posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

from source to sink to source

Thermodynamic and electromagnetic (energy) models of reality use the terms ‘source’ and ‘sink’. Given that certain aspects of living organisms are accurately modeled by thermo, it follows, reasonably, that in a science-driven interpretation of reality, these terms may be applied to human life.

Eau de source: spring water, water that is safe to drink. Source, re-source. Life-source. Keeps life in motion and creating.

And then, sink: to submerge (in water?). Water that kills, hypothermia, a demonstration of inverse heat capacity, from source (body engine) to sink (cold water). Taking from, depth, gravitational pull of the Sun at night: into the earth. Drawing, winding down, running out.

From source to sink and vice versa. The movement of energies from energy-dense to energy-deficient regions.

Back to the anisotropic distribution of energy/matter in the cosmos. Life is predicated on this seeming imperfection. It is the ground condition of Life as a negentropic phenomena. Pure sameness was once disturbed and began to differentiate. Back to Weil’s “Two forces rule the universe: Light and Gravity.”

Mind has forgotten how to string words together. Mind knows no more names. A retreat from naming is the end’s beginning. I will stop naming what I cannot recall. Rather, turn naming into an action stripped of all symbolic content. No adjectival building of sense: mere non-sense. A good thing perhaps? Rules broken, expression by fiat, without the symbolic chatter, without symbolic precision.

An urgency to fall back into a frenzy of creative action emerges from a deep loathing of empty-headed criticism of pointless tasks that have no use in changing the social system: the dysfunctional working life. In service of the overwhelming human inertia directed into the search for (re)sources. Sources. Am I then guilty of helping sustain the unsustainable? Maybe, but worse, guilty of tolerating the intolerable idiocy of management: an energy sink.

To be a source is to allow a flux of energy to pass into and through the body with minimal disruption, minimal blockage. Channeling, not grasping, not riding the tiger, but simply be-ing the tiger, inspiration, be-ing the tiger’s roar, expiration. Nothing to do with the social, the fiscal, the political, the noumenal.

 

 

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

notes: ‘using’ vs ‘taking-care-of’

I got onto this track while observing how others live in relation to the stuff that they ‘have’. A few additional thoughts coalesced between the annual moving of house, the monthly payments for a storage unit 800 miles away, and the effects of having too much stuff myself.

The personal nature of this dialectic rests within the character of an individual’s relation to reality, to the world, and to the perceived structural manifestations of that world. A worldview of flow acknowledges that change drives all conditions, that ‘things’ are temporary configurations of energy flow. A worldview rooted in the hard structures of materialism sees ‘things’ as mutable in their immediate usefulness, based on their potential to persist, if that characteristic is acknowledged at all. Both views stand in deep relationship as to how life is lived, moment-to-moment. Both are forced to acknowledge the transitory nature of be-ing.

Using suggests a consumption of a limited resource, something that is recognized or at least assumed to have a finite material life. And, when ‘finished’ or ‘used up’ the object is discarded, after being rendered use-less. But isn’t it such that everything gets used up? Sure, but there seems to be an inherent level of violence correlated to the rate at which something is used up. Laboriously accumulated or meticulously assembled things may be destined or actually created to be destroyed in a single usage: the explosive weapon. Although time is often measured relative to human perception and human life-span; this metric applies an anthropocentric stance that seems reasonable, given that many of the things used up are human fabrications. However, the speed question suggests that a slow dissolution is a constant background condition. If you don’t use me up, I will be used up anyway.

Taking-care-of suggests a stewardship that is governed by a continuity of interaction and attention meant to project the usability, the use, perhaps into a long future, perhaps a passing from person-to-person, beyond the individual’s life-time. In a way transcending the limitless hubris of the anthropocentric: it will last longer that I. However, to maintain usability an object needs to maintain its ordered existence: this requires energy and attentive care. Life-time and life-energy are drawn upon. Living is compromised. And, in the end, nothing will stop the dissolution that entropy enforces. You may be taking care of me, but I will be used up eventually.

Turns out, a majority of the ‘things I own’ are use-less to begin with: The Archive. Well, perhaps not completely bereft of function, but certainly not when in a survival mode. The Archive is the carrying of a story, of stories, forward in time. The use-full-ness of the story is directly correlated to how it augments survival—how it carries us through. The propagation of information forward in time is the core value in this. Whatever the form, information represents an ordered configuration of energized matter. However, value is relative. Information, energetically carried forward in time, compromises the viability of the carrier in a direct way. Without the compensating augmentation, it is not a good idea to participate in such a process as an organism. Use-full-ness is relative and changeable depending on circumstances, what was once useless may later become a valuable source in another context.

Using suggests a recognition that the end game is ever-present. Nothing is forever. Order cannot be maintained indefinitely. Energy runs out. We leave only the dissipating measure of our transitory presence: ripples radiating from that short cosmological pulse: use it, or lose it.

Taking-care-of suggests a refusal to recognize our impotence. Resisting the inevitable. Gentle raging at the dying of the Light. A refusal of the commonly assumed nature of reality: that caring is somehow an eternal value.

In the end, perhaps neither style of engagement with stuff really … matters. pffff!

posted

paralysis of power

East Germany soon ceased to exist, as did the Soviet Union following the abortive putsch in August 1991, suffering from an affliction that Mr. Putin described as “a paralysis of power.”

Myers, S.L., 2015. In Putin’s Syria Intervention, Fear of a Weak Government Hand. The New York Times. [Accessed October 5, 2015].

What does it mean that power is paralyzed? Power and energy are not synonymous. Power needs projecting, it needs to be exerted against resistance, where energy simply is, as a permeate feature (substrate) of reality. There is the omnipotent: that which has unlimited power. (Versus pluripotent — that which is capable of maturing into varied strains or specialties.) Power needs an energy source as well as a means to deliver the energy in a way that furthers the potency. Power is concentrated, collated, and projected energy; paralysis is a reification of the means of sourcing, concentrating, or projecting power. What brings it along, though? Lateral constrictions (perpendicular to flow is perhaps optimal?): obstruction. However direct obstruction requires maximum countervailing power (equal to or exceeding that-which-is-to-be-countered). Better yet, to obstruct at the sources of the projected power. In this case, at the people. Subtracting ‘the People’ from power paralyzes it.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

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

The Regime of Amplification

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

basic facts

One of the most basic facts about North Korea is that this country seems to be unstable in the long run. In spite of some economic improvements of the recent decade, it still remains very poor if compared to all its neighbours, and this gap keeps growing. The Kim family regime can maintain the stability for long time, but the information about the success of other countries — above all, South Korea — is filtering in, and gradually ferments discontent. — Andrei Lankov, AlJazeera

This is a simple statement of situation: where the question of stability directly relates to the amount of energy available to the system. All systems have a certain instability directly related to the size of their energy sources. Food, hydrocarbons, and other resources are not easily available to the Regime, causing upward tending instability. Hierarchic control exerted from the ‘seat’ of power (where resource energy flows are dictated) projects flow protocols downward, but when that projection of power has itself a diminishing source, control structures destabilize.

Both the projection ‘structure’ and the actual energy needed to ‘project’ power are never sufficient to maintain control of the population indefinitely. Nor, in reciprocal, are those factors sufficient to ‘motivate’ the population to give unreservedly of its own energy in support of the Regime. Any Regime must maintain in deep and aware consciousness that its primary source of power is, at base, the embodied energy of its people. In more recent times, technological concentrations of power allow this fact to be distorted significantly, but in the end, no Regime will survive a collective turning away of its vassal citizen’s energy and attention. The technological factor, if effectively wielded by a Regime, will allow profound imbalances to build up, imbalances that will inevitably cause catastrophic re-balancing. The nuclear ambitions of North Korea are likely the major contributing factor to the imbalance within the technological factor. Between that and the large standing army, energies that could possibly go to support the ‘regular’ citizen are shunted off to support the rigid command-and-control structures necessary to develop and deploy the nuclear deterrent and the armed forces.

Resistance is futile when a system is returning to dynamic equilibrium. Only another profound energy source will enable a return to a subsequent form of temporary stability. Otherwise, disorder at many levels ensues.

All these concepts apply to any nation-state, and to any system.

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

I don’t give a fuck!

I don’t think I’ve noted this in the blog as yet although it’s definitely a theme that deserves some expansion. When I was living in Berlin in 2008 I torrented all of Richard Pryor’s oeuvre for the record, as I wasn’t that familiar with his work aside from a few routines and his appearance in numerous Hollywood comedy productions. When shuffling through the mass of recordings, I stumbled on this inspired bit:

(00:05:16, stereo audio, 7.9 mb)

He is channeling his interior voice(s) in the same way as David Foster Wallace — drawing directly on the simultaneous apprehension/expression of life-streams sprinting through neural networks.

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

matters

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

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

posted
  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

back to B&B

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

the predatory life/death: lex talionis

With the growth of industry comes the possibility of a predatory life; and if the groups of savages crowd one another in the struggle for subsistence, there is a provocation to hostilities, and a predatory habit of life ensues. There is a consequent growth of a predatory culture, which may for the present purpose be treated as the beginning of the barbarian culture. This predatory culture shows itself in a growth of suitable institutions. The group divides itself conventionally into a fighting and a peace-keeping class, with a corresponding division of labor. Fighting, together with other work that involves a serious element of exploit, becomes the employment of the able-bodied men; the uneventful everyday work of the group falls to the women and the infirm. — Thorstein Veblen

A man gets shot once in the face, and a second time to the head to ensure his demise. Other men are shot. A woman is shot. Why celebrate except in the instance of savagery, with an up-turned face, contorted with suppressed rage, making a vengeful grimace, and declaring the nation-state’s supremacy. An eye for an eye, the context lost on those who do not even know the content of the holy book coming from their own god. Instead, kill and be killed and kill and be killed. more “the predatory life/death: lex talionis”

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

The Value of Nothing

Consider this example: My cell phone company gives me a free handset, bristling with features, so I become a regular contract subscriber or buyer of pay-as-you-go minutes. I am pleased, not least because I can now navigate through the city without having to remember where I am, and I have the pleasure of palming the latest little gadget. In order for those features to work, I’ll have to pay a little bit more, to buy either an app or bandwidth. Clearly, many people think it’s worth it. Indeed, there’s a cell phone arms race, in which increasingly swanky phones become socially necessary. These new phones come with new applications and uses that, again, become socially indispensable for the user, and the permanent sources of revenue for the provider. In the United States in 2007, cell phone expenditure per customer reached six hundred dollars per year (surpassing that of a landline for the first time). That’s a lot of cash, which gets divided out fairly unevenly. more “The Value of Nothing”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

more on control and autonomy

A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”

posted

projection of control

Okay, so in the process of simplifying last week’s posting — 08 Jan — I’ve got to take yet another look at how control is projected by an organism. Or maybe that should be a question — does an organism exert control over its environment? Or does it merely synergize with the flows that are available to it? What affect does the neurophysiological field of action of a particular organism exert on the localized situation? Primitive neuro-systems read gradients or difference that ‘matter’ to their existence. Quantifying these existing gradients of energy relates to an organism’s ability to find the energy sources through which it survives to prolong its life and procreate. This is the fundamental means by which life has prolonged itself on the planet continuously since it began. The existence and control of thermal (heat) energy gradients are also extremely important in the regulation of internal physiological systems through direct biochemical reaction-rate regulation. The surface or edge of an organism is clearly ‘signified’ in thermodynamic and physical terms; the maintenance of internal gradients might be called ‘control’ where the control is a function of defining the primary limit of the organism’s field of action. hmmm.

posted

conversation

Listening does not mean waiting impatiently, while someone else speaks of things that do not concern you: it means sympathetically identifying yourself with the speaker, his background, his desires, his troubles, understanding them as much as possible, and tactfully suggesting outside points of view, not too alien to his own, which may aid him in whatever problem is being uttered.

Matters of interest only to yourself are never proper subjects of more than passing reference.

Whatever your theme, be good humored. If you can sprinkle wit and humor into your conversation, you disarm almost any ill feeling on the part of others in the group. For laughter, it must be remembered, releases our prejudices. — Lloyd Smith

This advice floats on a surface of socialized presence. Slightly pithy, gendered, with a dated language that suggests quaint and formal relations of the past. Where are we now, in the swirling, mediated, media-saturated present? The opportunity for concentrated face-to-face dialogue seems almost as quaint, though along with the quaintness there is an explicit loss, somewhere behind the fractured and discontinuous surface of modern communications.

Could this explicit loss be the source of a growing and extremely deep angst that underlies wide-spread (and expanding) social insecurity? That the implied dis-connect between a world of hyper-socialization and the world we happen to be within and part of gives rise to …

blah blah blah …

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

at the edges of the envelope of power projection

When approaching the edge of a protocol-driven projection of power, the first thing noted is that the edge is in flux, constantly. Depending on the metric flow of the power, and the metric flow(s) of the countervailing chaos, the edge will shift at any temporal and spatial scale. The juxtaposition of controlled and un-controlled situations represents a more-or-less steep gradient from directed to random (or directed to countervailing directed) flows. A good example to consider is the two polarized and hegemonic forces of the Cold War compared to highly ordered (Imperial) military systems being projected into poorly organized social systems.

The edges of hegemonic Cold War projections of power were often located in social spaces of great chaos. But these points-of-contact generally did not impinge on the monumental and rigid structures (enabling ideological rigidity) at the core of Empire. Empire shielded itself with layers of decreasingly ordered spaces. The borders as projected closest to the two primary centers of power were defined by rigidly controlled edges across which there were few incursions or expressions of chaos. Natural borders represent a special case of intervening ‘natural’ chaotic systems which provide a temporary or long-term barrier to impingement. However, a power nexus has to deal with that chaotic border itself to maintain reasonable order there for its own population.

The space containing a vacuum of power is quickly filled whenever there is a localized energy source of a great enough magnitude to fill that space. It is more slowly filled when there is no localized concentrations of power. Again, the maintenance of an ‘edge’ is really about the maintenance of a gradient of order with a certain steepness.

An Imperial power will be more strongly be drawn into vacuums merely by the steep gradient between its highly organized (military) system and that vacuum.

The protocols of nation-statehood (currently) define geographic boundaries of power projections. However, it is clear that these boundaries and the protocols themselves are constantly in flux and themselves are finally defined by balances of power-projection on both sides. (Consider a con-federation versus a republic.) The border on chaos is a border that is under the greatest threat of alteration (because of that steep gradient mentioned previously).

posted
  • place: KCL Campground, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California

change

view south from KCL Campground, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California, December 2010

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam. more “change”

posted
  • place: en route Whanganui - Auckland, New Zealand - Sydney, Australia

away – Day 12 – eNZed

I miss the closing dialogue session with Doug Kahn. Goodbyes and a rushed departure from the house via taxi to the airport, a short wait for the hop to Auckland and on back to Oz for 20-some hours before heading boreal-spheric for a bit. Bags are mostly packed, but the trip to NZ made for some juggling and nervousness when booking two international flights within such at short time-span.

Ten solid and busy days leaves quite a positive first impression of New Zealand, although this is no surprise, given the richness of Kiwi encounters over the years. It was a bit distressing to see the extent of degradation of natural system that has and is still occurring, but this is a legacy everywhere there are humans. We, as life, have altered the planetary system (even as we begin to observe other planetary systems — can this act of observation alter those systems as well?). There are limits to the energy flux that a planet has access to, based on solar (Light) and gravitational sources. We, again, as life, have been increasing the entropy of the system at an incredible rate, mostly through the release of eons of stored solar (photosynthetic) carbon in two centuries.

Framing the entire week: workshop was only a minor surfacing within the context of many other dialogues, so, perhaps it had less organized force and power than it could have had. Discussion of the meta-structures that it was embedded within were limited to Julian and a few others. Otherwise, there were expectations of tradition and normalcy, and, thus, expectations not met. But the overall energy was significant.

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

anarchic food – Day 5 – eNZed

near the art museum, on the anciant dunes, Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

There’s quite some stress around the catering for the symposium as the person who was to do it had a terrible family trauma arise in England. There will be around 50-75 people coming from around New Zealand along with a few foreign presenters, and the food requirements are vegetarian, vegan, lacto-ovo, etc, etc … complex on limited resources …

Turns out that Gregers though, was the cook and manager of that anarchist vegetarian dining room near Bjorn’s house in North Copenhagen — I’d even eaten there a couple times when visiting Bjorn — so between Gregers and Jonah from the local community, along with volunteers, things will come together. It’s a challenge!

Oh yeah, and it’s Gregers’ birthday dinner in the evening. I work on a big fruit salad, and get the opportunity to introduce Freya to pomegranate seeds.

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Gonzo Papers, Vol. 3

February 18

L.A. notes, again . . . one-thirty now and pill-fear grips the brain, staring down at this half-finished article . . . test pilots, after a week (no, three days) at Edwards AFB in the desert . . . but trying to mix writing and fucking around with old friends don’t work no more, this maddening, time-killing late-work syndrome, never getting down to the real machine action until two or three at night, won’t make it . . . especially half drunk full of pills and grass with deadlines past and people howling in New York . . . the pressure piles up like a hang-fire lightning ball in the brain. Tired and wiggy from no sleep or at least not enough. Living on pills, phone calls unmade, people unseen, pages unwritten, money unmade, pressure piling up all around to make some kind of breakthrough and get moving again. Get the gum off the rails, finish something, croak this awful habit of not ever getting to the end—of anything.

Thompson, H.S., 1991. Songs of the Doomed: more notes on the death of the American dream, New York, NY: Pocket Books.

The narrative elsewhere in this blog lacks the edge that Thompson eventuated in his published works. Compact bursts of driving prose—the energy of which does not rely on the gonzo subject material—but instead brings directly to life the internal processes of be-ing and places them in direct juxtaposition with the madness of what’s out there. This is the trick: and it is precisely this trick, when the two flows are brought together, synthesized, and ultimately exposed to oxygen to be reduced and transformed into a sustenance for the human spirit.

That spirit is then taken to places it needs to go—not where the mutations of socialized comparison point it to, not where material consumption takes it, not where fear in all its phantasmal coloration deLights to compress the soul into. The soul needs to be able to expand, not contract. And it should have within itself a means to source for this infinite expansion. Should, would, could. For the infinite, there are no means, there is only the denominated will of the spirit—which, in the end, forces a division by zero.

And that’s an illegitimate operation. As is Gonzo generally.

posted
  • place: Glebe, NSW, Australia

it’s not Valentine’s night

Qi follows the will. (The will is a pathway imposed by Life on the ‘free’ movement of Qi energies.) If the heart is centered and in balance, the eye is clear.

If the heart is misplaced, distortion of everything seen and sensed occurs.

cross my heart and hope to die. opening the heart. set someone’s heart to rest. heartless. cold hands warm heart. near someone’s heart. broken hearts. cry your heart out. heart-broken. he’s got a big heart. to one’s heart’s content. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in the right place. absence makes the heart grow fonder. affair of the heart. heart and soul. bleeding heart liberal. after your own heart. be still my beating heart. by heart. beating heart. change of heart. steal someone’s heart. a man after my own heart. have one’s heart in one’s mouth. open your heart.

absence makes the heart grow fonder. take heart. after my own heart. at heart. break her heart. by heart. change of heart. cold hands, warm heart. cross my heart. cry her heart out. cut to the heart of the matter. do his heart good. eat your heart out. find it in their heart. from the bottom of my heart. get to the heart of. gave me heart failure. half a heart. harden mine heart. have a heart. have no heart for. heavy heart. in her heart of hearts. lose heart. lost her heart to. near to my heart. not have the heart to. poured out his heart. set her heart on. sick at heart. steal someone’s heart. steel my heart against. take heart. take to heart. to her heart’s content. warm heart. warm the cockles of his heart. wearing his heart on his sleeve. with all her heart. young at heart. with half a heart.

heart attack.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

Statement of Multi-Cultural Experience and Practice

With 20 years of experience with students from more than 40 countries and with educational organizations in 25 countries, I have a deep appreciation of the issues involved in multi- or trans-cultural education. My own practice as an educator looks at multi-cultural learning from both a pragmatic and a positive point of view. Pragmatically, for example, all of my classes in the past years are composed of students from a wide variety of cultural backgrounds. This simple fact brings to the fore in every situation the difficulties of language, and the cultural expressions that are deeply formed by language. Most often working under second-language conditions, I have honed my sensitivities to the relative speeds of comprehension and expression that second-language imposes and to the contingencies of difference that surface. Because difference is such a core creative source, I make it a practice in my workshops that students engage each other so as to open the potential pathways for creative collaboration.

It is tremendously important that a learning/creative situation is relevant to each particular student and that they feel comfortable enough to evolve and take on an experience that reflects a personal, internal source. Teaching in up to 20 different linguistic and cultural situations each year I have developed an appreciation for what is possible, what each distinct viewpoint opens up in a collective learning experience, and how personally relevant work may be seen as an inspiring source for peers. This kind of movement through radically different domains requires me to have a flexibility to engage and facilitate under widely varying conditions. While this is a constant challenge, it is one that I seek out for its richness, liveliness, and the consequential open space that arises when learners, myself included, are faced with the unknown — both inside the Self and inside the Other that they face. Because a fundamental concept of my creative work as well as my seminars and workshops is the facilitation of distributed (that is, non-hierarchic) network systems, I specifically deal with this human-to-human dynamic both in the conceptual/theoretical content as well as the lived practices that I stimulate in the classroom.

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  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

The desire to transcend distance and separation has accompanied the history of media technology for many centuries. Various attempts to realize the demand for a presence from a distance have produced beautiful imaginaries such as those of tele-presence and ubiquity, the electronic cottage and the re-invigoration of the oikos, and certainly not least among them the reduction of physical mobility in favor of an ecologically more sustainable connected life style. As current systems of hyper-mobility are confronted with an unfolding energy crisis and collide with severe ecological limits – most prominently in the intense debate on global warming – citizens and organizations in advanced and emerging economies alike are forced to reconsider one of the most daring projects of the information age: that a radical reduction of physical mobility is possible through the use of advanced tele-presence technologies.

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

The ElectroSmog festival for sustainable immobility, staged in March 2010 [1], was both an exploration of this grand promise of tele-presence and a radical attempt to create a new form of public meeting across the globe in real-time. ElectroSmog tried to break with traditional conventions of staging international public festivals and conferences through a set of simple rules: No presenter was allowed to travel across their own regional boundaries to join in any of the public events of the festival, while each event should always be organized in two or more locations at the same time. To enable the traditional functions of a public festival, conversation, encounter, and performance, physical meetings across geographical divides therefore had to be replaced by mediated encounters.

The festival was organized at a moment when internet-based techniques of tele-connection, video-telephony, visual multi-user on-line environments, live streams, and various forms of real-time text interfaces had become available for the general public, virtually around the globe. No longer an object of futurology ElectroSmog tried to establish the new critical uses that could be developed with these every day life technologies, especially the new breeds of real-time technologies. The main question here was if a new form of public assembly could emerge from the new distributed space-time configurations that had been the object of heated debates already for so many years?
more “Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog”

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

work, labor, action

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active lif, that is: ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself). These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic. The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.
more “work, labor, action”

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

eat the rich

“Eat the rich,” Chris reminds me on the phone. Visiting my sister in NoCal, I was over at Berkeley for a day (could it have been the same trip to meet Marty and Robb for lunch all those many years ago?), and I came across a t-shirt with a skull on it (I think), eat the rich at the top and FMLN (Fronte Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional) across the bottom.

When the people shall have nothing more to eat, they will eat the rich. — Jacques Rousseau

The wealthy (as a concentration-point for resources) are a source of sustenance (energy) when the number of the poor and hungry reaches a tipping point. Government, in the form of a cadre of elites who effect a mechanism of control of (social) energy flows, taps into the population of energized bodies (the social), directing their collective energy towards the maintenance of the (sovereign) state. When the cost to the precariate becomes too great, or when they perceive that the rewards they receive from that State (whatever that State is), are not sufficient to counter the drain on their life-time and life-energy, they will cease their participation in that State. Or, slacking, they may blame the State for their state: when it is their State, and is one in which they participate willingly.

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

the fluidity of leaking

What could better illustrate the instability of protocol-driven social control systems than the phenomenon of a leak? Springing a leak is an irruption through a human-constructed wall (hull) holding back the chaotic flows of the sea. Wikileaks is a reversal of that, where the leak is from the inside of the ship-of-State to the outside. Where inside there are protocol-defined pathways of State-driven communication flow filling a space of partially-stabilized human endeavor. Every so often, one of the nodes of State communication goes rogue, mad, AWOL, counter, and defies the standing protocols by whatever means possible. Opening the mouth and speaking, telling the secrets of State, a yawning vomit of bilge over the sides: merely seasick.

The hull of the ship of State exists across a multi-dimensional space of refined/defined energy flow. Defined energy flow resists change and promotes continuance. Regarding the State, protocol controls individual behavior through internalized patterns of embodied thought. The State seeks any possible way to apply these internal protocols, and is successful if those ways promote the existence of the necessary flow pathways that insure the continuance of the structure of the State. The more rigid the expectations of the State, the more necessary the adherence to prescribed protocols (and vice versa). The State also applies controls to patterns of energy flow external to the body. These two (internal and external) sets of controls are not separate but rather are united in the space of flow to effect more-or-less total control on the participant and the crew of the ship of State. more “the fluidity of leaking”

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mobile focus

Some people walk with both eyes focused on their goal: the highest mountain peak in the range, the fifty-mile marker, the finish line. They stay motivated by anticipating the end of the journey. Since I tend to be easily distracted, I travel somewhat differently — one step at a time, with many pauses in between. Occasionally the pauses become full stops that can last anywhere from two minutes to ten hours. More often they’re less definite. … Trapped by our concepts and languages and the utter predictability of our five senses, we often forget to wonder what we’re missing as we hurry along toward goals we may not even have chosen. I became a tracker by default, not design, when my tendency to be distracted by life’s smallest signs grew into an unrelenting passion to trace those obscure, often puzzling patterns somewhere, anywhere — to their source or end or simply to some midpoint in between. But when I began tracking lost people, what had begun as an eccentric habit — following footsteps on the ground — quickly matured into an avocation. … I now commonly walk toward a single goal: to meet the person at the other end of the tracks. — Hannah Nyala (from Point Last Seen).

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acceptance

Yes, as an originator man is solitary. He stands wholly without bonds in the echoing hall of his deeds. Nor can it help him to leave his solitariness that his achievement is received enthusiastically by the many. He does not know if it is accepted, if his sacrifice is accepted by the anonymous receiver. Only if someone grasps his hand not as a “creator” but as a fellow-creature lost in the world, to be his comrade or friend or lover beyond the arts, does he have an awareness and a share of mutuality. An education based only on the training of the instinct of origination would prepare a new human solaritariness which would be most painful of all. — Martin Buber

Buber, M., 1985. Between Man and Man, New York, NY: Collier Books.

The originatory creative act perhaps requires a (painful) level of social isolation — is this the source of the ‘tortured artist’ syndrome? This in contrast to the integrated flow of socialized encounter with the Other which is (also?) the locus of creative action. hmmm…

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

connections

A user or consumer, in the cumulative techno-social system of the developed world, will not see and cannot imagine the ultimate sources of what they consume and use. What is required to make these connections clear, position them as consequent indicators, and as compelling drivers of behavior modification?

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From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

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

Abstract

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

Introduction

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

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

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Migrating: Art: Academies: done

MigAA book cover (pdf download)

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

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

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The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming

roadside memorial, near Bitter Springs, Arizona, USA, March 2010
ed: This short note is the epilogue for the Migrating:Art:Academies: book. Because of the heavy-duty editorial tasks, I otherwise didn’t have time to write something more comprehensive on the ideas surrounding movement and learning, maybe next time!

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even secret pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

This volume Migrating:Art:Academies: represents yet another step on the (linguistic) migration from nation to nation, academy to academy, culture to culture, friend to friend, order to order, life through life. As with the first volume, Migrating Realities, any impossible contortions of English are this editor’s responsibility, and given the time constraints for this latest MigAA tome, there are sure to be some short-comings. But then, of all the movements within the social, language migrates the most of all. It is never static. Nor should it be, especially as it accompanies the learning process — a process which is essentially about encountering and naming that which is not (yet) known. more “The End of the Road and The Onset of Dreaming”

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assessments

And so, encroaching on the last major procedural hurdle before the doctorate goes to the external examiners (next year sometime). The panel assessment seems to be routine and bureaucratic. Public speaking in compressed time frames is no fun. When there’s always too much to get across in the extremely limited time frame, and the highly institutionalized context allows for negligible true dialogue. In some ways, the process is a deeply laughable (chortle?) imitation of what it claims to be, or what it once perhaps was. That is, learning as a process of open and sustained dialogue between two or more humans. Facing the unknown that each other presents, or both facing the unknown of what is, or what is out there. Contemporary ‘education’ is a thin and watery drool coming from somewhere up above — meager remains of what’s left of a blasting monsoon of shared life that brings one to a deeply profound awareness of that-which-is. Instead we squelch around in evaporating puddles of shared encounter, wishing for more rain, and complaining about the weather.

Tomorrow, it happens. We shall see. No brolly, no Wellies…

So, over this hurdle, and maybe the final work commences, perhaps finishing earlier than scheduled, or at least that inspiring outcome is a concept on the radar.

Meanwhile, surviving week-to-week, in part through the acupuncture and massage treatments from Heiji Cho and some of the Chinese Traditional Medicine (CTM) students here at UTS. The gall bladder channel is the one being worked — to release rising yang from the liver. hmmm. The treatments work, they seems to diffuse the migraines that do show up and eventually, as is common, with any lock, the migraines will vanish. I am confident of this, and only wish I had come to this conclusion last year, or even earlier as these episodes interrupted life from time to time. The stress of movement came on such a regular basis, but there was no thought to find a source, find a working solution, a cure. It was only the process of gritting the teeth until a dark and quiet room could be found for the duration. Western meds never really worked, they only covered the symptoms at best, and in some cases a single pill cost as much as a full 90-minute acupuncture treatment session.

But choosing to undertake a treatment of what is known as ‘alternative’ medicine was always a difficult stretch. Despite input from trusted others who had benefited. There was the hardship of paying cash from the pocket to the practitioner when cash was never so abundant.

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  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

birth of the DMA

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

Navy Predecessors
more “birth of the DMA”

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L-I-M-I-T-E-D

Aside from a fraction of a kilo-ton of human-re-configured matter that has been more-or-less permanently jettisoned from the immediate gravitational field of the Terran system, all human activities are and always have been fully immersed in what, for the purposes of modeling, may be seen as a limited (eco-)system with limited energy resources. L-I-M-I-T-E-D. Followers of the develop-and-consume-at-any-cost economic philosophy appear to think that there is an un- at the beginning of limited. But are these limits germane regarding the scalar possibilities of alteration that 6.9 billion humans applies to the ‘closed’ system? Can this plague-species actually cause significant change? It’s maybe only a question of where on a sliding scale the alteration sits, and what range on that scale indicates ‘significant’ change.

It is not difficult to observe that all expressions of life have an affect on the immediate vicinity. The bed of dead leaves beneath the cottonwood, layered by age: age showing as a returning dissolution, collenchyma structures in the veins remain longer, the epidermis stripped away by insects, solar radiation, weather, and time. The altered rhizosphere full of exudates nourishing symbiotic microbial life which, in turn, alter the chemistry of the surrounding soil. The altered atmosphere, being distantly distributed by the wind, the absorption of Light. Animals consuming leaves, wandering away. Reverberatory. What does a tree do to the rest of the cosmos? It does. Clearly any form of life has this effect. It’s just a question of how much. Quantitative, with the qualitative in the affirmative, but still open to how.

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gait and gluteals

The foot print, the pressure of the foot on the ground, walking in mud, on grass, ice, walking on the water.

Edward Tenner’s book intimates how walking itself is, at least partially, a learned social process, with variations introduced by the prosthetic (shoes) and localized environmental responses.

I had observed one aspect of this affect when I moved to Iceland. Icelanders are generally quite healthy — statistically, their longevity is second only to the Japanese. But one formal thing I did notice is the lack of prominent gluteal muscles. Flat arses! The difference was notable, coming the ethnically diverse US, where (aside from rampant morbid obesity) arses are, well, noticeable. In Iceland, they were noticeably absent: flaccid and flat. This puzzled me for some time until winter arrived and ice began to cover everything on a regular basis. Walking with a rolling gait that emphasizes a constant forward propulsion, ending with a final accelerating push off the big toe is fine when on a solid surface with decent traction. Try that on ice (this is Ice Land, right?), and one immediately discovers how, without traction, that ‘normal’ gait destabilizes the balance as the body is expecting acceleration, but not getting it (when it loses traction). The push off with the toe is ineffectual, and when one foot actually leaves the surface, between the lack of acceleration, and a compromised vertical positioning of the body (which was expecting the legs to be more forward), slipping and falling becomes a very real possibility.

Tenner, E., 1997. Why things bite back: technology and the revenge of unintended consequences, New York: Vintage Books.

Understanding this from being aware of my own movements (and instances of compromised balance), and watching locals, I noticed several major differences between their gait and mine. The primary feature of the local walk was that both feet never really left the ground and contact was flat-footed and somewhat stiff-legged. There was a substantial time when the full sole of the shoe was flat on the ice, and it was during that time when forward acceleration was made.

If you try this yourself, you will immediately see that the glutes are not the site of any muscular effort for locomotion as opposed to when accelerating off the big toe and Achilles tendon. Could this be the source of the predominance of flat bums in Iceland?

Aside from the glare-ice technique, there was another endearing and embodied gait by farmers when walking their fields. A thousand years of overgrazing sheep has seriously compromised most of Iceland’s grasslands. As the land was overgrazed, this exposed the underlying volcanic soil directly to powerful eolian erosion which could strip meters away down to a gravelly bedrock surface in no time. When life again attempts to establish itself on that surface, after sheep are removed from the picture, it first starts as minuscule moss colonies which grow in the shelter of a small cobble or so. The moss begins to capture wind-borne soil which gradually increases the colony size which increases the turbulent capture of airborne sediment. Over a period of decades these moss colonies form a hummocky surface with a relief of perhaps 50 cm (18 inches) and a horizontal frequency of a meter or so. To walk across such a surface is absolutely exhausting unless you conform your body in a particular way. The Icelandic farmer’s gait consists of the following: hands clasped behind the back, an exaggerated forward hunch of the upper body, and the knees bent dramatically. Leaning forward, and using the bend in the knees to essentially level out the distance between the upper body and the average ground height of the bottom of the hummocks, one takes long strides where the torso never goes up and down, but rather the level changes of the hummocks are compensated by different extensions of the knees. It’s humorous to watch, but is highly effective and a very rapid gait. If one tries ‘normal’ walking, climbing up and down the hummocks, it is slow and absolutely exhausting.

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  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

final tour

a final view of the yurt showing the support platform structure, Glade Park, Colorado, June 2010

Collin and Marisa are up and off early to Grand Junction, so I make a circuit of their land, stopping to wallow in some sincere jealousy regarding the yurt and how well they have managed to bring such a situation into being. it takes a real and dedicated long-term focus to gather the resources to make such ordered and rejuvenating configurations rise, Mongolian yurt-like, out of the chaos of the world.

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  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

end of the road

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

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

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  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

arrival and meditation

edge, Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed perusal of the rotating stellar field in ma’ face.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy—it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.
more “arrival and meditation”

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  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI residency — Energy of Situation

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).

Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”

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  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI: Day Eight

A few notes on techno-social systems:

In analyzing the affect of technology on a social system it is critical to identify and understand 1) what actors or protocols are determining the pathways of energy flow, 2) ultimately how individuals in the system interact with the pathway(s), 3) the resulting benefit and who receives it, 4) the mechanisms by which benefit (energy) is accumulated by those controlling the protocols. Prior to this it is probably necessary to map the general sources of energy that are being re-purposed (directed) by the techno-social system.

By tracing in detail 1) the relations of power, 2) the pathways along which energy and power flow, 3) the sources and destinations of the flows, the entirety of human relation may be positioned at both a macro scale and a granular (that is, human-to-human) scale: with the implicit understanding that all relation is permeated by the affects of the wider system.

For a techno-social system to be successful, by definition, it has to capture a certain minimum of the life-time/life-energy of participants in the system: this is a technology’s ultimate function within its social system/context. What is deterministic is the absolute need for life (human and elsewise) to continue, and in this continuance, to refine pathways of energy flow to aid in that continuance via the collective augmentation of the techno-social system.

(Are there technologies which do not concentrate energy within a certain subset of individuals to increase their ultimate life-extending pro-creativity? Are there systems which re-distribute widely their concentrated sources?) What about the struggle of certain individuals for a greater level of personal autonomy — those who would seek to either not participate in prescribed flow pathways or would seek to alter those pathways to suit individual desires? The inertia of the techno-social affects the personal trajectories of adoption or imposition.

In a wide social system, a techno-social system, technology is generally used as a means for concentrating energy for a subset of elites of the system. The balance of the participants, the drones, the prolls, the slaves, are inculcated from birth with the fiction that they are receiving more than they actually surrender to the social system. In the case of slaves, this balance reads: your life for your embodied labor.

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Clui: Day Five — tangential contact

Enola Gay Hangar, Wendover Airbase, Wendover, Utah, April 2010
In the sonic realm, this part of the western desert (the spatial extent defined by precipitation at least) seems, at first, quiet. Stepping out of the car after a bruising day of fighting the wheel, ah, only the susurration of blood pumping in the ears. But, despite this initial impression, human intrusion in the western desert is never silent. The ambient pre-human sonic domain is defined by a few animals making occasional signals “I am here.” Ravens and coyotes are perhaps the noisiest, with others following in a rapidly declining decibel range. Wind is mostly, literally, in the ear of the beholder as a register of turbulent flow around the aural orifice but occasionally one is in a place where the wind makes some secondary sound (in a riparian regime, in seasonal leaves, or whistling around a certain rock formation, but these are rare and difficult to record without exceptional and expensive equipment). Otherwise, then, there is only the human incursion. This incursion is typically related to the movement of those intrusive humans through the domain as few have the desire to stop and actually hear silence. The few who volunteer or are forced to stop for a longer time are not necessarily prone to sonic disturbances, though that group, as a whole, are dominated by willing or unwilling participants in the military-industrial machine. The balance, a small remainder, are likely seeking the silence. The members of the machine make plenty of noise via everything from weapon systems testing to mining to toxic waste incineration, but access to these secretive sonic sources are for the select, not the transitory rabble.

Those engaged in field recording are left with the experience of tangential contact. That is, functioning as a stationary point, recording the arrival and departure of a nearby transport vector — trains, planes, and cars. Given the proper conditions, especially the lack of wind, these can make interesting (and startling) recordings. Trucks may be heard many miles away and render an impossibly slow Doppler shifting that is also modulated by differential density and velocity metrics of the intervening air. Planes are often more difficult as the most dramatic contact is with the low-flying fighter aircraft which will show up practically without warning and are so loud that recording is impossible. The db peak of that tangential contact pegs the meter. Before the air-to-ground missiles are launched at you, the target, and field incursions become moot.

So, what to do? Muddle along. Hit the casinos. Though I’ve been tossed out of those in the distant past for making photographs, the H4 Zoom looks suspicious, so I think it also will attract attention from security for sure. Ach.

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  • place: Columbia, Missouri

life, living

Humans approach the ‘criticality’ of the global situation from a very species-centric view. (of course). If one looks at the flow of the continuance of life throughout its entire trajectory (back to we-know-not-where and we-know-not-when (and we-know-not-how)) — it is quickly noted that all species are transitory to one degree or another. Is there anything special about humans in this regard? So far nothing that humans have succeeded in doing has transcended the flow of life. There is the material/scalar aptitude with which we have accelerated the production of entropy within the limited planetary system. But this, in itself, is insignificant on any transcendent cosmological scale. If this is the only difference, then it might be said that we are only a more efficient life-form in that we cause this entropic acceleration. But even this aspect is relative. Each life-form will fully engage its energy sources and utilize them. To the degree there are readily available sources, life will expand its scale to take advantage of that abundance of energy, rapidly transforming it to waste. A pride of lions will not arrest its hunting of abundant prey unless satiated (and engaged in optimized procreation). Again, nothing new. It seems that the only disturbing characteristic that we sense somewhere in our perspective is the question of scale with our waste-production. Through windows of tele-media we have an (apparently) expanded perspective on the global picture. We see images of ourselves everywhere, engaged in the process of living. But this itself is suspect. A global perspective is a virtual artifice. Our awareness of our problem arises from an artifice of our own creation. What does this say about the problem? The perceived planetary scale is perhaps a distorted and very much reductive artifact embedded in our vision of life. But would the (limited) set of localized sensory perceptions lead to any different conclusions or ways-of-going?

No wonder people crave hyper-Terran (Celestial) visitation — what a perspective shift that would be. That we are not unique in a wider cosmos. That we are merely life. Only then might we be able to get on with it reasonably!

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myopia and narrow vision

What is certain is that even a skill as abstract as literacy has an unexpectedly strong physical aspect. In the history of humanity, our attention has shifted from the horizon to the length of our own arms: the printed page or the electronic monitor, or at the farthest the television screen. (p. 237)
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity, Tenner, E., Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2003

 
This shifting of attention has deeply affected the eyes, with a documented rise in myopia in more literate societies. Nothing like a myopic population: with the simultaneous illusion of tele-vision being foisted on bodies everywhere!

Edward Tenner, in Our Own Devices examines a number of basic technologies and their affect on embodied cultural/social participation. Think athletic shoes, chairs, eyeglasses, typewriters/keyboards, baby nursing bottles, flip-flops, and helmets. Where did they come from, why did they develop, and ultimately, what is their affect on users.

There are so many examples of this, one need only select any particular technology and begin to meditate on its source, its uses and (mis)applications: the affects on human presence gradually become apparent. The deeper the meditation on these, and the wider the field of affect is likely to surface. Tenner’s detailed histories become a bit tedious if the reader’s curiosity wears away, as the tone of the writing doesn’t change throughout, but it is in the examination of the details that connections can be made and eventually some basic principles emerge. Tenner himself is a bit glib about the meaning of the deduced affectations, and remains neutral with a slightly optimistic outlook.

In the case of computer keyboards, though, for example, he does not go beyond the direct dialectic between inventor, device, and user. Doing this, he neglects the affectations that arise not from direct usage of a device, but the indirect affects which are present as the widest context in which the device arises in a complex techno-social system. Clearly, this is not his goal, rather it appears to be more of an entertaining and surficial cabinet-of-curiosity stroll through the obscure history of everyday objects. In my opinion he misses a potent opportunity to carry through to the deeper relations between technology, technique, fundamental social relation, and embodied be-ing.

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Food, Energy, and Society

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

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

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

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

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

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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)”

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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.

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The Science of Disorder

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

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

The Science of Disorder: Understanding the Complexity, Uncertainty, and Pollution in Our World, Hokikian, J., Los Feliz Publishing, Los Angeles, 2002.
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on the IceSave debacle

A quick response on Alda’s Icelandic Weather Report posting concerning the veto by the Icelandic President of the IceSave agreement.

sotto voce: Strategic positioning relates to local, regional and global power flows and offensive/defensive weapon systems (among other factors). The US military left Iceland because it no longer represented a strategic advantage to be there (precisely because of weapon systems like submarine-launched ICBM’s, not to mention the very real shifts of global power that have come about since the Cold War ended). During WWII, because of the limits on aircraft range, Iceland was crucial to the Allied (US-supported) efforts in Europe. But gradually, again, with changing weapon systems and different constellations of global power, Iceland is no longer ‘strategic.’ Might be hard for some folks to swallow, pride-wise, not being ‘important’ in some global scheme, but that’s the way things go — they change. Iceland has few if any unique marketable/strategic resources as measured in the present world order. And on the other hand, they have liabilities according to globalist interests (for example, a quaint nationalism which is completely redundant in global market systems, no longer strategic travel/transport location (no need for Keflavík re-fueling!), no significant energy resources that are fiscally develop-able to the scale necessary for global competition, an education system that includes 100% literacy but is, on its own, entrenched and lacking innovative threads (and reinforcing the same naivete that gave rise to the recent disastrous foray into the global market system) … and so on…

And on the power of the (Icelandic) Presidency:

sotto voce: Presumably, though, the powers of the office of the president are circumscribed in the constitution, and, as such, are available to the person occupying the office. As happened in the US during the Bush regime, massive powers not explicitly outlined in the constitution were gathered by that regime, strengthening the office of president dramatically (powers that Obama has not relinquished at all — those at the top love extra power)… Any government or national political power structure goes through fluid shifts in concentration & location of power almost constantly, but some more precipitous than others. I’d suggest a close reading of The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus, for a good outline on shifting power structures in a nation-state.

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On The Poetics of Protocol

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

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

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

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