posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

web work

I have generally avoided any mixing of work-work with my personal online efforts for a variety of reasons. Together they consume more processing cycles than any other digital or analog activities—any activities at all, including sleep! But a few comments are warranted as the tasks rule my days.

I orchestrated three major roll-overs of the site in the four years I’ve been working there—all with zero down-time. January 2020 was the last and most complex one to an all-new design, new data structure, and ostensibly all-new content. It included logging an extra 250 hours over regular working hours—essentially ten-hours-a-day-every-day between 01 December 2019 and 28 February 2020 to deploy the new online-only Colorado Groundwater Atlas — the Atlas forming about 5% of the wider CGS site. In 2016, when I started the job, I estimated it would take around 10,000 hours to execute a complete site re-authoring, all-new design, and coalescing of the original site which dates back to 2001. It’s been patched and kluged together during the intervening years with only the most basic information organizing strategies: otherwise, it was a mess, especially in the back-end data (non-)structure, the poorly-coded custom WordPress theme, lame design, lack of editing standards, and lo-rez visual content. The range of associated and essential preparatory tasks primarily involved a complete organization of the CGS information space. This started with the physical publications archive which was in total disarray — that’s another story. There were no consistent data/file naming conventions at all, nor was there any but the most rudimentary order to the entire digital server space. With a constant churning of employees, the servers became a free-for-all dumping ground with each person (dis)organizing it according to their own needs. In any group of digital users, like room-mates, there are always hoarders and people who can’t clean up the mess they leave behind. Ugh! All that needed organizing as it formed the root source for all of the online content generation. Crucial to the success of the organization.

With few individual exceptions, there was no systematic process in place at the CGS to capture, organize, and archive visual research material. Management has no interest in imposing any standard workflows to address this: not realizing that the dataspace was the root source of all organizational information- and knowledge-production: those two products being the main reasons for the organization to exist at all.

(Field) geology depends heavily on photographic representation of geo-located earth phenomena. If one is doing field research, and takes a photograph but makes no attempt to geolocate the image, it’s like, why label the axis of a data graph? In earlier times, paper topographic maps and/or aerial photographs combined with orienteering skills located the field geologist within a few tens of meters. Contemporary GPS tools integrated with most digital cameras now provide centimeter accuracy. Along with the location, a description of what has been photographed has to be tied to the image. Again, in earlier times, with analog photography, a field notebook entry would be tied by a point numbering system to the sequence of film images. These days, the application of the essential concept of metadata ensures that human- and machine-readable alphanumeric information is directly tied to the digital image file. The coherence of information transmission requires a dedicated attention to these systems of recording and appending data-about-the-data.

At any rate, the details of this process are probably yawn-inducing for most readers. However, the organization of one’s own information space will directly govern how the effects of one’s life (presence) are projected forward in time and outwards to others: Legacy. It takes time and energy to do this.

I do admit to self that while thoughts dwell Lightly on the propagation of information into the future from time-to-time, it doesn’t matter all that much, as all organized and negentropic configurations go away eventually!

 

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

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transgenerational epigenetic inheritance

There you have it, this stinks. Now you can scientifically blame yer parents for all yer own ‘issues.’

Dias, B.G. & Ressler, K.J., 2014. Parental olfactory experience influences behavior and neural structure in subsequent generations. Nat Neurosci, 17(1), pp.89–96.

Everyone knew it all along and of course this raises the question of how much scientific research effort is spent on things that we already know? Confirmation of suspicions is generally why hypotheses are formed, eh? Maybe better to simply strike out into the dark, and create random hypotheses on things we know nothing about instead…

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Research is …

Research … is the exploration of the unknown. It is speculative, uncertain. It cannot be standardized. It succeeds, moreover, in virtually direct proportion to its freedom from performance controls, production pressures and traditional approaches … To be effective, new devices must be the responsibility of a group of enthusiasts whose attentions are undiluted by other conflicting responsibilities.”

Dr. Vannevar Bush’s Congressional testimony quoted in New Developments Division, War Department Special Staff, History of New Developments Division, War Department Special Staff, c. Apr 46, pp. 4-5. Manuscript in OCMH.

posted
  • place: Grizzly Gulch, Colorado

post-post

the day after the ascent of a 14,000+ footer (Grays Peak, near Silverplume), no sore-ness. remarkable, considering the intensity of the cardio work that such an effort entails. heart-throb rising from chest to throat to head as altitude is gained.

heading back into deep work on the thesis after a string of field research expeditions and dislocations. the gathering of material is continuous, as is the (plodding) process of getting archive material up (see new (old) stuff)

then, back to work.

So human social organizations constantly reconstitute themselves through a flow of members and other adjunct materials, information, and energy. Many of these are selectively favored through a continuing expansion or effort to expand above their original size. Such organizations may reach a point at which further expansion is blocked, and budding off is the only alternative to continue. The blockage may be due to internal structural problems, such as a Marxian internal contradiction, or the appearance of revolutions, and so on; or, to external constraints–such as furious neighboring states, or a strongly competitive market enterprise. — Richard Adams

I would suggest that the enumerated items — members, materials, information, and energy — may be re-categorized into energy, and the embodied and surrounding protocols (flow pathways accumulated through shared (social) information). Materials should be ignored in the sense that they are ultimately manifestations of energy: traditionalists are be encouraged to consider that the concept of ‘things’ and of static ‘materials’ are merely convenient constructs to be transcended or shed in the stead of energy and flow…

Let us transfix this momentary eternity which encloses everything, past and future, but without losing in the immobility of language any of its gigantic erotic whirling. — Nikos Kazantzakis

Ta… impossible, when writing, to accede, to yield tradition to this, eh?

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sketching mode

snow, Prescott, Arizona, December 2010

Still deep in sketching mode working out how to incorporate which chunks of content while moving both backwards and forwards in time augmenting what’s here. Have ideas, but the data preparatory work is daunting, especially paralleling the production of new written research. And another New Year just about to impress itself upon the brow. Snow still falling. Back in serious winter for a short time, after the antipodal summer play. Got to get this oscillation proper: summer in each hemisphere! Maybe next year. Including stints in Kiwiland.

Archive exploration. What’s it all mean? And what will this next year bring on? tragedy, success, joy, satisfaction, finishing, beginning, change … or just more head-banging on the screen?

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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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From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

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Migrating: Art: Academies: done

MigAA book cover (pdf download)

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers! more “Migrating: Art: Academies: done”

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Empty Infinity

Without beginning, without end,
Without past, without future.
A halo of light surrounds the world of the law.
We forget one another, quiet and pure, altogether powerful and empty.
The emptiness is irradiated by the light of the heart and of heaven.
The water of the sea is smooth and mirrors the moon in its surface.
The clouds disappear in blue space; the mountains shine clear.
Consciousness reverts to contemplation; the moon’s disk rests alone.

Wilhelm, R., 1962. The Secret of the Golden Flower: A Chinese Book of Life, New York, NY: Harvest / HBJ Book.

Researching more of Wilhelm’s powerful translation work that continues to widen an opening door into an ultimately livable space. The dorsal/ventral (toku – nin or Circulation of Light) breathing technique elucidated here — even when practiced with flawed concentration — has an immediate and profound affect on the state of the system. I am even surprised with the intensity of change which ensues. The body is straighter, uplifted, and the balance of body heat has shifted drastically — the chronically over-heated head is cooler, the feet and hands warmer. This shift has not yet directly impacted rising gall (yang) in surprise (reactive) situations, but when the breathing becomes first nature, it appears to have the potential to do that. The base-line of calm has shifted for the better. Will have to consult Heiji about these affects. A daily practice of some minutes, with as many reminders shot through the many unconscious moments of non-breathing, seems to be an auspicious start. There is no going back on this discovered knowledge.

posted
  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

birth of the DMA

History: National Military Establishment (NME), headed by Secretary of Defense, created by the National Security Act of 1947 (61 Stat. 495), July 26, 1947, which divided the War Department into separate Department of the Air Force and Department of the Army and reduced the status of the three military departments (Army, Navy, Air Force) to that of constituent units. NME redesignated DOD by the National Security Act Amendments of 1949 (63 Stat. 578), August 10, 1949.

Navy Predecessors
more “birth of the DMA”

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Concepts

Every concept has an irregular contour defined by the sum of its components, which is why, from Plato to Bergson, we find the idea of the concept being a matter of articulation, of cutting and cross-cutting. The concept is a whole because it totalizes its components, but it is a fragmentary whole. Only on this condition can it escape the mental chaos constantly threatening it, stalking it, trying to reabsorb it.

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, What is philosophy? p. 15-61
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empathy (smoke and mirrors)

John Vallee, 54, lives near the trestle that spans the Crane Creek and was watching TV when he heard a loud screech. He went outside and first thought he saw a blanket tangled under a rail car. Then he realized it was a person.

“It’s going to be hard for me to get to sleep,” Mr. Vallee told Florida Today. “I can’t get it out of my mind.” — AP

The energized impression and apprehension of be-ing leaves us with resonant formations in embodied memory. And it is resonance that best circumscribes (models) the phenomena of the propagation of empathy from the Other to the Self. Although there is no hard evidence in humans, the concept of mirror neurons would seem to support the idea of resonance. Caught a lecture at UM with Deb on “Empathy in Normal Adult Development and Neurological Disease” with Bob Levenson from UCB which got me thinking of the actual mechanism that allows for the transmission of the energies of expression across Cartesian space from the Self to the Other. The obvious model would be the transmission of band-limited radiative (visual, auditory, touch, etc) energy which then is apprehended by the neural system, a system which is sensitive to ‘matched’ or similar experiences that have already impinged and impressed themselves on the body system. This impression process changes the body system from one energy configuration to another. And any life system will have fundamental resonant pathways — these would be necessary determinants of basic learned experience — whatever the particular and precise mechanism is (mirror neurons being perhaps a primary model), the idea of resonance seems to be key. Resonance would depend on some accounting of sameness and difference as per prior embodied experience and the persistence of impressions (which themselves are configurations of energized neuronal structures: memory) among other factors. There would have to be a means for rapid energy pattern-matching across a huge volume of semi-fixed memory structures in the brain — it would be impossible to check all possible prior impressions with all live incoming impressions, so there would have to be some kind of disgressionary or limiting function to the process in the form of step or directional filters…

I can’t get you out of my mind…

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network power

Ran across this book a few days ago, and it imbued me with a sense of urgency in the effort to get more succinct ideas on paper. Grewal begins to make a connection between social systems, protocols (standards), and individual human participation in those social systems. He does not approach it from an energy/flow point-of-view, but rather a traditional materialist one.

Using the examples of the gold standard and the English language to drive his argument, he frames in detail the relation between the individual and the inevitable social network (system) that the individual is embedded in, looking at the dynamic feedback mechanism that occurs between the evolving social system (and the protocols which are its substrate) and human choice.

His analysis of intrinsic and extrinsic values for protocols (and standards) that define network power flows are spot on — along with direct and indirect forces which motivate the adoption of a standard — his framework goes a long way in circumscribing the dynamic between individual and collective and the politics of globalization. Network power arises through the concentrating affect that protocols apply to the various energy flows available to the techno-social system

Grewal, D. S., 2008. Network Power: The Social Dynamics of Globalization, Yale University Press, New Haven.

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structural point

There needs to be a repetition of certain concepts at numerous junctures — energy, thermodynamics, flows, order, flux, fields, reminders of the Newtonian language, control, image-based articulations of all key-worded concepts, and precise observations on the structure-of-relation of the (declining) Military-Industrial system. Choosing examples of technological deployment, tracing the affectations of it, across the full distance, simplifying (reducing) the connections. Connecting the altered flows and the ‘original’ flows, along the entire way (using thermodynamics as a foundational guide).

Dialogue, sound, and music are good examples.

Identifying between altered and originary flows is in itself is likely an impossible task. I would suspect that all comprehensible flows are already in a (corrupted!?) state?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Food, Energy, and Society

For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. …

Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. …

A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (p. 68)

Food, Energy, and Society, Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., Third Edition, Taylor And Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida, 2008. Food, Energy and Society, [Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., (revised edition), University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 1996]

I haven’t gotten access to the most current (2008) edition of this major collation of numbers, but the 1996 version is recent enough for the extrapolation process to be framed and the principles to be clearly demonstrated. Unfortunately that extrapolation reveals a worsening situation than they originally laid out (or imagined!) in 1979. With a detailed quantitative analysis of the (energy) costs of all eras and types of food production, as well as an examination of pesticide use, water, biodiversity, and soil resource issues, the separate chapters are full of numbers and comparisons which are remarkable in extent and sobering in their basic message. It would be possible to verify the extensive research in detail by tracking down the fifty-pages of references, but the message is simple: the human species is exerting an ever-increasing energy drain on the global environment merely to subsist, and there are definitely better and worse ways to marginally affect the situation. Humans tend to be wasteful — but any life-form causes this process of entropic waste (energy) production merely by living — it is not an avoidable condition. It appears now that the problems are of such a wide-scale, and the solutions are presently so haphazard (as applied by nation-states rather than through some trans-national instrument), that the inevitable upward geometric curves (population, resource consumption, environmental degradation, etc) will reach their limit. Those curves as they exist in the mathematical domain have no real upward limit and may approach infinity asymptotically. This would represent the system with infinite energy reserves. The earth, taken as a sub-system of the cosmos, is finite, and so are the energy resources it makes available for human use. more “Food, Energy, and Society”

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  • place: Primal Locus, Where Ever, Terra

temporary suspension

(this was the final posting to the travelog on the hybrid php/html platform p-machine pro before the tech-no-mad blog was initiated)

apologies for the lack. you have no-doubt noticed the dearth of entries here. no travel, no entries, no kangaroos. all energy goes into the tech-no-mad blog at this point in support of the doctoral research. you may tune in there for tidbits and fragments sampled from the wide range of inputs sliced through. here will remain dormant for a time, methinks. besides that, reflecting back on prior situations also dominated by remoteness. how there is no solution in distance. face-to-face has to ensue. sooner than later. (b)logging miles to return home where ever that place (of heart) might be. or not. e.e.cummings comes to mind, or so, while the Western Slope recedes from same. but without stretching abilities, formative pathways, expressive outputs, little will come. the ecology of words is not sustainable. whilst closing in on 2 million hits to this project (since 2004), gawd knows the total since inception in 1994!

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The Science of Disorder

I’ll retroactively begin to add bibliographic resource links with short reviews or notes on books that come to my attention. This one arrived via the usual intentional browsing. It represents several that begin to connect the dots between thermodynamics, techno-social systems, and the affect of human presence on the planet. It suggests that the movement away from a scientific approach to a technological approach is critical to the loss of our way to understanding the messy phenomena of human intervention in our world. Technological subjects are often taught without any grounding in philosophic principles of any sort. My own education at the School of Mines required only four three-credit-hour courses of (very general and poorly taught!) humanities for the entire undergraduate degree in geophysical engineering. And those courses in no way influenced the approach or the execution of any of the hard-core engineering courses. Instead they were frequently the object of derision as juxtaposed to the tough and demanding engineering classes — an implicit gendered polarity — wussy classes versus the rough and tough get-your-hands-dirty and only-the-toughest-survive macho applied-engineering classes. Things have changed somewhat in many engineering curricula (as evidenced by the fact that I do rather often have engineering students in my seminars and workshops), but there is the overt assumption that technology is above the messy fray of soft human affairs to which it brings only ordered progress, material wealth, and sustainable harmony. The former two are evidenced when examining closed (and limited) systems, the latter, nothing could be further from the truth.

Well-researched with both scientific and popular/media references, The Science of Disorder is readable, explicit, and provocative. (I’ll be expanding these reviews as I can manage: there is a huge backlog of rolling all previous bibliographic references to this style.)

The Science of Disorder: Understanding the Complexity, Uncertainty, and Pollution in Our World, Hokikian, J., Los Feliz Publishing, Los Angeles, 2002.
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On The Poetics of Protocol

How to transcend the rigidity of extant and defined protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is an emetic for it; or at least poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol. Or simply turning away to create a new protocol. But this threatens social viability. This is a critical issue as protocol underlies all techno-social deployments. All. And the affect of protocol, its genesis, its makers, its purview, all contribute to the formation of a (dominant) worldview that it imposes a(n arbitrary) frame of reference upon the participant in the particular techno-social system. On the other hand, life without protocols: an impossible situation for social animals (or any animal, for that matter — a protocol may be thought of as a way of going, whether self-directed or directed by innate sense and following the line of maximized entropy production).

This conundrum applies to all (socially) evolved protocols, no matter the genesis. It means that this pervades and saturates, all experiences of being (except perhaps for the pre-human, or over-human). On The Poetics of Protocol, a working title moving towards a core thematic. Using the metaphor of a sliding scale, at one end, chaotic ways of going, at the other, completely prescribed ways of going, life falls somewhere in between.

Having to jump between several points-of-view — the tremendous volume of applicable writing on the range of subjects; a strong, principled, and unifying overview tied to idiosyncratic personal experiences; and, finally, the mental focus required to tie all this jetsam together — the jump has to be transformed into a creatively complied micro-narrative. But looking around at the plethora of source materials is always discouraging — in form and content. The inability to structure my own content into a form consistent with the material that I consume is disturbing, though idiosyncratic expression is one of the goals for PhD research. (Inconsistency has potential to uncover innovative spaces and may be used as a strategic tool or approach.) So this can be viewed as a strategic advantage in the creative interpretation and packaging of the material. Content-wise, I am confident of the presence of something to say, as well as a subsequent pathway-of-action reflecting what is said. Daunting task none-the-less, from any vantage.

Seeing from more than one point-of-view requires motion or at least movement between points of stasis. Does the establishment of a point-of-view require a cessation of movement? (Motion of course is completely relative regarding point-of-view: life is never static so point-of-view never absolutely static.)

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  • place: The Pentagon and McLean, Virginia

Tuesday, 15 December, 1959

Class on FORTRAN.

More discussion with PSB re: organization. Looks like we will have three teams, with either Bill W. or myself as ass’t. to PSB. RHJ seems to lean to recognizing Electronics as a discipline. PSB finally saw RHJ & firmed up the group to have four teams: Airports, Electronics, ATC Systems Research, and Airspace.

Went to organization mtg. of the McLean swimming & Tennis Association. Was elected a director. The group decided to let the directors function under the new bylaws, for a period of six months, with suggestions for changes to come in in 30 days.

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  • place: The Pentagon and McLean, Virginia

Monday, 14 December, 1959

Spent most of day in a class on FORTRAN conducted by IBM.

Listened to the Director [of the Division of Research and Development of the FAA], Mr. Anast, discuss what he wants the new research Division to do. After two weeks discussion with General Cooper [Head of Office of Plans and Requirements], he wants Operations Research & Technical Research carried out in the Research Division. He isn’t quite sure what OR is, but thinks it should be done in the Research Division, looking at the actualities of the next ten years.

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devoir: a re-naming

Further, deeper, wider, (more iconoclastic), what is research? Merely to search again? The broadening of a socially-sanctioned knowledge-base? A connecting-of-threads to historic tradition? A discovery of what’s been before? A following of a pre-existing trajectory (but with more fuel for a higher, further flight)? What about re-sensing instead of re-searching? Immersing senses in a situation again (related to German entgegen ‘opposite’). Sensually immersive: sensing difference again (from another situation), and reflecting on that. Or, better yet, riding the gradient of that difference, and using that potential, that power, that source, to express from.

Re-search — to circle again, more intensively — but to remain detached. Neither academic detachment nor technological objectivity are the way that is needed now. We need immersive, connected, aware, and sensual be-ing. In order to apprehend what the world needs of us. An empathetic engagement with all expressions of life-energy. more “devoir: a re-naming”

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dipping into Ellul

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.
more “dipping into Ellul”

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Into The Cool

The Second Law of Thermodynamics, a foundation of Western science, circumscribes the role of energy and order in the observed behaviors of the cosmos. (It’s not just a recommendation, it’s The Law!) Into the Cool is an elegant and well-researched book that makes the linkage between this law and the fundamentals of life as a dynamic energy re-organizing process. I was frequently using the image of concentration and rarefaction in my exploration of energy-as-driving metaphor for the cosmos at all scales. This is a classic error — mistaking the stasis of Yin and Yang for the actuality that those ‘conditions’ were merely perihelion points in a dynamic process symbolized by the taijitu. Rarefaction and concentration are dynamic and reciprocal conditions in a non-equilibrium thermodynamic system at all times and at all scales — a sustained condition that can only be ‘resolved’ by the application of a theoretical limit on the system which makes it a closed and tending-to-equilibrium system. With the reciprocal maxim Nature abhors a gradient, the authors frame the issues surrounding energy and life. That is, observing the cosmos at all scales, it is noted that entropy, or the gradual descent into complete isotropic ‘disorder’ is a tendency — at the same time there is a tendency for ordering driven by gravity (and the rest of the fundamental interactions of physics). Defining life, and consequently, defining the role of life in this dynamic interplay of processes is essentially the same goal. Life could perhaps be defined by that which causes anisotropy to develop in the cosmos. Certainly anisotropy is a necessary condition for life — necessary but perhaps not sufficient — although sufficiency, well, the existence of anisotropy at all scales plays a crucial role in life — without it the universe would be exhibit no difference and would thus not be comprehensible nor could anything happen.

The continuously-variable energy fabric upon which all is drawn in may not logically be sufficient, but in the poetic schema of be-ing and presence, I would say that it was sufficient.

Into the Cool: Energy Flow Thermodynamics and Life, Schneider, Eric D. and Dorion Sagan, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2005.

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elevator pitch

Establish (via dancing around) the fundamentals of the cosmos; establish (by chanting a framework for apprehending those fundamentals) what individual presence seems to be; establish (by tracing lived experience) what the dynamic of interactions of human engagement are; situate (humanely) those encounters in the wider social system (or continuum of relation); examine the impact/role of technology on/in all of this; frame a creative praxis that might transcend the limits of those impacts while taking into account an energized world view, and, indeed, lessen those impacts in a sustainable way; open an empowered pathway to decode what is happening along this moment in history. These are the primary goals of the work.

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inconsistency

The language is based on joining and dis-joining, you see. That is, it’s a perfectly good language if we could use it properly. It has to be used as an artistic form and not as a rigid tool which is supposed to reflect reality exactly — reflect what is exactly. It’s like the notes in music. They look quite separate, but when they’re played, they’re not separate. — David Bohm, dialogue with E.Nada

A necessary feature of the thesis project is inconsistency. For it to be a rich learning experience, it should be variable or stochastic. How to achieve a creative inconsistency, then? Where changing perspectives and voices and models and worn pathways exists in profusion that is at the same time, not overwhelming. A sequence of statements (each a consistent sound-bite), with threads of difference demarcating their extent, applicability, and style.

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The Military

(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)

The second example — though it is a much more complex combination of pathways in its geo-political and material deployments and in its interaction with the overall continuum of relation — is foundational to the TSS (techno-social system) and is also a prototypical expression of amplification. It is even more a prototype than radio. Radio is merely one sub-system of what is ultimately a military organization.

A military system incorporates all the requisite patterns of an amplification system: input signal (the human population and other concentrated energy sources available to the TSS); amplification process (provisioning and equipping of the select grouping of people through the collective life-energies of the greater population of the TSS); the feedback system (communications, command, and control systems); and the output signal (the expression of amplified (and directed) energy flow as a campaign to secure the viability of the TSS either by offense or defense).
more “The Military”

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education and standardization

Eduard Freudmann writes on the nettime list:

The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of European Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen university’s economic position and increase their research-dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

sotto voce: Standardization is inexorable as long as the Techno-social system has the energy input to expend on maintaining and propagating ordered sub-systems.

That energy input is, at base, the attention paid to it by the individuals who populate its institutional sub-systems.

When the Techno-social system runs out of energy input, it will gradually gain in disorder and degrees of autonomous freedom.

Learning takes place everywhere all the time. It is a mistake that you expect a state institution, an integral part of the Techno-social system to be a free and open system. It’s best to pay it NO attention and instead take your education fully into your own hands. Take your attention and give it fully to your peers, and you will learn everything you need to know. And at the same time, you will see the Techno-social system weaken as it loses your energy/attention input…

Leaning on/into the State in opposition only strengthens the reified/reifying bulwarks of State.

Walk away on a new self-determinate path and the State falls flat, a crumbled edifice of artifice.

Liquidity and Flow (rather than Solidarity) from Sydney, where the #2 source of GNP to Australia is Corporate/International Education — it’s right behind #1 which is the Extractives/Mining Industries.

Not much difference between the two, somehow. One extracts concentrated energy from the earth, the other extracts concentrated energy from the attention and lives of young people.

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Proxemics

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that is, the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements, rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, as they do govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language-as-protocol. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-processes of one’s self. This particular energy ‘form’ arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body that allows for that particular expression: the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth, and so on. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ from the Self to the Other, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time), a protocol on the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation: when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

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  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

more Buber

Human dialogue, therefore, although it has its distinctive life in the sign, that is in sound and gesture (the letters of language have their place in this only in special instances, as when, between friends in a meeting, notes describing the atmosphere skim back and forth across the table), can exist without the sign, but admittedly not in an objectively comprehensible form. On the other hand an element of communication, however inward, seems to belong to its essence. But in its highest moments dialogue reaches out even beyond these boundaries. It is completed outside contents, even the most personal, which are or can be communicated. Moreover it is completed not in some ‘mystical’ event, but in one that is in the precise sense factual, thoroughly dovetailed into the common human world and the concrete time-sequence. more “more Buber”

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trauma

Yes, there was an event; yes, an event began, barely, when she began to say something. But this event did not come to fruition, for nothing, nothing really, happened — except a sudden defamiliarization of my world, an unforeseen estrangement brought about by the least violent of all acts — the mere emitting of sounds — that topple the sense-structure of my world. After she breached my silent existence, silence returned, devouring both of us again by expropriating my ability to respond. So nothing, nothing really, happened. But this nothing, compared to “idle chatter” and the “forgetfulness” of an ordinary conversation, was much more dramatic. It produced in me an effect like no other. Considering what happened, or rather, what failed to take place, I must confess that I was profoundly affected by it. In fact, I am still living that event through the unique nothingness brought home to me by the incident, suffering from it, agonizing over it as an event that keeps returning as a non-event. In any case, the undeniable fact is that there was an event, there took place a situation that, although nothing, nothing really happened in it, is still happening now. It was like a traumatic “primal scene,” forever gone but constantly coming back. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p 224)

Reflecting on the abstracted essence of the gap between the self and the other: it suggests the reality that we cannot share the same point of view. There exists an infinitely deep irruption, separation, or gap, between the Self and the Other. This is defined partly by the presence of the energized matter that makes up our bodies and by the fact that this particular embodied form of matter cannot be collocated or commingled with another body. There is the warm and wet topology of sensual engagement, but this is not collocation, though some would like to believe that it is. The Self will never share the same point-of-view as the Other. My eyes cannot be collocated with yours. I may exchange places with you, but when all is change along the arrow of time, what you experienced there and then, I cannot experience there and now. The interstitial chasm exists within constant change and flow and it exists as long as life is embodied. Some models of transcendence suggest a unification, an omniscient one-ness, after embodiment ends, but here and now we all face the challenge of hypostasis, that puzzling duality of existing in a transitory body now and yet connected with an apparently detachable spirit before and after.

Communication cannot not take place. — ibid, p. 227

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hydrogen economies

Economic efficiency is not correlated to the material efficiency within a limited system. (as example, the Icelandic Hydrogen Economy scam — where the production of the consumed goods necessary for running the infrastructure is remote: off the island and not at all within local system. None of the materials in the infrastructure are available locally on the island, none, except for the human consumers and the human bodies for local construction labor. That simple fact takes economic advantage of cheaper remote industrial labor, ecological damage, etc, and removes those factors from the costing of the local system. Local politico-economic policies are calculated and framed without considering the material re-sourcing.) This approach could be the biggest factor driving the lack of material efficiency of the global system where the feedback mechanisms are more localized and limited and driven by abstracted profit frameworks (which are locally influenced by taxation/government, shareholders, boards, consumers). And very often there is a complete ignorance of the physical reality of the (remote) resource extractives industries which prop up the whole system. If one travels to the location where large-scale (and generally un-sustainable) resource extraction is occurring, it is inevitable that there are social and environmental issues, it’s just a matter of whether they are discoverable under present knowledge-bases, or whether they are recognized by contemporaneous social milieus. Life is a transitory phenomena at all scales. When available energy sources (concentrations of matter) are exhausted, life cannot proceed.

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

(in) no time

Willie Wagtails (Rhipidura leucophrys), Minors (Manorina melanocephala) …

that entry stopped there. no time to observe and note things when constantly consuming texts and coping with the daily movements. it is highly inefficient to commute for this kind of work. research is 90% online, and moving between home and the office sucks up at least 1.5 hours a day. strange that it is able to absorb so much time when it’s just a short distance away. walking takes about 40 minutes each way, though, and waiting for the bus and the slow crawl down George Street is tedious. I find that the mind-space that I take on when in that mode is very unproductive and deadening. I observe, while hearing is constantly assaulted, occasionally some energizing encounters, but the locally dominant Asian sense of personal space I find deeply conflicting with my own. and the reflexive sensory protocols I developed through the time in the desert and mountains has been thoroughly destroyed — no stars to see, not even planets, and it is only in the 16th-floor office that its really possible to watch the weather develop albeit through heavy windows that cannot be opened and are filthy on the exterior (I cleaned the large inside pane of the window immediately over my desk, much to the amusement of several of the other grad students). optical clarity — if I’m forced to look at the world through a glass filter, it’s got to be clean!
more “(in) no time”

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Cultural Systems

A few minor references to energy and socio-cultural systems.

In order to evolve, a biological or a cultural system must obtain energy in increasing quantities from the external world. In the process of evolving, these systems move in a direction opposite to that of the cosmos as a whole as specified by the Second Law of Thermodynamics: i.e., they move toward greater concentrations of energy and increasing structural complexity. — Leslie White

The concept of cultural systems: a key to understanding tribes and nations, White, Leslie, Medium Aevum monographs, Columbia University Press, New York, 1975.

This view is simple, but outlines the fundamental situation. Research in thermodynamics (Prigogine, etc) has looked at the actual counter-intuitive problem of living systems countering general thermodynamic principles. It may come back to the mystical views of Simone Weil:

Two forces rule the universe, light and gravity. — Simone Weil

With gravity driving the coalescing of matter, the concentration of energy, or fluctuating densities (or simply fluctuation) of the cosmos. The anisotropic distribution of matter in the universe is not an insignificant evolving or existing condition. And Light, well, what may or may not be said about Light?

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Theorizing Communication

Hunting in the communications area of social research, doing a basic review of various theories of communications to focus in on what might be a useful jumping-off point. I’ll need one that is anchored, but also with some degrees of freedom to map the important new characteristics of my broader definition of dialogue. Craig and Muller’s survey of the field of communication theories (seven by their count) is a helpful text, allowing me to zoom into the phenomenological area of inquiry (anchored by Buber and people influenced by his committed I-Thou dialogical approach). More on that shortly. I’ve got 15 books out from the library already, and have made more than 200 entries in Zotero… yikes, how to cope with all that material! Still generating a internal process methodology that brings at least some impression of progress on a daily basis.

Theorizing Communication: Readings Across Traditions, Craig, Robert T. (Editor), Muller, Heidi L. (Editor), Sage Publications, Inc; 1st edition (April 5, 2007) ISBN-10 1412952379

It’s a pity that I didn’t previously know this book and that the editors were at CU-Boulder in the Communications Department. That would have been a nice coincidence, and perhaps if I get up there sometime in the long-term, I’ll drop them a line.

The most daunting challenge is the difficulty of mind-mapping all the disparate sources. I’m thinking a big wall with sticky notes might be good, and translate that over to hyper-linking within this WordPress armature. The sticky-notes technique has served me well in workshops situations. Howard has been using Adam Somlai-Fisher’s prezi mind-map software (think Minority Report data-space interface), but I find it too clunky. In theory that would be an excellent way to map and interface with the substantial data-cloud that will eventually accrete. But on this old G4 PB running Firefox, the Java scripting seems to dog the whole machine, consuming the CPU and rendering the machine worth-less. One would be better off with a huge wall-sized touch-screen to play with. So, sticky-notes are fine.

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technological affectation

If film can do this:

Film serves to train human beings in the practice of those apperceptions and reactions required by the frequentation of an apparatus whose role in their daily life ever increases. To make this whole enormous technological apparatus of our time into the object of human interiorization and appropriation [innervation] — that is the historic task in whose service film has its true meaning. — Walter Benjamin

Then is there any reason to doubt a connection between the declining power and influence of the (technocratic mediocracy of the) United States and the implementation of the Internet as-it-is today? Is there any connection between the tendencies of its population to spend their (limited) life-time in tele-communication (and tele-consumption!) and the demise of civil society? People seemingly now avoid confronting the (unknown) Other and rather cluster as mirrored-Selves, with a cumulative effect of breakdown of a (diverse) cultural fabric into a checker-board of self-interest groupings which spend time defending the borders of their squares from the surrounding Evil unknown.

this conclusion proposed in the sense that if film can have that profundity of affectation on human nervous systems (the primary interface with the world-as-mediated-by-body; or the primary EM antenna-structures), then what of all the wide press of technological development seeping into all parts and orifices of perception and reaction?

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

keywording, filing

such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space. listing everything or nothing or SIPs (Statistically Improbable Phrases). maybe the SIPs would be the best phenomena, as it is a tangible mapping of non-standard word usage … mapping out new conceptual spaces. kind of like those emails from a few years back, spewed out by random text generators (or a thousand drunken monkeys reading the confetti of paper-shredded copies of Naked Lunch and pausing at spontaneously proscribed intervals to jot notes on where precisely those confetti-signs sent their proto-humanoid minds.

Ich bin mit meinem Dasein zufrieden(?)

oder

Every man’s work, whether it be literature or music or pictures or architecture or anything else, is always a portrait of himself. — Samuel Butler

heavy shuffling through the digital archive and web links to assemble something meaningful via zotero. heavy work, reading reading reading. some semi-classics to remind, and enjoy the luxury of reading to gain or revivify knowledge. Kittler, Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter; Latour, Reassembling the Social; Vygotsky, Thought and Language; McLuhan, Understanding Media, along with reviewing the already substantial library/bibliography assembled on my hard drive from the last 20 years of info-filtering in the media-sphere. dragging copies of all that into Zotero, slowly, along with hundreds of bookmarked sources, and then the keywording begins, starting the cycle. plenty of SIPs there.

such a massive issue in a trans-disciplinary space, etc…

Zotero, an open-source project, by-the-way, a victor today when a Circuit Court judge throws out a law-suit coming from Thomson-Reuters, makers of EndNote, the monopoly research/thesis writing/citation tool out there in academia.

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  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

silent selection

Buber’s story illustrating that Silence is communication opens a certain mediatory path. Especially that of listening, a critical reciprocal of expression: the act of open impression. A kind of inversion, equivalent with Simon Weil’s framing of human obligations versus the traditional (and often violent) struggle for human rights. This inversion also maps into the qualities of presence and absence implicit in the mediated technological space. Where scripted and centered Silence is necessary for balanced expression. (Both the silence of meditation and the silence of listening).

Kittler, in Grammaphone, Film, Typewriter: plowing through his expansive, eclectic interwoven threads examining the development of technology and the ensuing affectations on social systems, on people. I perhaps haven’t given him credit previously that he deserves, although I always found his presentations to be too dense to follow (simultaneous translation probably didn’t help — native speakers surely had to focus to follow his thinking). And this book didn’t come out in English until 1999, so wasn’t available when I was crossing his path. He makes clear points on the connection between technological development and war, the contingencies of warfare which don’t merely draw technological systems into a problem-solving process, but actually arise purely out of the need to more effectively, efficiently kill the Other. Optimization of defense, primacy of offense, protection of home-lands, via reducing the potential for the Other to accomplish the same. Natural selection. Is this what drives the techno-social system?

Kittler holds a fascination for these mechanisms, a boyish focus on the tool and on the technological ground of war without once making any moral approbation or moral critique of the way it goes. Has he given up? Does he care? Is he a techno-determinist? Does the intellectual fascination not accept moral argument? Or is the disinterested contemporary academic not allowed to take a moral stance?

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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: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

to be mindful of modalities

exploring modalities of communication. of connection, of be-ing. Kittler shows up on the radar immediately (hmmm, recalling that extremely uncomfortable evening with him in that bar in Linz before the Intertwinedness happening. he needed the table to circulate around him. and it did because of the language (protocol) gap. I was not fluent in German enough to access the discussion that inevitably circulated, hovered, around him. strange situation. instead I talked with his assistant (and translator whose name I have now forgotten), a young American who came to worship Kittler in Berlin for a time. I left early as I had to catch a train to Copenhagen early the next morning.)

how to bind energy in to the text [as the particular creative output]. to be released in TIME. to the proper receiver.

that from an earlier travelogue entry. it clearly has been on mind for a long time. actually the transition from print-making to performance/happening was a mapping of that need. finding that the silver print was just too rigid a platform when compared to presence. although the print is, as with anything, in retrospect, a resonance of presence and be-ing as is any trace left in the wake of life.
more “to be mindful of modalities”

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

bzzzzzzz

a week into August already. more than two weeks in Oz, a number to go. haven’t made any images at all except the occasional telephone lo-rez abstraction. so that goes. this may be the way the travelog goes in the next months. as there are so many other things to get done now. teaching heavily underway, research cranking up, and networking. as well. essential life starts to make its way forward.

plenty of sound recording though. on aporee maps. and a few photos from around the house.

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  • place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

out and about

as is the norm, living someplace, I don’t make many images, that and the backlog into June hanging overhead, and getting on with research instead of data juggling. so, one image from Marrickville in the two weeks I was there. on a short evening wander up the Cooks River.

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

quick observations

tea and concrete in the morning and off for a full day of meetings and paperwork, prepping for teaching and research.

a visit to the library is disappointing, many books are in terrible condition, shabby, out-dated. hmmmm. what’s with that? evidence of zealous and active use? or small library budgets. in the technology section, so many were completely outdated and should have been consigned to basement stacks long ago.

profiling. black clad, stylishly-coiffed young Asian students with thick-rimmed Dior specs dominate the downtown city streets that I’ve frequented so far. haven’t gotten to the regular business district and will likely not unless there is a compelling reason.

bureaucracy. and catch-22’s loom out of the composition of days spent meeting people. technological infrastructure is problematic as well. regular network access simply does not work, and the help desk could not help. yet I can access a new WPA network constructed for iPhones and such.

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  • place: Marrickville, NSW, Australia

pseudo-settled

grounded. arrive at Devleena’s flat in Marrickville, John is there to meet me. a bit of communication gap with them and it turns out I have the studio only for two weeks, after that it’s been promised to a Kiwi researcher. so, got to put the word back out to the network for another place to live. drat. this place, where Sophea also stayed, would have worked out well aside from the fact that the internet WPA connection isn’t functioning properly (yet), it won’t accept my login, sh… I’ll email her in Delhi to see what the score is.

got a bank account set up with Paul at the ANZ Marrickville branch, went grocery shopping, and hung out in a caf for an espresso and wifi.

palm and eucalyptus trees out the window that overlooks the Cook River (more like a tidal draw) above Botany Bay. it’s warm even for Sydney winter stats, +20C today. sweaty. chilly at night. very much like Santa Monica in the winter. as I thought it would be. air is clear, stars are unknown. winter sun is in the north, in Arizona among other places. clouds and breeze from indeterminate quarters. drifting through. the sounds of the city are not unfamiliar, but are … elusive.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Reindeer on the Road

mikropaliskunta is back again! An expedition collects artists to explore the nationality of a tourist in Canary Islands 03-10.march.2009 The travel can be followed in real-time at renewed website https://www.mikropaliskunta.net

mikroPaliskunta is a series of interdisciplinary expeditions exploring contemporary imagined nation called Finland and its eco-social changes in a sustainable way. mikroPaliskunta has already made two expeditions: across Finland from north to south by a biodiesel car with a stuffed reindeer in 2006 and around Berlin by bicycles in Germany in 2007. This spring, the group starts a series of expeditions themed The Finnish on Holiday. The first expedition in the hell triangle of tourism is made to Canary Islands – the ever-popular holiday destination and a border shore for African refugees risking their lives to enter European Union. Following two expeditions head to entertain centers in Vantaa and Lapland in Finland The Finnish culture is moved to warm climate in Canary Islands. How does tourism intensify presented national identity in tourists themselves and in local people? Also, the affects of mass tourism from perspective of economic depression and ecological awareness is an interesting subject matter, explains media artist and member of the expedition Mari Keski-Korsu. mikroPaliskunta website is renewed for the Canary Islands expedition. As with the earlier expeditions, also this expedition can be tracked almost in real-time. The artists of the expedition work with their own individual themes producing articles, photographs, videos, maps and a series of performances about coffee drinking as a social phenomenon. All the materials about this and the past expeditions are exhibited at the website. Members of the expedition include media artists Mari Keski-Korsu and Mika Meskanen, photographer Eija Mäkivuoti, author and scriptwriter Taina West. Researcher of sustainable consumption and production Satu Lähteenoja is a special guest of the expedition. mikroPaliskunta is supported by Arts Council of Finland and Finnish Cultural Fund.

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social networking crit

Fuchs, Christian. 2009. Social Networking Sites and the Surveillance
Society. A Critical Case Study of the Usage of studiVZ, Facebook, and
MySpace by Students in Salzburg in the Context of Electronic
Surveillance. Salzburg/Vienna: Research Group UTI. ISBN 978-3-200-01428-2.

Study: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_Surveillance_Fuchs.pdf

Background Information: https://fuchs.icts.sbg.ac.at/SNS_E.html

The study recommends that citizens see commercial Internet platforms that store and evaluate personal data generally critically and that by establishing special consumer protection websites it could be documented in the public, which rights in dealing with personal data such platforms obtain by their terms of use and their privacy terms. Christian Fuchs: “There are many examples for how affected citizens try surveilling the surveillors with the help of websites. This can pose a certain degree of protection by making use of public information, but also has limits because the basic problem is that we live in times, in which on the one hand there are strong commercial interests in data collection and data evaluation and on the other hand after 9/11 continuously more political steps have been taken for creating surveillance societies. These are political-economic problems, not technological ones.”

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unusually large

John passes this one along, charting yet another step in the march of the Military-Industrial machine that began during WWII. and with the Christian Right quite comfortable with the prognostications of their arm-chair prophets about the impending Armageddon in the Middle East, no problem, Amurika will get the job DONE! along with lots of warm and fuzzies…

Martin MGM-1 Matador :: General Dynamics (Convair) RIM-2 Terrier :: Western Electric MIM-3 Nike Ajax :: Hughes AIM-4 Falcon :: JPL/Firestone MGM-5 Corporal :: Vought RGM-6 Regulus :: Raytheon AIM/RIM-7 Sparrow :: Bendix RIM-8 Talos :: Raytheon (Philco/G.E.) AIM-9 Sidewinder :: Boeing CIM-10 Bomarc :: Chrysler PGM-11 Redstone :: Martin AGM-12 Bullpup :: Martin MGM/CGM-13 Mace :: Western Electric MIM-14 Nike Hercules :: Vought RGM-15 Regulus II :: General Dynamics (Convair) CGM/HGM-16 Atlas :: Douglas PGM-17 Thor :: Martin MGM-18 Lacrosse :: Chrysler PGM-19 Jupiter :: McDonnell ADM-20 Quail :: Nord MGM-21 :: Aérospatiale (Nord) AGM-22 :: Raytheon MIM-23 Hawk :: General Dynamics (Convair) RIM-24 Tartar :: Martin HGM/LGM-25 Titan :: Hughes AIM-26 Falcon :: Lockheed UGM-27 Polaris :: North American AGM-28 Hound Dog :: JPL/Sperry MGM-29 Sergeant :: Boeing LGM-30 Minuteman :: Martin Marietta MGM-31 Pershing :: Aérospatiale (Nord) MGM-32 Entac :: Northrop (Radioplane) MQM-33 :: Teledyne Ryan AQM/BQM/MQM/BGM-34 Firebee :: Northrop (Radioplane) AQM-35 :: Northrop (Radioplane) MQM-36 Shelduck :: Beech AQM-37 :: Northrop (Radioplane) AQM-38 :: Beech MQM-39 :: Globe MQM-40 Firefly :: Fairchild AQM-41 Petrel :: North American MQM-42 Redhead/Roadrunner :: General Dynamics FIM-43 Redeye :: Goodyear UUM-44 Subroc :: Texas Instruments AGM-45 Shrike :: General Dynamics MIM-46 Mauler :: Hughes AIM-47 Falcon :: Douglas AGM-48 Skybolt :: Western Electric/McDonnell Douglas LIM-49 Nike Zeus/Spartan :: Bendix RIM-50 Typhon LR :: Ford MGM-51 Shillelagh :: LTV MGM-52 Lance :: Rockwell AGM-53 Condor :: Raytheon (Hughes) AIM-54 Phoenix :: Bendix RIM-55 Typhon MR :: Nord/Bell PQM-56 :: Northrop (Radioplane) MQM-57 Falconer :: Aerojet General MQM-58 Overseer :: APL RGM-59 Taurus :: Lockheed AQM-60 Kingfisher :: Beech MQM-61 Cardinal :: Martin Marietta AGM-62 Walleye :: AGM-63 :: Rockwell (North American) AGM-64 Hornet :: Raytheon (Hughes) AGM-65 Maverick :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) RIM-66 Standard MR :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) RIM-67 Standard ER :: Air Force Weapons Lab AIM-68 Big Q :: Boeing AGM-69 SRAM :: Boeing LEM-70 Minuteman ERCS :: Raytheon (Hughes) BGM-71 TOW :: Ford MIM-72 Chaparral :: Lockheed UGM-73 Poseidon :: Northrop MQM/BQM-74 Chukar :: BGM-75 AICBM :: Hughes AGM-76 Falcon :: McDonnell Douglas FGM-77 Dragon :: General Dynamics AGM-78 Standard ARM :: Martin Marietta AGM-79 Blue Eye :: Chrysler AGM-80 Viper :: Teledyne Ryan AQM-81 Firebolt :: AIM-82 :: Texas Instruments AGM-83 Bulldog :: Boeing (McDonnell Douglas) AGM/RGM/UGM-84 Harpoon :: RIM-85 :: Boeing AGM-86 ALCM :: General Electric AGM-87 Focus :: Raytheon (Texas Instruments) AGM-88 HARM :: UGM-89 Perseus / STAM :: BQM-90 :: Teledyne Ryan AQM-91 Firefly :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) FIM-92 Stinger :: E-Systems GQM-93 :: Boeing GQM-94 B-Gull :: Hughes AIM-95 Agile :: Lockheed UGM-96 Trident I :: General Dynamics AIM-97 Seekbat :: Teledyne Ryan GQM-98 R-Tern :: LIM-99 :: LIM-100 :: RIM-101 :: General Dynamics/Sperry PQM-102 Delta Dagger :: Teledyne Ryan AQM-103 :: Raytheon MIM-104 Patriot :: Lockheed MQM-105 Aquila :: USAF FDL BQM-106 Teleplane :: Raytheon (Beech) MQM-107 Streaker :: NWC BQM-108 :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) BGM/RGM/UGM-109 Tomahawk :: LTV BGM-110 :: Teledyne Ryan BQM-111 Firebrand :: Rockwell AGM-112 :: RIM-113 :: Boeing/Lockheed Martin (Rockwell/Martin Marietta) AGM-114 Hellfire :: Euromissile/Hughes/Boeing MIM-115 Roland :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) RIM-116 RAM :: RS Systems FQM-117 RCMAT :: Martin Marietta LGM-118 Peacekeeper :: Kongsberg AGM-119 Penguin :: Raytheon (Hughes) AIM-120 AMRAAM :: Boeing CQM/CGM-121 Pave Tiger/Seek Spinner :: Motorola AGM-122 Sidearm :: Emerson Electric AGM-123 Skipper II :: Hughes AGM-124 Wasp :: Boeing RUM/UUM-125 Sea Lance :: Beech BQM-126 :: Martin Marietta AQM-127 SLAT :: AQM-128 :: Raytheon (General Dynamics) AGM-129 ACM :: Boeing (Rockwell) AGM-130 :: Boeing AGM-131 SRAM II :: MBDA (BAe Dynamics/Matra) AIM-132 ASRAAM :: Lockheed Martin UGM-133 Trident II :: Martin Marietta MGM-134 Midgetman :: Vought ASM-135 ASAT :: Northrop AGM/BGM-136 Tacit Rainbow :: Northrop AGM/MGM-137 TSSAM :: Boeing CEM-138 Pave Cricket :: Lockheed Martin (Loral) RUM-139 VL-Asroc :: Lockheed Martin (LTV) MGM-140 ATACMS :: IMI (Brunswick) ADM-141 TALD :: Rafael/Lockheed Martin AGM-142 Have Nap :: Continental RPVs MQM-143 RPVT :: ADM-144 :: Teledyne Ryan BQM-145 Peregrine :: Oerlikon/Lockheed Martin MIM-146 ADATS :: BAI Aerosystems BQM-147 Exdrone :: Raytheon/Lockheed Martin FGM-148 Javelin :: PQM-149 UAV-SR / McDonnell Douglas Sky Owl :: PQM-150 UAV-SR :: AeroVironment FQM-151 Pointer :: AIM-152 AAAM :: AGM-153 :: Raytheon (Texas Instruments) AGM-154 JSOW :: Northrop Grumman (TRW/IAI) BQM-155 Hunter :: Raytheon RIM-156 Standard SM-2ER Block IV :: Raytheon MGM-157 EFOGM :: Lockheed Martin AGM-158 JASSM :: Boeing (McDonnell Douglas) AGM-159 JASSM :: Northrop Grumman (Teledyne Ryan) ADM-160 MALD :: Raytheon RIM-161 Standard SM-3 :: Raytheon RIM-162 ESSM :: Orbital Sciences GQM-163 Coyote :: Lockheed Martin MGM-164 ATACMS II :: Raytheon RGM-165 LASM :: Lockheed Martin MGM-166 LOSAT/KEM :: Composite Engineering BQM-167 Skeeter :: Lockheed Martin MGM-168 ATACMS Block IVA :: Lockheed Martin AGM-169 JCM :: Griffon Aerospace MQM-170 Outlaw :: Griffon Aerospace MQM-171 Broadsword :: Lockheed Martin FGM-172 SRAW :: Alliant Techsystems GQM-173 MSST :: Raytheon RIM-174 ERAM (SM-6) :: :: Douglas MGR-1 Honest John :: Douglas AIR-2 Genie :: Emerson Electric MGR-3 Little John :: NOTS RUR-4 Weapon Alpha :: Honeywell RUR-5 Asroc :: Ford MER-6 Blue Scout ERCS :: Raytheon ADR-7 :: Revere (Tracor) ADR-8 :: Tracor ADR-9 :: Raytheon ADR-10 :: ADR-11 :: ADR-12 :: USAMICOM MQR-13 BMTS :: Martin Marietta AGR-14 ZAP :: USAMICOM MTR-15 BATS :: Atlantic Research MQR-16 Gunrunner :: General Dynamics FGR-17 Viper :: NWC GTR-18 Smokey Sam :: :: JPL PWN-1 Loki-Dart :: Aerojet General PWN-2 Aerobee-Hi :: University of Michigan/NACA PWN-3 Nike-Cajun :: University of Michigan PWN-4 Exos :: Cooper Development PWN-5 Rocksonde 200 :: Atlantic Research PWN-6 Kitty :: Atlantic Research PWN-7 Rooster :: Space Data PWN-8 Loki Datasonde :: Aerojet/UTC PWN-9 Kangaroo :: Space Data PWN-10 Super Loki Datasonde :: Space Data PWN-11 Super Loki Datasonde :: Space Data PWN-12 Super Loki ROBIN

posted

thesis proposal :: Basics

Title

Sonic Presence Within The Networked Regime of Amplification

This research explores the relationship of (sonic)energy to social be-ing, technology, and the consequent possibilities for creative action.

Subject

Sound is energy, sound carries energy. Sonic energy is a product and a by-product of life. It forms one expression of organismic presence. It is one particular energized expression of our band-limited life that developed its particular characteristics through evolutionary processes. These processes are essentially structured around variations in the (spatial and temporal) concentrations and availabilities of energy. As one such expression, sound is employed as one means through which humans enhance their survivability. Amplification represents a particular model for what is essentially a life-process that operates on various energy flows, modulating their basic characteristics. How human collectives generate and interact with sonic energy governs a wide swath of their consequent techno-social interactions. This research is a distributed exploration of sound as a carrier of energy between the Self and the Other — as it is mediated through the globe-spanning network of techno-social amplification systems. Specifically, it will be a critical exploration of our contemporary techno-social terrain through the application of this model in a variety of creatively energized situations.

Outcomes

Formally, outcomes will include the dissertation, live/online performances, workshops, a blog, festival participation, and conference presentations. Through developing an energy-based model that amplification provides an armature for, it is my hope that this research will generate a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamic affects of technological systems on creative human engagement at all scales. This knowledge will be applied to facilitate actual situations for this engagement to be explored.

Keywords

amplification, sound, (sonic) energy, power, technology, techno-social systems, networks, continuum of relation, dialogue, collaboration, presence, sustainable creativity, social action, entropy, thermodynamics