posted

Vacillation

I

Between extremities
Man runs his course;
A brand, or flaming breath.
Comes to destroy
All those antinomies
Of day and night;
The body calls it death,
The heart remorse.
But if these be right
What is joy?

II

A tree there is that from its topmost bough
Is half all glittering flame and half all green
Abounding foliage moistened with the dew;
And half is half and yet is all the scene;
And half and half consume what they renew,
And he that Attis’ image hangs between
That staring fury and the blind lush leaf
May know not what he knows, but knows not grief more “Vacillation”

posted
  • place: Copper Basin, Arizona

more on the archive

A bit overwhelming, faced with thousands of images and texts in analog form. How to go about it, especially as there is no possibility of waving hands and all get transformed to digital gems. Dross versus age, time, and energy. And the solitary process of culling, ordering, and such. The application of a system upon that which has no system, or has an unusable system for the future. More order where there is less, more simplicity where chaos has lent an indeterminate complexity. And many holes in knowing what is what. The flesh-and-blood memory storage devices have dissolved in flame. So those faces from 60, 70, 80 years ago are now unknown by name, though the far-ago visages are here re-membered in form.

Only so much life-time/life-energy is available for these tasks, this remembering. Time spent on looking backwards is time not spent in the moment looking around and participating in the immediacy of creative action. But an inertia is building to return to works on paper, in large format.

posted

all watched over …

Who can resist the ominous simplicity of Brautigan’s All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace?

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado
  • enclosure: https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/20110906-232_chan.mp3 16943195 audio/mpeg, https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/20110825-202_chan.mp3 21471783 audio/mpeg, https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/20110311-013_chan.mp3 11006085 audio/mpeg, https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/20110311-014_chan.mp3 34050264 audio/mpeg

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”

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

Energy, Creative Action, and Sustainable Systems Workshop – Day 8 – eNZed

The official blurb for the workshop:

This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:

(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.

**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit

posted

desire, complexity, simplicity, determinism (mix-up mash-up)

Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.

[Complexity and simplicity are used here as general indicators of the depth and breadth of the techno-social system’s process of provision and production that leads to services, situations, or products deemed necessary for participants. Metrics of complexity would include geographic proximity, ease of access, energy density, and the number of substantive steps required to produce a product or create a desired energy flow. The relative necessity of a product is highly subjective and varies widely between different systems. Necessity is a cultural construct (complementing, say, Maslow’s needful ranking). Complexity may be indicated by the number of discrete steps that can be described that a process passes through — steps/degrees of flow alteration.] more “desire, complexity, simplicity, determinism (mix-up mash-up)”

posted

pox

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown. — Albert Einstein

and this work will (already) require an a-cyclic slippage into and out of mechanistic language which makes so much of the territory un-mappable (before a new language can be framed). a skimmering skittering across hot metal plates causing dissipation and evaporation. (where transformed language is a compressed gas, waiting for temperature and pressure changes to expand to fill a dialectic space — wherein the words and word-constructs are tested for vacuity or fullness). Conscious use will govern whether or not there is a sense of movement or an underlying stasis in the text. Thankfully it is a DCA and not a PhD so there is plenty of room for experimentation.

[and a pox on all you slackers who underline in pen or pencil or highLight texts in library books. I don’t give a damn what you think is important, so keep yer grubby hands away from public domain books!]

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

energy/complexity

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a Utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. — Joseph A. Tainter

There is much to explore in the ideas around organizational complexity/simplicity correlated with high/low energy requirements for a system — essentially basic thermodynamics (it always comes down to this). If the wider (widest) scale of human systems could scale social complexity down, the energy requirements would experience a correlative drop. But this is a very substantial IF. And it would mean that the energy reach of the average individual would consequently contract. And human natures seem to preclude any sacrifice of control that is a crucial part of the existing order. China fancies itself victorious, clambering over other nations to arrive soon at the top of the influential complexity heap, but it will soon discover that the price for this status is, literally, high. And it too, as a complex system, will gradually implode again. Though likely not after extracting, demanding, a high flow, or tribute, as the US is now doing, from the global system. That flow comprising the over-consumption and thus concentration of widely distributed materials which now, in their post-use state leave the globe energetically worse off. In the end this is not an issue of nation-state guilt, it is simply the evolutionary state of the tool-wielding bipedal mammalian species. The (over-consuming) developed world crosses many demographic and geographic borders, while likewise the under-consumers are widely distributed.

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet’s energy balance. — David Price

posted
  • place: Fishers Towers, Utah

desert moon

another place.

The wind will not stop. Gusts of sand swirl before me, stinging my face. But there is still too much to see and marvel at, the world very much alive in the bright Light and wind, exultant with the fever of spring, the deLight of morning.

Strolling on, it seems to me that the strangeness and wonder of existence are emphasized here, in the desert, by the comparative sparsity of the flora and fauna: life not crowded upon life as in other places but scattered abroad in spareness and simplicity, with a generous gift of space for each herb and bush and tree, each stem of grass, so that the living organism stands out bold and brave and vivid against the lifeless sand and barren rock. The extreme clarity of the desert Light is equaled by the extreme individuation of desert life forms.

Love flowers best in openness and freedom.

***

Dehydration: the desert air sucks moisture from every pore. I take a drink from the canvas water-bag dangling near my head, the water cooled by evaporation. Noontime here is like a drug. The Light is psychedelic, the dry electric air narcotic. To me the desert is stimulating, exciting, exacting; I feel no temptation to sleep or to relax into occult dreams but rather the opposite effect which sharpens and heightens vision, touch, hearing, taste and smell. Each stone, each plant, each grain of sand exists in and for itself with a clarity that is undimmed by any suggestion of a different realm. Claritas, integritas, veritas. Only the sunLight holds things together. Noon is the crucial hour: the desert reveals itself nakedly and cruelly, with no meaning but its own existence. — Edward Abbey

Abbey, E., 1971. Desert solitaire: a season in the wilderness, New York: Ballantine Books.
posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

net2art

(ED: Review of the net-to-art exhibition written for (the now defunct) Norwegian web-culture site http://kunst.no/ at the millennial change)

What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication. — Taylor and Saarinen, from “Imagologies: Media Philosophy”

Imagine.

Enter a plain white room with an Other. Take a facing seat one meter apart in not-too-comfortable chairs and follow these instructions: “You have three hours, create a dialogue with each Other.” There is no piped-in music, no magazines on coffee tables, no televisions, no mobile phones, no windows. No implements, tools, ethernet connections, or whining hard-drives. And, as this is not an experiment, there is no one watching from behind mirrored glass or by video surveillance.

Start the dialogue.

Imagine, what are the possibilities?

Now, increase the separation to ten meters between you and the Other. Repeat the instructions. What now? Add the mediation of a heavy glass window between; add a microphone and speakers on each side. What happens? Abstractly paint over the glass with opaque pigments. Take away the microphones and speakers, each of you has a pencil and paper to write messages which will then be carried by robotic assistants from one half of the room to the other via a long hallway.

Imagine designing the rooms.

Add the fact that neither of you speaks a common mother tongue, but instead, you must use a third or even fourth language, sometimes relying on a book to supply the proper words.

Imagine building the rooms.

Split the room in half, place the two halves at least 1000 kilometers apart, replace the hallway with a slender wire of glass, you are given the means to throw words, encoded with several layers of machine translation, through the glass wire. Provide keyboards for each to touch, exchange the glass window with a monitor that displays the color, form, sign and symbol of your decoded dialogue.

Imagine several hundred million rooms, a person in each.
more “net2art”

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

noun :: a naming in 21 parts

Starting to roll projects over, but until that is complete, the original page is located here.

The men of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that Light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart); wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.
more “noun :: a naming in 21 parts”