posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

language musing

Language arose as a crucial ‘technology’ in the milieu of the social. To connect with an Other requires a protocol—a common expressive pathway shared by the Self and the Other—in dialogue. This is an old idea.

glyph, Golden, Colorado, March ©2020 hopkins/neoscenes.
glyph, Golden, Colorado, March ©2020 hopkins/neoscenes.

The sharing and its deep compulsion arises in the context of momentary, memorable, and activated Life combined with the desire to communicate. (Noting the strange paradigm that ‘not communicating’ or silence is also communication in that social context.) The greater the desire to ‘connect,’ the more adaptable and flexible the two must be in their attempts to understand one another.

This is where the question of wider social viability enters the process. The more idiosyncratic ones choice of communications protocol (language usage or even which language itself) the smaller the potential receiver-base.

For example—formulaic as a genre—romance novels strike me as suffering from a simplistic extreme within such a paradigm. From the limited sampling that I’ve done, the contained language (English) and its usage is banal and bland: mealy-mouthed. As is the ultimate canned banality of the overarching ‘message’ that is being communicated: it’s more than enough to read the liner notes, look at the cover, or note where the book is shelved in the bookstore or library. Predictability allows for wider dissemination, a wider audience, and, thus, in a capitalist system, a better cash flow.

Some of the most striking texts I’ve encountered are the most complex, non-standard, idiosyncratic, dated—and yet are the most profound for their internal reach. Listening to the Other, receiving such texts requires an empathy for and open-ness to the Other that is rarely easy. Within a hunger for knowledge, enlightenment, or basic insight, these texts are sought out in the stead of couldn’t-put-it-down casual time-filling, time-killing reading.

It’s all about numbers. You may have a secret protocol that you use with only one Other in the cosmos: wonderful, as the carrier of idiosyncratic energies between the Self and the Other, it likely allows for exchanges incomprehensible and unreachable to any third-party.

This text has a meta-message: a dearth of readers indicates that it is unreadable: dour, boring, poorly structured, usage too garbled, or merely not relevant. Reaching relevancy through other means (protocols)—sonic or visual—to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the Self and the Other—also remains a challenge. Disciplined understanding and the application of more widely used protocols would be the growth-oriented marketing strategy in the attention economy. So would identifying and filling a particular need of the Other. Those needs are apparently filled by the oligarchs of the current social milieu. Besides, I can’t manage the level of discipline when faced by the fact that the species may not exist in another 2000 years. Transcribing what needs to appear on the screen in the moment is the most I can do in this transitory social incarnation.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

waking to death

Solstice pre-dawn seeps in the windows, and I wake up to thoughts of death and the gaping maw that it is. How can it be? How is it? What is it? Why is it? Never any answers. Psychospiritual gymnastics, any sort of denial or questioning, nothing stands against it. Pointless to consider. But how to come to some relation with it? I’ll have to dig up my copy of the Rinpoche’s Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. It brought some tiny modicum of thoughtful peace as I witnessed my mother dying. But that was the Other, not the Self, staring down the Void. All that is different now.

The difference in those two conditions is as stark a contrast as one can consider even though there is no ultimate difference, only (mortal) time frames. (cue: Dark Side of the Moon)

Faugh.

And the day closes with the horrible news that Nora, EJ’s youngest, passed today. Another victim of the fentanyl scourge. Only tears to offer in the moment. Unspeakable catastrophe. What has the world become?

Ever darker: the Solstice shift not sufficient, although Light is coming. Please.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

life, or

Life, or what’s left of it changes to a different ground state. Still indeterminate, still challenging, still energized. with others, with the self, with the world, with all perceived, all known, all thought of, all sensed.

But, when infertile senses are gone, what’s left? A hollow (corpse)? A teeming emptiness? A plasmatic field? A soul? or no thing.

I prefer no thing. I’m tired of the endless material chase of noun, of structured and reductive sameness. The soul-less naming of the world. The endless descriptions, declensions, and derivations, not to mention re-creations and duplications. Enough is … enough. Gluttony gnawing at the root of satiation. The belly ever larger than the eye. Consume this. It’s gone.

And yet, fully immersed in the stuff of nightmares, no stillness of soul. The body wracked by energies of disorder. Has hypostasis reversed itself, abandoning body’s object?

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

what’s new?

Weekends, weeks, months, even years speed by, entombing life in a retrospective silicon vitrine: a dim reflection of what it could be, or, even more passive, what it could have been. Life actually holds no interest for me except as it is. Five days on the road, three of those on foot in the bush, walking dry washes, wet canyons, fracture zones, sage forests, and several fault lines. Ancient barbed wire: almost garroted at one point. That would have been messy and, off trail, not discovered until late in the season, a scatter of catamount-stripped, bleached and cracked bones. Plenty of those stumbled on over the years. The only other impingement on body was a gashed shin whilst climbing high up on the flank of the Mitten Park fault scarp, will carry that scar for many moons, trace of a single misstep.

Some random conversations ensue in the campground, but mostly solitary bush-walking, ravens are curious when I initiate a dialogue, they circle closer (with sun at their backs in a clever move to keep me blinded, watching). The dry washes become the site of photographic essay, so empty and barren is the imagination. The in-sight of things draws mind to travel that thin line between madness and be-ing. It is impossible to re-present those things because they aren’t things at all. They are merely manifestations. They are fields of action, activated flow. No wonder that the representations are so pale and thin. Sagebrush, flower, rampart, water-washed stone, lizard, and, finally, days later, skin, activated and living skin.

Golden, Colorado, May ©2017 hopkins/neoscenes.
Golden, Colorado, May ©2017 hopkins/neoscenes.

more “what’s new?”

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how to see, seeing

How to see, seeing, and changing a point-of-view: intractable questions, persistent challenges, fluid realities.

Last fall, after making yet another series of portraits on a trip with German friends to the Grand Canyon, I had the realization that the geometry of my portrait work had been locked-in for years, decades now. Changing subjects, changing situations, surroundings, but the fundamental geometry between camera, Self, and Other was/is essentially static: an unchanging point-of-view. Different Others in the relationship — the collaboration of portraiture — can it be that the essence of relation is also static? To implement a different geometry suggests the necessity of changing the nature of (the) relationship itself. The technical means, the protocol, does have an effect, of course: the choice of lens unequivocally determines a primary geometry of relation. But what is the intersection of that optical geometry and the sacred geometry sketched that is within the continuum of relation?

I use (almost exclusively) a medium-wide-angle (a 28mm with film SLRs, an 18mm with the digital SLR). These tools/technologies and their explicit protocols frame the relationship. The selection is not arbitrary. It’s not simply ‘environmental portraiture’ — that reductive term comes after the process that generates the images. It could similarly be called ‘distant portraiture’, and indeed, distance is a determining factor in the outcome. A wide-angle lens brings the photographer physically closer to the subject while allowing the intimacy to expand, encompassing the context of the situation. A telephoto lens often propagates a stealing-at-a-distance of visage. And it compresses the perspective of that visage in such a way that violates the normal perspective of the eye. The eye sees approximately as a 50mm lens on a 35mm camera.

But all this is merely the technology, the mediatory tool. Strip that away from the eye, and see. Through the wetware optics of the orb alone. Digging deep into the head. Transferring the energy of the world, and of that collaborating Other, inside: seeing, and be-ing in relation to.

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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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sans-filtre: politics of the absurd

politics theater of the absurd…

proceeding. into histories. as present/future seem not to supply a place to occupy.

Our acquiescence to the thorough mediation of the world as sensed through our technological devices produces deep strains in the viability of the hegemonic (or democratic!) State. Requisite to civil society is the face-to-face encounter with the Other, where human reason and compassion, and, yes, empathy, are central to ‘knowing’ that Other. (Christian doctrine, anyone?) The level of technological mediation applied to what once was face-to-face encounter has stripped it of the potentials of relation that empathy provides. This loss unravels a crucial thread in the social fabric.

The further reliance on (media)ted feeds for information about the world reduces our ability to make accurate and propitious judgements about what to do next. The fact that these information feeds are now largely reduced to theater, and worse yet, simple life/time -consuming spectacle places us (as a class of self-determining individuals) at profound risk of external control. (That is, when we ‘pay’ attention to them, consume them!) The sensory sophistication of these feeds has the demonstrated capacity to re-form even personally-acquired memory. What are we left with?

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Gamergate

It occurs to me, standing on the extreme periphery of Gamergate, that many of the actors are behaving as though they are in a typical first-person-shooter game: kill the bad ‘guy’. Gaming will change perceptions of unmediated reality and alter the way one interacts with that reality. True, playing a game is part of reality, but the degree of stylization and heavy attenuation of embodied experience creates a stunted relationship between unmediated life and time spent gaming. This cannot but have an effect on relation-with-Other, as any techno-social mediation institutes by its nature a change in the flow pattern between the Self and Other, regardless of the ‘intensity’ of that mediation. And with tens of millions of people heavily invested, immersed, and dedicated to this particular mediated form of relation, there is no turning back — that is, until the electricity goes out.

posted
  • 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.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona, Prescott, Arizona

kickstart :: bio

A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Dr. Jay (as he is known to some) watches the sky whenever he has the chance. This despite having survived a BSc, an MFA, and a PhD. As an international teacher (or better yet, a learning facilitator) on collaboration, creativity, art, and technology, John has a long history in photography. He is a master printer despite being away from a wet darkroom for awhile: he used to promise his printing students that their eyes would bleed with see-ing by the end of the semester. He made them read “Zen and the Art of Archery.” He made one substantial detour into an education and career in Big Oil and geothermal energy as a geophysical engineer, but cameras were always at hand. John was artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah; and at the Gilfélagið in Akureyri, Iceland.

Finland? Utah? Iceland? For the last 25 years he’s led a peripatetic life that’s oscillated seasonally between Northern Europe and the Western half of the US (with another detour ‘down under’ for his PhD) although he’s also been spotted at many points in between, and sometimes he gets the seasons backwards.

While watching the sky, he witnessed twelve minutes of totality and twenty-six of partiality chasing solar eclipses around the world with his dad, an avid amateur astronomer and photographer who studied with Ansel Adams.

John has worked and played with (and made portraits of) thousands of really cool and creative people f-2-f in 30 countries. He’s been an online facilitator for Transmediale in Berlin, a workshop presenter at Pixelache in Helsinki and at the ADA in Whanganui, NZ; a member of the Icelandic Artists Union and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists; a volunteer at the Broadway Food Coop in Sydney; a net-art curator at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo; and has tracked mountain lions in several places in Colorado.

He watches the sky whenever possible. He photographs what he sees. Since 1983 his work falls under the moniker “neoscenes.”

posted
  • 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.
posted

snippets

fleeting passages, mental imaginations slipping through a narrow slot canyon, rubbing gritty walls and feeling the cool stone on cheek, fleeting passages, mental imaginations of non-being. going beyond what is pressing into eyeballs from out there. some kind of inverse folding of the in here to the out there, becoming all from being Self. or watching the Other vanish from meat-space tangibility, entangled-ness, there-ness, then gone. with a rough sigh. expelling all that is lively, and no longer receiving the inspiration that was once dealt: there’s a finite supply. clocks winding down, complications, intrusions to safe, normal living. looking around, first at patterns of mud flow after a flash flood, then at shapes of crenelate cyanobacteria in cryptobiotic colonies, then at the faces of friends, aging. and finally at the archive full of photographs.

posted

some points and hints for students :: a remix

point == be where you are, look deep into the world from your point of view, and into the self, and out to the Other. share what you experience

point == find a flow that you can tap into, do so, pay attention to it, and see where it takes you

point == learn how to focus your energies on something; do that, at least for a time, and see what reflects and refracts from that focus

point == be sensitive to what resonates in/with your system; when something resonates, listen to the tone of the heart and any other resonate sounds within

point == action makes anything possible — there is no such thing as failure, there is only change

point == be open to all possible flows — incoming and outgoing — this will show up as a(n) (r)evolution in your life as well as a lived practice (praxis)

point == movement along/with(in) an intuitive flow will reveal truth in ever-changing forms — seek out that internal movement

point == creativity and rationality are two words that partially describe human behaviors — no words can describe the full reality of behavior. creativity is the movement of energies, rationality is the play of social abstractions — deal with both, you will have to anyway

point == seriously enjoy what you do, — if you don’t, then try changing what you do until the enjoyment returns — smile, it’s Lighter than you think

point == keep your own rules and points in mind while understanding that rules are only socially applied pathways that determine possible ways of human collaboration. collaborate often: define new pathways!

hints:

breathe, listen to your breath, listen to the breath of other things

understand what energy is and where your energy comes from

be a receiver and transmitter of energy

be open to energy flows

absorb many forms of energy

internalize or embody memory

drink plenty of water

be someplace, not just anyplace, and not everywhere

participate : share

watch the sky often

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

changing the course of nature

Changing the course of nature, a series of actions, grew out of a fundamental principle that the embodied and living Self (as organism) alters the existing flows of the ambient natural system — the system which the Self is (merely) the energized extension of. If one envisions life itself as being a negentropic phenomena occurring as part of a field of energy without known limit, then it makes some recursive sense that a life-form would seek to extend the alteration of the flows that are moving around it, through it. Predation is a form of this, eating, consuming; sensing even could be construed to be an alteration (as Quantum) confirms — that the observer changes that which is observed. Alteration, fluctuation, change occurs at all scales.

One easily accessible phenomena that presents the idea of energy flow with a certain universal precision and intuitive simplicity is water. Fluid flow surrounds the body in water vapors, airs, sprays, and floods, while we also consume this flow directly, finding necessary sustenance for the body-system. Although the internal system is, topologically, simply an extension of the surface area of the external skin — both skin and gut are sensitive interfaces with submerging energized flows — with liquid energy flows everywhere.

Life speeding up entropy …
more “changing the course of nature”

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sketching

There is missing, in the long paragraphs of text that has characterized this work, this labor, there is missing any tacit explication of Self.  That dimension of be-ing is always held behind various structures and impediments, calcifications and reifications. Without any potential for at least mirroring that which is out there, separated from the wet eye and dry skin, reflected constituents of anything true.

So, false or antithetical meanings constantly overtake the possibility of saying (something) profound(ly) that “I am.” Instead there is duplicitous blather. Not that this is rooted in anything internal, actually not at all. The internal as a direct expression of conscious and unconscious presence is always authentic. It is only when that internal state collides with the social, even in the mental articulations of language, where pre-tension arises.

What life can compare with this? –
Sitting alone quietly by the window,
I observe the leaves fall,
the flowers bloom as the seasons come and go.
Do you understand, or not?
— Seccho

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

is-ing

There is the cosmos, there is the individuated being (the Self), there are Others, there is the collective, the ensemble, there is Terra, there is all that is not the Self and the Other: there is the cosmos. What are the upshots of a completely unified cosmos? There are none of the above. There is only procession of is-ing.

posted
  • place: Dewey, Arizona

dinner

deLightful dinner with the Dewey gals, nice to meet Kaolin after 18 years or so, and to meet Emery after the same. an after-dinner twiLight walk is shockingly intersected by a coiled rattler or so. my foot was only a meter away and ready to swing that direction. not a good place to plant the Self. the twiLight was dense enough that there was some doubt as to the reality of rattler-ness, no rattles were sounded and we didn’t press our luck. ‘nuf said.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

iDC dregs

iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.

sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of unlimited is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over). In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified. A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy. It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

the gift of cash

what could be more banal and even demeaning than receiving a gift of cash?

huh, what are you talking about? sheesh, what’s wrong with cash?

okay, that’s a gut response as I formulate the core of an essay The Regime of Amplification, exploring the dynamics of social exchange.

this is simply an attempt to frame a fundamental principle — to point out a perceived weakness in the social system. money, as an abstracted social re-presentation of life-energy, is not the thing itself, it is not life-energy. giving money is the substitution of an abstraction for the thing itself. that thing being life-energy or life-time. life-time, defined by the irreversible plunging arrow of time, is a limited commodity. life-energy is the quantity of time convolved with what it takes to stay alive for that time. it takes energy to maintain life for a certain amount of time. a gift is an infusion of life-energy (in some form!) from the Self to the Other. when the Self pays attention to the Other, the Self spends life-time and consequently, life-energy on the Other. the Self then comprehends certain forms of energy that the Other would, could need in their life. an auspicious gift is the providing of this apprehended needful energy to the Other when it is needed. money enters the picture — this abstraction of life-energy and attention — and is substituted for both of those. the Other, receiving money, has to decide how to convert this abstraction back into a source of energy. it is a lonely and life-time-consuming process. it demands of attention and and is void of directed life-energy. it is the converting process that exerts the most seductive appeal. with money one can do anything. can’t one? even to saving life-energy and life-time? not sure about that. giving money to fight poverty places the Self in a quandary.

having noted this, it is clear that operating on this principle would place the Self-Other dynamic in a certain place within the social system, whatever the exchange is. but the dependence on the abstracted sets up the least auspicious form of gift. or is it the most auspicious? uff. another hack job as the corrupt idealist, eh?

it’s probably better to make enough of the stuff on one’s own, then engaged presence can proceed on the basis of … presence alone, with the proper infusion of life-energy. and subsequently give all ones money away…

only after the last tree has been cut down
only after the last river has been poisoned
only after the last fish has been caught
only then will you find that money cannot be eaten
— possible Cree prophesy

or

There was an old lady, from the Cree tribe, named Eyes of Fire, who prophesied that one day, because of the white mans’ or Yo-ne-gis’ greed, there would come a time, when the fish would die in the streams, the birds would fall from the air, the waters would be blackened, and the trees would no longer be, mankind as we would know it would all but cease to exist. There would come a time when the keepers of the legend, stories, culture rituals, and myths, and all the Ancient Tribal Customs would be needed to restore us to health. They would be mankind’s key to survival, they were the Warriors of the Rainbow. — Lelanie Stone

posted
  • place: Glen Ridge, New Jersey

GPS

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

Wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance? When one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. Though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. How can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? The web of dependencies is both wide and deep. Can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? Can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? Or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. There is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon, hardly. That baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. Beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. Even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

The dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this (GPS-based) selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. A dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. It consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

How can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? It is a relative issue. Clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to the protocols of that system. It is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. Social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. From covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. It is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the self in relation to the system.

Iceland pops into mind again, as I was implementing a ‘new media’ and photo program at the National Art Academy in R’vík in the early-mid-90s, where, with a user-base of under 30K people, Iceland demanded a translated OS from Apple *and* Microsoft. Terms were collectively translated or ‘determined’ by public discussion — I had instances like that happen in my classes, where, teaching in English, and mentioning a technical photographic term, the class would erupt in an animated conversation in Icelandic as to the correct translation of the term. Their cultural autonomy lay (lies) in a collective collaborative resistance to the imposition of ‘out-land-ish’ protocols.

In the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct (likely) created by a subset of the military-industrial complex. But trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. This is where the self engages the other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of ‘what’s out there’. Trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other is critical in setting a metric of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. Sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway that trust must follow to be realized. What is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous others. What does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : info

[ED: Relevant to the recent “pulling plugs” post, and whilst migrating some workshop documentation from the static neoscenes site to the blog, here are the deets for a one-week workshop I facilitated in Helsinki in 2007—squeezed in between another workshop in Sydney and lectures at several universities in San Diego, Santa Barbara, London, Amsterdam, and Kiel. Busy times. (An associated essay In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation was published in the festival publication (pdf download)).]

Welcome! Following is more detailed information on the workshop presented by John Hopkins and brought to you by the pixelache2007 festival and Artists’ Association MUU in Helsinki, Finland.

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Daily Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007, 1700 – 0200

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, culminating in the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE:

With an engaged and holistic approach to facilitation, the workshop is ideal for individuals working in any discipline; it is designed to draw in a wide range of students, from those working with ‘traditional’ art materials, independent artists working in new media OR old media; VJ’s and DJ’s; media, design, film, and art students; media art producers and directors; network technologists and designers; culinary, engineering, and IT students; collaborative software developers and users — all of these will gain a powerful perspective on their own creative practice. The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in online collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new level are also welcome.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own creative works, backgrounds, networks, and impulses into the situation to maximize the potentials of open peer-to-peer engagement. We will finish the workshop with a re-vitalized creative practice, a new understanding of collaborative dynamics, and a deeper understanding of a wide range of technologies available for creative networking.

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

TO APPLY:

!!!TOO LATE NOW, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THE WORKSHOP, EMAIL US
neopixel [at] pixelache.ac
THERE IS A WAITING LIST, YOU MAY YET STILL BE ABLE TO ATTEND!!!

THE DETAILS:

This workshop moves from concepts and theories of creative action to the actualities of a sustainable creative practice mediated by technological and human networks.Online collaborative visual/sonic activities and platforms succeed when facilitators/participants understand the dynamics of human network-building as well as the possible technologies involved. The politics of collaboration underlie much of the potential of technologically-mediated social interaction. We will address the complex social politics of technology and build a powerful model for the critical and creative engagement of media of all types.

There will be a substantial exploration of the subjects of:

  • – tactical media
  • – creativity
  • – social networking
  • – design of sustainable systems
  • – principles of human engagement
  • – networks vs hierarchic systems
  • – ad hoc networks
  • – human presence as mediated by technology
  • – social politics of technology
  • – technologies/skill sets engaged will include: audio and video production software & tools, VJ software, streaming media solutions, open-source platforms, protocols, physical computing, live performance platforms & tools, synchronous communications applications

The final day on the workshop will be a public/live/online event. It will be a multi-channel multi-screen collaborative happening with live/local and online/remote performance components coming together for several hours in a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. Workshop participants will not only develop content for the event, but will help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambience, and the remote coordination. A number of local artists will be invited to participate with sonic and visual inputs, along with remote streams coming from New York, Montreal, Sydney, Los Angeles, and other locations.

In the search for Architectures of Participation, the workshop:

  • – examines a wide range of issues beginning from a fundamental definition of technology through to absolutely contemporary technological developments that affect socio-political and cultural scenarios
  • – presents a highly-developed model for comprehending the complexities of human presence and creative action in the contemporary world
  • – facilitates deep dialogue on local social/cultural/technical issues along with other issues relevant to participants
  • – establishes a broad-ranging, inspiring, and critical context for engaging a wide variety of technologies
  • – provides a powerful context for self-development and development of collaborative activities by presenting and subsequently exercising fundamental skills and awareness
  • – provides a comfortable discursive space to explore a wide range of historical and contemporary developments of art and science
  • – maps out connections between creative processes and technological mediation
  • – develops a deeper praxis-based starting-point for participants, helping them identify their own creative sources and tendencies
  • – involves practice-based exercises to develop personal creative focus
  • – provides a supportive atmosphere for rapid collective knowledge-building and collaborative sharing

Bio for John Hopkins:

As an active network-builder with a background in engineering, hard science, and the arts, Hopkins practices a nomadic form of performative art and teaching that spans many countries and situations. He has taught workshops in more than 20 countries and 50 institutions across Europe and North America. Recent streaming performance nodes include Berlin, New York, Sydney, Helsinki, Riga, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Santa Barbara, Winnipeg, San Francisco, and, of course, online. He studied film with renown experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage in the late 1980’s. He was recently artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology in Helsinki, Finland. https://neoscenes.net

Brought to you by:

This workshop is a collaboration between: pixelache 2007, Artists’ Association MUU, and neoscenes.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : call for participation

Call for Workshop Applicants:

Remote Presence: Streaming Life

Presented by John Hopkins as part of the pixelache 2007 Architectures of Participation Festival and in collaboration with Artists’ Association MUU

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Daily Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007, 1700 – 0200

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, finishing with the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

The workshop is open to anyone from any discipline with an interest in collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new collaborative level are also welcome.

On Saturday, 31 March, the final day of the workshop will be a live & online event. Workshop participants will not only develop digital content for the event, but will also help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambiance, and the remote coordination.

For detailed information visit:

https://neoscenes.net/blog/82803-remote-presence-streaming-life-info

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from local and international applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

THE WORKSHOP IS FREE OF CHARGE.

Those interested will need to send:

NAME:

LOCATION:

EMAIL:

Along with your reasons for interest in workshop and a brief background (studies, creative work, and activities) to:

neopixel@pixelache.ac

DEADLINE for Applications 5 March 2007.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

shifts and changes

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

vector attention

fortune cookie:

Be satisfied with what you already own. lucky numbers 16, 18, 21, 25, 29, 45. learn Chinese: Mayor = Shi-zhang

talk to Anthony on the phone, catching up with the poet hissef’, subject launches from Heidegger to Kennan (see following), to Paul Celan through to az’s own individual efforts at poetic production.

The automobile has turned out to be, by virtue of its innate and inalterable qualities, the enemy of community generally. Wherever it advances, neighborliness and the sense of community are generally impaired. — George F. Kennan

from a longer article at Transportation Alternatives. clearly another stab evidencing the general principle that every technological implementation costs something on a scale of alienation. the obverse of destruction of community. I place the destruction back at that granular level: where the particular techno-social implementation splits the Self from the Other by some means. the simplest example is the television, where the attention vector, a metric of the strength of personal connection, is generally directed towards the mediated/socialized flow, and away from, or at least perpendicular to the attention vector of the proximal Other. it would be better to watch the teevee via a macro lens as the media is reflected in the eye of the Other. or, of course, just turn it off and do the face-to-face.

all day today, hypersonic craft rip through the skies, squinting without sunglasses hardly finds any of them, they are distinguished only by their small size, invisibility, odd flight trajectories, and the sonic delay related to speed and altitude, that and the sheer volume. to be under attack from one of them would be fearsome even with a rational understanding of what was going on. it’s not common that they joy-ride around here, but neither is it unknown.

posted
  • place: en route Prague, Czech Republic - Rösrath, Germany

back in the West

Marcus gives me a paper about Bernard Noël.

What is it to be face to face?

From the depths of the window comes
the self that is not other

Through the eyes he casts
a cry of smoke

Then the knowing is
the torn off fingernail

Head and knife are cold
in the thought

and this excerpt from the powerful essay “The Delicate Oppression”:

Therefore, behind the appearance of a free and universal culture, is the attempt to seize entirely the cultural field and the mental space of cultural subjects, transforming them into simple consumers. The mechanism of this transformation is so simple in principle and practiced so regularly, that it becomes imperceptible as soon as it goes into action. It can be summarized in the following way: every cultural action always involves a certain effort of comprehension, learning and of listening, its movement leads to an exchange of pleasure. Cultural consumption, on the contrary, only requires a bit of passivity. A show serves as mental activity, an activity which is only agitation and ends by discouraging reflection, to the advantage of the voracious appetite of ones own nonsense. It is sufficient to sit in front of a television and watch, in a totally natural way, and what you are watching will drag you into its movement and become your thought.

this would apply to any form of re-produced, re-presented cultural manifestation, and in-authentic constellations of be-ing. so, again, a reaffirmation of the power of authentic be-ing in the world. not a retreat or return to some ‘primitive’ state of living, no Luddite protestation by refusal or opposition, but simply an awareness of the extreme psychic danger inherent in the collectivization of human expression.

noting the yet significant differences between Czech Republic and Germany. like the cost of rail travel. it will cost me more to get from Dortmund to Rösrath today than to fly from Prague. and if I was doing the same trip in the East, it would cost about a tenth of what it costs here in the West. no wonder people are making counter-migrations to the East. though there seemed to be fewer Amurikans evident in Prague these days, there were plenty from other places. not much to say. en route on an ICE train right now. deciding the connections to make. surely a ‘nicer’ system here, but not to a degree to justify the cost. the long-distance rail runs must be getting killed by the short-hop discount airlines. what does competition do to a previously nationalized system? it forces privatization. Frieder was mentioning that there are now private regional rail lines (actually they share the same rails), that was a surprise. it would be a pity if they move in the direction of the British Rail system which is a real mess. ach. whatever. doddering words here. full of nothing. noticing that International equity market funds are pegging a good upward stride this last month.

posted
  • place: Stockton, California

Haggin Museum

in the process of re-tooling the site, catching fragments of the travelog from ages past it surfaces, that self-constraining cover over many events that did take place, but are not noted in the log. incidents that, if recounted from my viewpoint, might hurt, insult, or reveal something about an Other, or the Self.

make a rainy trip to Stockton to the Haggin Museum where Nancy has located a favorite painting, “Moose,” painted by Albert Bierstadt, one of the Hudson River School’s (German-born) shining stars. the museum turns out to be pretty interesting, quite a large collection of art, cultural objects, and historical items.

posted
  • place: en route Catonsville, Maryland - Las Vegas, Nevada - Livermore, California

give thanks

back in Amurika. familiarity of being. and seeing what I want to see. or not. in the immediate surrounding there doesn’t seem to be a heightened sense of paranoia, but in the extended media surrounding, there is a sense of impending. bus ride from Newark shows the levels of social being. stratification, segregation. lower levels of infrastructure are eroded and the interstitial spaces of chaotic dispersion seem increased. obvious, and overlooked. that the overall depression evinced by the more open individuals, a tangible fear not of terror or violent intervention in the social order, but by the acceleration of intolerant and oppressive attitudes that are locking the society up into a polarity of ideologue and dogma. that the fundamentalism of one external social system is stimulating a reactionary rise in rigid (reactionary!) fundamentalism internally. with no good view in the horizon. no sense of optimism. (to such a degree I can’t even find a spark here in text, a fiction of easy life ahead.)

of course, there are elemental ways of going that do not slow down under a matrix of oppressive social conditions, ones that don’t acknowledge the dominion of legal, political, economic, or general social strictures. spirit. that which is removed from the relativist social sphere. the region where the Self moves as a flame, a fire, an entropic configuration.

yesterday’s stream and the conversations woven around with Steve are enLightening and stimulating. as is the rare case when the possibility to engage with an Other who shares not only the material basis for formal working, but when the aesthetic explorations, the attitudes, and the human interests are sympathetic. we are both net workers. it’s been a pleasure sharing contacts and possibilities over the decade since we met, remotely, during the Fax You project. I was at the Helsinki end, he and Genie at the New York end. contact. and sustained contact. what it’s all about.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

immersion or transcendance?

another month, gone. and the leaves starting to fall. what about that dia-positioning of network vs hierarchy on a sliding scale. or about my tendency to lodge myself deep in a larger socio-structural situation, rather than a forward, through and beyond, ahead of, anywhere else, but enmeshed in the blasé norm. instead, place the self in line with the sunLight, staring hard, blind, into life-giving radiation.

posted
  • place: Sequoia National Park, California

cycle – Big Trees

A primary movement among the Big Trees. Cycle. Creating a momentary vortex to dynamically lock self to place. Or perhaps to spin all belief into the Void.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

knife

gazing at the Flatirons out the window from Dona’s house. the first two days of class are over, Wednesdays are exhausting. three back-to-back 2.5 hour sessions. all covering more-or-less some of the same territory. the milieu of CU, Boulder, Colorado, the US seems to have shifted the deeper I enter the organizations and institutions. and enter into dialogue with the people. old and new friends. but no chance of identifying just what is going on. as I have changed as well.

bah, it’s all a fiction. re-presentation of the self here in hopeless form of stilted and hyper-conscious verbalization. no cutting edge. just a sharp knife (I do have that habit of sharpening knives in the various homes I am a guest in). to be on the cutting edge is to be sliced asunder. is this more of the sacrificial artist regimen? there is no need for that. it is possible to have fun, enjoy, and engage, swim in the waves of energy that push their way into tidal heaps, lenticular phantasms, and starry figures. finding the Self in the meantime.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

voice

teaching begins. another experiment in the lossy transfer of meaning.

is the voice of the self available at any point? like, theoretically? practically, most people cannot sustain genuine self-hood for more than small fragments of time. or maybe this impression, feeling, of living outside the self is a singular self-impression. an anomaly. created by historical condition.

made the mistake of lying down to a restless 10-hour period of sleep. ending at 0400. jet-lag. more like body-and-soul-lag.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

birthday

birthday comes and goes, a couple calls and emails. that I am here in a small flat in Joensuu defines my relationship with birthdays. they remain quiet events. my self does not connect with the idea of aging. just another phase of coming and going. and except for the impression of increasing speed, time is unchanged.

falling asleep dangerously in the mid-late afternoon. miss swimming. can’t open eyes.

posted
  • place: Brussels, Belgium

tech-no-madic meditations

On the road again / Going places I’ve never been / Seein’ things I may never see again / I can’t wait to get on the road again… — Willie Nelson

This unfinished sketch of text, expelled in November 2000, is a small surfacing of themes, presences, and fragments from a realm of hyper-presence and the author’s self-proclaimed tech-no-madic wanderings in the northern hemisphere at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Performance art enters the field of words as an action to be redefined as following:

Beginning with art
Art is an accumulation of ways of going and ways of doing. Art is the configuring of energy flows in a lot more than ten thousand ways in order that they become part of a transmitting dance, a dialectic movement of energy between beings. Those configurations are mediations positioned between two beings: they are carriers of energy from one to an Other and back again. The movement of these mediated or packaged energies is the essence of creativity. Creativity is not a peak experience, it is continuous and powerfully cyclic. Blocking energies is anti-creative and ultimately a blocked state may not be maintained when confronting the natural movement and flow of energy. Blocks appear to be placed by a manifestation of consciousness which disregards (or has learned to disregard) ambient and raw chaotic energy movements.

Leaving Newton behind
There is no reason for us to slog through a life that is subjected to materialistic 17th century attitudes and mechanistic points-of-view. Mechanistic (Newtonian) physics is an observational model, complete and self-contained under very limited conditions. Its applied pinnacle is the Age of Industry. That age represents the peak of exploitative systemization and ideation of rational thought. more “tech-no-madic meditations”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Lev’s edifice

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavík - Akureyri, Iceland

back sufferation

at the airport in Akureyri, after a long workshop. short in time, long on energy and things that transpired. learning how to teach, how to let go of the situation and let it develop on its own. injecting certain things, with-holding others. and just learning. it rolls on its own through humor, especially humor. despite my condition of the last two days. Soffia locates a physical therapist who cooks my lower back and then works it over with a heavy massage. I accept the most intense reworking of the tissues, despite the pain. it helps, mostly not by the physicality of the manipulations but by reminding me of the structures there, on location, structures that are reflecting the tensions of the mind. re-minds me to forget recollection and mind. period. just release it. like in the workshop. letting go. and not holding on. not fighting, but relinquishing territories, and the Other will advance to meet the Self. good night.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

medium: rare

On the above note, couldn’t any longer project energies into this space, but days have pulled me forward through nights as Rilke’s cornet: Reiten, reiten, reiten, durch den Tag, durch die Nacht, durch den Tag. Reiten, reiten, reiten… Threads build into a new fabrics to wear as old ways get worn, pressed between body and outer beings. Too many things happening for me NOT to be noting some of them. In case I forget what happens now, off in some future time, maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, maybe when this medium itself is not readable anyway: creating archaeological ruins in the moment, of the moment. Head so full, even eyes can’t see sometimes now, thought-forms dragging along despite outside influence, or just accumulating. (Summer is a time of storing and accumulating, and it is already gone.) Surrounded by successful people. Why is success important? It seems to have a deep evolutionary reading. Having or lacking the tools for survival: strong body, intelligence, creativity, cleverness, adaptability, conserving resources for lean times, positioning the self (security) properly for when the body declines, when success’ only prop is what was, formerly.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

meat-space incarnation

embarassed to admit I have nothing to say, nothing to offer. as I restate above the effulgence of Whitman: nothing to offer but the self. is this a monstrous fantasy of ego-stormed lameness, or is it an ultimate Truth? what more do we have. and offering the self, the complete risk and instability of change brings us to a flash-point of presence and being? or simply to the mundane facing of Other in their inscrutable meat-space incarnation. what more do we have, what more can we do?

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen, Denmark - Stockholm, Sweden - Turku, Finland

snow

There is snow. Hard pellets strike the flank of the X2000 train racing on slick steel ribbons across the land. NORTH NORTH NORTH. No chances now of spring in the near future. Almost horizontal, this wet frozen water. Snow on the ground. No chance. At all. And yet another 30 hours further north to go. This last stretch to Lapland will be bus, hydrofoil, train, bus, boat, train, train, bus. Past an unfrozen lake. Is this reason to Hope? Can it be read as a reviving, slipping from the dead to the green of living? Having been there before, alive, once, recently, and now moving negatively into backward time. Where trees are shorter. Flat Light, no snow now, land looking dried out and dusty, air Light blue, nascent pale. Birch trees cluster and cross trunks at low angles. Moving very fast at this second, and hours later, bus, and now the boat, I discover that one of the bars has Guinness. Good. I sit for one, joined at the table by the window by an elderly Finnish man who has two pins on his lapel, one with a silhouette of Kekkonen, the former Finnish president, and the other appearing to be an oak leaf cluster. I stare out of the window and REFLECT. It hits me, that the form of our imaginations at the moment we reflect are parallel to the universe of meaning and intention around us. As I am absorbed, watching out the window, watching the world, mediated by glass, my thoughts are fluid and in motion just as the scene playing by the window, rocky islands, wooden houses — we never have an open window, do we? Always our sensuality is mediated. Can we move through this condition in this presence? Or is it against the Spirit of the presence? Should I (in dreams) explore my presence? Does the mediation actually give us a small possibility, a small distance on the world that we can step back and SEE what we are (in Spirit) and … A call comes on the loudspeaker in the room in five languages if there is a Doctor on board, please contact the bursar’s desk as soon as possible…

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Labou

days have flashed by. at night on the kai (waterfront of the harbor), pause to look at the seal tank at the aquarium. the seal looks at me with bloated brown eyes, moving its head to the right and to the left on a sinuous neck with no shoulders below. public lecture last night, technical problems, an afternoon field trip to the Facist Death Memorial at Labou, class seems to be intense, Volker stops in for three days, conversations between he, Hubertus, and myself are of singular intensity, the school seems in a state of dis-awareness of itself, life is precious, I think of the David Bowie song Young American, all the way from Washington… and it all goes ’round. content, being, vessel, and void. a dance with music constructed from vibrating particles of self-and-Other. head north yet in two days, 36 hours, a stop in Copenhagen.

posted
  • place: Peters Valley, New Jersey

vision

I sit fire-fronting. Waiting for another Vision. Bach’s “Overture á la Française.” And so on. I move into the night, yes. And so on. I am so close to the next place. But I cannot even smell it. or see it. except as an impression of memory already. my thoughts pass. that all analysis should be left behind. The paths. The roads. The connection. Gary. Ellen. Bill. Andrea. John. Brian. Marcella.

And this Vision says: (not looks like …)

The overlaying: superposition of DREAM over this standard realness. Yes. there was not a “click” of awareness: knowing, but an awakening, a slow. gradual coming into. And so. Others were in my Vision. I see my vision come. Now I know what a vision is. And Gary recounting the experience as we crashed in the car behind the billboard past Wendover, Nevada … Whatever it was (the FEAR. The over-riding fear: much beyond PANIC.) The visitations of that time before. And I get the hint of the measure of what spiritual evolution is. Compared with the SYSTEM of the physical. I see something now. Mind-tripping along the synapses. Movement I cannot but partially predispose. And so. on. Self-to-Self.

So. Life has become this series of seeings. The owl at Joanne & Mike’s place. The owl yesterday here. The Indian mound. The Shaman in Death Valley. The petroglyphs there also. Vitamin Ell. This book Gary gives me. the Billboard incident. My branding.