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The Field of Attention, The Field of Flows

Slipping through a day, from dawn to late evening, time is a field of flows. Attention calls flow from its progress, delineating it temporarily as distinct and heterogeneous. Pass through attentiveness, and one arrives at the granular curtain of awareness. Seeing both detail and the full over-flow of being.

Fighting to maintain constant attention to lived life. Back to breathing?

An attempt to address the title of this blog entry. Entries arise from these titles. Titles self-generate from the textures of living. Entries are attempts to address the titles, to address the textures of life, to form a text: a reduction of life. A tautology of be-ing — writing about be-ing — a pleonastic embolism destined to disrupt attention, flow, and life itself. And yet these become normative to the social. Normative to the day of lived-life, pried from living body, in service to social presence, social acceptance, and social ‘success’. If only all the world were ignorant of Plato!

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sliding scale versus spectral range

I often use the metaphor of “sliding scale” to indicate a situation that can be described as having two end points and a continuum of blended conditions between those two points. The image came about first when talking about the different social relations indicated by the two end points “network” and “hierarchy” — and how any particular social system can be characterized as sitting somewhere along the line between those two (theoretical!) end points. I’ve always been uncomfortable with the geometric linearity of such a metaphoric illustration, though, as is relies on a limited Cartesian model. And, indeed, in an open system there are no end points to any particular description system. So, does “spectrum” OR “spectral range” perform an adequate substitution?

To speak of or to “re-present” an open system is to close the system. Language and re-presentation is a process of reduction and modeling of reality (where reality is the open system). The question of the adequacy of representation is core in this Age of Data Mining. The challenge of rendering digital data into human-readable analog information that can be effectively interpreted will always be the limiting factor in any data-driven decision-making process.

Back to the spectrum question: it is foundational to identify the (multi)variables that are of interest or crucial to what is being examined. A spectral space allows for this, but also allows for degrees of complexity that are greater than can be sensibly interpreted. This is where intuition, not analysis, comes into play. Forget artificial intelligence (what has intelligence brought us, anyway?); forget fast-Fourier-transformations (except in the case that they are generated through meat-space neural cascades; better to use a manual quasi-Gaussian blur by squinting and whatever analog output you can manage)… argh; the question of interpretation of what the spectral model presents is another challenge altogether.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

road :: amplifier / the difference?

The amplifier/road difference would sound something like this:

I defined the amplifier as a concept which exists at many different scales and in both ‘natural’ and human-dominated systems (though that particular dialectic is a problematic one). It is a system which concentrates (and by default attenuates) energy flows. It is a defined set of pathways for that energy to flow along. (a life-form is an amplifier!)

(As an example, fundamental physical laws, such as the set of principles—gravitational attraction, strong/weak nuclear forces, EM radiation, thermodynamics, etc.—’govern’ the process of stellar evolution and ‘supply’ the ‘protocols’ for the ‘expression’ of Light energy (radiation) in a highly specific and concentrated form (compared to the availability of that same energy in any random location in the universe).

In essence, humans are simply harnessing these physical laws to form their own pathways of energy flow. Indeed we can do nothing else, as these laws govern the entire observed and implied universe. So the difference between the amplifier and the protocols that ‘define’ it may only be question of articulation — that is, those physical laws, in human terms, simply exist (for us to discover and articulate over time). The protocols arise as humans initiate articulations of the extant energy flows within which we simply are. So the protocol is, again, merely, a human (socio-linguistic) reduction of observed and extant phenomena. We cannot do anything counter to those phenomena that those laws are ascribed to. However, using these reductive protocols/formula, we set up a wide variety of sub-systems which, cumulatively, are our techno-social systems — complex systems of re-routed energies. As soon as energy is re-routed, you have an amplifier situation because you consequently have a concentration/attenuation of flows. An amplifier is perhaps merely the condition of the existence of a concentration of energies. (this does get into the question of the role of, for example, gravity as a ‘protocol’ which drives the coalescing of energized matter in the universe — or is gravity actually increasing the entropy of that matter?)

more “road :: amplifier / the difference?”
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  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

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

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

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

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

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  • place: en route Prescott, Arizona - Paria, Utah

on the road again

sandstorm, Navaho Reservation, Arizona, March 2010
Heading out on a three-month road-trip. Tailwind across the reservation at least part of the time. Embarkation for slickrock and slot canyons, salt pans, playa, and rotated fault-blocks. Heavy tailwind expected, along with winter weather for the rest of the week across the entire west. Hope to appear, unscathed, at the other end in Wendover.

The road fills the head with eye-blink disorientation. Transient fragments of thoughts thrum along in no particular order, no rhythm, as unconnected as any sequence of fated events: reflecting fated events in minds-eyes. Too much seen outside the window, beyond the amorphous silica barrier. And too much not sensible because of that attenuated presence versus the full immersion. (Virtual) movement. Looking for roadside memorials this time. Something to lock the thoughts into the reality of mortal coils. Find a few. Stopping for them is always a bit tricky, especially with a 65- or 75-mph speed limit. I drive a bit slow with this old vehicle of mine, and slower still so that once I spy a cross of some sort, I can safely stop on the shoulder. To die on the same stretch of road somehow would not be auspicious; under the wide silent sky and red cliffs, stars, with the smell of spring sage in the air. Wind passing through shredded plastic bags caught on the barbed-wire fence. Someone told me those bags are called witches panties. A small golden bell tinkles vacantly, tied to a wreath of plastic flowers shivering in the wind.

What is the difference between that containable in the reduced tracing of recorded, reproduced, recreated image or sound and that which resists the reductive process with an impassive tenacity, no, a merely passive and eternal persistence. The difference lies in what the observer brings to the reductive process and what the hearer, viewer brings when consuming the reduced trace. It has little if anything to the originary energy of the thing, das Ding, das Ganze, itself. The emanations affect the reduction, there is a direct correlation, but in the technique, the process of reduction is deeply tied to the techno-social. No way to decouple that. (Or is there?)

All the way from telling stories to making movies to painting canvases to building houses.

What is the advantage of shunting the energy of a situation through more and more of the techno-social domain? Or does it matter at all? Compare (telling) stories in person about an experience (sono-linguistic reductions) with posting digital photographs online (visible radiation reductions). In principle a reduction is a reduction is a reduction. And when compared the the situated phenomena itself, any and all reductions are not the thing itself.

The dam at Lake Powell, as with the Hoover, a high-security zone, protected by hired guns. No bags allowed in the visitors center. Celebrations of all that the techno-social can bring to the merely social, along with a big-screen overview of the lake at 59-percent-capacity with a fat white bathtub ring contrasting the red rock cliffs. German tourists debate the advantages of the Best Western versus the Quality Inn motels.

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roadkill

death strewn on the highway. roadkill. carnivore, herbivore, amphibian, insect: getting to the other side of the road is just part of the inexorable (natural) systemic flow. Roadkill represents one intersection of human-defined flows and naturally-existing flows. The result of this fundamental intersection is near-death or absolute annihilation, a rapid reduction to component complex molecules. from the thathunk of meatier species to the simple fluttering splat of the butterfly. Leathery carcasses that persist for days despite the brutal pounding of truck tires and hard-to-remove stains on the windshield that resist even the most vigorous squeegee scrubbing whilst filling-up the tank.

Insects with a low weight-to-surface-area ratio can sometimes avoid liquidation by the slipstream effect which will carry them up and over the vehicle. But trajectory is all, and the meatier bugs, the swarming locusts and grasshoppers, have too much mass in their sagging torsos to experience this sanctified reprieve and thus become one with their maker in a soul-wrenching milli-second that can be a marvel of colorful abstraction a-la Pollack.

Along one stretch of the UFO Highway in Nevada, red locusts were on the march northward along a specific pathway that they were intent on following without regard to individual survival. At 60 MPH, the dynamic was such that their flight reaction to the approaching truck got them only a couple feet off the ground, not over the height of the hood, so, the lower grill was a mass of dessicated carcasses by the time we got to the Grand Army of the Republic Highway, a hundred miles away. Many more were simply crushed by the wheels, leaving greasy red-greenish stains on the road and in the wheel-wells: their natural trajectory on the ground was clearly discernible where it intersected with roads. I noticed in the gas station parking lot in Ely there was a small flock of birds who were picking over the the resulting detritus on the ground, and when they could manage, actually hanging onto the grills and directly harvesting the carnage, ‘burp!’ What would the evolutionary outcomes be? Birds that can smell idling cars? Locusts who tunnel for 40 feet underground when they encounter traces of heavy hydrocarbons, with luck, getting to the other side.

Larger animals, the mammals are the worst, though, when encountered at any speed. Moose and elk torsos will behave something like the old paper-straw-through-the-raw-potato trick — inertial physics at its most fundamental. The front bumper of the car will take out the long spindly legs whilst the massive quarter-ton of body-meat, at just the right height to clear the hood, will simply stay where it is. But where it is relative to the speeding windshield means that it will simply obliterate anything in the front seats of the vehicle. At low speeds, this can mean a struggling, injured animal in the laps of struggling, injured humans, gah.

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ant(s)

Latour’s network(s) of relations (in ANT) are complexifying descriptors for a multiplicity of flows where each actor in the network are the origin and recipient of various flows. Or, they are merely the nodal locales of concentrated flow (as conscripted by the social structures). Again, back to the observation that the structure of the social is the prescription that forces flows into rarefied and concentrated zones or pathways. Each attenuation (measured in relief to a ‘natural’ background flow) becomes an actor in full, constant, and distributed relation to at least some other points in the field. The theory, the image of a multiplicity of flows, taken to a near-infinite limit, a beyond-multiplicity, an infinity of nodes would then approximate “reality.” If the network is functioning properly — that is, constructing a plausible account of real social systems — the network will be “an expression to check how much energy, movement and specificity our own reports are able to capture.” (Latour) Those reports, though, are always reductive and incomplete. A map locating the nodes and noting the flows across each one is not the lived territory in time, nor does it accurately express the character of the flows, which in the end are more important than the nodal points.

Is this blog a report? If so, the question becomes how it might more accurately invoke the territory of inquiry. [indeterminacy, trans-disciplinary (discipline being “mortification by scourging oneself”, yikes!), without genesis or terminus, and sampling as many strands of lived-impression (not just screen-mediated living) as possible.]

If network is an accurate description of a situation then a consideration of the order that the network imposes on the situation is called for. Network and order, (including Latour’s actor-network) is about the application of a decodable order applied to a diversity of actors within the object of study. It implies reduction, though hints at an ever-expanding point-of-view. It is couched in language (report, correspondance, academic paper, speech, communications) which is problematic, but this limit is applied to practically anything social. Order is rooted in the negentropic tendencies of life in opposition to the entropic character of all non-life. (Depends — is an accretionary disk of stellar matter, through gravity, rising as anisotropic presence of order as the star forms negentropic, or not — is there any fundamental (ordered) difference between varying (relative and Cartesian) densities of energized matter?) The biggest problem with most current usages of network is that very often the nodes are well-defined (to a fault), as are the geometries of connection, but not so much the qualities of the flows between. I’ll have to pay attention to that lack as I troll the literature. There is the (network) engineering efficiency approach which examines the issues around signal transmission and reception including power usage and signal/noise ratios — which are inextricably linked to amplification issues.. But the efficiency is determined after the fact of the signal being strictly defined by existing protocols.

ack! my usage plunges into a cesspool. the Jekyll and Hyde of free-style and efficient. faggeddabouddit!

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scripting

it seems that a script with multi-modal inclusions, or extrusions could be the most profitable direction to move into. (a (tran)scripted dialogue, the optimal). with permutations, expansions, digressions, voice changes, multiple (modal) versions of the same content.

I want to tell a story, my story. not just my story, but I want to bring a world into being by naming it, one fragment at a time until it fills out like a balloon, until it feels suggestive, full, expansive, textured, and real. not that this world is any more special or force-full than that inhabited by the Other humans out there, but it is in this coming-to-be process of a world(view) as seen by the Self, it is deep in this process, that value comes to life. the intersection of that world-coming-to-be and the world that is out there, the construct that is the social system, the human-influenced world: as the Self is a cross product of the idiosyncratic individual (coming-to-be) and that social world.

so, scripting in the widest sense, circumscribing via once-removed reduction, yet pointing at that-which-cannot-be-named from as many vantages as possible.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

netart 2008 – Conch

I spaced-out posting the netarts 2008 selections last November. here’s my brief jury comments:

This year’s netart award was very difficult to close in on. The absolute volume and traffic of data on the network does not seem to be correlated to its ultimate creative vitality. Can it be that the net has reached the saturation point as a means to realize the creative potential of its creators: that the signal-to-noise ratio has reached an asymptotic limit? Or is it merely an approach to the saturation point of the haplessly consuming audience? Is the net only a flooded communications platform in service of global markets? There is perhaps no particular reason to be overly cynical, although for this tech-no-madic curator the life-changes that accompany each further implementation of technologically-mediated connection seem to lose their appeal more and more quickly. For a creative, though, the question remains — how to be evolutionary when taking on the next tool presented by the Venture Techno-capitalists. Where to find something that avoids the clichés of, for example, the ubiquitously pop Web 2.0? There are the occasionally surprising implementations of the 2.0 paradigm, but they are often revealed as the tired exercises in the viral marketing of venture capital dreams. What inspiring sources are out there in the net? Are there any? Perhaps, but only if we leave the material behind to search for the ghost in the machine.

Where is the immaterial, the trace or evidence of the metaphysical, where is it hidden in the technological network of things? Is it actually hidden at all? Or is it simply not there? Has technology, in the form of global networks, banished those inexplicable essences from itself? Technology does have its obvious formative materialized essence, as it is another thing that presents itself to us in our limited sensibilities. But in the dislocated network, far from our touch, what is the apprehended essence, that attractor that keeps us intently focused on the screen. An attractor so compelling and full of gravitas that we chose to limit any change in our point-of-view and remain instead in a motionless screen-bent gaze, in a stationary orbit?

What draws us with this gravity, what draws us into its field of action? We are fascinated by the Light, sure, but our attention is bound by the gravity. The attractor of the machine lies within itself, not within us. We orbit the gravitational center of our own creation, the dense hubris of code. Without code there is only the material gap into which falls our embodied being, levity left to airs and vapors, (hydro)carbon (a)(e)ffluence and other oxidation-reduction reactions.

The grand prize goes to a work that is elegantly inexplicable, conch by the Japanese designer Ｙoshiyuki Katayama. Four topical and simple interactive works explore code as a means to transform time and space into essential visual essences. We may easily orbit the code while watching its realization. And time passes. Such is life.

The runners-up all seem to find simple interactions between code and presentation, leaving some viewers to perhaps simply shrug and move on. Somehow I like to think that these projects represent a search for the network coding of the koan — the Buddhist meditative tool — where the code is an essential step on the path to enLightenment.

Cloud of Clouds by Miguel Leal and Luís Sarmento keeps the sky open for interpretation as it should be, while Ethan Ham’s work, Self Portrait, leaves the self open for interpretation. And, to disagree with the Internet, as does the Disagreeing Internet well, that leaves our orbit around the gravitas of code very much open for not only interpretation but for fundamental questioning and even outright rejection. No more passive agreement with those Venture Capitalists!

Perhaps, when the last flicker comes from the last flat screen, we will understand that code is a chant to exorcise the machine, leaving the ghost (and us!) free to move on to something else. We shall see.

John Hopkins, Prescott, Arizona, USA, 04.Nov.2008

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

empyre musings

John von Seggern (on empyre wireless sustainability):

I agree with you, however we shouldn’t confuse the Internet/digital networks in general with the larger techno-social system within which they exist. In point of fact, digital networks perform many tasks much more energy-efficiently than we could do without them (telecommuting vs. actual jet travel for example), so I would expect them to continue to thrive in an energy-constrained future even if many other facets of our society are radically reconfigured.

sotto voce: But in the end, that’s a little like saying how much money I will save by buying a pair of pants at 50% off the regular price. I don’t save anything, I spend money buying the pants.

The Internet as an infrastructure cannot (except theoretically) be excised from the techno-social system that it is embedded within. Energy consumption of that system rises, is rising. Web 2.0 sites brought online huge numbers of energy-consuming server farms which never existed when users did not store social networking data, for example. And the energy usage stats can’t be limited to nation-states, because it’s a global boat we are (apparently) floating in. It’s like saying the US uses far less energy making steel now than it did 50 years ago. What about how much it consumes? And where was the other steel made? The same argument was also used with digital creating “paperless” offices — track paper usage!

Internet helps Americans save more energy every year
sotto voce: Of course, in the process of the engineered evolution of any particular device there will be optimization — that is the goal of engineering. If that wasn’t the case, our system would have never been marginally sustainable from the beginning. Extracting stats on theoretically isolated elements is not valid except for more back-slapping “we’ve done it, we’ve found a way to have and eat our cake”—and it represents no real solution. It is exactly this localized isolation of elements which allows this mentality to persist. Just as with many previous industrial advances where a resource was abundant, any negative affects of the use of that resource was able to be overlooked by the end user who was somehow isolated (usually geographically) from them. That geographic isolation is no longer possible when the effects are global. Think, around the globe, there are no isolated corners to sit anymore.

This is exactly the point that I am making—that unless people realize radical shifts in their/our relationship with the deep and broad techno-social infrastructure, we are not making real reductions in the overall footprint, and it is the size of the cumulative footprint that will spell the difference between sustainability or the alternative which is only dimly making itself known through the fog of naivety. (and believe me, I don’t place myself above the fray, but energy consumption and the reliance on the largely invisible functioning of that globe-spanning infrastructure is a seriously addictive way to go).

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  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

amplification, initial round

Miss a meeting with Angela, got the wrong cafe in Hyde Park, there are two. Sent a SMS, but got no response. Ended up doing more audio work — of the Salvation Army Band in front of the big ANZAC Memorial. Called her, but she must not have had her phone on.

(00:09:21, stereo audio, 18 mb)

Wandered down to Darling Harbor to sit and write about amplification, surrounded by amplified and simulated culture. Hmm, the relationship between amplification and simulation could also be interesting to explore. Where amplification is a (possible) subset of simulation. Because the amplified signal is no longer the thing itself, but a simulation of the thing itself with a change of character, volume in the case of auditory works, intensification in the general sense — the intensification of a particular neurological input signal whatever the input is. At base, electrical — as in the stimulation of the auditory nerves. So, an intensification and sometimes narrowing of frequency (bandwidth) of the signal. Simulation is also about the re-creation of an original signal — one whose characteristics are well known — a re-production of those characteristics.

The better-known the parameters, the better that the signal can be re-produced. Always a reduction, always not the thing itself. Always the reductive. Efficient perhaps, amplifying the essential. But who determines the essential? That is embedded in the technology which is a determinate (determinating) product of the social system. Therein is one source of a significant skewing factor in the presence of these amplified and simulated signals. That the characteristic of these signals are being largely determined by a dominant social system which may or may not be optimized for the individual, or for even the greater good. Because the generating system for these re-productions has a long-term directional inertia coming from the technological production process — the larger the infrastructure (the more generally and specifically) complex the social production system, the greater the inertia, the greater the inertial resistance to changing conditions, the less relevant the amplified signal is to the individual or collective itself.

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  • place: Rushcutters Bay, Australia

pre-amped

Amplification is a primary function of molecular cascades (selective reduction of environmental cues—which are essentially electromagnetic energy impinging on sensory receptors). The process requires that an organism has a consistent surplus of energy to provide the necessary amplification of signal. Often amplification factors are in excess of 1000x in the case of optic nerve stimulation by a single photon and the subsequent processes unleashed in the nerve cell. An organism needs consistently and readily available energy source(s) to improve the possibility of survival-to-reproduction. But why does reproduction play such a big role in a discrete/single organism’s existence?—to simply continue life—or is life a continuum within which all organisms are connected by nature?

It is by avoiding the rapid decay into the inert state of ‘equilibrium’ that an organism appears so enigmatic… What an organism feeds upon is negative entropy. Or, to put it less paradoxically, the essential thing in metabolism is that the organism succeeds in freeing itself from all the entropy it cannot help producing while alive.

Schrödinger, Erwin. What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
posted
  • place: Lakewood, Colorado

jottings to iDC

sotto voce: A model is reductionist. A model will never be the thing itself. (A map is not the territory).

Consider an isolated individual — he/she looks at the world, receives energy into his/her body system. Recognizes patterns of flow, and behaves according to such patterns (over time)… (Learning). Building a model by which to interact ‘successfully’ with the flows around him/her.

OR, an individual is told the parameters of the model (non-experiential learning), accepting what an Other tells (because of the position of power-relation where the Other is more powerful in that social relation).

Science is a collective phenomena at the cusp between these two situations.

Which do we trust most? Our own analysis of the energy flows impinging on our body-system, or the system of the Other?

I believe that over-socialization — a global trend perhaps based on the simple facts of growing population and lessening room — is an inexorable force which demands the second condition to the exclusion of the first. The first is dangerous (to the social): unpredictable, unstable, and requires one to be living at the very front of experience, to learn in the moment, to exist in the momentary flow of being. The second allows leisure, taking the word of an Other about survival parameters, ‘good enough at this time.’

As a teacher I facilitate confidence in the first — trust in ones own sensory input — at the same time as acknowledging that we are products of the second system (more and more) which has interfered with the first process of immediate feedback from body system — embodied learning.

Technology is the means for a social system to codify and implement the (scientific) model such that it may be literally im-pressed on the sensory system of the individual (the collective hallucination). Thus, to counteract this process and to have embodied learning, the im-pressions of technology and of surrounding social system need to be removed (for at least a moment) to allow the individual to feel their socially un-encumbered body, and the flows of life that are impinging on it — without the intervention of non-experiential, second-hand socialized models.

Based on this description, technology is very problematic in that it socially codifies a point-of-view (worldview) which is then applied to the individual who is participating in that social system.

You can chose to trust the momentary sensory input to your system (and be marginalized by that same social system), or you can choose to assimilate into the social system and take on the collective worldview instead.

It’s a sliding scale of participation and reciprocal marginalization, but I believe we are sliding ever towards the second end of the scale. This slide precipitates the long-term denial of embodied and creative life in the stead of socially mandated ‘solutions for living’ like Songdo City.

Uff…

So, coming back to Situated Technologies — they seem to be the result of an (continuous) evolution of the social system — which is now intricate enough to apply/deliver these im-pression systems at an ever more individual/granular level to insure socially ‘proper’ worldviews…

yikes!

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

shifts and changes

three months out from accident/surgery and all reports are positive from Dr. Papadopoulos. he was busier than last appointment, but he gave the essential prognosis that I can wean myself from the brace and swim, hike, and so on. good deal. it comes off as much as possible. which may be a slow process, it has grown to fit, muscles succumbing to laze and sprawl in the molded plastic casing.

retro-fitting the travelog — now back to December 2000. about half-way, though the first half is probably twice the volume of text than the latter half. doubt I will get the whole thing done. it is a legacy project.

pondering how it is that I have not brought more relevant experiences into this travelog. the last decade of my trajectory is relatively singular, and has crossed the paths of a great many of those who are greater in the eyes of the mass pay-per-view. nothing rubbed off. or only a little.

it could be that, as with the subject of my inquiry — the continuum of human relation — I tend to take a relationist rather than a reductionist approach. that is, allowing a text (better yet, speaking!) to generate from the complex and dynamic space of the human connection rather than making a series of overarching reductions of that Other, through the encounter. hmmm. it is this pathway which almost requires an abandonment of social relevance, except as a chance by-product. there will be unprecedented outcomes.

it is exactly this reductionist approach which brings massive social rewards: the compressing/re-stating/re-creation of lived presence as completely embedded in the social system. indeed, this IS the essence of fame. the generation of parallel (yet seemingly convergent) pathways which appear known, or previously experienced (social structure is predicated on shared experience). when there is an encounter with an Other who, on examination, does not share any of the abstracted pathways of life-experience, we feel uncomfortable, distanced, and afraid. through the “getting-to-know” process — a process of trying to locate within the Self and the Other common pathways and patterns of being — if we are not successful in finding any shared pathways, then the social dimension of the relation is doomed. we are forced to simply be in the moment, in a fearful and unknowable sequence of moments that have no predictable outcome. “breaking-the-ice” — looking for the flow of shared life by breaking through the stasis and reification of socialization (judging on looks, on possessions). looking at life passing on around through the (distorted) socialized eye. seeing only the known, blocking out any confrontation of the unknown.

a couple Latino guys come to deliver the firewood. my ears are wooden. hard to understand them. not able to dredge up some English, and not used to hearing the Spanish, though I can understand when one of them translates to the other.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

exploring assumptions

how does the assumption of constant 110 volt ac (220 volts in Europe) electricity supply to a connected device bear on the efficiency of the engineering design process? this is an issue driven not by absolute power/energy consumption, but by the economics of the same. a subtle difference, but something to look at in more detail. the drive for engineering optimization has also been strapped into the Market. although there are hints that this process is built into engineering as a social construct. inseparable from economics.

The effectiveness of the leakage reduction depends on how precisely the behavior of cache line can be tracked. While turning off a cache line later than the last use can waste energy consumption, prematurely turning off a cache line can incur energy/performance penalties when it needs to be accessed. Thus, deciding when to turn off a cache line is very important. In this work, we utilize the knowledge about the state of an object in its life span to direct the turning off cache lines. In particular, we identify different states in the lifetime of an object, when it is created, last-used, becomes garbage, and is collected by the garbage collector. It must be observed that the cache lines containing only objects beyond their last use waste leakage energy. Our analysis in this paper reveals that this wasted leakage energy contributes to a significant portion of data cache energy consumption. (G. Chen, et al, 2003)

note, these terms used in systems engineering — asset, communication, coordination, disaster, economics, engineering, feedback, management, methods, organization, planning, policy, project, protection, recovery, responsibility, schedule, technique — are adequately defined by Webster. the rest of the terms in the Certified Software Development Professional Examination specs glossary, have discipline-specific meanings: the exclusivity of language in the priesthoods…

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs)

this mornings research through the landscape of information theory in biology, neurobiology, and genetics brings me to many places, including the following. rhetorical clusters.

(learn more)
nomological emergence, nonformal patterns, mereological emergence, feminist science scholarship, mechanism schemata, statistical relevance relationships, teleosemantic information, nomological supervenience, emergent with respect, successful intertheoretic reduction, mereological supervenience, basic physical parts, epistemological emergence, pointer observable, textbook semantics, biorthogonal decomposition, ceteris paribus problem, reasoning from data, causal mechanical model, qualified ceteris paribus, criteria for lawfulness, algebraic states, phenetic species, process structuralists, representational items

 
last day of swimming at the college pool. closing for a year’s worth of re-modeling. been using this pool for many hundreds of kilometers over the 20 years visiting this place.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the price of linguistic reduction

the sheer indeterminacy of ideas about things and actions and events:

Bohr was the first to recognize that the new quantum theory presented us with a view of experience in which different interactional arrangements resulted in complementary perspectives that need not be logically consistent, compatible, or commensurable, and in many critical cases could not be so. The reductionist trick was predicated on the assumption that the different ‘pieces’ or views from different perspectives could always somehow be neatly fit together. But we now know that material processes cannot be comprehended, cannot be exhaustively described within any one single self-consistent formal discourse. They always overflow the limited possibilities of our semiotic models of them. It is only by building more and more semiotic-discursive models, each internally self-consistent, but not limited by requirements of mutual consistency with each other, that we can, by adding together such ‘complementary’ views, attain to the most complete possible account of material phenomena, including semiosis itself. Thus we still come back to a version of ‘assemblage’ but hopefully a more sophisticated one, one that takes into account our own role and perspective as observers, as well as the material means by which we observe, compare, and assemble — the material mediation of our semiotic practices. — J. L. Lemke, in Material Sign Processes And Emergent Ecosocial Organization

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

chaos & dynamical systems theory

Illustration of a Julia Set by Scott Hotton. Dynamical Systems Theory (a branch of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex systems by employing differential and difference equations) is another limited framework for modeling complex systems. More accurate than linear and non-linear models, but none-the-less reductionist. (Well, talk about restating the obvious when it comes to anything mathematical, as the concept itself is a reduced language for expressing natural phenomena — I don’t subscribe to the early Greek concept where mathematics does not represent but is a universal and perfect thing unto itself). While human-generated system solutions (say, engineering problems such as placing satellites into orbit) are solved through classic computational modeling with linear systems, natural systems like the brain need something more.

Chaotic systems are especially sensitive to initial conditions. initial conditions are necessary for any reductive system analysis because in the abstraction process of reduction, the system is extracted and disconnected from the continuum of life. Good for mathematical (computational) modeling. But when defining a real-world problem, how feasible is it to define initial conditions at all? Is there a way to not define initial conditions?

A chaotic system is defined as one that shows sensitivity to initial conditions. That is, any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the future behavior. In other words, the system is chaotic. Its behavior can be predicted only if the initial conditions are known to an infinite degree of accuracy, which is impossible. — Gollub and Solomon
posted
  • place: Rösrath, Germany

Erlebnis

trawling, ANT (actor-network theory), social network theory, many many theories, some incomplete descriptions. mostly there is a neglect of the energy-transfer. most stay in the realm of abstracted social relation with only oblique reference to the actual embodied dynamic. why facing someone is different than standing at right angles. why eye contact is ‘important.’ and reading a book of Justyna’s about the architectural uses of glass (the airport here a good example of that usage). letting visible Light in is the normal paradigm. resisting natural flows, reducing the total possible bandwidth. from the asymptotic infinitude of blasting flows of the universe to something more manageable. the numerous graphs showing (transmissive) attenuation vs frequency only focus on the visible. a holistic approach would consider the full range of attenuation (what is not allowed to pass). glass is great for a narrow range of Light and some EM radiation off the incredibly narrow range of visible Light, but that’s about it. it stops everything else.

wind (as a formal naming of the flux/movement of air) is a form of energy. sit in a clear glass box in a tropical paradise. and you will die shortly. a glass box is the predicate for scientific (reductionist) experimentation. with a glass (optical) window observing.

again, back to the history of glass. a fragment of an idea that I have often explored with class groups. the history of glass.

They tore down the bus station
there’s chainlink there
no buses stop at all
and I’m walking through Chiyoda-ku
in a typhoon
300
the fine rain horizontal
umbrella everted in the storm’s Pacific breath
tonight red lanterns are battered,

laughing,
in the mechanism. — William Gibson

posted
  • place: Ukiah, California

netart 2004 – Ping Melody

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”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

mapping transitions

almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.

enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?

actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…

swarming

taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…

anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.

reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?

Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave

caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

doctoral registration

out to the University to register as a Doctoral student. the process took all of 15 minutes, and cost nothing. once accepted to a program (in most of Europe) the actual schooling is free. there is only the optional USD 80 annual fee to join the student union TOKYO which provides health and dental insurance and a variety of other discounts. unfortunately, as a doctoral student, I can’t take advantage of the 50% reduction in travel around Finland :-( student again — after a decade of being a teacher. with not too much to show. need the time to reflect. though I seriously doubt there will be such kinds of time, with the life-acceleration that seems constant (not constant velocity, but acceleration). soon to reach the hyperLight speeds and make a transformation. is this possible?

posted
  • place: New Hope, Pennsylvania

Mifune

self-portrait with Kathleen and Anthony, New Hope, Pennsylvania, June 1998

Kathleen sees a samurai-helmet-like aura exploding from me head while I do some yoga on the grass of her backyard next to the Delaware River, not so far from where Washington made his legendary crossing. she banishes or outlines it with a sage smudge-stick. I am aware, but feel bad later, when making a joke at dinner that this helmet is related to my desire to play Toshiro Mifune in a Kurosawa flick — the one I recall so vividly, The Hidden Fortress, I believe, where Mifune is galloping bareback, sword upraised with the two-handed hilt gripped directly and unwavering in front of his right shoulder. I am stressed about the Shaman situation. I am not able, in the time available, to unwind enough to engage the psychic energies that I have available, except. I am able to ponder that I have had a previous incarnation within the geographic confines of Scandinavia. a quick reduction tells me that, yes, indeed, I could have been a Viking. or a simple inhabitant with business to finish in the Northlands. takin’ care of business now. pacing pacing pacing that land, beginning to know it better in a distributive and global sense than the locals. strange (I say to myself). a word I use often to describe events of the external world. but it is a nice time, and Loki appreciates it all. he continues to theorize about the Lightning Woman, and the Rain Man, and the Cloud Woman from the huge bed in the bright white master suite with the balcony overlooking the river. the four of us (Anthony, Kathleen, Courtney, and I) throw him up and down in a blanket immediately before he and I get in the car to drive to Lawren’s place in Alexandria.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

open-x retrospect

Retrospecting on the disheveling week of near-constant stimulation and activity that was the Ars Electronica FLESH FACTOR event. Five hours sleep was a miracle which was as remote from reality as was the idea of downtime. A thrashing whoosh of flesh factors and virtual emulations and emanations and emissions and manifestations accompanied with the appropriate techno-beats, subtronic and subsonic throbbing, visceral vibrations and skittering cathode-ray-tube radiations. I spent a vast portion of my time within the comfortable, though frenetic, Open-X space where something of a revolution took place. A revolution of interface design between audience and artist, participant and observer, creator and consumer, networker and networker. As far as I know or can ascertain in discussion with other networking artists, Open-X is a first as far as restructuring the relationship between artist and audience — although even this pronouncement is a rather näive and surficial reduction. The space was occupied by about 50 networking-artists working on a variety of projects from finished web-projects, to live web-radio, to collaborative events (like our net.sauna), and a full-tilt live documentation of the entire festival. I should point out that this term networking-artist is something of a misnomer, or, at least, a scraping bow to the traditionally relegated identifications of this and that. Previous to this event in the heritage of conference, traditional paradigms have absolutely prevailed for electronic media festivals, exhibitions, and symposium. I came away from the festival feeling virtually invigorated and physically completely wiped-out. The 18-hour flight from Linz to Frankfurt to Washington to Denver was almost total torture for my back. I was constantly checking the count-down timer on my watch, the seconds tripping by far too slowly for me to remember anything through the constant hot-nails in the lower back. In the last hour, I got to digging my fingernails into my palms to make me forget the pain in my back.

posted
  • place: Rösrath, Germany

catharsis

The past few days have been spent around Köln and in Rösrath with Volker, an old friend from Avantière days in Aachen in 1990. I had just made a rather long entry here, but inadvertently erased it. Hmmm. Talking about the fragments of dreams, and the paradox of travel. I shall try to reconstruct it for the moment… Chris sent email from Colorado, following his return from a mountaineering trip in the Alps. He suggested that travel is a catharsis.

sotto voce: Catharsis, I dunno. Travel, well, I am oscillating between various poles on this travel now. Maybe I always have. But it does disturb me to look back and see that I have been doing this style/level of travel for over a decade, now up to 14 years! Wow. So, I am a bit critical, though at the same time, enjoying the momentary things, the various human contacts, the seeing of things, the times on the train when I can think and meditate, the conversations, and some slowly building confidence that this IS a way of doing, going, that holds some power and possibility, as opposed to what I see as a rather cumbersome and profane (too strong a word) process of making more objects to fill the material world. It does seem to me that a lessening of mediation, a reduction of mediation between peoples is the direction that one needs to move. And even with that said, I see direct in my own life that the way I have chosen — travel — mediates my contact with the Other, reducing it to a transitory melding. Maybe this is a metaphor for the larger scope of life … How people and situations pass away, forever. Maybe it is just life. period. Catharsis, yeah.

Yes, so it goes. I spend today and most of yesterday dealing with correspondance — email, snail-mail and so on. I got a package of post forwarded to Volker’s NetArt box here by my sister, Janet, who checks my post box in Prescott, Arizona. Good to see things like job application rejects and the like, eh? And my bank statement which reads a shrinking balance each month … Being on the road like this keeps me on edge for better or worse.

They shall not tame him. — The Lion of Flanders, Hendrick Conscience

The dream of building a house in Crestone, Colorado is no closer to reality than last year, although I do collect fragments of ideas and things to think about in the design. Of course, one of the primary things is simply to have a place with enough rooms that it will comfortably house a good number of folks who will surely visit me there in that beautiful place. Any suggestions?