posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

content provision

faugh, almost November, a few minutes, darkness, and withering of ideals, Eyes Wide Shut becomes more than a morality play. cryptic SMS messages play here, across the bitten baud-space, and frequented arrivals and departures become sets for drama, andrenaline-pumping, blood-chemistry jacking drama. to keep things shaky and unfocused.

The idea of writing itself was being corrupted; Microsoft was searching for “content providers” but they could not find any content, because the guys who were searching for it didn’t know what it was. Cyberspace had made the world so limitless that it started to seem like a series of empty hallways, empty rooms. Wherever you clicked, asking for entrance, you could never quite get past secret words, the mishmash of jargon, the bright-eyed men with their private language. — Emily White

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

TempLab

day after the Temp Lab presentation on Balkania. again, I don’t make so many notes about anything these days, so full of busy-ness everything is. but last night somebody made the statement, something like “art after artifact, art as communications.” which somehow, despite its obviousness to me, jolted a resonant cord (spinal or astral) inside that had not been directly stimulated before. the conflict between the two areas (matter vs [energy] flow) is apparent but is not surfaced much in the space of discourse that I circulate through. but so little discourse occurs anyway in the Academy, it could happen that by spending too much time in that ideological space, internal sources are bled away completely. and awarenesses diminish to the normative social pre-tension.

posted
  • place: Bologna, Italy

interstitial observations

breakfast, moving around the town to catch the atmosphere. another breakfast, then meeting the Bologna2000 people, and so on. the meeting will go on. and on. and the energies will cross linguistic boundaries and so on. simultaneous translation. on into the day and then night. finding levels and places of communications. seeing sights (an Apple sticker on the front windscreen of a motorbike, later a World Wildlife Federation sticker on another windscreen). many shops have succumbed to the chain invasion, but not as many as in Scandinavia. There seem to be many more independent product lines. a magnificent cheese shop around the corner from the hotel. I could buy a whole wheel of Parmesano or Romano if I had the possibility to carry it back (to where?). these are the things (even global capitalism cannot crush — the crystalline atomic interstices — but that is not a good metaphoric image from the energized view of the world — interstices cannot be in a continuum of energy — perhaps a model of flow pathways fits better, a sense of small, granular paths where flow takes radical liberty). Maximum packing densities for global capital is being reached, and still there are large interstitial gaps, spaces, based on the limited ionic structures of capital distribution. the larger the molecule chains, the greater the possibility of impurities. so on. cafe9.net, the official name of this pan-European networking project. now that I have been involved in this project for almost 1.5 years, opti-pessimist. imagining that already at least 150000 Euro have been spent on it so far — on culture-sector subsidies. maybe 50% of it going to the various airlines, 25% to hotels, and 25% to food and other meeting costs. meetings and how that goes. the cultural industry sector of the European economic system is probably the most heavily subsidized sector — not in absolute numeric terms, but if one compares the monies that are available in the private/public sector, and the total public expenditures. artists who complain here become objects of derision, or at least quiet scorn — that things don’t get better, anywhere in the world! and yet, people complain.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

psychic nomadism

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. finally getting around to exploring the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why real music is inevitably dangerous to readers). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar. more “psychic nomadism”

posted

module-tasking

finishing touches to the research plan part of the application to the doctoral program at UIAH (University of Art and Design Helsinki) Media Lab. an applied program which I hope might allow me some breathing space to recenter my activities in education and networking. and do things like coagulate bleeding wounds of sensibility:

Me:
>> I mean, can we really afford to ignore the conceptual/spiritual
>> philosophies underpinning the (monolithic) Chinese culture? As well as
>> MANY other basic cultures (including many local manifestations of
>> Christianity in the past 2000 years)? Typical blind-sided-ness of Western
>> Thought patterns! The dematerialization of life is essential, followed by
>> the transformation to the paradigm that all is energy! I love throwing
>> E=mc2 on the board! Energy is the body/mass convolved by the velocity of
>> Light acting upon itself! Conversly, the Body is Light to itself
>> subdivided by its energy…

Mark:
>> write it up dood! hypertextualize it in bodily chunks of light and then
>> link it to other destinations — the writer as networked energy…

glad that somebody thinks this is important. but this has always been a real problem with my work — that each time I have gotten something into a formal, materialized presence, I see how imperfect it is, and indeed, I have never been satisfied with any form of working this stuff out EXCEPT with a smallish intimate and interactive set of participants. everywhere from the slide-show parties back in the late 70’s and 80’s to the camping trips and dinners. why should an artist’s context be something ELSE if one is really intent on opening a dialogue with the Other. otherwise, the chances of opening any kind of connection through the overtly formalized and sterile ploys of the Art World is close to zero. slept with yer gallerist lately? Sanna calls, mmmmm. and have a rolling talk with Loki while he is multi-tasking between me and Saturday morning Tom and Jerry cartoons in Iceland. “Pabby, he just threw a paper airplane out the window … and look now, he opened the front door and the airplane just flew back in, how did that happen?”

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

straw dogs

trying to re-establish a line of energy for the workshop. distractions and loss of concentration. focus, focus, focus. the lack of personal praxis is getting critical.

Heaven and Earth are impartial; They see the ten thousand things as straw dogs. The wise are impartial; They see the people as straw dogs. The space between heaven and Earth is like a bellows. The shape changes but not the form; The more it moves, the more it yields. More words count less. Hold fast to the center. — Tao Te Ching

filing into certain spaces. understanding, when shared, is a vindication of being.

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

Odd’s bike

critical look at the workshop. the dynamic lost in the busy-ness of the institution (a little piqued that my workshop is not so important to the students) but understanding it is a greater question and not something that results from any particular structuring of the situation. probably the simple lack of structuring — which, in fact, is a cool aspect of this academy. the idea of structure/control and the lack of both those factors is a grinding fight for me. within the act of entering a space I am predestined to experience a strong motivation to modify the material layout. it seems nothing is in the proper alignment. like, what is the proper arrangement of elements? is there a single penultimate constellation of objects in a room? is there a proper use for every object? if so, how do we experience the knowledge of what that use is? are there useless or purposeless objects in the world? what is it about an object that communicates its proper function? seems like too relative a criteria to drive such obsessive rearrangement of THINGS around me. who cares? Odd loans me his cycle. immediately I identify that it needs the bottom-bracket bearings re-packed with grease and tightening — as well, the handlebar headset also needs repacking and tightening. the seat doesn’t go high enough, and so on. (that is the second level of awareness of the gift — purely as object and its inherent functionality). the first level is being psyched that I have wheels! cool, takk, Odd! it brings an immediate feeling of liberation. never was a walker. bipedal transport is boooooooooring. except for climbing mountains where I am a wimpy mountain-biker anyways unlike some of my thrash-out hardcore friends. wheels. groovin’. immediately cycle up to some fort on the hill overlooking much of the city. people are there hanging out in the late afternoon hazy sunshine. green ramparts, a stiff wind brings a smoky haze off the unseen open ocean that lies west over a smallish mountain. on the fjord itself to the north this smoky skin hovers against the hills at the far side. they are only silhouettes.

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

falling

morning. about the start teaching. it is Fall. there are those teaching feelings and Fall feelings. something about to happen. potential energies, stored from the summer Sun. to carry into the Winter. (oh, don’t use that word yet, wait until it is in-your-face, blasting the face, eyes to tears) later that same day. later. later. dinner in the flat with a crowd of folks. I escape to get some work done, but there is no real space or time for concentration. before, earlier in the evening, I wander around Trondheim, soaking up the energy of the Cathedral, in its silent presence. and try to figure out what course of action to take. stuck at a totally diverging point. with the progress of life so far. for the first time seeing the reverberations of past mistakes big and small coming back to shake in my ears and inject a plethora of negative and positive options that only confuses me. clear small voices are not so much heard. and there is no end to this.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

medium: rare

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

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

Kevin’s show

the day after Vappu. snow. and more snow. May Day. Kevin has an opening at Louise Bourgeoise’s house in Brooklyn. Stef sends a report:

I’m cc:ing Cam on this one as well since it was such a New York scene. Cam, Kevin is a painter that both John and I know very well and he just had his first major show of works. It was a one day event held at the studio of a famous painter/sculptor, Louise Bourgeois (sp?). She’s in her 80’s or so. Her studio is in Brooklyn. To give you an idea of Kevin’s relationship with her… she renovated her (very large) space just for his one day show. She erected walls and painted the place. He hung sixty of his series of 100 paintings of the Eiffel Tower and the bridge that is in front of the tower. Thus the show was called Bridge and Tower. In addition to having the support of such a great artist, his day job employer, Martha Stewart, came to the show and hosted a dinner for 25 or so people at a very chic bistro in SoHo (Balthazar’s).

The show itself was very impressive. To see all of the images in one place was very cool. Each painting is painted from the same vantage point but in different colors and degrees of clarity. People were asking if he lived in Paris for the year during which he painted this series. I’m not sure how he answered since he painted the Bridge and Tower from a scrap of gift wrapping paper that had various scenes from around the world; Paris, some windmills, London bridge, etc.

After the show we arrived at Balthazar’s where Martha had reserved two large tables. She had decorated the tables with miniatures of the Eiffel tower along with the show announcement cards. The first course was an amazing assortment of shellfish on the half shell, crab legs, conch, etc. At the next table was Gwyneth Paltrow. At another table nearby was Phillipe Starcke (the architect/designer). Betsey Johnson (fashion designer), etc. were also in the restaurant. Of course I would never have picked these folks out. When Gwyneth walked in, I just noticed her as an attractive blond… During the course of the dinner, Martha kept popping up and introducing herself to the various celebrities and marketing to them Kevin’s work by giving them a card and a tower. It was hilarious. I guess being a celebrity herself, she can actually pull it off.

Anyhow… dinner was excellent. The wine was very nice. When Kevin walked in we all applauded. Needless to say, he was embarrassed by the attention.

Bill and Andrea were there. It was nice to see them. They are now both into running marathons… and busy as usual. Bill was just over in Greece earlier this week. Hanna and Chris were there also.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

rumors of war

here and there. wandering in the space of approaching springtime. trying to focus on the varied chores facing me. scheduling and organizing the summer workshop, travel plans with Loki, professional schedule for teaching next academic year, the swell of propaganda raging around about WAR, market hysteria. I end up speechless. instead of watching the Weather Channel, go out for equal or longer time and watch the sky, the ground. and instead of mapping or predetermining change via news, listen to those around. the voices that are the local world. the schizophrenia introduced by remote-feed-being. is. a. problem.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Who?

end of the week. move out from the university housing. over to Christian’s place for the night. and hang in the lab, finishing up. closing down, over and out. and so on. drop by to say good-bye to Margret and Thordís, and so on, moving into moving mode. ramblin’ and this is playing when I get to Chris’ place:

Only love can make it rain The way the beach is kissed by the sea Only love can make it rain Like the sweat of lovers Laying in the fields … On the dry and dusty road The nights we spend alone I need to get back home To cool cool rain I can’t sleep and I lay and I think The nights are hot and black as ink Oh God I need a drink Of cool cool rain. Release. — The Who Quadrophenia

post-nuclear glow of sunshine jams a neon input through the dormer. sun impaled on a chimney and outlining a 1960’s administrative office building that looks like the Bureau of Standards where my dad worked in the remote suburbs of Washington, D.C. sunset. and Andrei Ujica’s “Out of the Present” plays on the tube. images from the Soviet/Russian MIR space station. which probably passes right over head as I write this. later in the evening, heading over to Hannes’ place for a party. never made it home, slept in the basement. among shelves of books.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

nomad spin-off

dinner last night with Wolfgang after a few hours of looking at online things and talking about the whole domain of these machines. today rain, meeting with Beatrix to see her thesis project about nomads which included a section excerpted from my web space — primarily the center of the Universe, the teaching philosophy, manifestations of networking article. strange to see these things worked into a project with works by Richard Long and others.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

public lecture planning

enough time for reflection. and restless pacing around relatively known spaces. looking out the window. reality. but the question of what to say on Tuesday evening. public lecture distracts me. structuring a finite period of time into what can be considered organized and clear information is something to be avoided? or just that regular nervousness about not engaging the audience, wasting their time, and that constant awareness of others’ — what they are producing (my critical stance towards the object is merely a translation of the jealousy of those who do create stunning cultural objects as a result of their artistic and other research).

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

stasis teaching

In some ways, lost the fight this week, and won the battle? Workshops, each has an internal and external dynamic. This one began concentrated and gradually dissipated. Students scheduling seemed to be the primary problem, there was always something else to be busy with. After a few days, I feel like being an entertainer, when the jokes run out, the audience splits. Competing for attention, okay, a childish notion to begin with, but when it applies to an educational situation where I am calling on the students to be participants rather than volumes of empty space passively waiting to be filled with knowledge — this seems to be the less desirable option for them. Far easier to be passive in education than active. Change is a brutal force that, in the end, ushers in death to the table of the living. But stasis is a death-in-life that denies the sensual realities of daily living. This dichotomy, death following life (following death following life) and death-in-life seems core to the process of revolution. Facing the bardo of becoming. Each and every day, letting the movement, the falling towards falling towards the mass of the world, acceleration. If the speed doesn’t change, time compresses. or Light strikes more directly into the soul.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

meat-space incarnation

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

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Realitätserweiterung

workshop at the FORUM space with a group of folks including students from MHK, former students, Frieder and Susi from Uni-Bremen Computer Science, and Hubertus. working title Äesthetic der digitalen Medien — Abbild der Realität, Welt der Metaphern, Realitätserweiterung. reception at the FORUM space later this evening. and this entry brings to an unceremonious close the third year of this travelog. tomorrow begins the fourth year. if I force myself to imagine that there is some use in it all. an imagination that has so far eluded my mental perambulations.

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

war?

NATO waits to bomb. WW III? why not. alignment of powers. Russia growls. teevee blathers. moon waxes after, at one-third full, nearly occults one star when I happen to glance out last night. workshop continues. construction of spaces. connection of energies. smoothing pathways. and for what? the educational system needs to be re-born. how come nobody else wants this to happen?

posted
  • place: Rosräth, Germany

Devi

A quick visit with Nils at the Media Academy in Köln yesterday, and happen to run into Irit Batsry who is running a video course there. I gush a little about the work of hers that I saw back in Montreal in 1995 — one of the single most powerful videos that I have ever seen. Walking between buildings, across Walter Peltzer Platz, Nils points out the two Golden Nica Award statues sitting in the window of the Knowbotic Research offices. later Volker and I go to a Kölsch brauerei for a bit of dinner.

She is Light itself and transcendent Emanating from Her body are rays in thousands — two thousand, a hundred thousand, tens of millions, a hundred million — there is no counting their numbers. It is by and through Her that all things are moving and motionless shine. It is by the Light of this goddess, this Devi, that all things become manifest. — Bhairava Yamala

Meet with Udo at dom.de to check into what he has been doing in the last three years. His current work explores relational data bases and how to construct complex navigational interfaces for interacting with the database — using it to construct a hyper-spatial narratives collaboratively. That is the key word — collaboratively — where the work evolves from a collective inter-dialogue which covers many aspects of everyone’s lives. A network constructed by a network! Along with some older experiments in data-basing of chats that are then reconfigured on the fly in further chat conversations between bots and humans. Very interesting stuff. The work produced for the equator project was one of the first tests. I hope to get him to provide such a space for neoscene occupation people to work in.

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

next five minutes 3 – tactical education

into the NextFiveMinutes conference. I have been burned out for much of the time for some reason, almost catching a cold yesterday evening, then this morning, spraining my back with the most minimal movement zipping up my suitcase, I wasn’t even bending over. scared the shit outta me. my panel presence (Tactical Education/Media Competence) was shortly after, and that went quite well, but by mid-afternoon I hobble back the the hotel, barely able to walk because of the sciatic pain. missed an appointment with Nan which I was quite looking forward to, not to mention several dialogues with new contacts. really don’t believe it, that I have done something serious. been stretching all afternoon and evening between bouts resting in bed. nothing else to do! Faugh! miss a dinner with an interesting artist. following are notes for the Tactical Education presentation (on the neoscenes occupation project):

sotto voce: introduction: start by restating my conviction that:

venues like this can, by their nature, only mirror or document what is happening “out there” — and although this precise venue here — me speaking to you is probably not anyone’s first choice of interaction — but I was eager to participate in this part of nextfiveminutes as an opportunity to open some dialogues on methodologies and experiences. I would wish that the expressions here will represent ideas so vital that there will be nothing to do after our brief time together but to ACT. but I suppose that the most one can hope for is that some of these thoughts would be on a level fundamental enough that some of you might share these dialogues at future times. or at least be entertained by my ignorant display of polarized generalizations.

put neoscenes occupation within a larger context of praxis, personal philosophy, and reality. more “next five minutes 3 – tactical education”

posted
  • place: en route Eindhoven, Netherlands - Aachen, Germany

food cycles

turbulence in mind, need some calming effects of … deep breathing. the future wells up, the future in mind, possible futures, and impossible ones, and the difficulties and fears of failure. always. seldom are the possible fun times pictured. only the problems. got to do some more positive visualization — negative vibes aren’t very nice. summer begins to loom, though, as a challenge of ordering movement. and time pressing in. and then hard after that is the question of the next academic year. deciding to remain free-lance or on dropping down into some relative space of at least less motion. thinking ahead is always a stress in this way. but then there is the idea that being a nomad should be a motion that is natural and un-self-conscious. and with that I get back to writing to others. cycles continue. animal protein products in the form of meat, egg, and cheeses, with grain products, bread, oatmeal, muesli, pasta; and plants, apples, oranges, bananas, onion, garlic, tomato, what else. eating the same stuff almost all of the time. (this thought comes after a week of living in a hotel and not being able to cook). about to leave again. these short gigs are too unsettling. they will be ending soon. with no base to move on.

posted
  • place: Eindhoven, Netherlands

on the Maas River

week ends. a lot of energy expended during the time here. I have gotten a bit soft staying in Scandinavia for so long. used to open spaces, fresh air and water, and that situation. here in Netherlands many things are different. people. bicycles, fewer mobiles. (today I run out to get a mobile card so that I can use my phone while I am here…) shifting numbers, identities, and all the while, I can be hunted down by whoever accesses the data. pinned down. near the Maas River, and escape is not possible. breakfast at the hotel, Dutch, French, German, English. middle-class business.

this is the way the World ends, this is the way the World ends, this is the way the World ends, not with a bang but a wimper… — T. S. Eliot

so, what else. the west is in a frenzy, and what lies beyond all this. nothing of note?

posted
  • place: Eindhoven, Netherlands

embryonic MacDonalds

day one finished. a bit exhausted by exposure. the Academy is functioning under some fundamentally different paradigms that, combined with the student and faculty, has produced an ambiance shifted away from that of many other institutions. it will be important to measure what is happening this week. view the situation. in short, there are no walls and no departments. only some themes from faculty deliberation. no classrooms. so, I take a space to gather the students, whilst others wander to and fro nearby.

in the evening, a program about the film crews with the Air Force who created images of the atomic tests. hearing the familiar names like EG&G (Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier), Eniwetok Atoll, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Lookout Mountain, Nevada Test Site, and on. into the Atomic Age. I reflect on what my father knows, has experienced in those times, with the envisioned threat of nuclear devastation hanging over every step of the way from strip malls to embryonic MacDonalds in Southern California. duck-and-cover. crouched under small first-grade sized desks, eyes and head covered. sirens wailing. for earthquake and/or nuclear war. forming the gross paranoia that bounces so much around Amurika and that brings such dis-ease to minds there.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki - Kemi - Tornio, Finland

colder, darker

in the end, I backspace to correct mistakes, erasing up to 20 letters while I sit, surrounded by a group of Japanese tourists, men, maybe on some kind of promotional or business-related travel. they are animated. can I bridge the gap with them? what would be the point? like the drunk guy on the ferry (again) today. he comes to ask me something, but I freeze up. people look through him or away from him, ignoring his singing and talking all the way into Market Square. Niko got me to the ferry at the last minute — his car was stuck in the snow which was falling all day today, heavily. It is about 20C warmer now. but by the time I get the the north, it will be the same there as it was here yesterday. what is it when I sit in the airport, waiting for a flight to board, and just noodle around with this machine. positioning the self. not needing the language of modernity (a hyped-mix of pixellated images and cyber-texts. intervention. processing. wired.) ears popping now. above clouds. horizontal delineations of sky etched in red and blue-grey. leaving Light behind. it was getting bright in Helsinki this week, despite the intense cold. only one more month in, Finland before breaking from Scandinavia for seven weeks. it will be full-tilt springtime when I return. another winter going into the Light. still nothing conclusive with Sanna: the dance of personalities becomes. what. exhausting. no, it is conclusive. I should conclude it. period. yep. that’s it, in making art, I have consistently made the fundamental error of not applying a technique/tool in a research-oriented way. like using a particular medium — my photography as a way of digging into reality and spirituality. not following the classic way of art research.

posted

imprints

swimming this evening in a very crowded pool. still thinking of this whole issue of how I have used my personal energies to imprint my personality, my presence, on my environment. something very much outside the needs of survival, very much obsessive (in mostly small rather harmless ways), but accumulating a force that exclude an Other from occupying that same space. is it possible? domination of landscape — the title of a work done several years ago. a simple image, printed as a postcard and sent to an exhibition in Texas, somewhere. a fragment of a landscape, I think on the crest of Independence Pass? with two square fence-posts, a heavy chain draped between them. but this analog illustration seems to be acted out every time I enter a space. organizing it. it is a form of finding comfort — same way, in a working space, I have to straighten it up before getting to work. kitchens, work-spaces, and especially, computers! Ugh. what about not making ANY imprint at all? is it possible? it is on a sliding scale, so, if there is the possibility, walk Lightly!

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Oslo - Trondheim, Norway

fallacious criteria

all things unravel. and I am in planes, buses, and taxis. south to north. plus or minus. no messages on the phone as I leave range for word to come. hauntings. futures compress, pasts well up, present reifies into words that fall like rocks to the floor, gouging everything living, and scratching everything dead. that’s it. ending so quickly, so pointlessly. absolutely no reason for ultimatums about hurt and pain and. so on. fictions churn out. where readers bring wholesale chunks of being into print, neither lost nor found. but set to float in a inner harbor glazed with rainbow oil slicks, half-empty coke cans, and spent condoms. left a pot of black-bean chili cooling on the stove: when it is cool, then there will be nothing more. bags of hot chili powder and basil, corn meal in the cupboard. birch-smoked salmon in the fridge, and everybody is starving for what they don’t want or can’t get. it’ll end up in the garbage. maybe there will be a general cleaning that will take into account the Indonesian Liberation tee-shirt that I threw on the floor in the rush to get out to the taxi to the rail station to store the two bags that I simply couldn’t carry all the way to Trondheim. rolling thoughts of what to do next time in Helsinki. flight back is in two weeks. fourteen days to arrange something. Imatra probably after that. re-arrange Eindhoven. fill out plans for Tornio. give in to the fear. icy fear. or keep going? head south? head west? US for the summer? what’s best for Loki? Iceland, maybe not. the initiative to be mobile to better keep contact with him seems to be receding in the need to get grounded again. the time in Iceland served to point out the serious crisis in the production curve. how things are made, why things are made. and the role of the powerful ego. how did it get so strong, and how does this compare to others’? don’t matter, comparison — that is actually a function of feeding for the ego — that consumptive looking-at-the-Other. that can’t be written out of this script. but most of time previous, I have identified the ego-center of other people’s work, and ignored the spiritual component — made easy and quick judgments based on a limited and possibly fallacious criteria. realizing that pursuit of material interaction (that is, using the material world to “make art,”) along with my developing sense of dematerialization, I must not reject physical manifestations. to do that would reject a certain class of communications that are attenuated by time, space, and possibility. in Oslo at the moment, hoping to get online this evening for a jolt of email to deal with. and to ponder what to begin tomorrow. Trondheim. the first road sign I see is to Hell. if I am correct, hell means bright? or…

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

hip, cool, and ripped-off

logging into the past. first I drop Loki off at school for a greatly shortened day that seems to be only a special pageant for the entire student body. 90 minutes. I go back home to read several weeks of nettime email. which gets me to this stage of needing to write here. photometry. grammetics. and new media is nothing more than more of the same. networked things – smeckworked things. learning in cyberspace, doing in cyberspace, personal technology begins/continues the inexorable involuted backfire on itself. but only personal technology. something to shoot back with. Corpo-tech, or mili-tech won’t cease. because selling and killing will have a greater field of action in the future. the mistake of all the applied technology hype is that it forgets the original interface — soul/body. where the ether jacks into the meat. all mediated things root in and then fly from this electro-colloidal fertilization-zone. all reason and form and metaphor and absolute can be searched, can be hunted in this zone. can then be copied, pasted into relevant organic categories. that’s it, the Confucian Analects that sends us through a process of searching the perimeter of the soul/body interface.

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

This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories
— Confucius, from The Great Digest or The Unwobbling Pivot, translated by Ezra Pound

it is possible to consider all things to be simple. complexity is a result of over-thought. over-processing of even the most simple data-set creates sampling artifacts, noise, and confusion. borders fabricate, delta-functions shoot to zero or infinity (the paralysis of alienated polarization), surfaces distort. convolution with questionable concepts creates complete areas of synthetic fabrication replete with discontinuities and false event horizons. forget metaphors, jam poetry, and all cultural production machinery paradigms, swallow language, stop writing. stop beating flesh against time and space barriers that make it hurt. no sex for entertainment: no time-slot filler, no wet commerce. body looks soft for a reason. that reason is coddling. ways of going that treat body/soul interface as a bother, not the crux (what is crux — old ancient forgotten word — is there a new word to fill the spot where this was forgotten and once lodged? maybe the word that fills it is catalytic converter or simm or talk-show). there are so many substitution fonts that language can be forgotten anyway. because people are knowing less and less exactly or even generally what each other is saying. no hearing, no talking. only dumb silence while fingernails grow to stab palms. while genetic receptors are mapped (where’s life?). and while questions are asked that raise a cryogenic boiling fog that dissipates to nothing after awhile. hip. cool. and ripped-off.

posted
  • place: en route Lahti - Töölö, Finland

multiple dreams

dreaming of something, but the memory is gone. 20:20 and listening to a Monty Python CD. waiting for Sanna to come home from YLE. ride in from Lahti on the bus with a group of students to Kiasma. Kirsti tells me about her mother who died this spring. we’re on an art field trip. art at 10:15 in the morning. Bruce Naumann, and the rest. coffee and a weineri in the Kiasma cafe and I have lost the foreign students that I was to take around the museum, so I head to a shop to buy a bunch of flowers and then on the number 10 tram to see Sanna — we end up hanging about talking for several hours before she has to go to work for the evening.
more “multiple dreams”

posted
  • place: Linz, Austria

InfoWar

the InfoWar begins. lots of people, humid weather, and the interior environment gives me a headache. central Europeans have such a warped sense of environmental cleanliness. too many damned smokers. network space modulating, and temporizing. fractured by audio overload coming from everywhere.

Hey, I’ve got a really good address!” “C’mon over, let’s have some sex!” “Make up your own mind.” — Tom Sherman, performance

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

neoscenes occupation

the neoscenes occupation project for Ars Electronica (which approaches in days) begins to take some form, at least as an idea:

the educational process in the developed world is dead or dying. neoscenes wants to re-create and renew education, making it an omnidirectional flow of energies with a force multiplied far beyond the meat count and with a reach that is far ahead of the game. join neoscenes, speak, act, make a difference in your own head and body and soul. the occupation is of the network, is of each others lives, is of being, is of body, it is of it all.

neoscenes is about the creation of personal spaces wherein the individual realizes the potential of individual and collaborative creativity. it is about seizing the opportunity presented by the Internet and contemporary telecommunications to create active spaces that are autonomous of the traditional “institutions of higher learning”. it is about sharing neoscenes has established a primary level of mechanisms for this engagement in the basic technologies of the web, IRC (Internet relay chat), and the neoscene listserv. IRC, a live text-based communications medium is widely available on any networked PC; the neoscene listserv allows distribution of information via email, and this website will become a central point networking neoscenes participants and their relevant web-based information. other means of collaboration will be employed as participants decide to utilize including iVisit, CUSeeMe, FTP, VRML, and other technologies as they become available.

so it goes. now to make it happen!

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

accidents

two weeks left in Amurika. planning the future. playing the game. needing to put some significant time into the Ars Electronica project which I have not even titled yet. how to include as many students as possible. consolidating a space (the exploration paradigm). is there another paradigm? how to bring young people into this space with a critical sense of the role of technology (and of simply occupying, utilizing the space represented by the Net)? I come to name the newly created listserv and netspace I have been carving the last two years — NEW MEDIA EXCHANGE — TheEnemy — as it were, is, was. I will unveil it at Ars Electronica in September.

They’re funny things, Accidents. You never have them till you’re having them. — A. A. Milne, Eeyore in Winnie-the-Pooh

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

memories of Alda

portrait, Alda with her roses, Hrísey, Iceland, June 1990

Monday morning. means nothing to me except for the beginning of a quick and long week of dinners, lunches, and other friendly convocations. lunch with Sari. Loki is still sleeping in bed after a late evening with Holly, Natalie, Rick, and Sally. he goes to bed very unhappy, and I am not sure whether this is a factor of fatigue, accumulated lack of attention, or what. MB sends me a sad email saying that Alda of Hrísey has died. Going to the island will not be the same. I recall meeting her for the first time when I was visiting Jón and Helga at their summerhouse on the island situated in the mouth of Eyjafjördur with Stefan back in August 1989. Actually Hrísey is called the Pearl of Eyjafjördur by its situation in the fjord. Alda was into her 80’s although no one that I talked to knew her age exactly. she lived alone in a modest-sized home at the far east end of the village of around three hundred that sits at the southern, sheltered end of the island. likewise, on the south side of her house, there was a small greenhouse and a very tortured fir tree. during the summer months, in that little greenhouse she tended the most fabulous roses that I have ever seen. one summer MB and I stayed in the downstairs corner room in her house, and all through the bright night a thrush sang at least 15,000 of its 30,000-small repertoire of riffs. LOUD. sitting either on top of the greenhouse, or right below the window on that fir tree. the tortuous pangs of beauty.

What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication. … If your goal is to communicate, you must use whatever means you have at your disposal in a given situation. Communicative praxis must always be radically contextualized. … — Taylor and Saarinen, from Imagologies: Media Philosophy

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

other spaces

arrived. from a traverse of Zenith. and other spaces. an early morning that starts at Rick and Sally’s place in Golden, where we stayed the night before heading to Boulder to house-sit for Jeff and Leslee.

posted
  • place: en route Alexandria, Virginia - Phoenix - Prescott, Arizona

viae pulchrae

merely a walk to the Pentagon.

Via Viri sancti viae pulchrae, et omnes semitae ejus pacificae, quia lignum vitae apprehendit.

 

The roads that the holy man took were roads of beauty, and his paths were all paths of peace, for he was connected to the tree of life. — Psalm 109: Dixit Dominus

and the flight to Arizona in the afternoon. unpacking bags from the trunk of the car in the mid-night darkness in front of my parents house, Loki says LOOK at THAT STAR, Pabby! and as Doug and I look up to the center of the Milky Way, our eyes are stunned by the second-largest falling star that I have ever seen blasting across the heavens, leaving a trail that persists for some time, the head of the meteorite breaks apart and appears to burn up. Is this an omen?

posted
  • place: en route Linz, Austria - Budapest, Hungary

intertwinedness

no sleep again. the full moon, the arriving solstice, and the stresses of movement. last night was a curious experience. in an arena where energies were so mis-spent, mis-directed, and un-perceived. experienced, but un-commented upon, imposed and not resisted, and on into the morning. missed train connection, so I will arrived later in Budapest than scheduled which will impinge on my abilities to prepare for tonight’s lecture at the Center for Creative Communications. I am so tired in the morning that I actually get on the wrong train, and head for Salzburg rather than Vienna. this shocks me a lot, and is totally unlike me, it reflects the state I am in. fortunately I am able to get off the train in Wels, only fifteen minutes from Linz, and board another train heading for Vienna. which should happen with considerable more grace than last night. there would have been… is the beginning of a retrospective on the event. or there could have been… energy and power was simply lost in the space that was NOT created. no intertwinedness happening. talk about the oppressive power of language. but it doesn’t really matter, what each individual experienced is simply that. an experience that they walk away with. no gleaming successes, but just a quiet continuation of the voice that is hard to hear in the crowd. no phantasm of world domination follows me.

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Hamburg - Kiel, Germany

languages

alien nation. night train really isn’t. leaving the flat at 1745 by taxi. leaving Tornio by bus at 1810. leaving Kemi at 2000, trudging in Light to the South, but noticeable dimming within the roaring grinding cabin, high whine of air movers, both the two bunks too slim for two, but two forced to be in one because of need. needs of fate, needs of whatever. I do not know, needs of time, beautiful in sleep, beautiful upon waking, stretching away, and the shyness that for me is an inscrutable hidden in language and culture difference and herself. her silence given to searching for words, and that thing I know well of Babylon — the excretory hubris to attain God after the language leaves. maybe this can never become anything other than what it is. and for that I am thankful, for it to be what it is in the moment of when it is enough. the word romantic surfaces, but this is only a poor shake of letters not touching on the actuality. romantic movements are gritty-eyed, skin-burnishing events. hallucinogenic Light flashing through the trees when the shades are opened in the morning, well, at the 0500 hour because sleep is not possible for me. last car in the train. yeah, the language difference, something I am too familiar with, and the limits of expression. can we substitute one form of expression purely for another? the example being the susseration of skin-to-skin, a touch-language (this has been thought of for years: and acted upon more than once), instead of this ancient way of going that would never be now — constructs of letters making sound, making sense and dissonance. the shaping and imprinting, wanting to remember the feeling (do we ever have memories of feeling?) hand moves back and forth, pressing the body-wall of Other, never knowing what it is to be. the conflict of sensory feeding and sensory survival and sensory overload and sensory subjugation and sensory purpose. goodbye is goodbye when the first meeting is only days in the past. saying goodbye is unspeakable. the way one looks at the Other. the eye as receptor (not transmitter like history gazing on itself) nor ear as receptor, only a transmitter of attention. The body and the voice as transmitter (touch, the receiver and transmitter.) Light emissions. (voices move) through the containing ether. shaping the words to trace an outline of being on the vacated space of that body once known or thought to be known or thought to be anticipated (memory of loss. and loss of memory.) anticipating that I would. or just anticipating what it was. shoulder, arm, wrist, finger. ring.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

ensemble

1.5 km swim. suddenly time compresses, and it is time to leave this place for a whole series of other places in the next four weeks. the swimming allows me to concentrate some energy for the movement. and at least it is a, oh hell, here this is, again, simply drowning in meaning and not allowing the words to say what is meant. the day barely ends, but is merely projected to the next, taxi to bus to train, the night train, ensemble. funny that I cannot bring myself to full-exposure in these pages, like I have to cover my words, my actions, my being. like the interstices become anti-regulatory and I merely forget what I have done. As moving into the way of the other. hanging log files in space with Carmin. preparing for the performance-event in Linz. trepidation and half-being.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

on a walk

In a painted corner, words fail me, in the class — this space that I have voluntarily entered with these other humans, who also entered voluntarily also — adjusting our collective visions and expectations so that they are in an eternal alignment, or internal alignment, or infernal inferno. In that painted corner the suggestions range from rescue to BREAK THROUGH THE WALL behind the back, to a basic “Let’s get outta here!” And so we do. A stroll through town to the bus station to get ice cream soaking up the brilliant sunshine that is here now. Fragment: approaching the bus station, an old man sits on a bench in the sun. At the corner of his mouth, as we approach, I see a sparkling diamond (this is a sign, but I do not know it, it penetrates my head like the summer sun Light on North Atlantic water. more “on a walk”

posted
  • place: en route Linz - Salzburg, Austria - München - Frankfurt - Offenbach - Rösrath, Germany

ice trains

Another early morning train, to München on to Frankfurt, then to Offenbach for the afternoon visiting the Hochschule für Gestaltung there, then on through Siegen to Rösrath to visit with Volker for a day. This movement. Last night vibrating inwardly, feelings electric again (there was a window there that opened regarding mortality versus immortality — walking behind Tom and Christa out in a village near Linz, heading for the country, I suddenly recalled that I had not been aware of my own being, I had forgotten to be, and then came a flooding roar that something could have happened in that state of not being within my own life, I could have had an accident!) But I did not. No use describing it. Salzburg. Another fragment of intensity, of energy, happened after the lecture yesterday, riding the strassenbahn back into town, I see the mountains far away, through the opposite window of the tram, they are small and though covered with snow, are pink from the industrial haze.

The vision leaps out at me. Recalling the instance that I have often recounted in class. Walking up to the bus stop one morning in Iceland, I have not really woken up, I am moving, but only the body is on motion, the mind is off, still, dull. Standing at the bus stop, it is at the top of a hill, there are some buildings around, but there is a rather unobstructed view plus-or-minus of the entire horizon which spans a long ridge of mountains on the Reykjanes peninsula, Mt. Esja sitting somberly to the north, and other low ranges and peaks scattered to the east and north, a few fragments of ocean are also visible. I am turning slowly, gaze traversing the critical intersection of these two rough half-spaces. The energy starts somewhere in the belly, at least that is where I first notice it, in the belly, maybe the solar plexus, it is rising in the body, and at the same time, the mind begins to fire. There is the immediate realization that the seeing, the apprehension, and absorption of Light energy through the eyes is charging my body with strong forces, fields of power. I become aware of living, being alive, being. As Rilke termed it, superabundant life began to trace each edge, each separation, while at the same time all things were fused into a unitary essence that circulated freely through all parts of my body. Yep. München. Snow here. Bright outside the windows of this ICE train. Moving again at high speeds.

posted
  • place: Düsseldorf, Germany

presence

here for a couple days. visiting Kaisu who has an artist-in-residence atelier here for some months. yesterday we take a day trip to Köln. unusually clear and warm for this time of year. it is strange to be in that city again, with all the personal history that has happened there for me. a visit to the Ultimate Akademie finds Hans-Jürgen and Lisa, I speak with Rolf on the phone and find out that Volker is indeed around, but has a disconnected telephone, a group of them had been in Chaing Mai, Thailand for some weeks, and Volker had not paid his telephone bill. so, I will probably see him when I return to Köln later in this month. circles draw tight. smaller circles, and every time I look at Works of Art, I am repressed, not depressed, but re-pressed. they repress me in the way of a reminder of the drives that exist around us in the world, the drives to control the world, maybe only to make sense of things, der dinge. needing strong touches of being. impressions of materiality. impressions on body. simple burdens of. intersections of material and body. no, it is not the intersection of body and material, but more the exercise of control. not making any ideas here. no ideas are better than formations of being that are simple and forward. Hans-Jürgen says I should do another performance at the Ultimate Akademie when I am back in Köln — he jokes about the other performance a bit, and seems a bit impressed that I am STILL traveling! meeting so many different people constantly. it begins to strike me that I am also now moving through spaces that I moved through when I started this mnemonic device two years ago. so there is introduced a reflexive element to my ramblings, being some place again. a cycle of memory, what do I recall? a dinner-party with several artists living locally, telephone calls from Claudia, who I missed by only a couple days in Finland, I haven’t seen her since 1989 in Köln when she had an exhibition there and in Roma also in that same year. I introduced Kaisu to her remotely a few years back when Kaisu was staying at the Finnish atelier in Roma, and they have since become good friends which is nice. Claudia’s new catalog which Kaisu shows me illustrates her strong and evolving works — now using photography. all things cease in mind, I am a receptacle for liquid experience, and not more, a vessel. even consuming experience. biting air, and chewing a stick of words that issue from mind to mouth. fiber. chewed and flayed like papyrus, bound together in bundles, dipped in wax, lit, they become torches carried by those who search darkness for the meaning of being. Kersten is home when I call there to say hallo, she is going out on a date and is in a hurry; I will see her also later in the month. Still no contact with Hubertus about the teaching in Kiel. catch Adele in Budapest, but she will leave for the weekend, and I will probably not cross her path. too bloody complex, these arrangements, even with email. telephone is easier. why? and sitting face-to-face better still. Samu and I talked about that. incontrovertible that Presence is the base to build on. writing through time.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

gypsies

Again time begins to compress and move into different spaces ahead of the actuality of it all. A blitz trip with Visa to Imatra to lecture there for a day and see the facilities. Seven hours on a train, cold, walking around. Only a couple kilometers from the Russian frontier. The closest, so far, that this Amurikan has been. It is a curious sensation. For me to understand the delineation that the geopolitics has constructed here would be a stretch beyond most things that I know and a movement into other spaces beyond this edge of Europe. I meet with Juhani and Terhi to discuss the situation in Tornio where I will be teaching a six-week workshop immediately following a two-week introduction by Terhi. Prospective students were required to write an application in English giving some idea of what they want from such a class, and what their experience is. It appears there is significant anticipation for the class, a good omen. Visa did an astrological calculation yesterday for me from a CD-ROM. Sitting in a room at a computer, the room is in the Imatra rail station, we had only to step out of the train, cross the platform, and enter the school. Lunch was taken in the Imatra Police Station where Visa and I really didn’t fit into the decor of bureaucrats and cops in a very new building. Somehow, I am quite comfortable in the countryside here, most times, not really stressed about having people know I am a foreigner, as generally they will not react one way or the other. That is, most times, but there is one set of circumstances which does seem to be catalytic, and that is the obvious ingredient of alcohol. A fellow gets onto the train one stop before we leave at Imatra. He has a black felt hat on, something I imagine a Scottish gentleman of the 30’s wearing to a funeral, he is carrying a guitar which he bangs hard twice as he sets it down on the seat. He has curious nostrils where the center bridge (lord, what is the anatomic name for that?) dividing the two nostrils from each other sits lower than the nostril flare itself. hard to describe, but something like a horse, in a way. I do not understand that racially he is different until Visa makes the comment how dramatic the Gypsies always are. True, I recall to him that gypsy transvestite we met after the Fax You performance in Helsinki in 1994. Preparing for the road begins, I look forward to it in a way, although it will present the usual stresses. But there will be some interesting new things happening along the way. A new country, Hungary, for one.

Suomenlinna is snowy and brilliant this morning, I take the long way to the ferry in order to wring a small bit of atmosphere from the Place.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

breaking the glass

I send a proposal to Christa for the Ars work coming up:
word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action: breaking the glass

The history of mediation is also the history of humans seeking to lessen the impact of raw nature and human aggression on their physical being. Language may be thought of as a primal mediating technology, and in that sense, the further mediations imposed on communications between humans — those mediations that are more commonly referred to as technology, are merely additional obstructions to understanding that overlie language. None-the-less, in this moment, it is still possible to speak, and to listen. At the very same moment that mediation stresses our attempts of attentive presence with the Other, it becomes more imperative to engage in Dialogue and in the creation of spaces in which Dialogue might flourish. Dialogue stimulates genesis, transformation, and revelation in life — it is a revolutionary art itself when in critical juxtaposition to silence. Dialogue, as pure expression of heart and soul, is the core of all meaningful activism.

This talk will explore the be-ing of Dialogue, the stresses of mediation, and our presence in the noumenal world.

posted
  • place: en route Lahti - Suomenlinna, Finland

organic humus skin

Starting off this morning in Lahti, sunshine, a few snow flurries, and doing a little web work. I just did a rather radical structural change on my site, and there are the usual glitches to overcome… The bus travels along the main route between Helsinki and St. Petersburg which is being widened from two to four lanes. A long-secret fantasy of the geological self materializes in a scaled-down way. When traveling along, I have often thought, or, well, did in the past — it is a childish wish, I suppose — that it would be cool to see a place with all topsoil and alluvium removed. Another words, see a place as it exists on bedrock, stripped of pretense and history and erosional after-effects. One context in which I thought about this frequently was from the lust for placer gold. Gold, with its high density (19 times as dense as water), always concentrates at the bottom of a placer system — that is the main principle that drives the classic gold-diggers of the Colorado, California, and Alaska gold rushes of the 18th century. The gold sinks down through rushing water, it settles to the very bottom, being in most cases the most dense free element in a dynamically differentiating hydraulic system. It is usually covered with whatever black sand, or magnetite is around, a mineral that often is found associated with the typical hard rock sulfide vein deposits of gold. So, stripping all Light alluvium and soil away, one would be left with hard rock with, under the right mineralogical circumstances, the cracks and crannies filled with the heavy placer gold in nuggets, flakes, and dust., Finland, beneath, is another story, one more mundane though perhaps at least a bit sensuous. Where the road is being widened, one step undertaken after all vegetation is razed, is a clean removal of the soil. Underneath this relatively thin skin of organic humus — thin by the temporal proximity of the last Ice Age which only recently even made the possibility of settlement of all of Scandinavia — underneath is the undulating, rolling, positively curvaceous gray and pink granite surface. This mapped infinite half-space glacier-tooled interface was scoured smooth and is interrupted only by the occasional glacial erratic — the rounded boulders that vary in size from large cars to bowling balls.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

tedium of time

Spending all the day languishing with a bit of a cold. Feeling a bit caged here, but otherwise the situation is quite good. I find that my teaching work goes very well this spring, as was the case overall last fall. Actually my energy level is much higher even, as I don’t have the burden of the back pain that dogged me all of last year. It appears that the approach of unmediated space of dialectic to pedagogy, something along the lines of Paolo Friere (though I do need to re-read his works), provides a dynamic and plentiful energy source for both the student and myself. The computer and network is the ultimate desiring device. Any system, including the Market, falls because of the unlimited and ignorant confidence it is held in by the masses of people who blindly believe in its efficacy. There are too many null points in human nature that drive a theoretical system to destruction. For example, the market depends on perfect information to be held by all. When has this EVER been the case? And when is the FULL price of production ever acknowledged by a manufacturer? That is, the price of future toxic-waste Superfund clean-ups, for example … Blind allegiance to a system is the primary means for that system to run amok and bring disaster to both those in power controlling the system and those under its power … Blah blah blah. A clear critical distance to a system, regardless of its apparent glories and blah blah blah… A bad Tony Curtis movie that ends with his house in Malibu sliding down a muddy hillside to the beach. Afterward, the news comes on with the same images from Northern California. captured between the walls, the weather, and a bad sinus cold, somewhere south of Karelia, a long two days walk to Russia, and only the far-off Equinox to break the tedium of time.

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

sleeping tight

The last day here, and consequently, the last day with Loki for many months. I will never get used to these partings. If ever I do, then I deserve the worst in life. Loki seems to take it all within a scope that does not disturb his equilibrium and being. He does seem happier at home here, rather than traveling around with me. He has his friends here, and a home and a room of his own, all his toys. I wonder if there will come a time when he will leave this place willingly to live elsewhere. Whether the relative glories of Amerika will draw him from this land of safety and quiet survival. Taa-daa … He goes to sleep, sleep tight, and don’t let the bed bugs bite… He tells me it is important to sleep tight so that one won’t have bad dreams. As opposed to sleeping loose. I go to bed tired. Although I can imagine that this night will be uncomfortable, as is usual for the nights before big jumps in space-time-e-motion. Actually only a short flight south, 45 minutes across the highlands, spectacular if clear, harrowing if the weather is bad which it very well may be…

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

interventions

No idle moments to be spent dabbling in web-site improvement. I dream about making some significant art projects this year, but it looks to be a year spent in teaching others, working for others … The snow gets into my cuffs as I step down to the school this morning to take advantage of a decent Internet/ethernet connection. I am able to spend a couple hours getting some items updated. I think constantly about re-doing the entire web site from scratch. Starting from zero. What that would change. Ego is the primary intervening force against clarity of vision. The long string of self-portraits that I have done over the last two decades suddenly come into my face as interventions — either cease the making of them or make them to use them as a tool to knock the ego from its intervening position. Make them so transparent that they show nothing but vision! In the end, it would not be for the Other, these exercises, but purely to loosen the self from the constant grip of the ego. raking leaves was. shoveling snow now. snow transpiring negatively to hard ice under the pressure of daily life. blue ether air twiLight seen between the slats of the dirty beige plastic venetian blinds fluoresces and vibrates. You Vee. like the ozone hole lets in leaks of deep space that, after a singeing from solar radiation, bleeds high frequency blue-ness into our realm. the snow consumes it, the cold consumes it, and it is gone eventually after a slow lingering of one hand of hours. it all makes me lie. it is really subsumed by gravity. I putter through digital letters written only year-ages ago. The archive that I have with me goes back seven digital years.

People will speak, They will not speak in order to convince, or to drown the noise of silence. They will speak because it will be easy to do so, and because life will surge from their mouths together with the words. Everything will be filled with life. There will no longer be room for anything dead or unintelligible. — J.-M.G. LeClezio
 

But do words truly bring us to a higher state of awareness — aren’t they just tools of a technology so old that its origins are inseparable from the origins of human thought? That is, language is merely another one of humankind’s shields from the terror of life on this earth. We are occasionally brilliant enough to realize our own physical weaknesses and subsequently to create prostheses that magnify the energies of our puny bodies, but we are not brilliant enough to recognize that our spiritual strength does not lie in our clever forays against the world, but in the limitless possibilities of the interface of mind-body-spirit, and the choices we make, and the Others we face in spiritual dialogue.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

static chill

measured sentences today marked the passing of time, I quit writing real sentences because. now frequently I see reflections of other frames of reference (deja vu — such a weak word, unable to pull itself into English, and yet these instances dog me daily now). meta-verse, meta-contact. always mediation always the insurgency (no rapt attention) injecting. only little hopes (we shall overcome). shouting at cloud riots straddling a bicycle seat talking to the wind and wishing I had watched the sunrise without sound background of house news noise. silence would have been the direction to flow into. words built up the day, words scattering across the way, words and looking at what there could have been behind them. in a position of leading life and following life, there is always the element of confusion that greets each successive moment. to be able to have possibility and nothing more than the fullness of it. Dar-es-Saalam comes up in conversation today, so does John Coltrane and Thelonius Monk (his birthday), and Guattari, the Thousand Plateaus, more “static chill”

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

word-prayers

The week flashes by in a way that continues to defy my clear understanding. Bullshit. Who cares how fast it goes. Quality, not lagging moments. sliding through the words, words that frame each human encounter. momentary existence flashing to ear enjoyment hearing knowing. the pleasure of speaking with others spoken to over long times and long places. the recognition. understanding no less a challenge, but the recognition and open acceptance remains the core heart of the interaction. a string of beads, word-prayers to the Other, passing through fingering hands one-by-one, where walking propels to the spatial coming-to-be, speaking-hearing propels the soul to a visionate space of confluential coming-into-spirit.

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  • place: Arvada, Colorado

open-x retrospect

Retrospecting on the disheveling week of near-constant stimulation and activity that was the Ars Electronica FLESH FACTOR event. Five hours sleep was a miracle which was as remote from reality as was the idea of downtime. A thrashing whoosh of flesh factors and virtual emulations and emanations and emissions and manifestations accompanied with the appropriate techno-beats, subtronic and subsonic throbbing, visceral vibrations and skittering cathode-ray-tube radiations. I spent a vast portion of my time within the comfortable, though frenetic, Open-X space where something of a revolution took place. A revolution of interface design between audience and artist, participant and observer, creator and consumer, networker and networker. As far as I know or can ascertain in discussion with other networking artists, Open-X is a first as far as restructuring the relationship between artist and audience — although even this pronouncement is a rather näive and surficial reduction. The space was occupied by about 50 networking-artists working on a variety of projects from finished web-projects, to live web-radio, to collaborative events (like our net.sauna), and a full-tilt live documentation of the entire festival. I should point out that this term networking-artist is something of a misnomer, or, at least, a scraping bow to the traditionally relegated identifications of this and that. Previous to this event in the heritage of conference, traditional paradigms have absolutely prevailed for electronic media festivals, exhibitions, and symposium. I came away from the festival feeling virtually invigorated and physically completely wiped-out. The 18-hour flight from Linz to Frankfurt to Washington to Denver was almost total torture for my back. I was constantly checking the count-down timer on my watch, the seconds tripping by far too slowly for me to remember anything through the constant hot-nails in the lower back. In the last hour, I got to digging my fingernails into my palms to make me forget the pain in my back.

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  • place: Cos Cob, Connecticut

William Burroughs 1914 – 1997

William S. Burroughs is dead. So now, both Ginsberg and Burroughs are gone. I like to tell the story of a day when I was living in Boulder working on my MFA. The Naropa Institute hosted a wide variety of readings each the year, and it was in early fall when Anthony and I decided it would be auspicious if we went to hear a reading by Bill Burroughs. We got there early and sat in the second row. Right before the reading began, Alan Ginsberg came in and sat down in the chair directly in front of me. Burroughs began reading, and after a while, I leaned over to Anthony and whispered, I am watching William Burroughs through Alan Ginsberg’s glasses…

This is a war universe. War all the time. That is its nature. There may be other universes based on all sorts of other principles, but ours seems to be based on war and games. All games are basically hostile. Winners and losers. We see them all around us: the winners and the losers. The losers can oftentimes become winners, and the winners can very easily become losers. — Bill Burroughs, “The War Universe,” taped conversation, first published in Grand Street, No. 37 (1991)