posted
  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

hmmm?

Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:

Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.

sotto voce: If you want to dig (no pun intended) into this more, I’d highly recommend this audio/video panel at the Center for Strategic and International Studies:

https://csis.org/event/rare-earth-elements

It’s a good in-depth intro to this issue by a panel of three experts who look at the contemporary situation with rare earth elements (which do not include niobium and tantalum from coltan deposits). But it is basically the same idea/situation — in the sense of there being a rare resource, in demand by a multiplicity of large forces/powers, in places where local people are considered to be disposable commodities.

(I am not promoting their opinions, but they do describe the situation well from their point of view, both historical and today’s view)…

I believe it is worth it to consider the principle, not the details, in these areas of activism, as EVERY material that the techno-social system uses for re-forming matter causes a similar distortion of localized systems: That is, look around your home, what’s made out of metal, plastic, chemicals, paper, wood… etc etc, it all requires machines to make which require more metals, plastics, chemicals, etc. etc… which make necessary the entire range of the global extractives industry which is closely allied to WAR (of every kind — both aggressive overt weapons war as well as slow and equally deadly environmental degradation warfare).

Humans do this. It is not avoidable. The only factor that we have the power to influence is *how much* we use — of course, this *how much* does imply choosing one type of device over another. It also places the choice directly in our power. We can make choices, we can influence others to make choices. But as long as this discussion proceeds here on this (telecom-based) mailing list, we are being somewhat hypocritical. Of course, educating each other is paramount, but the best teaching methodology is to ‘practice what one preaches.’ Which puts us squarely in a very problematic position of having to implement radical change in our tele- lived lives or else continue to support large portions of this global system.

If you want to stop mining, then you have to stop telecommunications. You have to go back to an industrial base before rare earths and coltan were discovered and rendered fit for use. (1800 were the first discoveries, but little use came before the beginning of the 20th Century).

Otherwise, this process will simply continue and expand, along with demand, and along with all the horrific effects that the human struggle for control of resources entails everywhere…

hmmm. god that sounds bleak. sorry, but from this materialist approach to global problems, there are no solutions. It would seem that a Buddhist approach which posits that *all is change* and to try to grasp and manipulate or put off change is a futile process. We must simply move through this incarnation and while treating each other as best as we can, not get caught up in the grasping at illusion…

I don’t know. (I type on my laptop and stare at the letters string themselves across the screen…)

posted

Fred Arthur Nettelbeck 1950 – 2011

F.A. produced numerous chapbooks and alternative press publications. Not on many radars, but definitely expelling severe electro-magnetic radiation for the time he was around.

Demonic seconds of my history must not stop now. I am sober and writing this alone. No voice touch or folded skin of beings. I cannot remember. My father is a vapor inside a black box buried hundreds of yards behind my house. I have drunk the last of his beer. I have heard the last of his hollow laughter many long nights ago as coyotes joined in erasing tears, excuses, lies. I am left with what I have created of years. My structured words contained in slim volumes as proof that my face will not last. That here are many ways to spell a life. I cannot blame my vocabulary. I cannot blame the alcoholic seizures. I cannot blame the wet and sticky hours I have spent inside a woman. I cannot blame the relentless black night or the sun again. Again. As I still don’t give thanks for the days nor care to court the clock. Because I am owed millions of dollars. Because they don’t make enough damn booze to drink. Because you’re too stupid to understand. I am living here. As the stars punctuate all the past and future lives. I am living here. Possessed. — F. A. Nettelbeck

posted

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

final leg

elephant-skin limestone, Goshute Mountains, Nevada, April 2010
Arrive at CLUI mid-afternoon, after a slow and cold morning with a walk among the juniper and the outcrops of limestone there in the Goshute Mountains, looking for something, not sure what. The final 100 miles is on an empty road, northbound with the dominant paleo-shoreline of the ancient Lake Bonneville appearing (everywhere) tracing an almost-human-alteration-looking bench line at the elevation of 1,555 m (5,100 ft.) feet above sea level — Wendover is at 1,308 m (4,291 ft.), that is, deeply submerged in a conceptual Lake Bonneville. More on that later. I will have to walk portions of the shoreline at some point. Matt is there at the residency compound so we immediately launch into a conversation that is broad, but specific in its range of subjects. There is the organization of CLUI itself, I am tremendously curious about it as a social entity and how it survives (and thrives) in the relatively hostile (to culture-orgs) environment of the US. Then there is the location here, as Matt takes me on a two hour driving tour of the facility and the town, I am really amazed at the depth and richness of the relationship he (and the organization) has fostered with this place.

We end up at a great Mexican restaurant, The Salt Flats Cafe, at the Blair exit (#4) off I-80. Have to go there again, the chili rellenos were quite good.

posted

tool-making and control

Nadine's hand, Alsace, France, June 1988

If one constructs a tool, what is one doing, and why is one doing it? How will one do it?

How to control of flows around oneself? And what does this control mean? Where does the desire to control arise from? Is it simply about evolutionary (survival/procreative) pressures? Is there anything about control that is altruistic (or simply outside of the broadly evolutionary imperative)?

The divide between life-forms that make tools and ones that don’t is fundamental, but it may be ignored when regarding the smooth continuum framing life as a system(?) that alters the flows of energy around it generally to its advantage (or to its need to continue — life is about life needing to continue life). The divide then appears to arise only when one considers how (from a mechanistic p.o.v.) that control is exerted.

mine, Bitburg, Germany, July 1988

This divide seems especially arbitrary when the body itself may be seen as a tool. The mechanical relations between bone structures, for example, or the magnifying ability of the lens in the eye. And, extending the definition of tool beyond the purely mechanical to, say, chemical, the body is a clearly a refinery in the exact same sense as a petroleum refinery. It conducts a wide-ranging set of thermodynamically driven reactions to access and distribute concentrated energy sources that it has introduced to its system. While there is a material dividing plane, the skin, which historically looms largely absolute in determining many classifications of relation and order, that plane may also be seen as arbitrary. The surface tissues — including the entire gut and lungs — are highly permeable surfaces which are constantly interchanging matter and energy with the environment they are in. In an optimal sense, at a particular time, this interchange process does not degrade the general order of the biotic system, but it does precipitate localized and systemic change. Also to be considered are the millions of microscopic organisms which synergize with the larger human body system — without which that system would likely not survive.

Andrea, Jersey City, New Jersey, May 1988

Are there, then, distinctions to be made based on body-as-tool and the ‘external’ tool that the body/mind system synthesizes? Or are these distinctions merely artifacts of the entire mechanistic p.o.v.?

It would seem so. If one considers, again, the relations within the body between , say, limb or organ, where a part may be seen as having a particular function which benefits or affects another part. A particular part has a function (as any tool also has) which aids in the performance of the body-system and interacts with other specific mechanisms in the body. In a living body-system these inter-relations are both necessary and sufficient if one includes the those moving between the body and the external. The body is seen as an indivisible whole, but without the constant interactions with the external environment, it would, for practical purposes, dis-integrate immediately.

The point of this short meditation is to emphasize the process which a tool, by definition, precipitates. That process is the fundamental alteration of the energy flows to which the tool is applied. This process unites the purpose of both internal and external systems for energy flow change which may be seen as a tool. The body is a technology as much as anything external to it which causes an alteration of extant energy flows. (Uff, this suggests that life itself be defined as a technology as it always alters the flows around it — we are life, we alter the flows around us, we are a technology.)

The division between tool-makers and those organisms which do not make tools may then be seen as a somewhat arbitrary one. Both organisms are needful of altering the surrounding flows to survive, they actualize that need via evolved mechanisms as they relate with those particular flows. The ultimate point for both internal and external tool use is the optimized continuance of life.

posted

difference, edges

Meanwhile, thinking about difference and edges. Organisms are distinguished by defined/refined difference between themselves and that-which-surrounds through changes in the characteristics of the field/flux. There is also an internal(ized) sensitivity to difference that arises in an organism — as an evolutionary trait related to the search for usable energy gradients as a source for ensuing negentropic action or use. Distinguishing difference: how does it arise and proceed? Or is the energy gradient, a fundamental expression of difference, difference itself? Skin seems to be absolute and abrupt but in fact is a layered, gradational transition from Self to what is out there. And, in fact, if there is a continuous energized substrate within/below/of all, there is only difference in relatively and locally definable by characteristics which are circumscribable with non-absolute frames of reference … sheesh …

posted

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”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

question of separation

I would say first of all that the question of separation or non-separation is a relative one. In some contexts the question of separation is a valid way of thinking, saying that I am different from the desk. I have independence of movement. What I think doesn’t affect the desk significantly, and this doesn’t bother my thinking significantly, and so on. There is a certain relative separation which we have to begin from. The point is that we can symbolize that by the notion of a boundary. And the boundary can be a relative boundary, like the skin is a boundary and yet everything crosses it. And thus boundaries can be moved, you see. One of the illusions we get is based on the assumption that these boundaries are absolute. For example between nations, people take the view that these boundaries are absolute and therefore by thinking that way, they create enough facts to make it look apparently verifiable, confirmable, right? — David Bohm

posted

notes prior to Memory Seminar with Andrew Hoskins

The concept of memory is related to my own work and practice — as an artist, part of my work does relate to the creation and preservation of my personal archive. Also, memory is a feature of collective Techno-Social Systems as a mapping of embodied participation in that system over time. It is also a concept to consider in the wider perspective of my work which examines human presence, encounter with the Other, collective social systems and their impact on the individual and finally, creative action.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the words of physicist David Bohm, that

… there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the individual (creator, participant).) The levels of loss of autonomy exist on a sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a collective or individual archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

many impressions, no time

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy’s Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. old Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up and show pantied crotches at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it’s the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can’t bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose. more “many impressions, no time”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Reindeer on the Road

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

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

posted

the Four, the Five; the Sink, the Skink…..

wow
bow-wow
and a swoon.

what an exhaustion,
what a prolongation,
what a
yeast-explosion
(souffle)
(implosion)
yesterday
was.

The Past is not dead;
it’s not even past.

Recently,
often enough,
my body has been a
contagious site

for arduous,
tenacious
spirits

for collisions,
elisions, litterings,
erosions,
floods
of certain humours,
certain histories.

Very much
in the Locus
of Mallarme and Naufrage,
Coup de des.

This “present” circumstance
(of intellectual inertia)
is untenable,
is impossible.

It Is Time—-
to cut the Strings
(of the Violin)—-
and to way with the giving Storm,
across the gravelled
waves.

The rigour,
the balance,
the elastic effervescence
of the Sycamore
surpass
every aspect
of the House.

No Need of Nature,
No Need of Art for This—-.

Franz
conceives of a “man”
who awakens in “his” bed
with the body of a scarab
(Old Egypt and its Love
of Puns);
a “man” who yet
(miraculously)
“retains” his human head.

What
might we say of a man,
who neither sleeps nor wakes;
who finds himself
inside
a Mural-Wall,
Wall-inside-a-Forest,
Land
travelling at Sea?

Wall: as Compass.
Forest: as its Clock…..

A….Reader? ….Reader-Hand?

Aestival,
estual,

Rain-Hand

Palus-Reeder?

(As with
*I Ching*—-
Biting-through-the-Sack….

What
kind of Sky?)

An.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

oblivion

month’s ending. All Hallows. images accruing in a form to share — 1996 (of this travelog) will be augmented first. complications with Berlin logistics, may throw off the November trip. and force a cancellation of Transmediale collaboration, hmmm. recalls the cafe9.net debacle in 1999.

end of the month, Friday.

finished with the DFW immersion. Oblivion is a brilliant set of stories, each one containing numerous positions, layers, points-of-view, (what to call the vantage of his voice/eye?). maybe the term channels applies. he has a multi-tasking eye, picking up information not just at the focal point of optics, but instead, immaculate macular generation. he has the recall, along with synthesis. imagination? springing from impression and spreading out through spaces which have not been mapped in that exact way. an example of voice-declaiming-self’s-model-of-cosmos. with a pivotal crux for the entire collection coming on page 326:

‘Who?’ She had ten weeks to live.

Wallace, D.F., 2005. Oblivion: stories, New York: Back Bay.

the deeply buried oblivion of our situation, now. everywhere. whenever. a weepy sad sketch of the human conditions. here, now. whenever. and a stiff finger punched into the chest of gloating cultural superiority. it all falls down.

how to push shaped impulse charges out, through the gate of psyche. and while pushing out, receive direct all the more.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

honeymoon’s over

dredging (scanning) personal archives, negatives unseen until now — 1979, 1989, 1992, 1996, and then far back into pre-histories. an image of my mother taken by my father on their honeymoon in 1945. near Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire.

it takes a day for one roll of 36 exposures, and entails multitasking that makes any coherent writing impossible. editing is possible, but not raw writing. and acquiring more digital scans seems vaguely senseless. what to do with all the ones that already are there? sounds, videos, texts, images. when life gets reduced to leaving traces, what then is life? stepping out of life to make a transitory tracing of energies, then stepping out for a longer time to take that tracing and massaging it into something coherent. (what is coherency?) much massage makes mashed potatoes out of some material. monster mash. right back to the archaic world of remix culture which is so incredibly boorish.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

pool

seven visits to the pool, either Vesturbaer or Laugardalur, sunny after the fog rolls back by late morning. old folks doing aquarobics. what’s different in Iceland this time? seems all the crosswalks and corners have been improved with stroller and handicapped ramps. that’s new. more cars. more construction, more fancy flats. more of all kinds of stuff. food, furniture, more foreigners, immigrants or whatever. people with different colored skin. not just tourists. uh.

(00:07:30, stereo audio, 18 mb)

the economy is in pretty bad condition with inflation cranking up as is the case in Eastern Europe, around ten percent. the Euro is around 127 kronur, the dollar at around 85, this makes the prices for local things slightly more reasonable than on previous visits. bus tickets are the same as in Berlin, the swimming pool tickets when buying ten at a time are just EUR 2.00. not bad. but food prices are increasing on a weekly basis. economics. this was the situation when I lived here in the early 90’s. not pleasant. stagflation.

drop by noisy opening of works by Hamish Fulton, and end up talking to a whole bunch of folks that I’ve not seen in years — Kees, Kristin, Ingolfur, and many others. strange to think how much I was into that sector of the society here all those years ago. how life makes pathways open and close.

(00:05:03, stereo audio, 9.7 mb)

and no visit to Reykjavík is complete without a stop at Hlemmer, the main city bus station, Iceland’s version of Port Authority in New York on a microscopic scale. the fringes of social behavior are relevantly displayed. notably, on this stop, a couple clothed teenagers demonstrating a variety tantric positions on one bench, faces making a range of slurping and sucking noises, whilst a Dutch tourist argues with the ticket lady about the bus schedule for the next morning. only the tourist is easily evidenced on the ambient sonic recording.

(00:05:25, stereo audio, 10.4 mb)

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

funeral, et al

just back from Helga’s funeral service at the Seltjarnarnes Church and the reception at Hotel Saga after wards. sad to see the ones who grew up with that old way of living pass away, that long-ago generation. Helga was born in a dirt-floored sod hut in Svarfaðardalur near Dalvík on Eyjafjörður just shy of one hundred years ago. she was the matriarch to four generations of descendants who follow her on the pathway.

(00:40:06, stereo audio, 77 mb)

while I will always be an outsider in this close-knit community deep in the North Atlantic, I will always be bound to the place through the people of this family. bound in the living and the dying, the movements, the step-wise step-fool wanderings along the rugged sphere’s surface, floating in a suffused crystal darkness. where replication and desertion become forces driving Light and spare living. messages arrive from all corners of life. direct in the face, through this and that face rarely seen, age-lines and sagging skin characterizing it all. eyes peering out from under graying crop. young ones dancing around, some so young that the dance has not yet begun in the newness of be-ing. but where eyes wide open take it all in to map pathways across pure soul. they take it all in. and the living move on, the ones who have left are there in memory as the ones who formed us.

posted
  • place: Zeesen, Germany

lake swimming

geesh, Junkers JU-52’s flying over the city. two weeks ago it was the Douglas C-47’s, now it’s the Junkers. does this have any geopolitical significance? I was feeling a bit funny the first time I saw one of those planes flying over Germany some years back. so that’s what it was like — to see low-level paratroopers pouring out of those things (not sure how often the Wehrmacht did that, but). or just a slew of those plowing across the country skies, bringing troops to the battle.

just back into town, now I recognize when I hear one of these machines. accustomed, but aware.

headed down (south-east) into Brandenburg to Zeesen to visit with Ulrike at the family dacha (well, actually a large and nicely designed home of her parents — the dacha is in the back yard.) she’s up from Zürich for the weekend. the lake is a few meters away. it is delicious. nothing like skinny-dipping in a summertime lake in the German countryside.

she tells about her uncle who lives next door in his beautiful rammed-earth house. I am fascinated to run across this technology existing here in Germany. and there is Sunny, the happy bulldog. conversation drifts along wide paths through language. Saturn setting in alignment with the first-quarter moon, Mars high, Venus rising only in the early morning. nice to sit in the top-floor deck and watch stars, though the sky does not get completely dark any more as the Solstice approaches.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

dkfrf review

Rinus makes some nice notes on the Amurikan evening at das kleine field recording festival last week in Kreuzberg.

Rinus is one of those intelligent and grounded souls who facilitate events that are the polar opposite of pretentious. informal, humane, and best, they include a collection of found artists. artists who are connected by their desire to connect with others in an open way. my impression of the evening of performances was largely the comfort with which it proceeded. for example, I had not intended doing a visual set, thinking conservatively it was about field recording. but when Brandon got the video-projector set up, I thought, yeah, why not. so I started the evening with a slowly-building barrage. guilty, sure, of a phat mix. Rinus noted that it divided the crowd — it’s that polarizing influence that I seem to have. hmmm. it’s partly the software, got to explore how to slow it down for a more meditative mix. density. (going back to the thoughts about levity and density a few weeks ago). Brandon’s set was a perfect counterpoint to mine with the levity and Light of his life.
more “dkfrf review”

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

ascending

holiday in Netherlands, Ascension Day. internet goes out. just after figuring things out with the next day’s schedule. meeting tomorrow with Carmin, Rob, Geert and Linda, uff.

several times, friends in Europe have expressed the sentiment that they should be allowed to vote for the next US president. I don’t blame them.

in a cafe. pretending that I am a normal tourist. visiting this place on a week’s break from the job. shaky premise. Chinese tourists, comfortable in their own skins, progressing to world dominance. while Amurika founders in scarce 225 years. street musicians sing “if you’re going to San Francisco, make sure you have some flowers in your hair…” or so. he’s Amurikan, maybe 40 years old. maybe more, maybe less. who knows. age becomes less knowable or even contemplated. as day after day there is yet another blank page let lie, while pretty girls smile and rub their lover’s backs. tattooed arms intertwined. and what of life trajectory, how it goes? year overtaking year. while an older guy sits down at the next table with a baby-fist-sized spherical knob on the top left side of his head. bulbous. the tattooed gal shows the dimple in her lower back to her lover. they kiss. each second of eye contact they have, I age a year. slowly sinking into anonymous senility. nothing to do but stare down the far horizon, if it could be seen at all here in the City, to spot any sign of Death approaching. but there are too many brick buildings framing the space of Rembrandtsplein. more “ascending”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

tea

gusts and streamers of corn snow bounce past the windowsill, bringing the imagined shivering anticipation of heading out to shop for groceries. finally finished with the tin of Turkish Tomurcuk Earl Grey tea. it was good, but a disappointment compared to the long-leaf Ceylonese also available at the Turkish supermarket around the corner from Mindaugas’ place. I bought the tin because is was smaller than the huge kilo boxes of long-leaf. can’t decide now whether to pick up a small quantity of finer tea, or what. last month I picked up a stainless steel tea brewer that holds probably three or four regular cups of water. I’ve been brewing a full container each morning for the pre-noon writing session, drinking by the sip the whole time practically, tea with whole milk. necessary practice just to keep hands warm. otherwise I have to wear half-gloves — the relative lack of finger motion (am I not writing enough?) chills the hands. so, it is an integral part of the writing process that seems to be happening here. whether or not it is successful, I cannot say until I spin the text out into the wider spaces of network. that’s about to happen as I am working on the conclusions while refining the precursor parts of the overall text.

and in the time I write this, blue sky arrives. squall weather like in Iceland. ripping through. and vanishing without a trace.

I head out for a trip to the grocery. it is cold, but the trip down is with the wind, and I travel between squalls. I’m in a quandary over which tea to get now. bags are three times the cost of bulk, but they have only large 250 gram bags of bulk, so the total price is steep. and also, since I again focus on Earl Grey, though I wouldn’t mind a custom mix with some Lapsang Souchong or Russian, the bergamot in the Earl Grey is very volatile, so a large bag will lose its flavor unless it is used quickly. hmmm. but the price point drives me these days on as tight a budget that I am. so, big bag of Earl Grey. so it goes. looking forward to the first cup after the end of the Turkish stuff.

yesterday, a touristic walk around the Reichstag and Tiergarten area with Marie-Hélène. clearly a major holiday, most shops closed except for cafes. and hundreds of people out walking despite the chilly weather. the line was too long to go up into the dome, so we wandered down to the HKW to take in Song Dong’s installation, then back to the Holocaust Memorial via the Brandenberg Gate (past the guy dressed in full buckskins and a faux-Sioux war bonnet playing some kind of generic indigenous flute music with a back-up sound system and generator. just too weird for me. the Euro-obsession with an imagined and imaginary cowboy-and-indian culture in the mythological West of Hollywood is mostly over the top and with no connection to reality.)

I find myself frequently (at least in mind) making the comparison between Washington, D.C., and Berlin. as Imperial centers (in different phases of dominance).

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

soupe populaire

Marie-Hélène gets into town from Toulouse and Montreal so we decide to meet at tmp.deluxe for the soupe populaire. I cycled down, a good 45 minute ride, and was waiting outside on Potsdamer Strasse to meet her, she called asking for directions from the U-bahn and my phone died. Then it started snowing. I cycled down to the station but didn’t see her, dang. So, went back to tmp.deluxe and waited, talked to Sencer a bit, then went back out front to wait. What about life before the mobile? Okay, she arrives, mmmm, cool. Good soup to warm up by! We hang out there for awhile, then wander down the canal to see Mathieu‘s exhibition Kompetenz im Laborbereich over at Alte Stadtklause. Far-reaching conversation stitches time into a long chain, we shut the place down gradually into lateness. And a cold ride downwind across town back home.

And thoughts of politic enter into the day at some point: random collision with thought.

The more the worldwide [capitalist] axiomatic installs high industry and highly industrialised agriculture at the periphery [of the world economy], provisionally reserving for the centre so-called post-industrial activities (automation, electronics, information technologies, the conquest of space, overarmament, etc.), the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the centre, internal Third Worlds, internal Souths. “Masses” of the population are abandoned to erratic work (subcontracting, temporary work, or work in the underground economy), and their official subsistence is assured only by State allocations and wages subject to interruption. … In enslavement and the central dominance of constant capital … labour seems to have splintered into two directions: intensive surplus labour that no longer even takes the route of labour, and extensive labour that has become erratic and floating. … The opposition between the [capitalist] axiomatic and the [nomadic] flows it does not succeed in mastering becomes all the more accentuated. — (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 469)

posted
  • place: Berlin - Friedrichshain, Germany

OSPC

busy day, at home online all the time — a performance to check out with Helen Varley Jamieson as hosted by Annie Abrahams’ Breaking Solitude project. along with some stream testing with the backyard radio people for the moving forests event later this week (part of Transmediale). meeting Loki for the first time in awhile for a decent conversation. and otherwise heavy multi-tasking that characterizes a day like this — sending out to local nodes my new contact info here in Berlin, trying to figure out when to see people where, and on and on. a brief foray out, taking the long way to another grocery store, walking in increasingly long circles to check out the neighborhood. haven’t found the organic food store yet. a bakery, but no organic grocers. no Turkish shops either. this is definitely different than other neighborhoods that I’ve experienced in Berlin — it is in the former East (ever-lingering eau-de-coal-fired-furnaces in the air) — although many of the apartment blocks have been re-furbished, there is a different vibe. hope to more specifically explore that in the next weeks.

I read with interest this reaction from Malawi from Martin Lucas on the recent iDC list discussion about Nicolas Negroponte’s One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative. So I asked Martin if I could permanently host the text on neoscenes:

I have been reading with interest the discussion of the ‘hundred-dollar laptop’ and the One Laptop per Child initiative as I sit in Malawi, a small landlocked Southern African nation lodged between Mozambique, Zambia, and Tanzania. According to Wikipedia, the OLPC effort has its philosophical base in the idea that children with laptops will be able to do a certain kind of thinking that isn’t possible without the computer – exploring certain areas – particularly in math and science where computer access offers a qualitatively superior learning experience. Making such machines available at low prices should allow developing countries to bridge the ‘digital divide’, and leapfrog learning. Countries that have signed on include Uruguay. India has given a definite no. Either way, the OLPC initiative is an aspect of ‘development’ even ‘IT for Development.’ How does the initiative square with the reality of a small African nation? … more

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

another TAZ?

tmp.deluxe. call for interest. huh? a large empty space inside a renovated neoclassic building with high ceilings and big windows. controlled on the U1 line by two smiling-but-thuggish youngsters merely flashing their KVB identity cards. as a performance or so. fortuitous to have the right ticket. €2.10 normal tariff. not so cheap. I’m committed to a single round-trip maximum per day. how to do this when a typical day might require getting to four destinations or so. anyway, make it to the tmp.space. they are asking for proposals. slowly the space fills. black clothes, I’m no exception other than wearing faded jeans. there are two of us sitting at a raw chip-board table. call for interest. two large stacks of bluish-white A4 paper, two glass ash trays, one with a few pens cradled in it, one empty. the ubiquitous stench of cigarettes. why is that smell the quintessence of stale? somebody changes the music — electronica for death-metal or so. conversations trip along and don’t seem to get through the aesthetic miasma that is anchored in the stacks of paper and the ashtrays. following the reasoning, following the line. and attempting to insert energy into the situation. having seen and been seen. and a child in a pink t-shirt wanders around. Papa! Papa! making space-testing sounds. to locate herself in the space. doing this, she locates all other receivers in themselves. placing them in the stiff reserve of their aesthetic opinions which they trade in measures, lubricated by wine. locative media while Rome Burns. or is this an exaggeration? more “another TAZ?”

posted
  • place: Margaretville, New York

storms

the rumored severe winter storm becomes only a Light sleet. despite all the globe-girdling technological network of weather sensors, they are wrong. it is a modest fall. mostly rain and a bit of sleet. windy.

The Meteorological Society … has been formed not for a city, nor for a kingdom, but for the world. It wishes to be the central point, the moving power, of a vast machine. … It desires to have at its command, at stated periods, perfect systems of methodical and simultaneous observations; it wishes its influence and its power to be omnipresent over the globe … to know, at any given instant, the state of the atmosphere on every point on its surface. — John Ruskin

posted
  • place: Düsternbrooke, Kiel, Germany

African Feedback

Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.

Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.

and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

starts

class begins. another configuration. not so comfortable in my teaching skin after all this time away. but so far, seems to be a workable group. the vocal along with the silent. the brave and the timid. the left-brain and the right. time is the chief enemy, only five days for this one.

posted
  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

right place at the right time

the Solstice, in Echo Park. what more to ask?

walking upstream in Pool Creek Canyon above the abandoned ranch. cross one branch of that major fault, and there the creek is, totally spring fed, gushing from a sand bank in the center line of that huge fault. continue up the canyon in the dry wash. find a cave with a crude lean-to fashioned in it. hung with clothes, boots, and other items. old, very old. at least 50 years, perhaps 75. on the wall are a couple rock paintings. the clothes are working ranch clothes, the rock paintings appear to be authentic. I do not disturb anything, but am very conscious that my boots are making footprints in the sand floor. continuing up the arroyo, the canyon is defined by subtle and massive structural essences of the rock. on the uplifted side of the fault, the underlying limestone shows in the wash. the down-thrown side is at least 1000 feet lower. dramatic geology, good location for field mapping exercises.

sense a mountain lion at one point, the sage is often taller than my head, so, walking through deep brush, scrambling over rockfalls, peering into the numerous caves formed in the eroded sandstone. shooting many images. this is one of the best walks taken in the area. with plenty of cool places to stop, even in the vibrating mid-day zenith of the Solstice sun — overhangs, caves, some Douglas Fir trees, large old junipers, and areas of over-hung canyon wall, rising a few hundred feet above. the absolute depth is about 800-1000 feet, perhaps a bit more. I do not go as far as I can, but stop for 30 minutes to remove fox-tail burrs from pants, socks, and boot liners, where they are beginning to drill into my skin.

Loki does not accompany me.

we later swim/wade upstream to the Green/Yampa confluence and explore. the Yampa seems a few weeks yet too strong to cross. the current is strong even in the hip-deep areas, making a perfect speed for swimming a hard workout in place. the flow of the Yampa is around 2000 (cubic feet per second, cfs), it was twice that at the beginning of the month (see the USGS water data site). in May it can reach up to 20000 cfs on rare occasions — with good snowpack and rapidly increasing spring temps. the Green is half that, and does not vary from around 900 cfs because of the Flaming Gorge Dam. there are a pair of beavers who have found a sheltered cove to hang out in, noshing on aspens up to five inches in diameter which they have cut down and dragged to the river, leaving strange markings in the sand whilst doing so.

the previous day, coming down from the Uinta Mountains, we pass the monstrous phosphate mine which has modified a significant chunk of the south side of the Uintas. I continue work on the Domination of Landscape series to be uploaded later. everywhere in the west is plenty of material for this project. unfortunately.

posted
  • place: en route Aachen, Germany - Brussels, Belgium

migrations

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit (cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

posted
  • place: en route, Heathrow - Stepney-Limehouse, London, England

Stepney

now it’s the next day (of arrival) after all the delays, and the contorted efforts to sleep in a seated cattle-class configuration. Heathrow immigrations takes a long time, baggage claim, no problem by the time I got there, change some money, get an Oyster card, get on the Piccadilly line headed East. senses begin to wake up to the pleasures of movement, travel: seeing, talking to Others. change at Baron’s Court to the District line getting out at Aldgate East, try to find the bus stop. for a moment, not trusting intuition, and get into a conversation with an Irish chap with a small news-stand. asking for the bus-stop, but him only interested in my destination “that’s a new’n by me, Senrab (Street)…” it’s chilly and damp. nothing new. slightly cooler that California, but not by much at all. the driver nods at the request to drop me at the Marion Richardson school, before the Troxy Bingo Hall on Commercial Road. not far from the Stephen Hawking Special School. no where to stand on those buses when toting a bag — always in the way of folks getting off and on. aLight and make the short haul to Senrab and neighbor Christiane’s house a few doors down, she comes to the door, gets the keys and an envelope for me, and I am aware of two little girls crouched at the top stairs watching my appearance. back down the block — Maya and Jez, room-mates of JB’s are home, though, so I hadn’t needed to get the key. They show me in/around and Jez makes some tea and we chat for awhile. great to have a home to enter, when landing in a foreign land. I get the sitting room for a bedroom, comfy. with a view out to a garden, lotsa brick walls, and what looks to be a factory out back, converted to a school or so. beautiful building, I watch it in the night and when dawn comes.

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: San Jose, California

re-colonization

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

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

start: time:money:energy

lines of the hand, with the skin thinning, turning to trapezoidal textures that shimmer differently than they used to do. cool tonight, here at altitude, in the dry west, when the sun goes, warmth goes as well. remembering the nights in the desert, so many times. no matter the heat of the day, the night gives the heat back to the darkness of the sky. only in deep summer, is there more heat delivered than can be reflected away, so that only at the null hour, a time before dawn, does the air loosen itself of the burden of heat. but as soon as fall comes, with a couple days of cloud cover, the night air is an empty chill. more “start: time:money:energy”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

sotto voce

so, from here on forward (and backward), recognizing that there is plenty of material to be culled from the email archive and the daily outgoing rush of words to generate relevant content here. as I run into the issue of editing — why not put material here that is more immediate, more intense, more reflexive of the trajectory of life in this incarnation? one old memory popped up — that of a small scandal that I precipitated when I was in my last year of teaching at the Icelandic Academy in 1995. with a group of students, I was running a collaborative email- and fax-based project with a couple other schools and as I had also built the first, very primitive, web site for the school, I decided to put some form of documentation of the collaboration up as well. I stupidly put transcripts of emails that I and the students exchanged with the other schools. at the time there was a part-time video teacher at the academy who was using the computer lab repeatedly without asking me, for his own projects. I objected that unless he clear things with me, I would rather that he not use the machines during the day for his own things. somewhere in an email I mentioned this to one of the other schools, complaining about this guy. and somehow he ended up reading it (doh, I did put it on the nascent web) and complaining to the Rector. I was leaving the school anyway, but it upset some of the other teachers who were already ticked about the amount of money that I lobbied for — to build up the photo/video/computer lab. anyway, sotto voce will become entries culled from email. they will only be scandalous for me.

sotto voce: I’m pretty slow on the reply — just now coming out from under what seemed to be a large rock. I can walk (slowly), sit, drive now without the brace I wore until last week. it feels weird to be without it — like a shell-less turtle. & still months before I hope to get back to full strength. it’s been strange though. everything from the hi–tech repair job, the interruption to ‘real life,’ and dealing with a very material body…

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

neuroscenes

I think Nick suggests that moniker, but maybe not. my memory of daily existence is very flat and lacking any cataloged depth or retrieval landmarks. this will persist into the future. with spinal cord damage. the entire neuro-system is off. so is the lap where the laptop resides. some skin surface below the suture line reacts with the definite sensation of burning when there is only a slight pressure contact. confused nerves. distorted signals. while the main body system slowly oscillates, out of equilibrium.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Unocal memories

Reflecting on parallel universes, light musings surround the controversy that today ceased rumbling around CNOOC (Chinese National Offshore Oil Company) and Unocal (Union Oil of California). Back when I worked for Unocal in the early 1980’s, it is hard to imagine any other response than hearty guffaws to the suggestion that in 20 years the US oil concern would be up for auction with Chinese buyers out-bidding Chevron. No longer in contact with any of my colleagues from those days, I would be curious to hear their situations, if, indeed, they still are employed by the firm. Times change the conditions of the market. Unocal has been an acquisition target since the early 80’s when I was there — when the infamous Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was in hot pursuit of the company, such that the board tried to sink the company into multi-billion debt to make it less attractive. It is a different time indeed when a Chinese company, 70%-owned by the Chinese government, makes an aggressive bid to acquire a legacy US corporation. And on top of that, a company dealing with the major strategic resource of the developed world of the 21st century. No wonder Washington hawks are screaming! After watching the entire Cspan-aired Senate hearings on this precise merger, I was astonished at the lack of intelligence in the expressions of the ‘experts’ called in by the Senate. So little understanding of the movement and evolution and change of power in a dynamic world. Fighting or resisting inevitable power shifts is for the naive who cling to temporal power under highly conventional paradigms. It is clear that China is rising, and the US perhaps falling — in the broad sense. the empty cup tends to fullness, the full cup tends to emptiness. Rather than deal with the realities of socio-political evolution, the Washington power-brokers cling to an out-dated and very static worldview. Few seems to get Sun Tzu.

But how is it, these men and women who populate a corporate landscape, how do they live? Remembering back to the instance of going on a executive retreat to an exclusive resort in Ojai, north of LA, for a 4-day review of Unocal’s status in the oil business. My task was to present at an informal seminar an overview of state-of-the-art technology and applications for gravity and magnetic in petroleum exploration. Golf was on the schedule for a majority of the older execs, their bonding exercise. Open bar helped with that. I got the feeling that everything simply went along a certain and safe pathway to the intended goal of regular paychecks which were fed into mortgages, car payments, and very short vacation splurges (only 10 days of holiday per year for the first 5 years). Like a corral to tame the wild engineering student broncos. At the end of my briefing on the Colombia Llanos project, I showed a series of slides including portraits of the local peasants, the landscape, and the on-the-ground operation. It was very quiet when I was showing images of the people.

I have always maintained that my departure from the Big Oil scene was in no way an altruistic choice. this despite an early radicalization which included studying “The Communist Manifesto” in 7th grade — a fact that classmate Russ Werner picked up. he was the funniest kid in the junior high school, and the best cartoonist as well. he left a note in my yearbook addressed to the Pinko Commie Rat. no, that predilection did not factor in, though I can point to Roger Steffens program on KCRW, where I was a volunteer-member, The Reggae Beat brought the vibes of the Rastafarian belief system into high relief with guests the likes of Bob Marley, Alton Ellis, and Peter Tosh. If music can radicalize, it did. Bob Marley speaks as powerfully as any German philosopher! Jah Rastafari Makonnen! not to mention programs like “Alma del Barrrio” on KXLU “schizo-radio on the Left.”

I also recall, when living off of Lincoln and Ocean, taking a long slow look at a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard, running around $1200 at the time, now I really wonder what would have happened if I had bought that rather than a Nakamichi tape deck, a used 6’2″ twin-fin swallowtail surfboard, and a Fiat Spyder.

No, leaping from the Big Oil gravy train was merely the next step. on the eve of departure, the actual handing in a letter of resignation to Dennis Mett, the director of International Exploration, there was the huge Mombasa project that came up. For six months after I left, I would get occasional phone calls from Bill Sax, the VP of the International Division, asking if I wanted to continue working for Unocal and go to Africa for a couple months to oversee a mag survey from offshore up into the Great Rift Valley. By that time I was on another trajectory completely. Not nearly as lucrative, but somewhat more soul-satisfying.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa. — T. Boone Pickens
posted
  • place: Beroun, Czech Republic

coal drift

second day of the workshop. hard to read the situation. everyone is in an unfamiliar environment. the ambiance in the place is calm. but hard to decode. we are strangers. landing from one planet to another. it is unusual for me to be sharing the direction of the workshop, or at least trying to. there is an internal process of deference, but that clearly is not collaboration, I need to retune myself. it is hard for me to find a balance because of this. on my part. waiting for the students to make the 0900 morning start request to appear after losing most of the first day to stragglers who arrived late into the evening. there is a lack of awareness of the meta-structural social dynamics that would facilitate a greater intensity. but this is the normal condition. intuitive actualization is possible, but going through the gymnastics of cognitive understanding first seems the only way to bring back the operational authenticity of that intuition. either that or just get drunk with them all night, see who is the last standing.

I think what we need is critical consciousness. Critical consciousness towards the entire construct of technology. Technology is not neutral, it’s not God-given, it doesn’t come from the burning bush, it doesn’t emerge from the world of antimatter. It’s something that human society makes. So all of human society is inscribed in the machine in this sense – and then the machine becomes a force to reinscribe something on society. And you can have the negative aspect of this, and you can be truly creative – why not. I’m absolutely not denying anyone’s creativity. All I’m asking for, for myself, is critical consciousness about technology. — Hakim Bey

posted
  • place: en route - Phoenix, Arizona - Cologne, Germany

en route

en route. sitting on the floor. Phoenix SkyHarbor Airport gets poor marks on available mains plugs. very few, and so far, I found only one close enough to a seat that I could sit and work. and that chair was too far away from the gate for me to monitor what was going on, so, now perched o the floor leaning on one of the large concrete columns that support the jet-way. as usual mixed feelings in the heart on departure into the unknown. never made a direct flight to Europe from Phoenix (in memory), so this is a new protocol. security seems marginal. have to change planes and terminals in Heathrow, not really looking forward to that as it will be in the middle of my night. tried to go to bed a bit earlier last night, and set the alarm for 0500, but with the stars still shining in the window and the house cool, no way to get out of bed before 0700 when the sun starts Lighting the eastern horizon. in the shuttle down from Prescott, a young guy sitting in front of me has the word “ambiguous” embroidered on the back of his baseball cap in Techno font face. red on gray. he gets the attention of the two young girls in front of him by asking their opinion on the diamond engagement ring procured from his pocket — he decided this morning to buy it for his girlfriend who lives in Kansas City. he is on his way to the bus station in Phoenix. no baggage. he plans to propose in the Kansas City bus station. what a life. no baggage. can’t begin to penetrate the reality of that kind of life. as equally perplexing as the couple profiled in USA Today with a detailed recounting of their financial status with pension, 401k, and other investments. USD 200,000 saved at 30 years old. the plan includes paying for their grand children’s college. is this sacrifice or incredibly cynical control of life. nothing is made clear by media.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

baggage

traveling Lighter than usual. Eagle Creek suitcase: 2x jeans (blue & tan), 7x socks, 7x underwear, swimsuit, swim goggles, knit hat, 4 teeshirts, 3 dress shirts, 3 pullover shirts, scarf, leather gloves, heavy wool gloves, biking half-gloves, umbrella, Birkenstocks, cables (firewire-dv, rca, 2 rca-to-minijack adapters, s-video, composite video, ethernet), three miniDV cam batteries and power adapter, usb mouse, digital cam battery charger & usb adapter, 160 gig ext hard drive, power adapter, cd/dvd case w/ OSX disks and 8 blank dvds, spare 250 mb zip disk, shaving cream, razor, 3x blades, tiger balm, skin cream, shampoo, conditioner, deodorant, electric toothbrush and charger, toothpaste, dental floss, brush, hair ties, 4x earplugs, extra glasses frame, 3 cans of almonds, bag of almonds, bag of pistachios, bag of walnuts, bag of cashews, 4 Luna bars, uh, what else? oh, an incredibly compact self-inflating sleeping pad — normally my camping pad, but with my back problems, it is a good solution to soften some beds enough to ensure a decent night’s sleep.

daypack: digital still cam, iPod, adapter, 2x earphones, miniDV cam, boom mike, remote control, spare DV tape, PowerBook & case, power adapter, dv-to-vga adapter, passport, ticket printout, several select rail schedule printouts, 2x Science magazines, Finnish bank deposit forms, glasses prescription, Visa card, Visa Gold card, SIM art union card, Icelandic residency card, bound notebook, eyeshades, 1-liter water bottle, toothbrush, ear-plugs, toothpicks, fine ball-point, cd marker, Euros, Dollars, some GB pounds and Danish Kroner…

wearing: bikers jacket, black boots, black jeans, red pullover, fleece pullover, heavy socks, tee-shirt, money belt, leather cap, earplugs, sunglasses, ear-plugs in pocket, but otherwise nothing else that will set off the metal detectors…

posted
  • place: Mojave, California

Route 66


Pissing in the night, first the awareness of a full bladder, then the struggle into a wakefulness or forceful sleeping to ignore it all. Or checking the air temperature in the stellar darkness. Chilling. unzip the bag and squirm out, sandals on, turn around, open the door. Skin is less sensitive to the cold with sleep-warmth stored up. Intake breath with the brilliance of horizon-to-horizon density of stars. Vision is possible. It’s not totally dark. The Orion nebula clearly a nebula. Planets almost shedding shadows on dark ground.

Up in the morning with the sun cracking the southeast horizon. Dense fog filling the entire valley to the south, covering the railroad and floating the mountains far beyond on a silver sea. Have a fast breakfast, load-up, and drive to the Cadiz-Soda Lake road, but there has been so much rain in the last week the road is flooded so instead retrace path to the old Route 66, paralleling the rail line east to Needles. Stop at the BLM office and have a chat with Murl, a local with tremendous knowledge of the Mojave area. Trade stories and show respective trilobite samples, mine not too bad, considering that I had little memory of the place and that I found outcrops that had not yet been worked over completely. Thence on east, into the Arizona (Sonoran) desert with the saguaro and cholla cactus. Each growing in specific and very distinct ranges. The saguaro limited to south-facing rocky hill- and mountain-sides, never in the flats. The cholla often in north-sloping gravel alluvium. As the local nursery-lady, working in the native flora department said to me — “if it (a particular native plant) isn’t growing somewhere, then it can’t grow there…” without enough help to overcome the negative characteristics of the location, water, soil chemistry, Light, etc — obvious, but profound at the same time…

The desert is green, some areas like a billiard table, wildflowers will be resplendent later in March and April as the rainfall in the last month has already totaled more than the usual annual fall.

Clouds race towards the highlands to found the winter storms. Still in the lowlands, I trace a prickly pear and a Joshua tree in electron fullness.

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen - Åarhus - Copenhagen, Denmark

Åarhus

back on routes, a grueling week from Iceland to Denmark, to New York to Maryland to San Francisco. all in seven days. after the early morning departure from Ice Land in a chill dark snowy wind. nothing else but. so it goes. leave-taking, the usual heart pain.

dash away for a lunch and meeting with Søren in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at the Åarhus UNiversity. then a brief stop at the Art Academy of Jutland, home of splab, to meet Tanja and take a tour of the place to satisfy my always-keen curiosity to see schools and organizations on the ground. run into mr. noisejihad himself, Mikko, who participated in both di-fusion events and was a co-curator of the Overgaden festival as well. connections, connected, but the total brevity of the visit makes it almost useless. feeling antsy about getting somewhere, and the in between sensation gets overpowering when stops are too short. needing like a week to chill and engage anymore. and I didn’t even visit folks in Iceland hardly. nomad leaves for the steppes where stars are hard and cold, and many. check out. rocketing through the night by train, in the hvileplads car (the quiet-place). phones and talking are banned. I lucked out getting a seat in this car, the train seems pretty full. yeah, just noticed that I haven’t heard anyone speak except for the conductor going through asking for tickets. even the guy selling food didn’t really say anything, but is suddenly smiling in my face.

posted
  • place: en route Trondheim, Norway - Reykjavík, Iceland

movement

up early, eat the rest of the food in the fridge for breakfast. veggie omelet. and head out. back in Ice Land, where the landing was preceded by some minutes of rough buffeting, and at the gate it is hard to remain standing in the parked airplane from the wind shaking it. rok it is called. roaring wind from some direction, this time from the northwest, from Greenland. so, cold. bitter on exposed skin. so, stay inside and wonder if flights north will be delayed tomorrow, not too keen on doing the stol (short take-off-and-landing) Fokker hops to Akureyri in bad weather. not at all. will call in the morning to see what the status is.

posted
  • place: en route Reykjavík, Iceland - Oslo - Trondheim, Norway

Hafnarborg

a trip to Hafnarfjördur to the city exhibition space yesterday, Hafnarborg to see the show that Valgerdur organized and put up with a couple of print maker colleagues. the Italian artist, Paolo Ciampini’s work shows much skill in a variety of mark-making techniques, but with a few exceptions, the subject seems banal, with the work in the larger gallery upstairs far out-stripping the rest in the lower gallery. of Valgerdur’s installation: the visceral quality of the hanging substrate suggests the various accretions of time on skin, while the sonic background sustains the viewer’s motion in relation to the object fields. the slabs of black basalt ground the embodied self as it moves through the Cartesian space while the etched basalt pebbles exert a field of visual gravity — enabling a kind of orbiting passage through the psychic space — good feng shui! Deborah Cornell’s work complements the overall show, although there is an overtly cerebral — with definitive Amurikan elements — where art is posed in opposition to competing (academic) “fields of inquiry” — in this case, big, bad science.

today is of travel and movement, starting late in the day and ending up much later, in the early morning. but arriving in Trondheim with only minor inconveniences.

posted
  • place: Nida, Lithuania

mushrooms

sonorous night of outside vodka partiers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now comfortable meaning is heard in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.

a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.

mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.

I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.

this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.

posted
  • place: Vilnius, Lithuania

ram6.1

ram6 starts. Breakfast brings many familiar folks out from closed hotel doors. Nomeda said that we are the only people checked into the hotel for the duration—it gives the feeling of a large house. Soaked on the walk up the hill to the Contemporary Arts Center. Find Kim working so we go have lunch until the opening session where the workshop presenters introduce our respective plans to let attendees know what they can choose from. As usual my speaking is a bit cryptic, but there is a line of people afterward asking good sharp questions and it ends up I have an overflow. A bit wishing to be an attendee only, though, to catch Kim’s, or Sara and Derek’s workshop, for my own selfish reasons. And with thoughts to tomorrow, making the core decision to follow praxis by theory, rather than the other way around, at the beginning of the workshop tomorrow morning. Simple risk, though taking risks in a teaching situation is something that is more than less difficult, relatively: already the deep risks inherent in many previous workshops prove the worth of each step in the direction a distributed and autonomous learning. Facilitator, not teacher, or so.

Also was thinking I have to improve the content of the travelog photos. They seem stale. I don’t do many portraits because the medium of digital snapshots seems so … unstable. And unsatisfactory—primarily because of the delay, the ponderous e-lapse from the time the shutter release is depressed and when the electronic shutter activates. Impossible, so I stick with architecture and static life.

posted
  • place: Fort Myers, Florida

continued dental misery

Back from another dentist’s office. more work, some drugs, this time, to curb an infection. making the perhaps chronic instability of the immune system, due to sugar consumption, an important object of scrutiny. made it to hot and humid Florida yesterday afternoon, and collapsed, exhausted in the hotel near Aunt Mary’s flat in the Shell Point retirement complex. the week in New Jersey seemed to blaze by, mostly because of the cotton-headed-ness of my senses on simple 2×200 milligrams of ibuprofen daily. remarkably over-sensitive to even basic pain-killers and anti-inflammatories like that. seems to affect my whole being. but, lumbering around, trying to avoid the mosquitoes and the rain, making the system-jarring transitions from outside to inside environments. that’s the hardest. small air-conditioned interior spaces at maybe 22C, forty percent humidity, and exteriors at 35C and ninety-five percent humidity. the body reels from switching on and off of body temperature-regulation mechanisms. sweating to chill, skin clammy with condensing water immediately on exiting to open air. stays cool for a few moments, then the real heat takes over and the body withers. I’d much rather be in the heat all the time and acclimate to the ambient environment. but in this age, humans make the re-engineering of the world the paramount aim. to conform it to a narrow band of temperate, un-threatening, and benign artificial living situations. not recognizing that this makes the species soft, vulnerable, and ultimately unable to deal with the real environment. it makes, among other class structures, a split society — those who function mainly outdoors, and those who stay primarily indoors in a steady climate regime. this class structure is often delineated along education and class lines, but can be crossed by yacht-owners, boat-racers, and hotel maids.

Floridada. as Paul named it. thin sliver of earth between swamp and sea, tangled vegetation, voracious insects, carnivorous reptiles, strip malls, developers, and snow birds. not to mention the German tourists — signs in German signify that, though the real bodies are not much in evidence, at least I haven’t heard them around. prolly too bloody hot for ’em.

go swimming and listen and look.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

more from Bern Porter

recalling the time, Kevin and I driving the rental truck full of Conran’s Habitat furniture and location gear from NYC to Acadia National Park for the catalog shoot, stopping in to see Bern, but he was out. cruisin’ around the town, found a place to buy Maple Syrup which I loaded up on to take back to Iceland for French toast and corn bread later. I took a picture of Kevin in front of Bern’s porch. don’t have that neg scanned, but it does exist perhaps as an artifact in Kevin’s collection of my postcards. or actually, I think I sent one later to Bern as well.

Bern says:

I finger zero, readjust my couch in a void that sloth built, the better to do nothing.
…
Obsolescence revolts me. The alleged modern is a repetition of the ancient decorated in chrome, styled with air-flow and color-engineered to abomination.
…
Thus, communication-wise I junk drum beats, smoke signals, semaphores, flag codes, light flashes, telegraphs, telephones, radios, television sets and all other such systems, devices and developments for my own sensory organs wherein desiring to make known my wishes I merely think them in a frequency universal and in a tongue world known and whomever wishes to hear, receive and understand does so.
The spoken word, printed and tele-dramatized word becomes a particle of thought energy.
The drawn, photographed, painted and kinescope-picture becomes more of the same.
All of the devices of locomotion, subterranean, surface and aerial equally reduce.
I am at all places, in all forms, at all times.
What were books became word sequences screen projected, then free-floating vibrations which impinged upon my mind as I desired them.
What was art left museum walls to become gaseous fusions in color similarly projected, then all prevailing rhythms of radiant energy that stimulated my eye whenever I wished them.
What was poetry became equally transformed to responses for feeling.
Architecture became constructions of ether and light.
Clothing a logical extension of skin without embellishment.
Theatre a pageant of masked spectators.
Automobiles, body rockets.
Toys, fondling in the dark.
No civilized thing was left unmodified or unreverted to its natural, logical and true state.
I transformed the world and in so doing I found myself.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

signal-process

already every evening filled this week. as the low thrumming outside signals the passing of one of the daily cruise ships through the narrow channel at the south-east end of the island. workshop underway. listening. meditative, but this is how I always am anyway. wandering through foreign streets, as the observer. listening. but along with that way, there was a flash, an indication, that all social interaction is a skin over … what? an intangible absence. and that the skin held little, maybe the absence was not hold-able. in the end, social connection or relation falls away. and does not carry into the next state of being. and while the proposition that the next Other offers the realization of transformation, of Buddha-hood, is powerful, that transformative process appears to be almost entirely internalized, only triggered by the con-frontal Other. (not even catalyzed.) having to present my ‘work’ in a limited time frame to a fresh audience is always a challenge (where part of me resists the social framework that generates such pre-tentious configurations.) of course, encounters with an Other are encounters, but it always feels like the anticipation and formality are far too rigid to de-power. I have done this on a more general scale by denying a relationship with PR. keeping documentation minimal, subjugating the value of presence over re-presentation. and paying the consequent social price. arbeit macht frei. but paramount in personal relations, that PR?

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Selkä-Sarvi

sweating in a hot bath. memories of Finnish sauna experiences. on the island, Selkä-Sarvi or so. back in October 1998.

Man who is born of woman — how few and harsh are his days!
Like a flower he blooms and withers; like a shadow he fades in the dark
He falls apart like a wine-skin, like a garment chewed by moths.
And must you take notice of him? Must your call him to account?
Since all his days are determined and the sum of his years is set —
look away; leave him alone; grant him peace, for one moment.
Even if it is cut down, a tree can return to life.
…
But man is cut down forever; he dies, and where is he then?
The lake is drained of its water, the river becomes a ditch,
and man will not rise again while the sky is above the earth.

— Job, as translated by Stephen Mitchell

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

outcomes

Einstein. got no further. than that. entries at only one or two per month these days, awaiting some other outcome, future reference, stepping up, onward. side-stepping the past, no possibility of looking into it for now. the long path of the past log tails the dog, where hair of same-said dog would be more appropriate. physical placement seems to bring on a dullness. second skin growing over the eyes.