Thomas S. Kuhn described in his 1962 classic, “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.” The center of the island, by contrast, is safe and comforting, which may explain why businesses struggle to stay innovative. When things go well, companies “drop out of learning mode,” Gary P. Pisano, a professor at Harvard Business School, told me. They flee uncertainty and head for the island’s interior.

Holmes, J., 2015. The Case for Teaching Ignorance. The New York Times. Available at: https://nyti.ms/1KGCGLU [Accessed August 24, 2015].

posted

silent existence?

Human existence cannot be silent, nor can it be nourished by false words, but only by true words, with which people transform the world. To exist, humanly, is to name the world, to change it. Once named, the world in its turn reappears to the namers as a problem and requires of them a new naming. People are not built in silence, but in word, in work, in action-reflection.

Freire, P., 2000. Pedagogy of the Oppressed, New York: Continuum

posted

To the Nightingale

On what secret night in England
Or by the incalculable constant Rhine,
Lost among all the nights of my nights,
Carried to my unknowing ear
Your voice, burdened with mythology,
Nightingale of Virgil, of the Persians?
Perhaps I never heard you, yet my life
I bound to your life, inseparably.
A wandering spirit is your symbol
In a book of enigmas. El Marino
Named you the siren of the woods
And you sing through Juliet’s night
And in the intricate Latin pages
And from the pine-trees of that other,
Nightingale of Germany and Judea,
Heine, mocking, burning, mourning.
Keats heard you for all, everywhere.
There’s not one of the bright names
The people of the earth have given you
That does not yearn to match your music,
Nightingale of shadows. The Muslim
Dreamed you drunk with ecstasy
His breast trans-pierced by the thorn
Of the sung rose that you redden
With your last blood. Assiduously
I plot these lines in twilight emptiness,
Nightingale of the shores and seas,
Who in exaltation, memory and fable
Burn with love and die melodiously.
— Jorge Luis Borges

posted

The Peace Of Wild Things

When despair grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting for their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

— by Wendell Berry

posted

writing what?

1. Abandon the idea that you are ever going to finish. Lose track of the 400 pages and write just one page for each day, it helps. Then when it gets finished, you are always surprised.

2. Write freely and as rapidly as possible and throw the whole thing on paper. Never correct or rewrite until the whole thing is down. Rewrite in process is usually found to be an excuse for not going on. It also interferes with flow and rhythm which can only come from a kind of unconscious association with the material.

3. Forget your generalized audience. In the first place, the nameless, faceless audience will scare you to death and in the second place, unlike the theater, it doesn’t exist. In writing, your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know, or an imagined person and write to that one.

4. If a scene or a section gets the better of you and you still think you want it — bypass it and go on. When you have finished the whole you can come back to it and then you may find that the reason it gave trouble is because it didn’t belong there.

5. Beware of a scene that becomes too dear to you, dearer than the rest. It will usually be found that it is out of drawing.

6. If you are using dialogue — say it aloud as you write it. Only then will it have the sound of speech. — Mr. Steinbeck

posted

what is happening? how is this happening?

• Our analysis finds that at the end of 2010 the Top 50 private banks alone collectively managed more than $12.1 trillion in cross-­‐border invested assets for private clients, including their trusts and foundations. This is up from $5.4 trillion in 2005, representing an average annual growth rate of more than 16%.

• The three private banks handling the most assets offshore on behalf of the global super-­rich are UBS, Credit Suisse and Goldman Sachs. The top ten banks alone commanded over half the top fifty’s asset total – an increased share since 2005.

• The number of the global super‐rich who have amassed a $21 trillion offshore fortune is fewer than 10 million people. Of these, less than 100,000 people worldwide own $9.8 trillion of wealth held offshore.

• If this unreported $21-32 trillion, conservatively estimated, earned a modest rate of return of just 3%, and that income was taxed at just 30%, this would have generated income tax revenues of between $190-­‐280 bn – roughly twice the amount OECD countries spend on all overseas development assistance around the world. Inheritance, capital gains and other taxes would boost this figure considerably.

• For our focus subgroup of 139 mostly low-middle income countries, traditional data shows aggregate external debts of $4.1 tn at the end of 2010. But take their foreign reserves and unrecorded offshore private wealth into account, and the picture reverses: they had aggregate net debts of minus US$10.1-13.1 tn. In other words, these countries are big net creditors, not debtors. Unfortunately, their assets are held by a few wealthy individuals, while their debts are shouldered by their ordinary people through their governments.

Tax Justice Network

posted

split world: memory

This schizophrenia seems largely invisible to the widest sample of the population. Offline behavior, so historically conditioned and un-self-conscious (at least as far as instigation, perhaps not process) proceeds without compunctions, aside from those traditional struggles for control and power between the image-maker and the subject. The contemporary selfie, a special case, propagates yet another psychic split within the self over power and control. This in juxtaposition to the huge deficit of awareness of the wholesale deposition of the Self into the hands of an increasingly omniscient corporo-governmental master. What to be said, there’s no stopping it until there is a higher level of consciousness. But will humans make that step, ever?

Our lives have become split between two worlds with two very different norms around memory.

The offline world works like it always has. I saw many of you talking yesterday between sessions; I bet none of you has a verbatim transcript of those conversations. If you do, then I bet the people you were talking to would find that extremely creepy.

I saw people taking pictures, but there’s a nice set of gestures and conventions in place for that. You lift your camera or phone when you want to record, and people around you can see that. All in all, it works pretty smoothly.

The online world is very different. Online, everything is recorded by default, and you may not know where or by whom. If you’ve ever wondered why Facebook is such a joyless place, even though we’ve theoretically surrounded ourselves with friends and loved ones, it’s because of this need to constantly be wearing our public face. Facebook is about as much fun as a zoning board hearing.

Cegłowski, M., 2014. The Internet With a Human Face. In Beyond Tellerrand. Düsseldorf, Germany. Available at: https://idlewords.com/talks/internet_with_a_human_face.htm.

posted

Militarizing Cyberspace

In the dreamy 1990s, when the Internet was first popularized, the ruling meme was beautifully and evocatively utopian with that enduring desire in the human imagination for a technology of communication that finally matched the human desire for connectivity and (universal) community finally finding its digital expression in networked communication. Few voices were raised concerning the specter of harsher realities to come, namely the possibility that the Internet was also a powerful vehicle for sophisticated new iterations of ideologies of control as well as for inscribing a new global class structure on the world. To the suggestion that the destiny of the digital future was likely to be the rapid development of a new ruling class, the virtual class, with its leading fragments, whether information specialists, from coders to robotic researchers, or corporate visionaries closely linked–nation by nation, continent by continent, industry by industry–by a common (technocratic) world-view and equally shared interests, the response was just as often that this is purely dystopian conjecture. As the years since the official launch in 9/11 of the counter-revolution in digital matters indicates, the original funding of the Internet by DARPA was truly premonitory, confirming in the contemporary effective militarization of the networked communication that the visionary idea of developing a global form of network connectivity that harvested the most intimate forms of individual consciousness on behalf of swelling data banks was as brilliant in its military foresightedness as it was chilling in its impact.

from the CTheory.net monograph Surveillance Never Sleeps, July 2015, Volume 37, #1.

Red Herring and Wired magazines might have been dreaming of a utopian desire-filling network, but I surely wasn’t. Yeah, there was a tiny window for using the Master’s tools to quasi-autonomously generate disembodied and low-bandwidth connections with other humans remotely, but some of us knew that DARPAs master was the master of the protocols that drove the ‘net. And the maxim that ‘whomever controls the protocols of human connection controls the very human energies that are carried via those protocols’ applied then, applies now. This very much independent of any privacy concerns, as privacy is simply not a characteristic of communications or data storage when someone else is controlling the communications protocol.

posted

Hesse: Ohne dich

Mein Kissen schaut mich an zur Nacht
Leer wie ein Totenstein;
So bitter hat ich’s nie gedacht,
Allein zu sein
Und nicht in deinem Haar gebettet sein!

Ich lieg allein im stillen Haus,
Die Ampel ausgetan,
Und strecke sacht die Hände aus,
Die deinen zu umfahn,
Und dränge leis den heißen Mund
Nach dir und küß mich matt und wund –
Und plötzlich bin ich aufgewacht
Und ringsum schweigt die kalte Nacht,
Der Stern im Fenster schimmert klar –
O du, wo ist dein blondes Haar,
Wo ist dein süßer Mund?

Nun trink ich Weh in jeder Lust
Und Gift in jedem Wein;
So bitter hat ich’s nie gewußt,
Allein zu sein,
Allein und ohne dich zu sein!

My Pillow gazes upon me at night
Empty as a gravestone;
I never thought it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,
The hanging lamp darkened,
And gently stretch out my hands
To gather in yours,
And softly press my warm mouth
Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak-
Then suddenly I’m awake
And all around me the cold night grows still.
The star in the window shines clearly —
Where is your blond hair,
Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight
And poison in every wine;
I never knew it would be so bitter
To be alone,
Alone, without you.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Alfred Kedy MacKenzie 1915 – 2015

death

portrait, Alfred, Framingham, Massachusetts, November 1968 [by C. Hopkins]

Well, Al makes it to the century mark, and decides it’s time to go. Hard to believe he was born in the opening months of WWI. One of a stubborn and somewhat obstinate crew, he is the last of the Scottish-Canadian side of the family, clan MacKenzie. Guess I’ll have to carry on the attitude.

Alfred Kedy MacKenzie, 100, of Prescott passed away 10 July 2015. Al was born 27 May 1915 in Melville, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Al attended Mechanic Arts High School in Boston, MA, and graduated from Northeastern University in Boston in 1939 with a degree in chemical engineering. Subsequently, Al was employed as a lab assistant with Weymouth Heights Art & Leather near Boston from 1939-1943; as a company chemist at Bemis Associates of Watertown, MA, from 1943-1945; as a chemical engineer with Dr. Gustavus J. Esselen of Boston, from 1945-1956; and as a chemical engineer with Dennison Manufacturing of Framingham, MA, from 1956-1983. He was issued several US Patents, among them: #3359945; #27260; #3682542; and #3733127.

Al married the former Edith Bates of Boston in 1944. Upon his retirement in 1983, Al and Edith moved to Prescott. Al was a member of Park Street Church in Boston from 1927-1983, where he was active in Christian Endeavor and the Fellowship. Since 1983, he had been a member of Prescott Heights Baptist Church/The Heights Church of Prescott. He was active in the missions programs of both congregations. He also won several prizes as an avid amateur photographer, spending his free time and post-retirement life camping and hiking with Edith in the mountains of New England and the West, with his favorite spots being Mount Katahdin and Acadia National Park, both in Maine.

Al was preceded in death by Edith in February, 2002, and is survived by his sister-in-law and 15 nephews and nieces.

A memorial service will be held in Building H-1 at The Heights Church, 2121 Larry Caldwell Drive in Prescott, at 10:00 a.m. on Saturday, 08 August 2015. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made to New Tribes Mission, PO Box 8010, Sanford, FL 32772-8010 for the specified ministry of Jonathan and Susan Kopf.

posted
  • place: Charleston, South Carolina

Among free men …

“Among free men,” said Abraham Lincoln, “there can be no successful appeal from the ballot to the bullet; and those who take such appeal are sure to lose their cause and pay the costs.”

Yet we seemingly tolerate a rising level of violence that ignores our common humanity and our claims to civilization alike. We calmly accept newspaper reports of civilian slaughter in far off lands. We glorify killing on movie and television screens and call it entertainment. We make it easy for men of all shades of sanity to acquire weapons and ammunition they desire.

Too often we honor swagger and bluster and the wielders of force; too often we excuse those who are willing to build their own lives on the shattered dreams of others. Some Americans who preach nonviolence abroad fail to practice it here at home. Some who accuse others of inciting riots have by their own conduct invited them.

Some looks for scapegoats, others look for conspiracies, but this much is clear; violence breeds violence, repression brings retaliation, and only a cleaning of our whole society can remove this sickness from our soul.

Kennedy, R. F., Remarks to the Cleveland City Club, April 5, 1968.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Sontag to Borges

Books are not only the arbitrary sum of our dreams, and our memory. They also give us the model of self-transcendence. Some people think of reading only as a kind of escape: an escape from the “real” everyday world to an imaginary world, the world of books. Books are much more. They are a way of being fully human.

I’m sorry to have to tell you that books are now considered an endangered species. By books, I also mean the conditions of reading that make possible literature and its soul effects. Soon, we are told, we will call up on “bookscreens” any “text’ on demand, and will be able to change its appearance, ask questions of it, “interact” with it. When books become “texts” that we “interact” with according to criteria of utility, the written word will have become simply another aspect of our advertising-driven televisual reality. This is the glorious future being created, and promised to us, as something more “democratic.” Of course, it means nothing less than the death of inwardness — and of the book.

Sontag, S., 2002. Where the Stress Falls: Essays. Reprint edition., New York, NY: Picador.

posted

the persistence of systems

If a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves. . . . There’s so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.

Pirsig, R.M., 2009. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values, Pymble, NSW; New York, NY: HarperCollins e-books.

posted

the social algorithm and social engineering

This, an extract from an introduction to the Facebook-run study appearing in the current edition of the journal Science. It reminds us of the positive answer to the question of whether the communicative protocol that is deployed by a social institution (in this case, Facebook) affects the qualities of the communications itself. YES IT DOES! Hello folks! In this case that effect is to the social (fiscal) benefit of the social institution. more “the social algorithm and social engineering”

posted

The Completion of the Pacific Railroad

There was a smack of theatrical effect in the announcement that the Pacific Railroad would be completed by driving a spike of gold into a sleeper of laurel, each blow of the sledge being simultaneously recorded in the telegraph offices of New York and San Francisco; but there is an excuse for flourish and display, and it will be hard for the most bombastic speaker to exaggerate the importance of the iron band which connects the Atlantic and the Pacific, and as it is the noblest Work which Western civilization has successfully accomplished, must hold the first place in the material achievements of the century. It matters but little whether there has been stealing and plundering during the building of the road; whether ten men or a thousand have been enriched by contracts or place. All that we need remember is that the Pacific Railroad is completed, that eleven hundred miles of road are added to our gigantic railway system, and that the locomotive which pants in the streets of the cities of the East is never silent until it reaches the shores of the Golden State.

The Charleston Daily News, Charleston, South Carolina. May 12, 1869.

How did they drive a gold spike into mulberry wood? Gold is incredibly malleable, very soft, to hammer. They must have ended up with a pancaked spike and substandard engineering on the bond between steel rail and wood.

posted

liberties of communication

There are two liberties of communication, and these seem to me to be the utmost possible ones: the one that occurs face-to-face with the accomplished thing, and the one that takes place within actual daily life, in showing one another what one has become through one’s work and thereby supporting and helping and (in the humble sense of the word) admiring one another. But in either case one must show results, and it is not lack of trust or withdrawal or rejection if one doesn’t present to another the tools of one’s progress, which have so much about them that is confusing and tortuous, and whose only value lies in the personal use one makes of them. I often think to myself what madness it would have been for van Gogh, and how destructive, if he had been forced to share the singularity of his vision with someone, to have someone join him in looking at his motifs before he had made his pictures out of them, these existences that justify him with all their being, that vouch for him, invoke his reality. He did seem to feel sometimes that he needed to do this in letters (although there, too, he’s usually talking of finished work), but no sooner did Gauguin, the comrade he’d longed for, the kindred spirit, arrive than he had to cut off his ear in despair, after they had both determined to hate one another and at the first opportunity get rid of each other for good.

Rilke, R.M. & Rilke, C., 2002. Letters on Cézanne, New York, NY: North Point Press.

posted

photography and witness

Transforming is what art does, but photography that bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible is much criticized if it seems too “aesthetic”; that is, too much like art. The dual powers of photography — to generate documents and to create works of visual art — have produced some remarkable exaggerations about what photography ought or ought not to do. Photographs that depict suffering shouldn’t be beautiful, as captions shouldn’t moralize. In this view, a beautiful photograph drains attention from the sobering subject and turns it toward the medium itself, thereby compromising the picture’s status as a document. The photograph gives mixed signals. Stop this, it urges. But it exclaims, What a spectacle!
. . .
So far as photographs with the most solemn or heartrending subject matter are art — and this is what they become when they hang on walls, whatever the disclaimers — they partake of the fate of all wall-hung or floor-supported art displayed in public spaces. That is, they are stations along a — usually accompanied — stroll. . . . Up to a point, the weight and seriousness of such photographs survive better in a book, where one can look privately, linger over the pictures, without talking. Still, at some moment the book will be closed. The strong emotion will become a transient one. Eventually, the specificity of the photographs’ accusations will fade; the denunciation of a particular conflict and attribution of specific crimes will become a denunciation of human cruelty, human savagery as such. The photographer’s intentions are irrelevant to this larger process.

Sontag, S., 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others, 1st. Ed., New York, NY: Picador.

posted

To Be Governed

To be governed is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be governed is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality.

Proudhon, P.-J., 2004 (1923). General idea of the revolution in the nineteenth century, Mineola, NY: Dover Publications.

posted

it’s been said before

Mechanical instruments: these instruments will have a great future in teaching. They are automatic auxiliaries to the teacher, the extension of the word and the book. Without a doubt, they are a long way from being perfect, but what marvelous progress has already been made. The gramophone has assisted the teaching of language greatly … It can do the same for music. The Pianola will permit the acquisition of an extensive knowledge of music, of works which one should hear. Machines for projecting fixed diapositive plates or microfilms (photoscope), the cinema in black and white and in color, with texts interspersed in the film with the possibility of interrupting it, will allow knowledge of things and actions which should be seen. The radio (broadcasting …) with its personal apparatus and its great speakers, its musical programs, its lectures, its courses, will permit one to be in direct contact with the outside world, to receive messages, to observe the usefulness of foreign languages, to attempt to understand them …

New Teaching Equipment: education based on the considerations developed here will necessitate the development of teaching materials. The poor material which educational establishments use to-day will no longer be satisfactory.

Otlet, Paul, 1926. L’Education et les Instituts du Palais Mondial (Mundaneurn), Publication No. 121; Brussels: UIA — in Rayward, W.B., 1975. The Universe of Information — The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization, Moscow, USSR: International Federation of Documentation.

posted

Re: sacriledge or ?

j ,,,,,,

there appear marvellous “pipes”
“robes”
“tobacco bags”
“drums”

victory for the wasichu

the coin the carceral masque

the sacred pipe the seven rites of the oglala sioux

what a tremendous loss
yet
the hearth of earth remembers the way of the pipe

the pipe
neither object nor subject
did not cooperate
with the cavalry of words

black elk
black kettle
sitting bull
stand as presences for me

the constitution
impresses me as alien
ignorant

without provision
thanking the plants the animals the insects the stars
sun and moon
earth
water
fire
air

i went to the pine ridge reservation once
i went to wounded knee

it was not a message
not scene
not for words

wind
blood
light shadow
wind

“the wind”
“the breath”
are mysterious ( unknown ) profound

language and the will
are dependent on “the breath”
“the pipe”

the conquerors build temples
polity
coin counters

the paraclete of the gospels
holy ghost
does not live indoors

today
plumage
a spring snow
illuminated
the fine discourse
of the smallest branches

a

^^^^

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Everything in the universe

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation in its entirety or in certain of its parts. — Paul Otlet

posted
  • place: Wheatridge, Colorado

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

death

portrait, Dr. Gene Woolsey, Golden, Colorado, October 1979

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Entropy and the shaping of landscape by water

The south side of the house with the drainage coming from the neighbor’s yard is the site of experimentation with the principle of entropy applied to surface water flow. Creating more turbulence is a way of dissipating the energy of gravitationally-induced water flow. Small scale to larger scale, by interrupting the laminar flow of water across a system, the energy is effectively diffused back into the local environment in a way that is not as destructive (though as I write those words, it occurs to me that the absolute energy content of the water — as a falling mass, minus frictions and surface-tension coefficients — is a constant). It’s only a question of at what scale one chooses to work at to diffuse the energy — giant rocks, big waterfalls; smaller rocks, smaller waterfalls, tiny pebbles, tiny waterfalls. These versus smoothly finished surfaces that transmit the maximum amount of inertial energy to the folks downstream.

We have given an overview of some energetic and thermodynamic principles that have been applied to hydrology. We note there are currently two distinct analogies, though we suspect they should ultimately be related. The first principle states that a fluvial system may be considered as an engine driven by the supply of water at high elevation flowing to low elevation. In this sense elevation, or hydraulic head, is a direct analogue of temperature for a heat engine. Secondly, the configuration of a river network can be described by certain statistical properties, notably an entropy. The notion of minimum energy expenditure in the network should then correspond to the principle of minimum entropy production, where the prescribed boundary conditions do not allow for much flexibility. However, since much of the dissipation of energy in river networks is related to turbulence, Maximum Entropy Production should also be applicable, although the detailed application is not clear and needs further investigations.

If the thermodynamic background to the hydrological shaping of the landscape becomes sufficiently understood, practical applications may be developed. In particular, statistical properties of hydrologic networks may provide quantitative means of classifying networks and thereby understanding the geomorphological processes by which they formed. The relationship of the observed ‘maturity’ of a river system with the Gibbs’ parameter (i.e., network temperature) may be a fruitful avenue of inquiry.

Finally, we note that exploring the thermodynamic concepts of fluvial geomorphology also appear useful for shoreline processes. Their generality may make these ideas quite fruitful for investigating networks on other planetary bodies, where the specific mechanisms and working substances may be different from Earth, but the aggregate effects are similar.

Miyamoto, H., Lorenz, R.D. & Baker, V.R., 2005. Entropy and the Shaping of the Landscape by Water. In Non-equilibrium Thermodynamics and the Production of Entropy: Life, Earth, and Beyond. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas: done

Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas, Migrating Art Academies, March 2015 (pdf download)

So, Displace finally arrives from the printers — Dovile did a fine job designing it, and overall it looks good thanks to Mindaugas’ hard work as Editor-in-Chief. The editing process went on three times longer than we originally had hoped, but I guess that’s just another lesson on how to estimate the work on a complicated project. Mindaugas is sending me a case of sixteen for the record, and it will be interesting to look through the physical copy to see all the mistakes I might have made! Argh!

Those errors aside, Migrating Art Academies is a brilliant program, period.

Subject: [MigAA] Displace: A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
Date: Fri, 06 Mar 2015 18:59:36 +0100

Finally long awaited the third Migrating Art Academies publication Displace is out! If anyone is interested in ordering a copy, please do send a short note to info (at) migaa (dot) eu.

Best,
Mindaugas

Displace
A Migrating Art Academies Compendium of Ideas
ISBN 978-609-447-143-8

Download preview @
https://www.migaa.eu/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/MigAA-Displace_preview.pdf

This book — the third Migrating Art Academies (MigAA) publication — marks the end of the third phase of the MigAA program, which, over the course of seven years has grown into a dynamic and vital network of art academies and universities, independent arts organizations, many hundreds of people, and endless ideas. It documents the results of sixteen innovative workshops the network organized during the last four years that took place across nine European countries.

The book includes works, essays, concepts, and other documentary and peripheral material developed before, during, and after the sixteen different workshops. It is first of all presented as a source for any and all emerging artists who search for a means of creating, nurturing, and manifesting their ideas. Secondly, it is meant as a source for inspiring and fresh perspectives for professional artists experiencing a creative block or who are stuck in unproductive patterns of thought. Finally, for those seeking to understand contemporary art and its challenges, it constitutes an excellent window into the surprising variety of practices with which the participating artists addressed the issues that confronted them.

In order to emphasize the distributed nature of the MigAA network, the book is designed with no particular hierarchic continuity. The only source of continuity is the page numbering that follows the chronological sequence of the laboratories: each of them are separated into chapters corresponding to the name of the laboratory. The chapters are presented in a random order to reflect the open nature of the network. Each laboratory/chapter is formatted the same: identifying where it took place, and providing the relevant information on the input, the process, and the output, as well as an introduction section and a list of participants.

The publication of this book could not have been possible without the enthusiastic and farsighted support of the EU Culture Programme 2007-2013, Nordic Culture Point, and the Lithuanian Council for Culture.

// Migrating Art Academies https://www.migaa.eu
// https://www.migaa.eu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/migaa

posted

on the occasion of a stranger’s passing …

making explicit the implicit impact of a single person’s presence in the cosmos:

Some people come into our lives and quickly go.
Some move our souls to dance.
They awaken us to new understanding
with the passing whisper of their wisdom.
Some people make the sky more beautiful to gaze upon.
They stay in our lives for awhile,
leave footprints on our hearts
and we are never, ever the same.
-Anonymous

posted
  • place: online and Nantes, France

AudioBlast Festival #3: les frontières sonores

AudioBlast Festival #3: les frontières sonores, online and Nantes, France, 01 March 2015

Sound and music networked practice is increasingly significant, the public is very interested in this type of emerging practice, and Apo33 continues to develop this unique festival in the world! There is no equivalent.

Audioblast is a festival from cutting edge using digital tools to cross the concert, performance and particular form of exposure where the public can sit, listen to concerts, roam and chat with the artists during their online “live” sets; with possibilities for live chats with the musicians. The public can both listen at the Plateforme Intermédia which also allows a wider public into this world.

Audioblast Festival is an annual edition in the program of the Association and will be presented as part of the cultural project for APO33 at La Fabrique.

neoscenes was invited to jump into the festival for a one-hour live improv stream between 1400-1500 (GMT+1) Sunday, 01 March in Nantes (6-7 AM Mountain Standard Time – Arizona / 8-9 AM Eastern Standard Time – NYC / (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones).

I would quibble with the ‘cutting-edge’ designation — I’ve been involved in streaming sonic (and visual) performance for almost 20 years now. It’s more ‘fringe’ than cutting edge. And the is likely more an issue of a distinct lack of solid historical references for most artists who are now discovering these mediums of expression. Even when I’ve been teaching about such stuff, for example, at CU-Bolder in 2012-13, the students were repelled by the thought of approaching a cutting edge, they literally couldn’t handle it: too indeterminate. (every time I remember that teaching experience, I wince.)

For the last five years, sonic art has seen (heard) huge growth among young artists as the tools are ubiquitous and pocketable in the form of smart phones. I can now stream over wifi using my iPad. Of course, it was possible 10-15 years ago as well, but it was a lot more unstable and often complicated. Today, at AudioBlast there were no technical glitches during my set. Good!

Audio in the network: a digital sound festival using the network as a venue for diffusing experimental, drone, noise, field recordings, sound poetry, electronic, and contemporary music. The festival will be streamed live online (you’ll need VLC or another ogg player — iTunes doesn’t work for this, argh, they switched to (open source) ogg at the last moment) and in quadraphonic sound at the venue La PLATEFORME INTERMÉDIA – LA FABRIQUE (4, Boulevard Léon Bureau – 44000 Nantes – France).

The theme this year is “Sonic Frontiers” / “les frontières sonores” :: the full schedule and the list of artists and another place to listen from (https://apo33.org:8000/audioblast.ogg)

Audio has been instrumental in pioneering many digital and communications technologies and is a versatile and creative medium for gaining deeper understanding of digital coding languages both visual and text based. Sound can travel and encourage a more horizontal and collaborative society, which also has the potential to germinate innovative practices across mediums and genres. During 2015 through the framework of “Sonic Frontiers”, APO33 will question and debate the ideas around audio migration, how sounds travel, influence and structure cutting edge music practices and sonic arts.

[documentation of the performance]

self-portrait in the studio, Prescott, Arizona, February 2015

posted

the inner Light

Without going out of my door, I can know all things on earth
without looking out of my window, I can know the ways of heaven.

The farther one travels the less one knows, the less one really knows.

Without going out of your door, You can know all things on earth
without looking out of your window, you can know the ways of heaven.

The farther one travels the less one knows, the less one really knows.

Arrive without traveling, See all without looking, Do all without doing.

Harrison, G., 1968. The Inner Light.

Watching the two-part George Harrison HBO bio-flick, it’s quite good; and what of those people, that man, among others. Life is so simple and so complex.

posted
  • place: Prague, Czech Republic

Galerie Díra

neoscenes at Galerie Díra, Prague, Czech Republic, January 2015

water fills the hall goes live at Galerie Díra in Prague this coming week. Lloyd Dunn (of nula) is the curator, so it’s an honor to be selected. I’ll be curious to hear reactions. (note that the following needs to be corrected — I’m no longer based in Australia…)

Můj koncept neoscenes směřuje k syntéze. Zvuková kompozice “Voda zaplní halu” je nepřetržitým proudem: v tomto případě jde o proud aurálních tekutin – (zvuků) kapek, probublávání, omývání, spěchu, stříkání, šplouchání, nárazů a uklidňění tekutiny – vržené proti (láskyplně půvabným) machinickým systémům (Deleuze), které do takových řečišť rozmisťujeme. V knize I-ťing se píše, že vlastností vody je tekutost a schopnost zaplnit všechno, čeho se dotkne. Nic nemůže opustit vlastní podstatu, zůstává sebou za všech okolností. Co jsme tváří v tvář tomuto proudu plnému energie? Směřujeme dopředu, nebo ustupujeme s odlivem? Smyje déšť naše hříchy? Pokud umíme plavat, utopíme se? Vzpomínáme na naši duši objživelníka? Žízníme po něčem dalším, nebo jen máme žízeň? John Hopkins (USA) je mediální umělec a pedagog, žije a pracuje ve vysoké poušti Arizony. neoscenes je projekt ztracený ve víru sonických simulací a stimulací, posbíraný a reprezentovaný pomocí různých konstruktivně-destruktivních algoritmických metodologií a proudící řadou post-karteziánských prostorů a paralelních vesmírů. V závislosti na vašem vlastním referenčním rámci můžete buď sledovat stejnou stopu nebo nikoliv.

posted

from “Notes on Nationalism”

By ‘nationalism’ I mean first of all the habit of assuming that human beings can be classified like insects and that whole blocks of millions or tens of millions of people can be confidently labelled ‘good’ or ‘bad’. But secondly — and this is much more important — I mean the habit of identifying oneself with a single nation or other unit, placing it beyond good and evil and recognising no other duty than that of advancing its interests. Nationalism is not to be confused with patriotism. Both words are normally used in so vague a way that any definition is liable to be challenged, but one must draw a distinction between them, since two different and even opposing ideas are involved. By ‘patriotism’ I mean devotion to a particular place and a particular way of life, which one believes to be the best in the world but has no wish to force on other people. Patriotism is of its nature defensive, both militarily and culturally. Nationalism, on the other hand, is inseparable from the desire for power. The abiding purpose of every nationalist is to secure more power and more prestige, NOT for himself but for the nation or other unit in which he has chosen to sink his own individuality.

Orwell, G., 1945. Notes on Nationalism. Polemic.

posted

Werner Herzog suggests:

1. Always take the initiative.
2. There is nothing wrong with spending a night in jail if it means getting the shot you need.
3. Send out all your dogs and one might return with prey.
4. Never wallow in your troubles; despair must be kept private and brief.
5. Learn to live with your mistakes.
6. Expand your knowledge and understanding of music and literature, old and modern.
7. That roll of unexposed celluloid you have in your hand might be the last in existence, so do something impressive with it.
8. There is never an excuse not to finish a film.
9. Carry bolt cutters everywhere.
10. Thwart institutional cowardice.
11. Ask for forgiveness, not permission.
12. Take your fate into your own hands.
13. Learn to read the inner essence of a landscape.
14. Ignite the fire within and explore unknown territory.
15. Walk straight ahead, never detour.
16. Manoeuvre and mislead, but always deliver.
17. Don’t be fearful of rejection.
18. Develop your own voice.
19. Day one is the point of no return.
20. A badge of honor is to fail a film theory class.
21. Chance is the lifeblood of cinema.
22. Guerrilla tactics are best.
23. Take revenge if need be.
24. Get used to the bear behind you.

Cronin, P., 2012. Herzog on Herzog, Faber & Faber Ltd.

posted

au soleil: on sensing the world

The faint but clear sounds were wafted through the night in a murmur of operatic music.

A voice near me said: “This is Sunday, and the band is playing in the public park of San Remo.”

I heard this with astonishment, thinking I must be dreaming. I listened a long time, and with growing delight, to the strains of music carried so far through space. But suddenly, in the middle of a well-known air, the sound swelled, increased in volume, and seemed to gallop toward us. It was so strange, so weird, that I rose to listen. Without doubt it was drawing nearer and louder every second. All was coming toward me, but how — on what phantom raft would it appear? It seemed so near that I peered into the darkness excitedly, and suddenly I was bathed in a hot breeze fragrant with aromatic plants, the strong perfume of the myrtle, the mint, and the citron, with lavender and thyme scorched on the mountain by the burning sun. more “au soleil: on sensing the world”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Posthuman Prospects

The desire to find short cuts and to invent technical solutions is indicative of the impatience of the present age. The utilization of fossil fuels that led to the creation of industrialized societies benefited from the fact that such fuels had accrued their energy potential over millions of years:

All the fossil fuels, in energy terms, are stored sunlight heaped up over geologic time. . . No human being had to put a single day’s work or a single gallon of diesel fuel into growing the tree ferns of the Carboniferous period that turned into Pennsylvanian coal beds, nor did they have to raise the Jurassic sea life that became the oil fields of Texas. The second half of Nature’s energy subsidy took the form of extreme temperatures and pressures deep within the Earth. Over millions of years more, these transformed the remains of prehistoric living things into coal, oil, and natural gas and, in the process, concentrated the energy they originally contained into a tiny fraction of their original size.

These resources, if they had been developed in more sustainable ways, and used to serve more balanced societies, could have benefited us for many years to come, but we have squandered them with our impatience and greed. In an analogous way, we are highly impatient with the technologies that we wish to invent. We are unsatisfied with the intelligence that has been bequeathed to us through millions of years of evolution and we wish to create a copy of it, as soon as possible.

What has been lost is a certain sense of balance, and a knowledge of natural limitations. Ambitious innovation is certainly a virtue but when it relies upon the false premise of unlimited natural resources, or the belief that we can short cut evolution by recreating intelligence at will, it becomes the vice of hubris. Undoubtedly, we will face challenges in the future provoked by advanced technologies. And, equally certain, as we run out of natural resources, governments will increasingly ring fence such resources for themselves to continue with unsustainable military research programs. In this sense, Faye’s two tier system will come to pass although it is unlikely to operate in the interests of European man. Instead, there will be a return to more sustainable, more rural, societies that will have to learn once again what it means to live in accord with natural limitations, and that will be forced to become reacquainted with the slow passing of the seasons.

Pankhurst, C, 2014. Posthuman Prospects: Artificial Intelligence, Fifth Generation Warfare, & Archeofuturism, Counter-Currents Publishing blog, 23 May 23 2014, accessed 29.11.2014.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Stan’s lectures

Stan starts a lecture on George Méliès thus:

Now let me say it to you—simply as I can: the search for an art . . . . either in the making or the appreciation . . . . is the most terrifying adventure imaginable: it is a search always into unexplored regions; and it threatens the soul with terrible death at every turn; and it exhausts the mind utterly; and it leaves the body moving, moving endlessly through increasingly unfamiliar terrain: there is NO hope of return from the territory discovered by this adventuring; and there is NO hope of rescue from the impasse where such a search may leave one stranded.

Brakhage, S., 1972. The Brakhage lectures: Georges Méliès, David Wark Griffith, Carl Theodore Dreyer, Sergei Eisenstein, Chicago: The GoodLion. Available for free at UbuWeb

I love the drama that was always wrapped up in a straight up sense of the absurd of what he was saying despite it being something of a truth — I can just hear his voice, and now can really regret that I never recorded any of his classes or our conversations back when (my spacious graduate-student office/studio was next door to his office/studio cubbyhole for a couple years — the very place he made many of his hand-painted films). I still have my class notes, and some of the letters we exchanged after I moved to Iceland. To be such a teacher, unafraid of anything except The Void that he faced down with bold fist-shaking.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

Mitten-clad hands …

Mitten-clad hands opened beer bottles with a key and we sipped from them while trampling the snow in dress shoes. We walked single-file through the graveyard, holding on to each other so no one lost their way among the gravestones. Beyond the graveyard followed a sharp, steep hill, which we didn’t realize until we had half-rolled, half-ran down it. Still we landed on our feet and stood in the backyard of a house. Made a racket under the bedroom window and smoked a bunch of cigarettes. We sprinted over Tjörnin’s sheet of ice, letting ourselves glide across, fell and hurt ourselves more than we expected. Kept going and kept falling. There were stars in the sky but we didn’t see them for the street lights. Anyway, we didn’t want to see anything in this ice cold gale. — Arngunnur Árnadóttir, Meðgönguljóð (Partus Press), 2013

whispers from the winter darkness of Reykjavík from a poetry collective returning to the radical roots of self-publishing, bravo! (The Grapevine published a long profile on them in English.)

posted

the nightmare of editing ESL, a.k.a., WTF?

Before, huh?

Live through, which is the starting point in the formation of human personality traits, often can be in the vacuum space of the human experience. The given fact does not guarantee departing from the own internal disagreements concerning the choice of vector orientation and finding an optimal solution to assigned task.

This project is my personal and intimate story of contiguity with this situation later turned over my life. It is story about one moment in my biography, which describes developments and the internal struggle that began to unfold inside of me after a deep reassessment of the scale of values.

Really, how can this be done? (Without sitting the ‘author’ down in a chair facing a bright Light, and asking many hard questions, like, Why did you use Google translate to pull a random text from Romanian into faux English, why? and, What the f#$k are you talking about????) Argh! Two hundred more pages of this yet to ‘edit.’ Gott und Madre de Dios, help me!

After, euhuh, right…

Daily life, as the basis for the formation of human personality traits, occurs in the sometimes vacuous atmosphere of wider human experience. This in no way guarantees that abandoning one’s own internal struggle concerning the path to follow will allow an optimal solution to the problem.

This project is a personal and intimate story of the progress of the circumstances that later turned out to be my life. It is story about one moment of my life that describes the development of the internal struggle that began to unfold inside of me after a deep reassessment of human values.

posted
  • place: Mint Wash, Prescott, Arizona

naming

Hyla arenicolor, Mint Wash, Williamson Valley, Arizona, April 2005

“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A person without a name is nobody. A human’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing — nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was — the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.” —

Abbey, Edward. Abbey’s Road. New York, NY: Plume, 1991.

Plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, years since reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” his writing seems dated, depressing, even dark. So much of the landscape that he passed through is (de)evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the land. The forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). Bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe MacMansions to dot the landscape along with scaled-up vehicular afterbirth: Hummers in every five-car garage. Although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale—meaning the easily visible—local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. But with any consideration of scientific data—atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, and hydrological systems are being irretrievably altered. What of the domination of a species that will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live on briefly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to a viral celebration in the host of hosts. Definitely, catch it while you can. Take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. And the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.

At any rate, this is a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog – Hyla arenicolor). But note the incredible coloration. The green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. The pinkish blush of the oxidized feldspar in the granite. There were four of them literally stuck to the side of a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. This particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, it was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. The other three were glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. So, this one had to do. The beautiful beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

various psychical states

I have supposed a Human being to be capable of various psychical states, with varying degrees of consciousness, as follows: (a) the ordinary state, with no consciousness of the presence of Fairies; (b) the eerie state, in which, while conscious of actual surroundings, he is also conscious of the presence of Fairies; (c) a form of trance, in which, while unconscious of actual surroundings, and apparently asleep, he (i.e. his immaterial essence) migrates to other scenes, in the actual world, or in Fairyland, and is conscious of the presence of Fairies.

Carroll, L., 1893, Sylvie and Bruno. MacMillan & Co., New York, NY.

There you have it! Who can resist Mr. Carroll’s fertile mind?

What state are you in?

posted

all watched over …

Who can resist the ominous simplicity of Brautigan’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace?

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the academic dance

In response to yet another call for papers at an academic conference on the fibreculture list (this, unsent as I thought it too in-your-face).

fibrecultists:

I’m making the contrary assumption that fibrecult is not merely an announcement list these days … I could be wrong, but …

3D printed goods, cryptocurrencies, digital sharing – just some of the disruptive online practices and technologies that are transforming and reshaping our economy. These innovative technologies have impacted the market, enabling new business models, evolving market conditions and transforming economic and social landscapes. However, the commodification and commercial adoption of these disruptive technologies has also raised concerns and questions in terms of access, control and sustainability. How can we develop these practices to not only support a digital commons, but also to support more equitable and sustainable worlds?

The three items at the beginning of the paragraph above could very well be replaced by practically any ‘communications/fill-in-the-blank-here’ technology of the last 150 years. A materialist approach to technology, one that is hypnotized by each new and glittering object, its form, even its ‘potential’, seems never to learn any principled lessons on what is going on through technological ‘innovation’ and how to deal with it across the techno-social system. It’s as though there is a constant expression of surprise on the face of critical academic thinkers, “Oh look at this new toy coming from the ‘clouds’ today.” I can’t count the number of conference announcements from the academic-cultural-industrial complex of the last 20 years that read the same as this one, with only the names of the currently in-vogue technologies changed.

If there are no readily available and powerful answers *already in place* and *operational as a lived practice* for the issues and questions suggested by the rest of the paragraph, then there is absolutely no hope that an academic discourse will have any effect on the processes being commented upon. The gathering becomes simply another career notch of sessions, papers, panel discussions, talks, after-parties, meals, meet-n-greets, and, literally, insider trading in the currencies of academic ‘success’ (or survival, in the contemporary world of add-junk-tified edutainment). I understand there is always the need to propagate good ideas, and there are younger people who have to hash these things out in the face of a lack of historical perspective in their education, but it begins to resemble a treadmill that in no way serves to solve the problems.

I have no issues with the actual empowered coming-together of people, regardless of the reason, but it seems there is an inexorable evolution of academia towards a point where it is simply bankrupt of ideas *and lived practices* to deal with the current world. Where are the TAZs supporting change?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

The Geology of Media

But digital culture is completely dependent on Earth’s long duration. Despite the fallacy that media is increasingly immaterial, wireless, and smoothly clouded by data services, we are more dependent than ever on the geological earth. Geology does not appear in normal conversations about media and culture, but there would be no media without geology. This isn’t a simplistic joke, that without the Earth under our feet there would be no need for universities talking about the Earth or offices of social-media start-ups in Silicon Valley plotting away metaphorical business strategies like the “mining” and “dumping” of data. Rather, the resources and materials gathered from geological depths enable our media technologies to function.

Parikka, J., 2013. The Geology of Media. The Atlantic Online, (October 2013)

posted

Dulce et Decorum est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

— Wilfred Owen, thought to have been written between October 1917 and March 1918

posted

cash flow::energy flow

Since money and energy/resource flow in opposite directions, the use of monetary flows to make public policy and decisions regarding the future of a country is in reality looking at the world backwards. Frequently, sound economic advice in resource rich nations recommends the selling of raw resources and the importation of finished products. Yet under such even monetary trades, the resource-exporting country always loses, sending out far more wealth than they receive in finished products. Continuing uneven emergy trades at the expense of the developing countries of the world is a recipe for global instability because it keeps the majority of the world’s population in poverty while the west tries to live an unsustainable lifestyle.

Brown, M.T. & Ulgiati, S., 2011. Understanding the global economic crisis: A biophysical perspective. Ecological Modelling, 223(1), pp.4–13.