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diminished potential for resonance

As technological civilization diminishes the biotic diversity of the earth, language itself is diminished. . . For when we no longer hear the voices of warbler and wren, our own speaking can no longer be nourished by their cadences. As the splashing speech of the rivers is silenced by more and more dams, as we drive more and more of the land’s wild voices into the oblivion of extinction, our own languages become increasingly impoverished and weightless, progressively emptied of their earthly resonance.

Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York, NY: Vintage Books, 1996.
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knowing someone

It begins somewhere in the Self: what, an inclination? No, it’s much more complex than leaning towards (already language fails to offer any easy way out). There are the mirror neurons, so it is thought, that encounter the vibe, both the raw and formed energy of the Other. This reception (crucially formed in resonance) drives our actions, our expressions. This is not noise. The word sounds carry directed energy. An expression is directed (at) (the Other).

This expression is directed at No Other. This is the way we lose what we have.

From the inside, watching. It’s easier to watch the sky than to watch an Other. Or to be watched. While there is another Watcher, always, in the sky, the air. One that expects us to be present in every moment. It watches for this. And when, for a nano-second, we slip, slack, into the apathy of being elsewhere, there are irruptions that change the trajectory of living, without any recourse to mercy. This is the Watcher, Seeing us in the Light. Being watched shivers through our perceptions of ourselves and of what we are doing. Have done. And we are left with nothing but the essence of sight. As we stand in the Light.

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

die Mauer

Gah, it was twenty-five years ago (today) … seems I was busy, very busy in 1989. In August, Stefan, Debra, Magga and I headed for Kassel from Köln and then on to Berlin. Through the huge Charlottenburg checkpoint, past the Soviet tanks, after the surreal drive on the lousy autobahn where, if you stopped the car, you could be shot. We had a nice flat somewhere in the West, don’t recall where in the Western Sector, a friend-of-a-friends. We entered the East through Checkpoint Charlie for a long day which started out at the Soviet Culture Center, went on to a impromptu visit with a photographer, Micha Brendel, (who I learned of from my gallerist in Lyon, France, Raymond Viallon — and whose work resonates with the presence of the Stasi State) and finally ended up at a youth music festival somewhere up the Spree on an island. The high-point was trying to find food to eat and only locating one restaurant where, of the handful of items on the menu, they had only one. Much more could be said, but I just want to the get the images up (a couple days too late, but).

Earlier that summer I had noticed several things—the first was the not-insignificant fact that the super-sonic overflights by the US military along the Eifel region (and Köln) had ceased since the previous summer when one would hear them on a regular basis. Germany had reclaimed its airspace from the occupying power. And secondly—easily as profound as Reagan’s tear down this wall Mr. Gorbachev! stunt—I saw, but regretfully did not document, posters in the Vienna underground featuring Mr. Gorbachev in his fedora and heavy winter coat with a hand raised, palm facing outwards, and the simple text Lay Down Your Arms!. As far as I noticed, there was no other text or attribution, and I did not remark about it to my friends who I was visiting. I thought to myself—this is profound, and more profound things are on the way. My German friends would not accept the idea that a major paradigm shift was on the way. I was not surprised in November 1989 when it happened!

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

imprisoned

Imprisoned by my own lack of imagination…

These words popped out of an interview between two people on the radio. It resonated: driving, I grabbed a red Sharpie from the glove box and the old spiral notebook I keep for just such instances, and scrawled it down, further endangering other drivers, the ones chatting on their phones.

Arriving home on another day, I remember to grab this scrap of paper torn from the notebook and bring it inside. Putting it on the top of the pile of papers on the desk initiates a reverie:

Is imagination, imagining, a liberation? Is it something possessed? And is its loss akin to being locked up in a cell in Soledad? And what does it mean to once have it and lose it? Mon dieu! Such things to muse about, on the outside world’s Monday morning. While I bide the moments:

Waiting for. enLightenment to arrive with a slamming door and a pine-cone falling on the roof.

Imagining the effect of imagination’s potential for, what, seeing the path that brings us here and now to imagine upon?

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  • place: Margaretville, New York

give me your time

Give me your time, give me your space, your eyes, your ears: this is the mantra of the Self. I give you my time, I give you my space: this is the mantra of the Self, the self released from the bonds of egoism. I give you my self.

Watching tears well up and begin to fall. Where do they come from? And what will become of them? Feeling tears well up and fall. It’s a bit of a puzzle, the neurons that resonate between two (or more) bodies. There are the shared events of social adhesion: nationalistic synergies, mass tragedies, and the spectacles of sensual attraction. These are not the true resonances of the soul. Souls play together in the strangest of circumstances.

And networks proceed at the speed of life. Something I’ve been saying for years.

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  • place: Cornwall, Pennsylvania

long dialogues: alexithymia: interhemispheric transfer deficit

Conversations range through histories, futures, thoughts, and dreams. Nothing like spending time with old friends: with my oldest friend this week. Junior High, seventh grade, we shared all seven class periods each day, 40+ years ago. How histories recede: resonant memories tend to be supplanted; revivifying them in active recollection makes them last a bit longer, fills them out from another perspective, another memory system. Until our outward form sinks into the background (dis)order of the cosmos. There, the memories persist as slowly devolving trajectories of activated, materialized energy.

Gary’s evolution and sustained presence inspires so many of the people who are around him including myself. What to think about this? Do we ever really evolve, or do the changes we experience along the way in life impose merely small surficial modifications of our root character? And of this root character, what may be said? Is it the outcome of a chain of incarnations, is it an alignment of planets, the arrangement of molecular spirals? Inspiration from Day One? Predetermined be-ing? Can we change ourselves?

This particular trip takes the form of yet another pilgrimage, a soft confrontation of what the word ’empathy’ is in lived praxis among the network of friends. Finding empathy’s place, there is no pre-existing internal road-map. Its locus is within sight, reach, and touch, but it cannot be accessed directly except through thoroughly unpretentious and purely expressed action (not merely words). Embodied, in motion, moving towards. Up to this point, there are only fleeting instances where empathy as a defined characteristic is questioned. Having it, not having it seem to be questions that do not touch its real nature.

Then come the questions: Is it possible to attain an empathetic state where none existed before? If not, what becomes? Is life for some a desert of hollow resonance, disconnected from any Other? I don’t know, I don’t know, (pushing through gray curtains of neural absence). Into the Light, or, at least, looking for the Light.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Miles

Sonya’s current jazz trumpet fav is Nicholas Payton (@paynic), so Chris writes. It’s her birthday and Payton’s in town (Denver) playing, great! Afflatus that arrives with first-person experiencing ones creative muse can be a rare and singular event in life. (It may be possible to make this a regular — daily — event: partnering with muse! What a concept!)

Payton’s a radical, Amiri-Baraka-with-trumpet, but not afraid to pick up a pen: “On Why Jazz Isn’t Cool Anymore” is of note. And he takes on the legacy of Miles without compunction, without needing to think about compunction.

And following that thread takes me back to this passage from Miles’ autobiography that resonated hard in my mind back when it came out in the early 90s:

The very first thing I remember in my early childhood is a flame, a blue flame jumping off a gas stove somebody lit. It might have been me playing around with the stove. I don’t remember who it was. Anyway, I remember being shocked by the whoosh of the blue flame jumping off the burner, the suddenness of it. That’s as far back as I can remember: any further back than this is just fog, you know, just mystery. But that stove flame is as clear as music is in my mind. I was three years old.

I saw that flame and felt that hotness of it close to my face. I felt fear, real fear, for the first time in my life. But I remember it also like some kind of adventure, some kind of weird joy, too. I guess that experience took me someplace in my head I hadn’t been before. To some frontier, the edge, maybe, of everything possible. I don’t know; I never tried to analyze it before. The fear I had was almost like an invitation, a challenge to go forward into something I knew nothing about. That’s where I think my personal philosophy of life and my commitment to everything I believe in started, with that moment.

Davis, M., 1990. Miles, The Autobiography, 1st Touchstone ed., New York, NY: Simon and Schuster.

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  • place: Santa Monica, California

Tropic of Capricorn?

Wading into those formative texts from 30 years ago or more. Again the intense resonances of practically every paragraph, sentence (this time, listening to the book, rather than reading it). Stumbling again on Miller — it’s not like he was ever recommended to me by someone, and in that, I have no recall of how I came across his writings. The Santa Monica Public Library was the loaning institution, walkable from both abodes there in the Peoples Republic way back when. How does one stumble on Henry Miller? And once found, what to take away? (Why give a damn about what to take away?) When grinding, groaning, swearing through incarnate elbow-clashing existence, it’s not enough to take things away from mediated expressions. Better to simply fine-tune all available sensual resonance and be with the source for the moment, while not being afraid to skip mediated input and simply live.

I thought, when I came upon her, that I was seizing hold of life, seizing hold of something which I could bite into. Instead I lost hold of life completely. I reached out for something to attach myself to — and I found nothing. But in reaching out, in the effort to grasp, to attach myself, left high and dry as I was, I nevertheless found something I had not looked for — myself. I found that what I had desired all my life was not to live — if what others are doing is called living — but to express myself. I realized that I had never the least interest in living, but only in this which I am doing now, something which is parallel to life, of it at the same time, and beyond it… Whether I die today or tomorrow is of no importance to me, never has been, but that today even, after years of effort, I cannot say what I think and feel — that bothers me, that rankles. From childhood on I can see myself on the track of this specter, enjoying nothing, desiring nothing but this power, this ability. Everything else is a lie — everything I ever did or said which did not bear upon this. And that is pretty much the greater part of my life.

Miller, H., 2001. Tropic of Capricorn, New York, NY: Grove Press.

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  • place: Belfast, Maine

Bern Porter’s Sciart Manifesto

Finite worlds of infinite reality and beauty revealed by the tools and discoveries of Science are ripe for aesthetic development.

1. Of light, besides the commonly employed natural and artificial, there is the polarized, the radiating chemical, mineral, and radioactive types along with x-ray, cosmic, and nuclear-particle beams with all related electro-optical phenomena.

2. Of other vibrations, there are the natural, the mechanical oscillatory, resonant, and supersonic sound, the entire frequency range of electrical and thermal waves.
more “Bern Porter’s Sciart Manifesto”

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  • place: Bremen, Germany

coupling

Thinking back: Walnut Cafe South in the Table Mesa Center, meet Chris for one of our weekly Boulder breakfast get-togethers.

Subject of resonance comes up. and the term coupling which I did not include in the dissertation discussion on resonance. Coupling is where two circuits designed to resonate actually transmit electromagnetic energy from one (the transmitting coil) to the other (receiving coil). This is used to do wireless power transmission. The two coils have to be in relatively close proximity otherwise there is significant power loss:

By designing electromagnetic resonators that suffer minimal loss due to radiation and absorption and have a near field with mid-range extent (namely a few times the resonator size), mid-range efficient wireless energy-transfer is possible. The reason is that, if two such resonant circuits tuned to the same frequency are within a fraction of a wavelength, their near fields (consisting of ‘evanescent waves’) couple by means of evanescent wave coupling. Oscillating waves develop between the inductors, which can allow the energy to transfer from one object to the other within times much shorter than all loss times, which were designed to be long, and thus with the maximum possible energy-transfer efficiency. Since the resonant wavelength is much larger than the resonators, the field can circumvent extraneous objects in the vicinity and thus this mid-range energy-transfer scheme does not require line-of-sight. By utilizing the magnetic field to achieve the coupling, this method can be safe, since magnetic fields interact weakly with living organisms.

(written in Wikipedia-English!)

Is there any way to explore if this occurs on some scale between organisms? Transmitters, receivers? Coupling? Would seem to be an obvious model for interactivity between any organisms — the question being what is the nature of the embodied resonant circuits? Can an organism or a part of one be modeled ‘properly’ as such a circuit? Or is it too complex — the electromagnetic ‘field’ of a body as a mass of overlapping radiations and flows — such that there is no comprehensible order? Nah, of course there is a ‘sensible’ order — that may be expressed as the general sensuality of ‘presence’ that a living organism exudes. (This presence signified by the dynamic of interaction that any single organism exhibits with other organisms — as defined by evolutionarily-developed interdependence.) For example predator/prey interactions would suggest that there are highly developed coupling mechanisms such that the predator can identify with a high degree of precision a potential prey.

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  • place: Helsinki, Finland

across the great divide

We are constructed by those who came before: just witness our behavior, how it links back and back into the bright and dark ages of the world. We carry the patterns of life that have already come and gone, but at the same time, they persist and persist in unchanging variation. This is how it is, this is how it goes. This is what proceeds:

Body is vibrating, deeply resonant. Trembling with the anticipation of what is not known in the next second, what might befall, what has already fallen into the arms of others. A shrug of the shoulders, again, and what is left is the sternum forward, the heart wide open, wide open to the airs and to the fluctuations of presence. The heart feels, directly, the proximal Other.

Then, it’s late, it’s arm-in-arm. Left, crooked to catch hers, left hand stuck in right sleeve so that it doesn’t feel tense, holding it up in the air. Then finally, later, holding her warm hand in a slightly cooler one: thermal gradient—does this mean that I am sapping her energy? In a closed system, yes it would. In an open system, lucid nights, in the city spring-Lighted night, thousands are testing their compatibility ranking for re-creation of permuted life. Life energy is being traded through many passions, along many pathways. We are only two of many, on pathways that cross in one way or another. Is this it? Or is there some other awareness emblazoned secretly within our energized selves for us to be more than what we appear to be, more than what we feel? Walking the perimeter of Töölönlahti in the white twiLight, there is no water, there is no sky, there is only The Void and the blackbird singing. Life goes on.

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Deep Resonant Networking panel

How do you know when something or someone is affecting you?

There are many ways of describing or modeling the dynamics of human encounter and collaborative relationship. The concept of resonance is a powerful tool for understanding the qualities that relate us to each other and to the world. Resonance is an intuitive (pre-)cognition where something, “when stimulated, spontaneously responds according to the natural guidelines on the particular phases of vital energy engendered in itself and active in the situation.”[1] Resonance is a ‘natural’ extension of a creative praxis: “Resonance allows the universe (or any of its parts) to influence a human being”.[2] One intention in creative collaboration, given that “[t]hings ‘energize’ each other,” is to propagate a resonance between the Self and the Other. While this is a very uncertain undertaking, it is one that in any instance has almost unlimited potentials.

This panel seeks to open a space for sharing and exploring experiences of resonance while helping define what it might mean to rely on such an intuitive feeling. In the context of the Bricolabs network, differences — location, culture, language, social background, and others — that are the realities of distributed creative action, often seen otherwise as divisive challenges, are overcome through ways of relating that transcend surface materialism. This transcendence might be framed as a deep resonant networking where energized participants establish trusting relationships based on a more ethereal vibe: maybe it’s about mojo! Join the conversation and let’s see if we find some resonant frequencies on which to groove.

[1] Roth, H.D., 1991. Psychology and Self-Cultivation in Early Taoistic Thought. Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, 51(2), pp.599-650.
[2] Kaptchuk, T.J., 2000. The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine, New York, NY: McGraw-Hill.
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bricolabs @ pixelache

Helping Felipe, Jerneja, Bronac and other bricos get the following text out for our Pixelache Festival presence — still not sure that I can make it, logistically, between cost and timing: it will be a nice conclave of old and new friends, though, and a good landing back in Europe.

Bricolabs (https://bricolabs.net) is a fluid network created in 2006 to investigate — from a critical and creative perspective — the loop of free/libre/open content, software and hardware for community applications. Bricolabs promotes open debate and critical making on such themes, between people with diverse backgrounds, in areas of expertise from Latin America, Europe, Asia and North America. Special attention is given to affective networking as a shared value.

Responding in a collaborative fashion to the call to reflect on the theme “Facing North – Facing South,” Bricolabs is currently planning, organising and developing part of the Pixelache Helsinki 2013 programme. Bricolabs wants to bring a multilayer perspective to trans-local networking, engaging the participants of Pixelache 2013 in new ways of being as well as new ways of doing things together. Bricolabs proposes a critical perspective on the usual north/south dichotomy, interested and rooted in deep resonant networks where borders are seldom taken into account. This is as true for geographic boundaries as it is for disciplinary ones – recently Bricolabs members have turned their attention to anti-disciplinary collaboration as an escape from the common traps of western/northern paradigms of development.

The Bricolabs programme will include live remote sessions with a number of collaborative groups sharing their perspectives from different parts of the world, as well as an exhibition articulating models of open source culture, translocality, DIWO, and subjective infrastructures. Several practical workshops will be conducted along these same lines. The festival will give Bricolabs members a rare face-to-face opportunity to meet and organise working sessions for particular collaborative projects. Bricolabs will also be facilitating discussions and panels, portraying collective efforts that take place across diverse practices engaging the work of artists, developers, thinkers – thus redefining the geophysical and virtual ecologies of their practices, as well as methodologies in the context of open source models and the theme of the festival.

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  • place: Lincoln Laboratory, Lexington and South Acton, Massachusetts

Thursday, 14 February, 1963

JLV missed his connection last night so will travel east today, to be in the office tomorrow.

Decided to go ahead on the travel arrangements for Kwaj — (space confirmed)

16 Feb – Lv on B+A/Framingham
17 Feb – Arr Chi 9:15 AM
17 Feb – Lv Chi 6:15 PM Super Chief
19 Feb – Arr. San Berdoo 6 AM
19 Feb – Go to LA in PM
20 Feb – Go to Honolulu
21 Feb – Go to Kwaj. Space confirmed

Talked to Jim Knight at Kwaj — he thot it ok to arrive on 21 Feb for 10 days/2 weeks.

15˚F
Clear

Obtained a list from Fred Lake of the exact hdwr they propose for the Church and discussed the payoff from the loudspeaker system, which costs $804. It has a smooth response at all power levels and will not resonate with any resonant frequencies of the sanctuary; it also has a sufficient margin of power-handling capability to reproduce peaks without rattling.

Left word with Mrs. Cheever to tell Alden that we should meet at the church tomorrow at 1830.

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resonance: bursting

Interest in resonance is spread widely as the phenomena shows up in many systems. In bio-systems resonant responses to [energy] burst communications (as an intrinsically generated stereotypical pattern of closely spaced action potentials) is a crucial means for the propagation of flows across neural networks: STOP SHOUTING AT ME, I get it!

Many electrical, mechanical and biological systems exhibit free vibrations or damped oscillations when stimulated by a brief strong pulse. The frequency of such oscillations is known as the natural frequency or ‘eigenfrequency’ of the system, and the period is known as the natural period. For example, the Hodgkin–Huxley model exhibits oscillatory potentials with natural period 12.5 ms when a single brief pulse of current is injected. If the injected current is sinusoidal, sweeping through many frequencies (a so-called ZAP current), then the elicited oscillations of membrane potential have largest amplitudes (possibly resulting in action potentials) when the frequency of the input is near the natural frequency of the system, which is 80 Hz (1/0.0125 s) in the Hodgkin–Huxley model. (This frequency might be slightly different when an oscillating synaptic conductance rather than a current is injected.)

Izhikevich, E.M. et al., 2003. Bursts as a unit of neural information: selective communication via resonance. Trends in Neurosciences, 26(3), pp.161–167.

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Richard Freeman

Shane reminds me that Richard is giving a talk after the usual Sunday afternoon mysore session at the studio over on 21st Street. It’s cold (record low temps) outside, and steamy inside.

But great to finally meet him, he’s a wonderful extemporaneous speaker, and his meta-process definitely resonated with my own sensibilities on the way to go with teaching. His knowledge-base of Sanskrit and yogic teachings provides him with a wide and very deep territory to explore, and he dances around it all with a wry and humane sense of humor. The same essence that I attempt within any of my teaching, though I lack the depth of a single systematic view and that muddies the water to some degree. At most one can only do that circuitous dance around the Void, laughing and pointing at it through the clouds and letting righteous fear fall away into the absurdity of it all.

He speaks of the soft-palate and its role in resonantly apprehending external energy sources (as in ‘awe,’ think of the palate’s role in vocalizing that phoneme…).

We have a conversation after class. I told him how much I appreciated his CD series on yoga practices and breathing. I used them as a base for my own praxis when I can’t get to a class.

Strangely only one or two people approach him after his talk. I don’t know if this is a respect thing, or some protocol that I missed, or that he intimidates his students, or what. But he was very forth-coming responding to some of my comments about resonance between exterior energy flows and internal flows. Good vibe!

Bandhas are the internal energy valves or gates, which when activated allow the energy to flow through the bodily vessel activating the dormant potential of embodied spirit. Another way of stating this is that the stagnant rigidity of a chronic spiritual disconnect can be disrupted through bandhas, pranayama, and pratyhara quickly providing the pathway for flow — the ongoing ever-present spiritual reconnect of the great expanse of being. Although, commonly denoted as locks, bandhas act as such only in so far that they prevent the outward flow (dissipation) of the energy. However, a better translation would be valves, gates, or doorways, because they direct the internal energy flow to irrigate the nadis, open to continuous flow, activate the energy body, and align it with all-creativity.

Etc…

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

coupling

Down to the Walnut Cafe South to meet Chris for our weekly breakfast.

Conversation drifts through resonance. And into the concept of coupling which I did not explore in my dissertation when talking about resonance.

While somehow, the LaTeX functionality of the WordPress plug-in isn’t so developed (what’s with the black border? destroys any elegance that the equation might hold.

[latex]\omega_0 = {1 \over \sqrt{LC}}[/latex]

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  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

matters

Matter is not what it appears to be. Its most obvious property — variously called resistance to motion, inertia, or mass — can be understood more deeply in completely different terms. The mass of ordinary matter is the embodied energy of more basic building blocks, themselves lacking mass. Nor is space what it appears to be. What appears to our eyes as empty space is revealed to our minds as a complex medium full of spontaneous activity. — Frank Wilczek

Sometimes I get the feeling that I don’t recognize even my own life. Among the array of phenomena which present themselves for the sensual body-system every … second … recognition shouldn’t be necessary for any one of them, given that change is the governing principle, or so. All should be new every time, all the time(s), and thus recognizable whether or not there are any observable and (relatively) invariant* features. It could be that this lack of recognition is itself merely the reliance on external models or comprehensions of ‘what’s out there’ as opposed to a deeper reliance on what is experienced by the Self as being (relatively) invariant. more “matters”

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  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

back to B&B

Martin Buber and David Bohm — German-speaking Hasidim Jew phil-theo-logist/sopher and Anglo, McCarthy-black-listed quantum physicist. Unlikely combination, but in my practice, my pathway, they elicit a resonance unlike any others, although there are Legion sources of energized engagement that have made my trajectory a rich experience. All those Others who share the way(s). But I will work with these two as they both resonate. Simple, complex. One provoking an imaged-cosmos where there are no things, but only activated orders of manifestation, and this condition of being directly informing the way of interaction and relation between the Self and the Other. And the other thinker, sketching a cosmos which itself comes-to-be in the reality of relationship: within the encounter lies the source of all things.

Both these worldviews are highly idiosyncratic visions of the cosmos and also, consequentially, of human relation, but neither of them are mutually exclusive of the other. I find my own worldview shares at least this characteristic with both of them. But there are other ways in which our models overlap, and it is these pathways of flow which will stimulate the thesis.

The image of humans and their view of the cosmos that I always describe in a classroom setting is: (this after getting to know the students at least a bit) — “it’s as though we are dancing around the Void, each of us, in groups, pairs, alone, catching glances out of the corners of our eyes of it, calling out what is looks like in throat-tones frantic with fear, joy, and wonder. Sometimes a whole group will shout out in unison, the agreed-upon vision. Others stay to speaking the wind. Occasionally we turn to face it on, or are rudely pulled by the shoulder by another who is straying close to the edge. It has no name, yet we all insist on calling It something. Even when we turn our backs directly to it, we can feel it, perhaps even more than when facing it.”

So, idiosyncrasy is a way of movement (as point-of-view needs change), which leads to a clear, albeit self-relative, experience (impression) and the consequent expressions while regarding, receiving, that. Springing from these two pathways (im- and ex-pression) is a third which dictates, in part, the motion of the point-of-view. It is a feedback mechanism which generates, gradually or quickly, a worldview that touches on the Void if only by discrimination against what cannot be directly named.

Okay, working (or “working”) in the office much of the week and weekend, not too effective, but I think I did finally begin to imagine a framework to hang all these words on. And it feels like one that will work. Norie gave me a couple other theses of former students of hers — very interesting works. My intuition about her seems well-placed. And it’s a funny expression of the morphing social network that I’ve participated in the last 20 years. Connected.

And swimming. Hope to hit 100 km/3 months by the time I move on. That’s attainable, easily if I take care of things.

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  • place: Preston, Victoria, Australia

memory, it occurs

The problem with externalized memory is that when memory is extracted from the self, we may no longer feel its effects – in recall, in re-living. We may only simulate the feeling of it, or, at most, internally resonate with the symbolic values represented in its external reproduction. Individual embodied memory is directly experienced as a changed body state. Externalizing memory is a particular and collective phenomena which arises when the pain of actual experience and its associated memory is too much to bear. Externalizing is available from the same (tele-)technologies which cause the pain to begin with — dislocation and the pain of separation. Perhaps technological development may not proceed fully until the relevant memories are externalized to begin with, then the pain of alienation is transferred to a painless place.

This is illustrated through the wide-spread propagation of pictorial documentation and the subsequent sharing of those images. The originary documentation occurs to enhance or prove the fact that the individual was fully living; at the same time of documentation, the very documentary process dislocates the self from being fully in the life flowing around, causing a pain of loss.

It’s like looking at a stranger’s snapshots from their youth. They contain only generic and shared cultural triggers, nothing more (or less). Beyond that, there are resonant memories in the viewer, based in the configuration of their own experiences, and while these can be quite strong at times, the difference between lived experiential memory and those resonances is significant.

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  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

end of the road

Start to try making time-lapse sequences from the immediate surroundings. Lousy and/or old equipment, a quasi-functioning power system, and the results show it. Add a portable generator, a better tripod, longer cabling, a 3-CCD camera with chip memory (ah to be free of tape!), and a laptop with a battery that lasts longer than the start-up sequence. I’m ready to cash in some of my retirement piddle to cover it. Maybe $10K I could get away with all of it, including a decent audio recorder? That, along with a better 4WD truck and I’d be part of the pseudo-elite for once. hah. So, anyway, now, marooned in Echo Park by the intense weather, (I was warned, fair enough, but I told the ranger that I wasn’t planning to come out until Friday next at least, anyway, so things should dry up by then, and that I had enough supplies for at least two weeks if not more). Stormy already today, late morning, humidity pulled the clouds up, and while attempting some decent time-lapses, it gets worse. What else is new? Maybe I end up sitting in the car just writing. There are rain filaments across to the north.

Cutting tamarisk growth behind camping site (#7) to feed the fire. Keeps mind busy, with flinging sharp blade biting into hard wood. No help around in case of an accident. This sharpens the wits. more “end of the road”

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  • place: en route Wendover - Gold Hill - Callao - Dugway, Utah

CLUI: Day Thirty-Three — finale

near Callao, Utah, May 2010

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular and rugged Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over-night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

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CLUI: Day Six — intention

The psychical framing of intention within the making/creating of a reductive tracing of the phenomenal world would seem to be critical. What is the intention of an image, for example? Is it as fundamental as the intention of God in the creation of the world? Or can it be explained away as merely an artifactual process of the techno-social system that one happens to be embedded within? Clearly one intention is to use the artifact to say “Look what I saw!” And, so, the process should never be undertaken when there are others around, as they are already experiencing the phenomenal world, albeit from another point of view. Although this suggests that the artifact is used in the presentation and validation of one point of view with an other. (This presentation process and its outcome may also fast-forward root into the resonances arising from the juxtaposition of those two differing POV’s). Is this the sole, core reason? Or is there something else? Is there more to it? This juxtaposition (though more complex and intertwined than that word suggests) is a form of dialogue in that extended sense of the energized interaction of the Self and the Other. hmmm.

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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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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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A start to meditations on The Road

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.
more “A start to meditations on The Road”

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Sydney Non-Objective Gallery exhibition

[ed: An excerpt of neoscenes::drift was recently included in the Sydney Non-Objective Catalogue and CD 2005-2010, SNO Gallery, Sydney, AU, 2010 (gallery catalog and audio CD) ISBN 978-0-9805877-3-9, Mar 2010]

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

lost in a maelstrom of sonic simulations and stimulations, re-collected, re-presented, via various creato-destructive algorithmic methodologies, drift moves through many post-cartesian spaces and through several parallel universes. depending on your frame of reference you may follow a similar path. or you may not. drift demands relativity and provides quantum realism.


(01:00:00, stereo audio, 115 mb)

blurb for SNO gallery exhibition web site, November 2009, NSW, Australia:

drift arises from an ordered archive of ambient phonographic fragments recorded over the past twenty years or so. From this archive improvisational works are assembled: indeterminate and reductive modulations that critically sample the flow of embodied be-ing. Known objects and discrete events populate our world only because we are social animals who have learned the dominant protocols of the techno-social system that we inhabit. This condition is especially onerous with the protocols circumscribing the failed (object-oriented) materialist worldview. drift consciously moves algorithmically with-in and with-out of recognizable protocols, acknowledging that without these memory-impressed protocols, all immediate experience becomes an incomprehensible flow. However, the cosmos we participate in, and indeed, are part of, is composed of these flows and comprehension is an illusion. What we know is only the temporal persistence of patterns in our embodied consciousness which resonate with an attenuated selection of those flows. drift simulates the full signal width of the flows, recognizable or not, and simply transits the field which is the present.

more “Sydney Non-Objective Gallery exhibition”

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  • place: Ultimo, NWS, Australia

controlled or dynamic processes?

Do humans (life-forms) exert control over environments by modifying flows to help them re-member and stabilize their forms? To form them in a way that resonates within their energized neural storage regime (life-form)? Probably not, as from a bio-thermodynamic point of view, life exerts control (simply) in order to deplete energy gradients (according to the authors of Into the Cool, an exploration of NET (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) and its relation to life/living systems).

Or can this even be considered a control process, this interaction of modifying flows? Or is it merely part of the cumulative (dynamic) process of life as an engagement of the entropic/negentropic fundamentals of the universe?

I realized that in Regime of Amplification I got the terminology a bit wrong — focusing on the anisotropic concentration and rarefaction of energized matter as the fundamental condition (as driven by gravitational forces). When it is the gradient between the two situations which is of primary interest and importance. — a bit similar to seeing only the elemental yin and yang instead of the overarching dynamic unity, the taijitu. So, a rewrite is in order — to look at the transitional state rather than (theoretical and limited) end-states.

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  • place: Bondi Beach, NSW, Australia

Pacific

meet Vernon, Marty’s friend from the NSF for lunch and a wander from North Bondi. the beach resonates my SoCal memories. water is warm, finally. summer. I stop by one of the surf shops, looking at boards, find one like my 6’2″ swallow-tail twin-fin. they even demarcate the boards in English measure. they are damn expensive, around AUD 1K each. wow! long boards up into AUD 2K. big business. there are at least 100 surfers out on the wide span of the beach. some of the breaks are nice, some are lousy. but there are some phat sets that come in every so often, like on Monday.

late in the day. at least an hour spent in the breakers. only dodging the 2-meter breaks, though. no body-surfing, too high-risk for the back, but some strong and far swimming in the Pacific, it feels great. this could, will become a habit. not so easy to juggle, though, when looking at rental prices out in the Eastern suburbs (of which Bondi is one). then there’s the issues surrounding public transport to the uni to consider as well. no cheap answers. once Fort street closes down, alternatives will be tough to find.

later.

when 11:11 rolls around, there are no rides left. ‘nuf said.

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

resonance, matter, and poetry

I wake up this morning remembering spatial plans for grocery stores in Prescott, Arizona, and then, one in Kiel and another two in Berlin, Germany. As I started to think about it, after a few minutes, I came up with (mental) spatial maps for more than 50 different food stores in ten countries. Small segments of an enormous set of spatially-framed memories of tens of thousands of situations passed through. Repetition of exposure is more likely to create and lock those memories into recall-ready be-ing. It is what structure and structured situations impress onto the embodied life. The access to these memories arises as a sequence of resonant flows across consciousness. As mindfulness scans a region of mind, resonances appear as bright spots of particular order in a dim background. Resonance is a fundamental indication of higher or concentrated energy states. Fundamental quantization of resonance will cause distributed peaks and troughs in the strength of resonance. The subtlety of resonance guides our movement through the flows around us.

(Who cares?)

Does it matter that dominant views exist? Does it matter that humans are faced with a decision to submit to those views or not? To matter is probably the wrong question, because matter locks us into one view to begin with.

How to transcend the rigidity of extant protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is perhaps one pathway, poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol.

Poetry. The Prose Edda, especially the Skáldskaparmál comes to mind, Snorri’s guide to the forms and language of the Saga, and the process of kenning or naming the objects of that world. Imagine making such a device for covering the territory of inquiry. It brings up the text sketched, though later scrapped, for the Hybrid Spaces workshop: The Hybrid: This and/or That. Could be a useful source for later on…

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

on participation, part one

I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
more “on participation, part one”

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Weltanschauung

The construction of a worldview is a process of feedback, memory, and resonance with that memory arising out of an awareness of difference.

We know remarkably little about the ground functions of practically the entire system we are embedded within.

Writing an idiosyncratic worldview oscillates between the interior and exterior of being. It moves through all culture and social systems, the natural world, and every code encoded, every text ever written. To this passage is mixed lived impression, the accumulate energized traces that life leaves on the body — traces that, ultimately, are memory. And through memory, life compares these two strands: difference arises.

Traces of word and traces of where and when word arrived into the body-system: spoken, written, the two means to no end. Each in arrangement, in relation with an Other, Others. The relation to the Other defined by inarticulate resonance framed and directed into word, and left as traces both embodied and those dis-embodied, change left behind as bodies pass by. more “Weltanschauung”

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what is language?

(a title: On The False Invariance of Text)

Writing is oscillation, it is frequency, it is tone and overtone. It is directed at a hundred thousand invisible targets some not yet alive, most dying, some dead. It is all-encompassed by the infinite flux of be-ing at the same time as being uncircumscribable. Resonance drives the text. Without resonance, the text is more than dead, it is simply not. Null, less-than-zero. Silent. While speaking in tongues, interfacing with one another, we tack meanings to the words, sounds, making them become for a moment, a surfacing out of a wider flow of dis-connection. Or merely happenstance accretion, coagulation, a resulting (sepsis-in-mind) of something (quelque chose), making: turbid agglomeration becomes acculturation.

The whole engagement with the idea of doing the doctorate arises from a combination of pragmatics and desire. The pragmatic considerations are real to the degree that the author understands the social value of ideas that are formally exposed, independent of format, and that the Other takes up, paying life-time and attention to. This is a basic premise. Desire enters the process where there is the need to be recognized, this, not on a social scale, but on a simple and uncorrupted personal scale. There is the deep risk that both these motivations are hollow and base-less. To defeat that potential, the process will be open and open-ended, unending. It will not begin and end with bound covers and stitched bindings. It will mimic life that came from who-knows-where and is going elsewhen.

One point of this blog is to de-stabilize the general process of writing to the degree of opening up expressive possibility. It is not here to be a blog, with endless sifting through and cross-referencing of network sludge. It is an armature on which to hang the infinity of idiosyncratic individual inputs and some limited external inputs into the process flow.

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

open dialogue

What of the experience of an opening, an open, dialogue? Re-creating that experience of presenting the Self to a random collection of Others. Or to a single Other. I keep thinking of identifying, finding an Other who would be willing to have a series of dialogues that would be re-produced for the purpose of mapping out the initial space wherein the model (as script) is to be constructed. The script being a primary resource for a 60-80 hour workshop (which would never be used because the workshops are open systems and have to leave a script behind soon after starting). It would merely point in the direction for certain issues (resourcing them), giving a framework that is an optional (inspirational) component for the process. As a multi-modal hypertextual object within a social networking space, it would imitate/mimic the knowledge-flow features of a more traditional teacher (and little or nothing else — memesis of a teacher being a fundamentally antithetical concept regarding outcomes of learning!). Fundamentally, the workshops are about attentive presence, that crucial realized, actualized, and embodied facilitation process. You had to be there. (So, back to the conundrum of being and not-being when documenting, re-producing life.)

Memory — especially the memory of human encounter — is the tangible, real resonance between the Self and Other, arising through the movement of energies. Memory is a re-configuration of the energy-field that is called body; it is a dynamically persistent re-configuration of the Self. This re-configuration requires the movement of energy between the Self and the Other. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. That is the minimum requirement, and, perhaps is the only requirement, as it is the essence of the process of encounter. It is the encounter, and the flows that are the event of encounter (the Light coming from the body of the Other, the sounds emanating from them, their cumulative presence) which precipitate change in the Self. The only further commentary might come from a qualitative exploration of the flows, and the possible blocks to flow that are ever-present in relation. This view of communications does not fall easily into the traditional phenomenological tradition of communication theory. And indeed, most theories of communication that I have run across are tightly focused on language and meaning rather than any acknowledgment of a real and tangible exchange of energies that occurs in any human encounter (even when subject to the relative intensities of mediation which, in fact, are simply the presences of different forms of energy pathways imposed by cultural conditions (both internal and external to the encounter)). [ED: burbling parenthetic expression, uff]

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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: Prescott, Arizona - Berlin-Neukölln, Germany

48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III

A special live/streamed event, radio aporee presents flickering wastelands III in its long-standing open-house tradition. good foods, good sounds, good people. part of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival. neoscenes, fresh back from many weeks on the road in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona will take you, with hydrocarbons flaring, on a drifting trajectory through spaces that dwell restlessly between ears and leave traces of soot, soil, and water (listen below!). more “48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III”

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  • place: Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

last day

sleep dissolves along with the darkness. full moon is covered with high clouds most of the night. but morning brings full sun breaking over the eastern horizon. in the bed of the truck, it finally finds my eyelids. and brings first a reddening haze, then, with squinted opening, shafts of eyelash-broken brilliance. the five percent humidity has scraped the throat and nose raw. water is the first thing: imbibio. reaching up to unlatch the rear gate which slams open with a thud and lets in the sound and sun of morning desert. impact on body by place is subtle and brutally immediate at the same time. already leaving this particular place, only four days. leaving precisely when there is that draw, that pull to go deeper, longer, to simply become there or at least to completely resonate to its frequency. resonate to rattlers, springs, green stone, slickensides, smaller and larger bursts of psychedelic colors every few centimeters, the dead cow, the lone cottonwood, the humming, the air, the water, the Light; thoughts of other places, other people, and other lives bring mostly a deepening melancholy and turbid state to clear thinking. ants. mosquitoes. snakes, thistles. what did I kill by walking, by being there? there are indeed thousands of tiny flowers scattered on the ground everywhere. the cattle have already destroyed the vast majority of the cryptobiotic soil spanning between the other, larger vegetation. they represent the most damaging influence on the desert environment. specifically they cause the widespread compression of the upper surface which cryptobiotic soil cannot recover from in any short-term way. so, every step taken… life destroys to create. only problem now is the plague species, humans, and how the system will deal with them.

posted
  • place: Columbia, Missouri

Randy Olson

(00:56:52, stereo audio, 109.2 mb)

attend a screening last night of Randy Olson’s Flock of Dodos at the RagTag Cinema in Columbia. he was in attendance. and again this morning, he gave a presentation for science academics at the university as a part of their Darwin Days (where the Chair of the Life Sciences Department pointed out they were not allowed to say “celebration” but rather “commemoration”). the film’s premise was to map out the way both sides of the evolution/creationist divide are communicating and presenting their POV to the public. scientists are shown to be poor communicators, creationists shown to be poor communicators except for some who know the value of style and appearance (the Discovery Institute being the chief antagonists posing as a non-partisan think-tank). they are the ones leading the issues. in the same way Republicans have been successful in constructing the narratives guiding the story-following population to the conservative Nirvana. Olson, a former Harvard PhD biologist transitioned to Hollywood via a degree at USC’s film school. he now tells stories that bridge the divide between science and the general public. but the leap from stories to action — stories that form a context for action — well, there is generally a passivity that is a condition of listening/watching a story recitation. listening to stories has to stop at some point. so, the story has to have a transitional mechanism leading to action. how does that work? telling a story and have action arise out of the exchange of energies. the attentive focus of absorbing a story transforming into world-changing action. in the evening Nick and I catch the screening of Sizzle also by Olson. overheard today:

mass media is directed at the pelvic floor, but what about having Kegels for Consciousness…?

later a repaired drum appears, as does a Tibetan singing bowl, and a basket full of instruments. resonant sound-making ensues.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

https://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980’s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

https://neoscenes.net/blog/cv-resume

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT more “Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Wiegemesser

Solstice come and gone. joined in the aporee solstice happening down in Kreuzburg last night at 23:59, the official moment of the Solstice. is today’s darkness because of the knowing of the long slide to 21 December? or does it matter? swinging, Light to dark. the performance ritual, reflecting on last year’s foray up Pool Creek Canyon in Dinosaur on that Solstice, does not evoke the energy. and screening the old Solstice videos from Ice Land also do not provide the right resonance. what is the essence of performance. making visible the energies stored up when in stellar regions. or?

the streets are chaotic after Turkey beats Slovakia in the European Cup.

Wolfgang bestows a couple of good Solingen kitchen blades in exchange for computer consulting:

Mini-Yatagan — Windmühlen-Küchen- und Obstmesser “Mini-Yatagan”, konvexe Klinge, nicht rostfrei, aus hochwertigem Kohlenstoffstahl / Carbonstahl, blaugepließtet, Griff aus Kirschbaumholz-Schalen

Klingenlänge: 85 mm

Der Yatagan. Diese Form hat einen langen Weg hinter sich. Dem türkischen Säbel entlehnt, über Frankreich zu uns gekommen, hat dieses praktische Messer immer seinen Platz als Obst-, Gemüse- und Kräutermesser. Mit der Spitze läßt sich beispielsweise ein Apfelkerngehäuse besonders gut herausschneiden und auch die bauchige Schneide und gute Ausgewogenheit erleichtern das Zubereiten von Gemüse, Kräutern und Ähnlichem. Das Windmühlenmesser gehört zur Serie der “blaugepließteten” Messer von Schleifmeister W. Fehrekampf. Das Blaupließten ist das aufwendigste Verfahren der traditionellen Solinger Schleiftechnik.

Man erkennt eine solche Klinge an der Lichtbrechung, die sich in den feinen Schleifschrammen als bläulicher Regenbogenschimmer darstellt.

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  • place: Berlin, Germany

Nan Hoover 1931-2008


I am shocked to hear via Raul that Nan Hoover just passed away. I had just talked to her on the telephone back in April she was just back in town after setting up her show in Salzburg, and we were going to get together after not crossing paths for some years. lung cancer and the ensuing chemo took her away in five weeks.

A condolences site is set up.

we first met through a very bizarre coincidence back in 1991 or so. MB and I were traveling in Germany and were up in Düsseldorf for a day, I don’t recall why. we were in the neighborhood of the Academy, so I thought it would be interesting to see this place where Nam June Paik (was teaching) and Joseph Beuys (had taught). the place was empty as we wandered around the halls. at some point I saw a name tag on a door that said Nan Hoover, and I recognized the name as this American video/performance artist. it was the only door with a Light shining out from under, so I knocked. Nan answered the door and I introduced myself mentioning right off that I was from Iceland and was at the Icelandic Academy teaching electronic media. she practically fell over. she and her student assistant, Paschutan Buzari had just at that moment been talking about the trip they were planning to Iceland, and that they didn’t have any direct contacts at the Academy. needless to say, a synchronous event which was a nice start to our connection. I subsequently did much of the ground logistics for the two week trip. the photo above is a group portrait of Nan (with some of her students and Icelandic friends along with MB and Loki (who was at that moment all of 5 days old!)). It was taken on the top of Perlan in Reykjavík. I hosted the student group at the Icelandic Academy where we had a nice collective happening at the end of their visit. and before that some field trips and visions of the Northern Lights among other activities. Nan and the students stayed in a couple flats that the Academy had right behind our house on Holmgardi. I arranged for her to do a screening and public talk at the Nylistasafn in Reykjavík as well. I later went to Düsseldorf a number of times to visit with her classes, as well as meeting her back in Amsterdam a few times.

re-reading the letters I was sending to Nan back then, somewhere packed away in the archive are her letters to me. her work is profoundly energized and a fundamental exploration of Light and change (the video and installation work). I would really like to get to Salzburg to see the show that she is sharing with Bill Viola. I never saw any of her live performance work. time passing. life passing.

A memory of standing in early autumn darkness in Reykjavik, behind my house, watching the Aurora Borealis with Nan and some of her students. Years later, she leaves us, and it occurs to me that through all the ways that she manifest for us, she was explicitly revealing the nature of Light as a process of living and of life. Black absorbs the energy of Light: she spent her life re-radiating that Light in a variety of splendid forms for us to be inspired by. Her vision of Light is profound and it thankfully resonates through all those who encountered her or her work. Thank you Nan for that and for our last phone call.

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  • place: en route Berlin, Germany - Vilnius, Lithuania

non-transformative systems

flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.

lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.

got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970’s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.

Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.

(00:03:38, stereo audio, 7 mb)

We stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. The garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. Stone walls + narrow streets + no speed limits + bad roads = intense noise levels.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

teaching parameters

begin this morning sketching out the chapter Dialogue and the Other :: Protocols of Intimacy (that’s a provisional title, I came up with the protocols of intimacy phrase a few days ago, and liked it). it has a chapter-title-resonance like the Regime of Amplification :: A Primer.

this is the chapter where the core teachings lie. or where many foundational assumptions that hold up the broader teachings will be framed. it is the easiest and most difficult chapter. simple and complex. powerful and simple.

and a question pops into mind — when thinking about how I need to provide as many examples of situations to students to re-inforce the efficacy of the worldview — how is it that the teaching of ones own worldview is so different than teaching the worldviews of others. how is it that so much education is simply the mass inculcation of a canon of Others by individuals who are somehow lesser than those represented by the canon and to a grouping of individuals who have no value to the social system until they are fully inculcated. was it such that only those in the canon were truly great Teachers, and all who come after them merely lesser disciples? Or does the social system have the tendency to self-reify at the price of eliminating successors of equal or greater inspiring power? isn’t it such that any individual has some lesson to teach any Other? where is this lesson taught? it should be enshrined in a bill of human obligations (versus human rights), that any human may learn something from any other human.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Pariser Platz

migrating realities, day two. people going WAY over time, people reading papers. understandable a bit when they are second language speakers, but I thought at one point, why not have a native speaker reading it for them? (it would be more understandable and wouldn’t require their presence). my hand goes up, I’ll do it! annoying aspect of, again, the meta-structures of the encounter. as do dominate all social encounters. but tend to restrict and form the formal.

situation in Lithuania. empty spots, people leaving. an empty landscape (compared to Central Europe), poor standard of living, life expectancy, wages, employment. not good. but the emptiness is a nice thing. the politics of emigration.

Johannes Deutsch: WDR cultural spectacle, Mahler’s Second Symphony, gala concert … (Ars Electronica, Linz, big-ass spectacle). with live manipulation.

(and with that, I quit taking notes) <>

the last evening was nice. the conference panel in Savannah, which I managed to do from Hubertus’ flat, across the street from GdK, was not so good. my intervention was in poor comparison with the power-point presentations some of the other’s did. but I just couldn’t bring myself to engage with that hyper-limited platform. it is so ubiquitous in the pathway it prescribes on a presentation. clearly, though, Adobe Connect, the collaborative platform, is also so limited and restricted to particular forms of hyper-socialized human encounter. although limits can stimulate creativity if there is a resonance between the two people who are connecting via that pathway. it doesn’t resonate with my be-ing. I don’t use it again. f-2-f resonates. minimizing encounters mediated by cultural spectacle. focus as close to f-2-f as possible.

the performance, as with most performances is fringe, a good concentrated group, but small, the young folks wander off when the Vilnius student crew leaves. some people had come after reading on the site of my connection to Stan Brakhage. interesting conversations afterward. and a nice denouement, wandering back down to Potsdamerplatz and so on home. running on adrenaline.

today ends with a longish wander from Gdk to Pariser Platz in the reception center for the Akademie der Künste, thanks to Hubertus. wow!

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany
  • author: Sarah Chung

Sarah Chung

former student Sarah lets me reprint this article she wrote recently about her creative practice:

Sarah H. Chung :: https://www.myspace.com/sarahhdot

I am an experimental multimedia artist, a student, and a teacher based in Denver, Colorado, USA. My latest artistic pursuits are a combination of various mediums including still image, video, sound, sculpture, light, and performance. Most recently I have been collaborating with another female artist, Heidi Higginbottom, to choreograph audio/visual performances using found objects, homemade instruments, contact microphones, and film loops. We make homemade contact microphones out of easily attainable and affordable materials and use them to amplify the sound of the movement of objects. We have used objects ranging from dishware, tile, typewriters, music boxes, sewing machines, thumb pianos, toys, water, or any curious object we can get our hands on. Our intentions are not to make melodic pieces of “music,” but to isolate and arrange pure commonplace sounds that would normally be easily lost in the proceedings of everyday life. While these objects may be ordinary, they refer to a vast web of associations and marked memories. By arranging them, we create a new resonance in the relationships the objects and symbols have with one another. These relationships are meant to be memory cues that can be triggered by sensory experience. We are in the process of experimenting with different technologies and digital software to incorporating projections, audio delay, editing and looping.

As a studio art major I was largely focused on traditional forms of art such as painting, drawing, and photography. It was about six years ago that I began to pay more attention to the intricate and beguiling aspects of the digital art culture. I was introduced to it from digital art courses being taught by visiting professor, John Hopkins, who is a working artist and has taught and traveled internationally. Projects included collecting and arranging self-generated media and media filtered from outside sources. These included field recordings, videos, still images, and lines of text. I had not dealt with this kind of medium prior to this, so I approached it the same as I would painting and 35mm photography. While the navigation of new software in a limited time span was challenging, the results of the projects left me very intrigued and curious about digital culture. I believe that the success of these projects were due to the non-linear process of collecting media without a finished product as motivation. Filtering media (books, internet, video, music, sound clips, etc.) provides an intuitive process for choosing content. It becomes a dialogue that interacts with an individuals sensibilities and social views. Whether I am drawn to content or pure aesthetic, some aspect of the media strikes me, and I collect it.

With human interaction, technology can be used as a tool to express emotion and the individualized perspectives of human experience. Technology brings with it an efficiency that adds new time-lines within our culture. Ubiquitous media screens flash loaded images and sounds that are intended to influence feelings and opinions about products, services, and perspectives in government. These messages compete with each other and have conditioned us to receive information at an exponentially increasing rate. In a society saturated with advertising, I feel a responsibility to express and tap into more emotive, internalized feelings and memories, and to offer a situation for slowing down. This desire is what caused me to seek out the tools and skills that could connect me with the vast and accessible network I was experiencing.

I believe it is of utmost importance for individuals to be informed about technologies so that they may exercise basic democratic principles. I had been intimidated by technology before, but I felt that placing myself outside of the existence of it is like surrendering my own rights. Technology is propelled by human curiosity, but is often used as a system of control. History is constantly redefined based on documentation. Dominant historical theories are based on those with the power to document and expose others to their material. It is crucial to actively participate in the documentation process of our own history in process.

Links: (check them out!!)
https://www.neoscenes.net
https://home.earthlink.net/~erinys/contactmic.html
https://www.pierrebastien.com/
https://members.chello.nl/j.seegers1/
https://www.mutek.org/
https://www.haamu.com/launau
https://www.colleenplays.org/
https://www.skoltzkolgen.com/

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

revisitings

the second anniversary of the accident. while doing yoga, the body muses on the possibility that the technological solution to the shattered spine will fail, catastrophically, one day when in the Warrior One Pose. rendering the body in two halves. one which does not function, and one that might.

There is no happiness for the man who does not travel. Living in the society of men, the best man becomes a sinner. For Indra is the friend of the traveler. Therefore wander! — Aitareya Brahman

so, movement beckons, re-reading Bruce Chatwin’s Songlines, and recalling the little snippets of antipodal behavior that resonate. going walkabout, as the Aboriginals do, seems to be a highly developed form of psycho-geography with a substantial spiritual element fused into the embodied core.

but two years later, I am calmly ecstatic when I am able to do a six hour bush-whack in a landscape where I recognize most of the elemental features as well as the more universal vibe of the place. to do the same in an unknown place would cause a bit of stress, but with an equal dose of thrill. to see the unknown world, absorb the sounds, colors, the people, the life. what more can one ask in this incarnation?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

spokendays

Darko Fritz announces his participation in spokendays. I reflect on this intriguing project, tracking the sonic resonances:

time passing. this project touches on that inexorable passing. where inspirated and aspirated breath divides life into periods. periodic demarcations like the seasons, like the sun risings and settings. months are social demarcations that frame our social existence. not shared everywhere on the globe, they represent one system of social order. how else could one sing and chant time passing? by facing the sun each morning and saying to it, upon appearance above the rim of self-seen earth, welcome! from the rested and warm-skinned body.

Twelve international artists were each invited to choose a month in 2007, and to record an audio file of themselves speaking all the days of that month, ie: Monday, January 1st, Tuesday, January 2nd, etc. Those audio files were forwarded to me where I added additional sounds or musical elements in response to what they had submitted. Each artist spoke their days in their native language. The result is a conceptual experiment to achieve a ‘verbal’ calendar. Each month’s audio file (MP3) is available for online listening without charge or registration. A good quality computer sound system or headset is highly recommended. Future ‘spoken Days’ years will feature speakers from various commonly-held occupations, beliefs or interests, ie: actors, politicians, blue collar workers, and so on. This project was not motivated by politics, religion, or financial goal. It was independently funded by only the time spent in the process and by the generosity of the various international participants. — Jerry King Musser

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Bruce Elder

blast not having a digital copy of this essay, but as it is one that I use in teaching on occasion, and one that brilliantly explores the spiritual dimension of the alienation of the age we are stepping through — so I type it by hand from the catalog printed by the Anthology Film Archives in New York on the occasion of a screening of Elder’s Book of All the Dead in November 1988. I was not present at that screening, but was at the prior premiere of the first 18 hours of the 40+ hour cycle which happened in the Film Studies building at CU-Boulder. there were just three of us who sat through the whole weekend event in an ancient classroom in the now-razed Film Studies Building. a handful of others made parts of the reel-after-reel intensity. it was a transformative experience — from the simple physical immersion that 18 hours of film induced, but also the visual energy from the work itself, and the intellectual rigor that was embedded into the narrative and visual contents. it has resonated for years as a source. neoscenes dreaming and the performative visual-sonic works that came around that impulse owe something deep and intangible to the Book of All the Dead. I was deLighted that Bruce assented to my hosting of the essay, adding to the small collection of ‘third-party‘ essays replicated for interest and convenience.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Rexroth

Mr. Sobol, while mentioning his wonderful gigblog, finds resonance in my travelog and the work of Kenneth Rexroth, and sends one of Rexroth’s works along.

Inversely, As The Square Of Their Distances Apart

It is impossible to see anything
In this dark; but I know this is me, Rexroth,
Plunging through the night on a chilling planet.
It is warm and busy in this vegetable
Darkness where invisible deer feed quietly.
The sky is warm and heavy, even the trees
Over my head cannot be distinguished,
But I know they are knobcone pines, that their cones
Endure unopened on the branches, at last
To grow embedded in the wood, waiting for fire
To open them and reseed the burned forest.
And I am waiting, alone, in the mountains,
In the forest, in the darkness, and the world
Falls swiftly on its measured ellipse.
* * *
It is warm tonight and very still.
more “Rexroth”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Henry at the Beach

okay, okay, I’m slacking here. using all these GIANT bytes of texts-from-elsewhere. well, Karen sent this to me along with a nice photo of her son Henry at the beach. it resonated with my state of being at the moment.

Before the beginning, there was this turtle. And the turtle was alone. And he looked around, and he saw his neighbor, which was his mother. And he lay down on top of his neighbor, and behold! she bore him in tears an oak tree, which grew all day and then fell over — like a bridge. And lo! under the bridge there came a catfish. And he was very big. And he was walking. And he was the biggest he had seen. And so with the fiery balls of this fish — one of which is the sun, the other the moon?

Yes, some uncomplicated peoples still believe this myth. But here, in the technical vastness of the future we can guess that surely the past was very different. We can surmise for instance that these two great balls?

We know for certain for instance that for some reason for some time in the beginning there were hot lumps, cold and lonely, they whirled noiselessly through the black holes of space. These insignificant lumps came together to form the first union, our Sun, the heating system. And about this glowing gasbag rotated the Earth, a cat’s eye among aggies, blinking in astonishment across the face of time.

Well, we were covered with the molten scum of rocks, bobbing on the surface like rats. Later when there was less heat, these giant rock groups settled down among the land masses. During this extinct time, our earth was like a steam room, and no one, not even man, could get in. However, the oceans and the sewers were simmering with a rich protein stew, and the mountains moved in to surround and protect them. They didn’t know then that living as we know it, was already taken over.

Animals without backbones hid from each other or fell down. Clamasaurs and oysterettes appeared as appetizers. Then came the sponges, which sucked up about ten percent of all life. Hundreds of years later, in the Late Devouring period, fish became obnoxious. Trilobites, chiggerbites and mosquitoes collided aimlessly in the dense gas. Finally, edible plants sprang up in rows, giving birth to generations of insecticides and other small, dying creatures.

Millions of months passed, and twenty-eight days later, the moon appeared. This small change was reflected best perhaps, in the sand dollar which shrank to almost nothing at the bottom of the pool where even dumb amphibians like catfish laid their eggs in the boiling waters only to be gobbled up every ten seconds by the giant sea orphans and jungle bunnies which scared everybody.

And so, in fear and hot water, man is born! — The Firesign Theatre