renewal – the neoscenes/tech-no-mad (b)log ::

25 : March : 202317 : April : 2024

place: Cedaredge, Colorado

about time

Finally done with the primary phase of an onerous rollover from GoDaddy hosting to ReClaim hosting, a mellow outfit which I hope survives and thrives. ReClaim provides hosting solutions for folks in educational contexts. After 20 fraught years dealing with GoDaddy’s abuse, I’d had it. In the (almost) thirty years of neoscenes web existence there have been many technological changes which have made the long-term survival of the site a shaky proposition at best, and at worst, it has come crashing down: offline on occasion. Many turns of angst and frustration at the forced change of specs, formats, codices, platforms, and protocols. I just wanna post audio-video-text-image material, along with hosting content from a few other folks (at this point, Anthony Zega (RIP my friend), and Rod Summers, aka vec world service).

Not having the platform secure and stable as a place to spontaneously create content is always disturbing. During those intervening thirty years, so many head-banging technical issues, ugh, not good to recall. Onwards and upwards … into the AI wilderness.

Now to repair all the collateral GoDaddy damage to various aspects of the site content and performance …

10 : March : 201928 : December : 2023

Justin Kaipo Kaoni 1976 – 2018

It was a shock to receive this news. Indeed, all the loving words in his obit are true. Justin worked his deft and skilled magic on the ponderosas in my yard there in Prescott. But far more than that, he was a beautiful, affable, intelligent human presence in the lives that he touched. Generous with his time and energies, he always carried others around him to a Lighter and more profound moment. In a small way, I documented some of his tree-work with audio and some portraits over the years — his presence will be greatly missed, never forgotten. Indeed, his influence on the ecosystem of the area will live on far beyond human years.

On Friday, Dec. 7, 2018, the world lost one of its best people. Justin Kaipo Kaoni, inventor of the karate chop dance move, was called home by his creator.

Justin was born in Lahaina, Hawaii, to Chris and Sam Kaoni on Oct. 20, 1976.

As a young child, you could find him swinging from a banyan tree or roaming Wahikuli beach in search of seashells and sand crabs. At age six, the family relocated to Prescott, Arizona, where he would make the ponderosa pine forest his playground for the remainder of his life.

Everyone who met Justin was touched by his relentless love of life and genuine presence of being. His intellect, foresight and humble leadership was sought out by anyone who had a problem to solve or a project to build. In his career as owner/operator of Mile High Tree Service, he spent many days in the canopy with his crew removing branches and treetops. Nimble as a ring-tailed lemur and strong as an ox, he would perform the work of three men while wearing an ear-to-ear grin. He protected the city of Prescott as a former Granite Mountain Hotshot and defensible space ninja.

He turned superhero at night as adopter of strays (human and canine), distributor of smiles/sage advice, and midnight snack chef. Purveyor of good eats, his home kitchen has a Michelin star and no shortage of loyal patrons.

On a lucky night in Las Vegas, Justin met the love of his life when he crossed paths with Shannon Rhoades of Riverside, California. A few years later, they were married on a perfect spring evening, May 6, 2006. Together they raised three amazing children, Shane, Elena and Chaz, who continue to make their father and family proud every day. Shannon and Justin’s profound love for each other has never faded in 12 years of marriage, as affirmed by their recent renewal of vows at the place where they met.

Justin was proficient in everything he spent time doing, but was best at spreading love and positivity. He will be remembered by everyone who was lucky enough to meet him (even just once).

He is survived by his wife, Shannon; children, Shane, Elena and Chaz; father, Samuel; sister, Sierra; and brothers, Brad and Kaikea. He was predeceased by his mother, Chris Kaoni-Turner.

An awesome celebration of life will be held at Mountain Club Clubhouse, Sunday, Dec. 16, at 1 p.m., 900 W. Clubhouse Drive, Prescott, Arizona. All are welcome to be a part of the Kaoni ‘ohana (family) for the day and come share a story about this amazing person.

In lieu of flowers, have a laugh and meal with a close friend in his honor, or donate to the Eric Marsh Foundation for Wildland Firefighters @ https://ericmarshfoundation.org.

Information provided by survivors.

3 : February : 201828 : December : 2023

The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

eh?

Be Pro-Active: Take the initiative and the responsibility to make things happen.

Begin With an End in Mind: Start with a clear destination to understand where you are now, where you’re going, and what you value most.

Put First Things First: Manage yourself. Organize and execute around priorities.

Think Win/Win: See life as a cooperative, not a competitive arena where success is not achieved at the expense or exclusion of the success of others.

Seek First to Understand: Understand then be understood to build the skills of empathic listening that inspires openness and trust,

Synergize: Apply the principles of cooperative creativity and value differences.

Renewal: Preserving and enhancing your greatest asset, yourself, by renewing the physical, spiritual, mental and social/emotional dimensions of your nature.

Covey. Stephen R. 1989. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. New York: Simon & Schuster.

21 : March : 201228 : December : 2023

cutting room floor

The cumulative fabric of the social system evolves through a constantly shifting, hybrid, and continuous field of change, affected by all flows: we might call it simply a net/archy. The differences arise largely as an effect of the varying degrees of freedom that available or potential protocols apply to the nodal/human relations. The sourcing and dynamic evolution of the protocols that govern energy-flow pathways between participants are crucial metrics of the evolving qualities of relation. This field of change is expressed simultaneously as a participatory site of tension, simmering conflict, dynamic encounter, and the vital renewal that is necessary for any viable system.[1] Control vies with autonomy at all scales from the deeply embodied to the global.

[1] As an example, Václav Havel’s well-known essay “The Power of the Powerless” contains a profound exploration of the nature of power in an extremely hierarchically-controlled social system near the end of its existence. It is a system that “for a thousand reasons, can no longer base itself on the unadulterated, brutal, and arbitrary application of power, eliminating all expressions of nonconformity. What is more, the system has become so ossified politically that there is practically no way for such nonconformity to be implemented within its official structures” (1985). It is the application of power via protocol which exerts the control and eliminates (as that exertion becomes more and more intense) any spaces for autonomy to exist. But these systems reach a saturation point where the control (and feedback) system, a necessary structural part of it, begins to absorb all the energy available to the system overall—destroying it from the ‘inside.’

Havel, V., 1985. The Power of the Powerless: citizens against the state in central-eastern Europe, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe.

8 : April : 200828 : December : 2023

place: Berlin, Germany

dabeisein ist alles!

it is finally the cold rain on the last lap home after a day of being in the cold wind of late winter Berlin, the cold rain gets my head cold, giving me a head cold. damn. waiting with M-H to get into the Reichstag to see the heart of the German government. for what it’s worth.

meanwhile workers are quickly replacing all the monumental (and mostly broken) Light posts that line Karl Marx Allee with new ones, though of the same form. at first I thought, oh, construction, been like this for years, but soon realized that things actually proceed at a good clip in this continual renewal of the city. who’s paying for it?

if only, with the greyness of possibly imminent spring times, sweeping through a head full of cold. unable to concentrate. unable to do that at all; with nothing to think about, and nothing to think about from lack of attention to the moment. out of it. and dreaming of the Golden Elixir that Taoism offers, though finding will not be in dreams, but in full be-ing.

Human beings receive this Golden Elixir from Heaven . . . . Golden Elixir is another name for one’s fundamental nature, formed out of primeval inchoateness. There is no other Golden Elixir outside one’s fundamental nature. Every human being has this Golden Elixir complete in himself: it is entirely realized in everybody. It is neither more in a sage, nor less in an ordinary person. It is the seed of Immortals and Buddhas, and the root of worthies and sages. — Liu Yiming

11 : March : 200828 : December : 2023

place: Berlin, Germany

huh?

down to the Märchenbrunnen on a nice sunny afternoon to meditate on the back of me eyelids. still wish I had all the photos that I took in Berlin in 1988 and 1993. the changes are profound. the Germans have managed to make things look good. but what’s behind it? hard to tell, being the outsider. strikes happen, but aside from graffiti and broken bottles on the street, there is little to suggest deeper social problems. for the outsider it can be difficult to read cultural signs. bullet holes are still there, though, and chaos is a scalar creeping into everything that humans bring into the world.

Berlin is clearly a cosmopolitan city, though, with many foreigners seemingly integrated into the foot traffic in most neighborhoods that I move through. but what is most remarkable, just when I think I am entering a blighted neighborhood, there are signs everywhere that everything is being reconstructed. some nice old brick warehouses (formerly the city slaughterhouses are the only buildings in the area that are fenced off and in bad repair. surely there are others, but the construction and renewal seems to ongoing. not sure what this has to do with Byron, but, reminds me of some dreamy be-ing elsewhere, elsewhen…

They slept on the abyss without a surge —
The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,
The moon, their mistress, had expired before;
The winds were wither’d in the stagnant air,
And the clouds perish’d; Darkness had no need
Of air from them — She was the Universe.
— Lord Byron

2 : March : 200811 : October : 2024

place: Berlin, Germany

ultraintelligence?

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. — Irving Good

aside from inventing a pretty damn smart off switch.

urban renewal is happening in Berlin. on another circuit walk, this time further to the East, I can stand in one spot and see a dozen construction cranes. they are all working on domestic housing units — mostly low, three story maximum, like row houses, condos. filling up vacant lots which were once filled with warehouses. most of the red brick warehouses are gone, and the lots are scraped clear, down to the golden beige sand that underlies the whole city. the top few feet are always full of detritus — porcelain, shattered bricks, glass, and mortar. somewhere I read that in the process of doing random construction in Germany, they also frequently discover WWII munitions accompanied by an occasional detonation and casualties. yikes! I am amazed by the intensity with which the city is still transforming itself.

19 : October : 200728 : December : 2023

place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

panarchy

running across this term via Paul on the iDC list. as he does a PhD on the subject. another name for how to organize life among humans. never an easy task, everybody leaves it to those who want the feeling of power that it brings.

Panarchy, a term devised to describe evolving hierarchical systems with multiple interrelated elements, offers an important new framework for understanding and resolving this dilemma. Panarchy is the structure in which systems, including those of nature (e.g., forests) and of humans (e.g., capitalism), as well as combined human-natural systems (e.g., institutions that govern natural resource use such as the Forest Service), are interlinked in continual adaptive cycles of growth, accumulation, restructuring, and renewal. — C. S. Holling

11 : August : 200611 : October : 2024

place: San Jose, California

seeing hearing feeling

spend the morning with Sally Jane, checking out some of the exhibitions including a personal walk-through of the Animalia project with producers Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (more kiwis!). then on to the ART MUSEUM to see THE SHOW curated by Steve Deitz. some amazing works, leading off with the elegant live-chat-based piece.

lunch with Ken at La Victoria Taqueria, better burritos than Macho Taco which was inexplicably closed at lunch-time.

also happen upon the npr (neighborhood public radio) broadcast studio at the downtown cineplex in an unused ticket booth. was wondering where they were broadcasting from — last night I happened to tune them in at 88.9 on the car radio on the commute back to the ‘burbs. so, met Jon Brumit and

hard to begin and end the day with a rattling vibrating swervy commute that lasts about an hour, door-to-door.

some overviews on the conference:

yadda-yadda-yadda; blah-blah-blah.

so many words, so many moving images, so much sound, talking heads, and spectacle. along with nice personal encounters. the monumental, the hierarchic voices along with the personal, networked, and confidential/private.

San Jose is interesting clash of urban-renewal towers of glass and corrosion-resistant metals: ringed some hard-core barrio Victorian bungalow scene, interlaced with the chronic homeless scattered between the shining spaces and conventioneers.

organized networks are interested in new institutional forms. tactical media has come to a stage of confronting itself. question of scalar transformation, (vs) networked organizations. democracy and networks are antithetical. bunk.

prototypes: sarai, iDC, srishdi school of art and media, indy media, etc

end up going to see a Mike Figgis remix of his film Time Code. a pseudo-press guy is giving away a couple tickets, so I snag one. he explains that he’s not really press, but a writer, and is trying to write a history of media art starting with the worldview of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose he very well might be a better writer that explainer. the film is a disappointment — the subject of the narrative is hermetically sealed in Hollywood and lacks any compelling visual or story elements. Mike is there, verily, and does a live “remix” which consists of rewinding the tape(!) and fading in/out the 4 different screen audio tracks. in form — the four frames which simultaneously inhabit the main screen that were recorded in four single simultaneous takes starting at the same time — there is an extremely interesting potential, especially as the overall resolution of video systems for shooting, recording, editing, and playback are gradually increasing. but the possibilities of the form seem completely wasted by the insipid narrative and visual void. is it a joke maybe?

head back to Livermore on the 87-280-680-84 pilgrimage route. not really liking that violent traverse of the land. though one segment moves across the Calaveras Valley which is still unpopulated and sports the rolling amber hills with huge live oaks scattered at stellar intervals.

7 : August : 200611 : October : 2024

place: San Jose, California

re-colonization

things have not really started for ISEA’06, but I head down to San Jose on a shake-down run and to see who is around already. the drive and parking logistics are a bit complicated, so it is good to construct an operational head-map without the pressure of schedule. public transportation in central San Jose is revived along with the recent urban renewal that appears to be taking place. a re-colonization by huge shiny-skinned office buildings, no real community thriving are the foot of these gleaming beasts. just restaurants to cater to the convention crowds. food shopping? no chance for that in this infotainment core. immediately outside there are the remains of a pre-existing indigenous community.

11 : November : 200529 : December : 2023

place: Prescott, Arizona

George Saunders

George (Saunders) leap-frogging a parking meter somewhere on Sunset Boulevard, sometime in the year that Orwell’s O’Brien tagged when the lesser shall have a future controlled by the greater, thus:

How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?
…
By making him suffer. Obedience is not enough. Unless he is suffering, how can you be sure that he is obeying your will and not his own? Power is in inflicting pain and humiliation. Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing. Do you begin to see, then, what kind of world we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic Utopias that the old reformers imagined. A world of fear and treachery is torment, a world of trampling and being trampled upon, a world which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain. The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before the Revolution. We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. We shall abolish the orgasm. Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.
…
And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. — George Orwell

George Orwell I did not know, but George (Saunders) is a friend from some distant past. I heard a cryptic review on NPR of his first novel The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil that made its way to shelves recently. I’d buy a copy, but I don’t spare cash for material things that I would just have to carry around. I’ll wait until it’s online with the Gutenberg Project or so. maybe somewhen else I’ll resurrect some visual histories of other days that were shared. why George was leaping over the parking meter I no longer recall. why I made an image, I only know that I have been taking images of friends in various stages of living at various ground coordinates for more years than I can remember why. certainly not for nostalgic reasons because when I took them, there was no future, only a present that skittered along, like the rocks I sometimes spin across bodies of water, or the rocks that I have held in hand, drawing lines on another’s body, or those same rocks, smooth in their repeated collisions with other rocks, now in my jean’s watch pocket, getting warm from expended body heat, and grounding one side of my body to the body of the earth. humans have life collisions. I collided with George, numerous times, it wore down some sharp edges, maybe. maybe not. I still have sharp edges, George perhaps not. maybe not proud of that, as evolutionary alteration is a sign of maturation.

12 : October : 200428 : December : 2023

Crisis of Education

Education is the point at which we decide whether we love the world enough to assume responsibility for it, and by the same token save it from that ruin which except for renewal, except for the coming of the new and the young, would be inevitable.” Hannah Arendt in The Crisis of Education.

15 : September : 199928 : December : 2023

place: Helsinki, Finland

neoscenes occupation: an international network-building project

[ED: written and published as part of the acoustic.space initiative established by friends Rasa Smite and Raitis Smits at the re-lab in Riga, Latvia net audio issue 1999 ISSN 1407-2858.]

In September of 1998, neoscenes occupation (nso) was formally launched as a networking project in the second Open-X venue at the 1998 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria.

The basic concept for the project is rooted in several facets of my former and current involvement as a networker, and my broad experience in arts and design education in Europe and North America during the last fifteen years.

Having taught or lectured in, and visited many tens of art and design institutions, and engaged in wide-ranging discussions with many educators, I had gradually come to the conclusion that much of the (formal) educational process in the developed world is irrelevant, dead, or dying. I viewed neoscenes occupation as a vehicle for the re-creation and renewal of the learning process—applying a series of conditions to make it an “omni-directional flow of energies with a force multiplied far beyond the meat count and with a reach that is far ahead of the game.”

Rhetoric aside, the project has several interlinked concepts and goals relating to creating a viable independent social network of people who share creative aspirations.

Dialogue is at the core of the whole nso idea — dialogue as the bi-directional movement of energies between any two people who engage each other in honest and open exchange. Dialogue that moves in opposition to the oppression of monologue and centralized patriarchal infotainment; that stands as two quiet voices versus the blasting inferno of social emission. Dialogue, as pure expression of heart and soul, is the core of all meaningful activism. more “neoscenes occupation: an international network-building project”

30 : August : 199412 : October : 2024

For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson

This essay, by London-based artist Ian Rawlinson, mentions a project I was involved with Clive Sall and Emma Davis called Outpost which appeared at the Venice Biennale (1995) and the Edinburgh Festival (1994).

In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign. more “For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson”

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