A short note about the installation that I just opened yesterday as part of the Akureyri ListaSumar 1997 (Summer Arts Festival). It is an extension of the performance series solstice-to-solstice: a naming of the Light of Being [it takes a few seconds for the java slide-show to cue up—there are a total of 225 images].
and the intro on the wall reads something like this:
This installation is a visual exploration of a life-path—a braided passage that is both material and spiritual. As Light forms, informs, and sustains Life, its influence on the large and small is whole and complete. The eye absorbs this energy and that inspiration becomes material essence for Being. These images are a meditation, a reviving of memory, a remembering, a potential source for the imagination and, most of all, a visual naming in the fundamental sense. Naming is a basic creative process that brings the material world into being, it forms a matrix, an armature, upon which this personal visual history and memory is built. These images span a Cartesian time from 21 June 1995 to 21 June 1996, they span a wide Cartesian space. Outside of the Cartesian, they span steps of eye and heart that leave the Cartesian behind, and are suspended in a new construct of community, network, and being.
Probably a measure of bullshit, but the 40-meter long strip of images that span the space impressed the hell out of my back, leaving me crippled and craving more of the pain-killers that the Doc prescribed. One step forward, two steps back. A photographer from the national paper came in to do a portrait for upcoming coverage of the town’s summer art festival, and during the opening, the most retro and pin-headed critic (no, I can’t honestly call him a critic—should simply say guy-who-fills-columns-with-pointless-drivel) employed by the newspaper ran through the installation. The poor old fellow knows little about art, and nothing about photography. I recall the review he wrote for an exhibition I did some years back which was of as much critical value as an equal quantity of paper pulp destined to clean a baby’s arse. Some people don’t know when to quit. The only positive point is that a bad review from him pretty much confirms that an exhibition is at least interesting.
Day follows day follows day follows day. Cartesian time folds into a state of being that is muffled by watching. Outside the window a machine, an EX100M Hitachi Rotator excavates the front entryway area of the elementary school. The operator is at one with the machine, expressing from his fingertips a detailed choreography that rips and scoops over-human quantities of earth, gravel, and construction materials, transforming the features of the space. I am as much and as little an artist as this fellow. I think less. Measures of art are in the cultural constructs that we are immersed in.
a pilgrimage made to a hill-mountain a hundred kilometers away to think for the sun to fall dormant
it never does but only hovers far above the horizon for hours and with full moon weighing the other horizon in a tense and perfect balance of gravity and Light that leaves us in wonder and burning with a quiet energy of sight and vision and being and each spinning a particular way within the self of body-walls Finnish tangos and arias and beers and drunks and dances and mosquitoes and the Light
the Light
fir trees and aspen-birch branches in full green leaf used for fans to keep bloodthirsty humming at bay from body
a tower to climb we occupy it for a time and time again with occasional tourists Sweden and Australia and Finnish lovers who I see twice, once at the top of the tower then in the Lappish teepee they crouch near the fire hands and bodies entwined loving the others presence and the night that was all the darkest in that teepee with reindeer skins on logs around the skirting and two reindeer out back moulting with pink blood-close skin on their antlers
I stare at the sun so long that it makes a hole when I look at the moon, lacing it with fire and spots while the chill north wind blows I make my muscles relax to allow pulse to travel to extremities to bring heart-warmth
then driving a Mercedes van packed with travelers who came to this place at this time to marvel at the sun-ring-rainbow sky dancing with cloud and Light and rain and a blue sky that reflects in the eyes of many here who look at it even the ones who hardly pause to let it all seep into head through the clear wet lenses the green leaves that just exploded in the change time of spring that is only a week happening like one morning and there it is with the birch trees an empty landscape only green from evergreens and then comes the green from the new things growing greening everything and the new flowers planted in the cemetery with the ravens above in the trees being harassed by the little birds afraid that they will devour their nestlings so that same cemetery around the quiet wooden church is noisy
old ladies filling watering cans and talking gently to the dead when no one is near
is it that old ladies inhabit these spaces naming the old names and the days when those names stopped being when they moved themselves to that part of us that is called memory and is that part of mind memory which drives us more to what we are than any other part of us when nothing else is left?
A collective dinner tonight seems to be a precursor to the midsummer’s party that will follow on the coming Saturday night. And tomorrow night there will be an evening of touring some local parties and such. I am afraid that not much more work will be accomplished before I leave, so I am desperate to finish at least one more video work (waking up in Finland). 0345 and the sun is busy coming up, well, just still up, nothing different. Day is day. And there is no night. Coffee swelling in my veins. But I get much more video work done. The strength of the Solstice is a humming vibration shaking from the feet up, a harmonic oscillation with a frequency of the pulse, exactly synchronized from moment-to-moment. Pulse speeds for a flight of stairs and the heart-ringing does not become asynchronous but always stays tuned to the frequency of being. No deviation and the two become one whole massive vibration that shakes the self, and all that one perceives and senses, so that gradually one becomes aware that there is only the vibration and ones awareness becomes this vibration. Buildings and trees shake in perfect rhythm to the eyes, relativity rules. Nothing deviates except the internal awareness of swinging at a vast distance from the pivot, the fulcrum, moving through a knowing-ness at skin-peeling speed, yet there is no movement. The space within which things wholly revolve has dimension imposed by relativity. No faster than we can know, no slower than we can care.
Yet more days later. I have finished two new video works (mama, where are you going and memory of three infinite half-spaces), very different works, partly as a result of exploring the possibilities of the AVID digital editing system, and partly from the limited amount of raw material that I brought with me. I am wishing I had brought the collection of dinner tapes this time, as there are plenty of machines to do the heavy editing needed to finish that CD. But, here I am. So far I have learned a tremendous amount being around the others, it is really a luxury to be with other working artists when there is a relatively relaxed atmosphere that is free of agendas … The days blend directly into the nights which blend into the days. A seamless continuation of varying Lighting effects. I like working late into the morning when there is a special quietness that soaks the air.
Today I pick up the WinNT server from the computer department. Another project to get it running! We hope to get a REAL AUDIO server up for some weeks, although I see there is much to be done just to get the NT server up and cruising as I would like. But the real state of mind is rather indeterminate. Digital oscillations are interposed with human movement and various ocular stimuli arising from solar phenomena. Yesterday a huge sun-ring imposed itself across a quarter of the sky. This evening, now onto midnight, swallows are reeling across the sky and between the buildings. Outside the window which is wide open to catch the evening breeze and help dispel the interior new-building air pollution, there is a dirt and gravel space and then an elementary school building that workmen have been almost totally gutting over the course of the last week-and-a-half. New windows, new desks, and who knows what else. The first day we were here, there was a dumpster full to overflowing with birch desks which were thankfully carted off by locals before being discarded. The movement across life is full in the summer of this place. Winter is the Other. Activity is vigorous though tempered by the luxurious languor of warmth. The birch trees are filling the air with a sensual tree-essence that one smells to one degree or another all the time, and their trunks are warm from the flow of sap. A week ago they had no leaves, and today they are full and filling vast Cartesian spaces with detailed energies.
Oh hell, what pretense to think that I could really get any sensible writing done here, when all other mediums seem to fail me as well. Concentration lags behind — a result of very poor physical condition that my body is in, and mentally I am really unfocused … Can’t really point to what is going on. Material stimulation and the stimulation of speaking to others seems to not hold my attention for long. I wonder at how others can focus and make massive and detailed material contributions to this monolithic world of Art. I am left babbling about spiritual transcendence, hypostasis, and being. Out of step with the environment that I have immersed myself in … This Art world. This world of commerce and culture and the intersection thereof. more “volume”
I notice some elm trees on the way from visiting Johanna at her atelier. The bud-leaves are exploding in a sticky fluorescent green. Spring is definitely happening, the late Light, the birches are already in full leaf. The City gets more and more vibrant. People get un-tired. I dropped by an exhibition that Eva and Visa put on in a space below their flat — works by children that they have been teaching art to privately in Visa’s studio. Eva and the kids (Ella Paloma and Kitty) happened by, a pleasant surprise. The family is in the process of moving to their summer house for the summer, so they are quite busy, but we hope to get together next week. Johanna is having an exhibition at Artek, the interior design store on the Esplanade, so I stop be there, as well as at the final exhibition of the students at the Academy of Fine Arts where I run into several people including Oliver and Tanja. Then I go back to MediaBase to continue working on a variety of things, taking advantage of the facilities. And now back at Tapio’s place.
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place: en route Akureyri - Stodvarfjördur, Iceland
At the home of Rikki and Sólrun and their two teenagers Rosa and Kári. I worked with Rikki at the Icelandic Academy of Art for some years, he is an Austrian native (actually from Bolzano which is now in the Italian Dolomite Alps) and is a print-maker. Sólrun teaches in the local school in this small fishing village of around 350 inhabitants. Rikki is still in Reykjavík finishing up teaching at the College. The drive today is long and cold. We finally get out the door around 1030 and head east to Myvatn where we happen to run into the President of Iceland and his wife who are touring the north this week. My back is not doing too well, so I give up driving and lie in the passenger seat for most of the day. We make stops at various places, tourist spots, and locations that I think might be interesting to film. The Hi8 video camera that I have with me is making something of a challenge. I have so long carried my Nikon with a 28mm lens and nothing else, that I am having trouble adjusting my seeing and pacing when using a time-based medium suddenly. One nagging feeling is the dilemma of what I will do with the material once I have gathered a number of hours of raw tape. I rarely have access to decent editing equipment, and even if I did, would I have the time to do the significant editing required to make something interesting out of it. The camera is on loan from my nephew, so I won’t have it on a continuous basis either, which limits the time for experimentation. Of course, I have used video extensively in the past, and audio also, but it remains a challenge to see creatively through this new mediation. I did happen onto an expression of an old idea that I worked with a decade ago in a photographic project with Bill, that of the “infinite half-space” of geophysics and math, where a theoretical space is divided into two half-spaces by an infinitely extensive plane. This is the beginning point of mathematical modeling of the earth and its surface and the various properties of and reactions to changes introduced by external sources. One half of the space is the earth, the other is the atmosphere or space above the surface. Anyway, this idea pops into my head as I am watch the incredibly varied earth-sky interface rolling virtually by outside the silicone-dioxide car window. I make a short video work (to be finished off with titling and all the formalist details in, Finland) called memory of three infinite half-spaces simply by filming with the camera rotated 90 degrees from the horizontal while moving and attempting to maintain the left half of the screen as sky and the right half as earth … a second short video comes from that single day — mama, where are you going? starring Loki with his expansive style. The landscape is bleak and snowy, and there is Light snow falling almost all the day with the exception of an hour spent in Egillstadir at the house of Steinnun where it was warm and sunny.
Well, as I come to the close of this project, at least as I consider it, I look back at the fleeting year of movement through ten countries and tens of homes and beds. It has been a rich and complex movement in both space and time, exhausting, stressful, joyful, exciting, seldom profitable from a monetary point, but I think, profitable for the soul. And seriously problematic for the back — which is now broken.
The intro IRC test session was interesting. Willa showed up on her lunch break, Robbin, one of the PORT curators dropped in, and Terhi, from Helsinki appeared. There were some minor technical hiccups, but generally thing worked out. Josephine had some trouble, but it ended up that she was on the wrong network, and so couldn’t find us.
I stay indoors all day. Why is it that I don’t want to go out. I should. But IceLand has made me completely abhor being cold. Now, if it was 75F or hotter, I would be out. Shirt off, hat on. Sun screen on my poor over-exposed nose. But it is chilly out, and I can’t make myself go out. Whatever. I had dreams again last night, but they are lost in the brilliance of the sun rising up over Mingus Mountain across the valley. It is especially bright because of all the snow. Flagstaff, to the north got up to 40 inches of snow and is still held in that slow powdery embrace. Now I watch the Simpsons. What am I doing this for? My back is trashed sitting in the lab, I don’t have a good chair in there, and I think that is the main problem with my back. And so it goes. Fragments from public television:
His body is strong, and he loves it
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones
Adrianne posts me this excerpt of a review she has written about Blast for January’s Intelligent Agent — it includes:
_John Hopkins_, photographer and writer, proves an active theorist/theory activist as an artist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented – creating an empty space between one participant and the other which, in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art.
I am grateful that she takes the time and energy to not only support my work, but to actively frame it in within the context of her prodigious and ongoing experience in the arts.
Okay, my mother insists that I go to her regular doctor for a checkup. I have been resisting this with visions of hundreds of dollars flying out the window for nothing, as well as getting the bad news that I have a condition demanding surgery. Then what? So. I end up going. The doctor is rather nice, and checks me out, reassuring me that it is nothing too serious, gives me some anti-inflammatory drugs (plenty of free samples), a sheet of exercises to do for the lower back, a bill for only $35.00, and sends me on my way much relieved that, indeed, I am not about to die or become cripple for life. He says about the pain: Live with it. Okay, I can handle that. And treat it with some stretching exercises, careful choices of what furniture to move, and what chairs to sit in when doing computer work. I find it funny that I can be so reassured by a simple visit to a doctor. Especially when, in the US, I don’t have so much expectations or even high regard for the general profession. Of course, I don’t condemn all doctors, as they are certainly victims in the whole health care system as much as patients. It really is a mess, the system, between the malpractice suits, the insurance companies, and the uninsured 30% of the population. Wow. When visiting with a doctor in the US, I am always bring up the fact that I have been living in Scandinavia for some years and try to get a response from the doctor regarding socialized medicine, but here I get little response. Sadly, I think doctors in the US are often pawns in a ‘market’ system that is run by insurance companies and lawyers. Anyway. I feel much better today, and even go into work this afternoon to talk with Mickey and Hope about a business plan and some technical details on the server architecture. I guess by now I am the Webmaster for LANKaster Online — and, although I readily admit I am a crummy designer, I do have a good sense of organization, and that will be beneficial for their business as they edge their way out of hardware support and into software and internet- and Web-related services. I come home and spend the evening typing on a whole series of things, letters, email correspondance, papers, this web space, the LANkaster web site, seems like life really revolves around this little machine! Can’t get away! Now to make a little money with it…
Relafen (nabumetone) is a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drug (NSAID) that exhibits anti-inflammatory properties in pharmacologic studies. As with other nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory agents, its mode of action is not known. However, the ability to inhibit prostaglandin synthesis may be involved in the anti-inflammatory effect. The parent compound is a prodrug, which undergoes hepatic biotransformation to the active component 6-methyl-2-naphthylacetic acid (6MNA), that is a potent inhibitor of prostaglandin synthesis.
The Solstice. The shortest time of dayLight. Here in Arizona, there is not so much meaning or impact as there was in Iceland, and all those Northern places. Here is another day in the wind-up to the Christmas consumer free-for-all. So it goes. But for me, the day does resonate deeply, in a tone that goes unheard here, in this Place. A tone too deep and of a harmonic that sympathetically moves not the body, but the Soul. It is in me. From that other Place. That I once was.
Lawren, my niece, arrives by car from eLAy last night, late. Traversing the Mojave.
mind wonders if my sixth grade teacher, Mr Fichter, is still alive? He’s the one who turned me onto Modigliani, Cezanne, and the other impressionist painters. way back. deeply. I have not stories to tell. It means so little to write here. In this form, mediated. I am no free-thinker. Rather. I see myself as a human who is unable (passive, rather than determined, active) to exist in a mediated space. so it goes.
Dinner with Heather Wagner. She woke up this morning sick. We’ll have breakfast Sunday morning instead.
All that goes before forget. Too much time at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it there behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Sometimes it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft. — Samuel Beckett
I go over to Alec and Dana’s place in Brooklyn in the morning to work some. It is bitter cold today, and down there on the waterfront under the Manhattan Bridge it’s really frigid. I come back to Kevin’s and just write. On these pages and others … I am hoping that I will get some server space from Remo to use, as my site on iex.net is full, and I can’t afford to get any other space… Thanksgiving Day. (Give thanks and praises, so high, give thanks and praises…)
Dinner with Adrianne Wortzel. Long day today. I stopped by early to pick up the Noun portfolio that I have kept at Stefan and Ellen’s and delivered it to Kathy for her to have on hand at this new photography space. It does seem that the long doldrum in art photography sales is lifting. I am hoping to take advantage of that development. In two months the print sales business has eclipsed sales in her custom black&white photographic printing business! I then went right over to artnetweb to meet with Remo who is encouraging me to turn in a proposal for the internet exhibition called port: navigating digital culture coming up in February at the List Gallery (and online) at MIT that he is curating. The main premise of the exhibition is art-as-communication utilizing the possibilities of the net. Following that meeting, I went over to Alec’s place in Brooklyn, across the hall from Vito Acconci’s apartment. I first met Alec a few years back — we had a mutual friend that I had gone to grad school with, Chuck, who Alec had met when both of them were living in Denmark. Once, when Alec was passing through Iceland, he stayed at our place. From that visit I learned about the concept of negative space as the tracing of edges of fore-grounded things and back-grounded things. He had a nice way of thinking/seeing in his drawings that reflected an intense focus on edges — which are singular lines of fractal complexity and no real substance, only an indication of difference.
Other performers and performative works include: John Hopkins, photographer and writer, reinvents the artist as theory activist/active theorist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented—creating an empty space between one participant and the other, which in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art. — Adrianne Wortzel
Dinner with Antoinette LaFarge. Little Poland, bean soup and bread. I picked up my ticket for Arizona and with that, spend my last money. Right after, I head up to Chelsea to see my old boss, Kathy Kennedy at PhotoWorks — the printer that I worked for in the mid-eighties. She is one of the two top custom black&white printers in the City. She has remodeled half of the lab space into a nice exhibition hall and is showing a number of photographers’ work including her own, although the space isn’t technically a gallery and she sees people interested in buying only by appointment.
I sit and read a special Forbes supplement on the impact of technology on business and society. Most of the essays graze the mark, but none really dig into the root causes of the vague-and-growing discomfort that most people are feeling about the encroachment of technology into all aspects of contemporary being. Technology is merely another predestined manifestation of material life, or is it? There’s no proof of the pre-destination, the inevitability of development, nor the neutrality of it. The logical product of the development and ascension of the human intellect, ha. I talk to Adrianne today, and begin to make final arrangements about the Dinner series which begins on Sunday evening in and out of the Sandra Gering Gallery in Soho. I am relying on wit and presence to carry me through this series of performances … And trust that simply by doing this action will add a bit to the definition of what performance is (or, perhaps subtract from that same definition…). I rather dislike the word performance anyway. It seems to be more about theater than about real life, and I would seek to wrest those collective and hierarchical actions from the sphere of the spectacle and posit them back in the personal space.
At Randy and Amy’s place. I have to stop this. The crashing at friends’ places is beginning to wear on the friendships. I want to disappear, taking no space and needing nothing. I feel irresponsible and unsuccessful. (Money is the measure of success that I all too often apply to myself — because I live within a culture that pushes and reinforces this value above all others.) To consume is to be. Not to consume is not to be.
Should I care about this? Yes and no. As I drive inward with questions, I am still faced with a feeling that somehow what I am doing is right, scary though it may be. Not that I consider it exactly honorable to ask of others some generosity or hospitality. This is not my mission, and actually I have no mission at all, except merely to survive in a world that has become more and more inscrutable to me. Senseless combinations of events are strung together to make a Public History for which I have no feeling whatsoever. Or at least no more feeling than for any other fragment of the past that I might stumble upon in my own travels.
For communication to have meaning it must have a life. It must transcend you and me and become us. If I truly communicate, I see in you a life that is not me and partake of it. And you see and partake of me. In a small way we then grow out of our old selves and become something new. To have this kind of sharing I cannot enter into a conversation clutching myself. I must enter it with loose boundaries, I must give myself to the relationship, and be willing to be what grows out of it. — Hugh Prather
Loki and I drive back to Kathy’s place around noon today. On the way we stop again at the house where I grew up and took a hike into the woods behind it to see what was happening there. Developers, those fiends who would wish to see the world paved and marketed, have begun their work in the area, and direct behind our old house is a new development of about 20 houses built in what were open fields and forest. Walking down the steep hill behind the house I was a bit shocked to see the large pond gone and only a creek running down the center of the open space that the pond used to occupy. I had spent hours and days at that pond, fishing (there were a number of large bass, countless sunfish, snakes, and frogs there), sailing model sailboats, skating, and paddling about in our canoe. The pond was formed by an earthen dam erected by farmers perhaps a hundred years previous, maybe more. Either the developers had knocked a hole in the earthen dam or flooding had washed part of it out. There were only a few weeds growing up in the silt which lead me to believe that it had not been empty for more than a year or two… I stood in the middle and stared into the sky above feeling the years wash away. Remembering the times. And watching my own little boy wander around the place, throwing rocks into the creek. I spoke to the sky. Musing. Back up the hill, I took a look at our old back yard and saw that, much to my disgust, the current residents had cut down the 20 fruit trees that my father had labored so much over. They were all highly productive after the initial few years of tending — apples, nectarines, peach, plum, apricot, crab-apple,and pear. The row of Christmas trees which we would plant each year after having them inside for the holidays were now up to 40 feet tall. The Coastal Redwood likewise towered over the house.
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place: en route McLean, Virginia - Clarksburg, Maryland - Lebanon, Pennsylvania
The drive up here from Virginia starts with a short detour past the house where I lived from 1965-76. The landscape of my childhood in winter. So it was, although much of the nearby farmland has been butchered in the wake of suburbia that is burgeoning and multiplying as Legion. The road that our family house is on has changed little. The houses are still small, the trees bigger, many of the same people live along it, as I saw on the mailboxes. But the house. Well. Other people live in it. Maybe I will stop by on the way back south and ask if I can walk through the yard to the pond in the woods behind down the hill — to show Loki. And to make some photographs. To fix in Silver the volume of time that has moved through my senses. I am feeling not old, but as one who has lived long. A certain richness has moved into my experience. The layers of time and space and experience have grown to be a fertile loam where groves of narrative being can erupt in a single evening, in a single conversation. Sparked to life by the intersection of life-energies. Old friends, new friends. So it goes. We are staying with my oldest friend, Gary, his wife Ellen, and their daughter Sarah who is the same age as Vika. We speak in memories, where each phrase has a resonance unobtainable in new friendships. That resonance of historical experience, built up over time and time again, multiplied and divided.
Staying at Scott’s place for the last days here at Florida State University. He’s doing tech management for the Art Department, having just finished his MFA up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yesterday was heavily involved in discussions with students and faculty about my performance last Thursday. Passionate discussions to be sure. Because of a small glitch in communication between Paul and I, (and, the onerous ideological relationships that accompanied the performance space itself — the Art History lecture room) the dialogue which is the third component of the performance stopped after about ten minutes. The intensive hours of discussion that ensued in the days following amply illustrated to me a number of factors influencing the dialogue. The first was the power of the ideological structure enclosing the audience and space. (This would include the unfulfilled expectations, based in preconceptions and comfortable same-ness)… Anyway, the continuing discussion has been very stimulating and has opened up new areas of consideration for me. I have very mixed feelings about the performance, but the flux of energy that has enveloped it in the four times it has happened — once in Köln, once in Helsinki, once in Tampere, and now, in Tallahassee — has carried my thinking on a productive tour of my own pathway as well as providing deep insights into others’ attitudes, dreams, and beliefs.
Absolutely no chances to update this log of certain being here. Barely a moment to consider even the possibility in mind, much less the quiet and concentration to put hands to keyboard to make this happen. I spend long hours with other people. Teaching, speaking, discussing, listening, planning, and the rest is for slaving away on practical Web things and whatever. I have finished with all the teaching I will do in Finland on this trip. Terhi and I ended two days of intensive lecturing and hands-on work with students at the Academy of Fine Arts yesterday. The course turned out very well, the students were quite enthusiastic and motivated despite the short time imposed on the teaching. It is a good opening into a place that is in great need of getting a more broad introduction to concepts relating to networking and to technology. Oliver, the Vice-Rector of the Academy, and the Head of the Time and Space Department, has done a good job bringing technology-based mediums into the teaching space, but there is the usual resistance. I find technophobia to be an interesting phenomenon. On one side, a distrust of machines is necessary, even demanded by the excesses of the situation we find ourselves (our Western Selves) in these days. But unless there is some kind of (anarchic?) engagement of technology by some people at least, we leave the driving to the Aristocracy of Technologists. They will rule in their new Hierarchical Form (Consumer/Slave vs Producer/Master) without opposition. Ahhrgh. I am not an ideologist, and dislike framing the issues in pseudo-academic lingo. For myself, I believe that the most revolutionary action I can engage in is an unmediated and genuine dialogue with another human being. Maybe too simplistic. I wash some clothes in the sink. It cleans my fingernails and exercises my hands at the same time. I listen to the radio, voices talking about the Market. There is no other World, it seems. To the voices of the New Media, the world is a phenomenon of the market. And the people are Workers and Consumers. I do not understand what the impact of this propaganda, this imposition of a monolithic worldview, is upon daily life. Does it dominate life? Is it true that we are merely pawns in the consume game played out by these cloaked NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations)?
Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of fluid memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My rough mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project.
The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?
At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
— Pierre Birot
And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.
Well. Entries got thrown off in a massive way following the complete crash of my hard drive on the evening before I was to fly from Arizona to NYC. The eighteenth of August, Loki’s birthday. Ten absolutely hectic days later I am returning to some equilibrium, although something critical has been broken in me head. The ten days have been full of all kinds of mind-twisting events including a weekend of memory mounting … my twentieth high school reunion (Gaithersburg High School, in a suburb of Washington DC), plane, bus, van, limo, taxi, and car travel, frantic action to attempt recovery of data from my crashed drive, a long hike into the National Forest near my parents, a long day of interviewing for the position of either Director or Photography Resident at the Peters Valley center, an art/craft center about 70 miles outside of NYC in the Delaware Water Gap National Recreation area, attending a show of the Prescott Cowboy Poets Festival … I hardly know where to begin. The crash surely is front-line to my steadily increasing angst with this life-style. As I put so much stock in my laptop, investing the full roles of studio and office and personal living space in it, it has become incredibly important a tool. I do regularly back up, but don’t carry an extra drive to backup to all the time. I did a partial backup around 7 July, but in that, I missed my entire email archive. That I lost back to May. Along with all the writing and image work I had done in Arizona. But there have been plenty of things that I would like to comment on. So I will simply retrospect on what I can. In the form of fragments … At the moment I am sitting in Amy and Randy’s apartment in Stamford, where I have been except for a few nights for the last ten days. Randy is on his way home from work, and the three of us will head for a movie. Friday evening beginning the last holiday weekend of the summer, and, in most peoples minds, the last weekend of the summer. Schools begin next week in most places, and, well, frankly, it is getting colder. I ended up staying at the folks place for three more days beyond Monday the nineteenth. I was scared to death to get on the plane with much of my data somewhere between chaos and oblivion. I lost at least four hundred scanned images and all my teaching notes. Somehow the whole event threw me off so badly I can hardly bear it. Losing memory. Like I will forget what was written. Again, it goes directly back to mediation and all that: memory mediated by the memory of the machine. Remembering all the 700 telephone numbers and emails and addresses of those in my address database. As though I could recall them all myself? And the thousands of words I have typed to people around the world, and thousands received. The sheer volume. Quality? Quantity? I am left at an impasse. Straddling a fence. Part of me thinking it would be better to simply bag the whole way-of-going. Forget it. Or push myself to improve my meat-space memory. Like imagining my son. I don’t carry pictures of him. Do I remember his face, his way of laughing and smiling? The sensation of hugging and kissing him and holding him. Watching him sleep in the bright summer twiLight of that land of Ice. I do not know. The effect of Machine. Of mediation. Loss of memory.
When you are young you always expect that the world is going to end. And then you get older and the world still chugs along and you are forced to re-evaluate your stance on the apocalypse as well as your own relationship to time and death. You realize that the world will indeed continue, with or without you, and the pictures you see in your head. So you try to understand the pictures instead. — Douglas Coupland
Just got back from Phoenix where I stayed overnight with Tom and Dawn after dropping Aunt Mary at the airport and visiting with Jason and Angelique for a couple hours and running some errands around town. It approached 115F yesterday, the heat making everything vibrate and shimmer. Getting in and out of the car, into and out of air-conditioned spaces has always bothered me, and this day was no exception. Yet another example of how we mediate what the world begs to impress us with — the weather. I find life in air-conditioning is hermetic, and leads to short-sightedness and isolation. Combined with all the other amenities like the new 300-channel-plus digital teevee systems, automated coffee-maker and lawn sprinkler system, and the separation from the environment is nearing completion. It seems the only time that real life impinges is in the form of a natural disaster or through the random acts of violence that are inflicted by other humans or even by some level of technological intervention like the automobile. This idea of mediation is beginning to make me more than a little crazy. I would seek to live an authentic life on this planet, at this time, for myself and those around me, yet each day I encounter more and more ways of being cut off, isolated, and separated from the milieu of existence. How is it possible to begin stripping these filters away without becoming socially isolated from those other humans around? It just dawned on me that something in what I say hearkens back quite some time to the laments of St. Augustine. His solution was to simply pull out of the race, the rat-race, the gaming, the spectacles — whatever separated him from authentic life…
Too late came I to love thee, O thou Beauty both so ancient and so fresh, yea too late came I to love thee. And behold, thou wert within me, and I out of myself, where I made search for thee. — St Augustine
Another day lost in a haze. I was having computer problems, but I seem to have solved them. Actually, it was just a stupid oversight that cost me $18.00 to set right. I forgot that my scanner needed a SCSI terminator on it, and so I left that back east with all my other junk. I had to go out and buy another one. I am consuming media here, helplessly. I am unable to avoid turning on the teevee to watch the shameless hucksterism of the Olympics and the breathless and paranoid 24-HOUR BOMBING SPECIAL BRIEFING UPDATE COVERAGE, not to mention the absolutely disgusting back-patting tunnel-vision attitude about the TWA 800 incident. I know that Dan would be sick with the sensationalism. And the advertising. The actual amount of time spent on the Olympic competition. Maybe 20% of the time. The complex way of mixing the visuals down — distorting of time and space … The heavy nationalistic slant on the coverage is shocking. Snide comments by the announcers — for example, during the opening ceremonies, the announcers began to discuss the political situation in China when that countries athletes came marching out. And so on. Actually I hardly want to discuss this, rather leave it as simply another example of The Spectacle.
In other parts of the world there are people who are born, live, and die in a perpetual crowd. To be always visible — to live in a swarm of eyes — a special expression must develop. Face coated with clay. The murmuring rises and falls While they divide up among themselves the sky, the shadows, the sand grains. — Tomas Tranströmer
Okay, a late evening following a long day of mixed activities. Another huge storm circled the area this afternoon. Driving back to JAH’s place in Chino Valley (I’m dog-sitting for a week: Tigger and Tadley), there were drifts of half-inch (1+ cm) hailstones on the sides of the road. I was glad I wasn’t around for that. And that was about two hours after the storm passed through the area. It is, in local lingo, the Monsoon season, and although these storms don’t have the temporal duration of a tropical monsoon, they definitely make up for it in momentary fury … The Lightning was striking within a few hundred meters repeatedly as I drove through an edge of the storm on the way into Prescott earlier in the day. Fascinating! And the land needs the rain. Looks like the forest fire on Granite Mountain is dying out from a combination of rain and natural firebreaks. They left for a weeks vacation in Utah and Colorado. Fishing and camping and one day for competing with two of their Australian Sheepdogs in a regional dog show. They just started training and showing the Aussies earlier this year. I was telling Joy this story in an email letter: JAH picked me up at lunch so I could get her car and start dog-sitting at her place. We went by another (Aussie) trainers house to pick up a travel kennel for one of her dogs. I picked up the kennel to take it to the car and both the women kinda moved away saying something. I didn’t pay attention to their reaction until I saw from the corner of my eye on the garage floor a modest-sized tarantula. The other trainer said something and then stepped on it. Faugh. I felt a ripple of karma, kind of a shaking of space-time equilibrium, but said nothing. Looking at the destroyed creature for a split second before getting out of the place with the kennel. I thought, there’s a person who has no sense of the value of life, what a gross thing to do so off hand … Not that I am innocent of karmic crimes, but at this stage of life, I would not step on or otherwise kill a tarantula. I mean, what for? Why kill them? Lordy. Anyway.
posted
place: en route Manhattan, New York - Phoenix, Arizona
I am more sober today than yesterday. Last night Leslee sent me an email informing me that a good friend, Dan, and his wife Stephanie, had both been on TWA Flight 800 that exploded off of Long Island a few days ago. At one point, Friday, I had begun reading the list of passengers in the New York Times, but quit, not wanting to consume the tragedy. And thus find out the news directly from a friend: email brings it home. Somehow I am happy that I find out about it in this way, direct, and not by reading the Times. Dan and I were in grad school together in Boulder where I found him to have an insightful and critical viewpoint which was tempered with a brilliant sense of humor. He understood the ways of the System, and deLighted in tweaking its nose! He was a highly intelligent artist, as was Stephanie, although I did not know her as well as I did Dan. It is like winning the lottery, but in the negative. Impossibly long odds, but it does happen to someone. Talking to Linda, a fellow grad student and friend of mine from those days, it turns out that they were on their first trip to Europe, to visit and explore the gardens of France. Dan had been working as a landscape designer for some years, and I wondered if my frequent exhortations to him that they should visit Europe someday ended up as an influence on this terrible event.
Alyssa comes in late from a week in Savannah, Georgia, where she will begin teaching at the Savannah College of Art and Design. I pick her up at Newark Airport. She looks happy to be back. Summer evening. We head to the countryside to enjoy the humid freedom of languor. While I wait for the delayed flight, I wander around this public place, people-watching. Spanish is the language most heard. When I am in most public spaces in America now, I feel more as a foreigner than ever. Not just for the language issue, but for the strangeness of Americans. (With a statement like that, I have to elaborate, but am not sure that I can…). Writing is a flippant out. Or flipping out, or copping-out. Not in. I am being careful to limit my mediated inputs these days. Finding so much is mediated in this society. I wonder how hard it would be to eliminate any level of mediated input (web, radio, newspaper, teevee, magazines, telephone, books, and the like) and simply rely on first-hand sensory input. Mulling all this makes it all the nicer when she arrives. And we get to the car, head north west to the darkness towards the hexagon house.
another night, I remember there is a copy of the Kama Sutra on the bedside table. Once again, it is read, ensemble. That the lover should leave careful and particular impressions from fingernails on the body of the loved — not scratches, but small unhurtful grooves — is subtle. In yet another context. I guess my copy is packed away in boxes moldering in storage there in Newton. damnation.
Loki is up early because he is sleeping on the bed in the kitchen and there are only Light curtains on the windows. I have something of a rare hangover (timburmann, I think, in Icelandic, for wood-head). Shortly after breakfast we head down to the swimming pool with Rebecca Rún, Loki’s island playmate who lives next door. The pool doesn’t open until an hour later because the electricity is off somewhere. Friends Hoffí and Kristín arrive on the 1330 ferry, so MB goes to meet them. I stay swimming with the kids. Late in the evening, around midnight, after a big dinner of leg-of-lamb I head to the north end of the island on a too-small borrowed mountain bike that I know will give me sore thighs tomorrow. There is a dirt road all the way to the Light house that stands on the highest point of the island about two-thirds of the way north.
The north half of the island is private property, but MB called earlier in the day and got permission for me to ride to the end.
In general, visitors are discouraged, mainly to protect the vast number of breeding birds. The island has the largest single breeding population of arctic terns in Europe. These are incredibly fascinating and beautiful birds. I’m not an ornithologist or avian freak, but I can watch the terns for hours. It is unbelievable that they fly all the way from South African and Antarctic waters or so, each spring — although, watching them, you understand immediately that they represent a rare peak of efficiency and grace-in-motion. The entire ride I am accompanied by terns and other birds who swirl up from the heather and grass to run relay with me for one reason or another, all making their own characteristic sounds. I was wishing I had brought fresh batteries for my tape deck … The sounds are varied and mostly piercing, and in the case of the tern, they can actually presage a physical attack from the birds, whose sharply tapered beaks are potent weapons. Other birds on the island are Oystercatchers, Whimbrels, Curlews, Snipes (yes there is such a thing!), Woodcocks, Ptarmigans, Godwits, and Skuas. Birds comprise the vast majority of living things in Iceland, I both ignore them and concentrate on them. Although I don’t startle any Eiders, there are plenty of them on the island as well — usually seen segregated in the coastal waters — the brown females with a passel of chicks, and the black and white males swimming in a group. I recall once, out hiking on the east side of the island, I saw one of the score or so known White-Tailed eagles in the country doing some serious aerial acrobatics as it was being attacked by a group of terns.
I was last at the north end of the island four years ago, in the very spot with Nick, Chris, Debra, Chris, Stefan, and MB, who was, at that time, almost eight months pregnant with Loki.
On that night it was rather clear, or at least we got to see the sun make its transit, grazing the surface of the ocean direct to the north of us. Tonight, there is a gray pall hanging over the ocean, actually touching it just a few kilometers off shore, so the sun is not seen, except indirectly in the constant shifting of the Light omnipresent. I stay at the end of the island for a couple hours, enjoying the solitude, knowing this will be as far as I get to isolation in the coming months. The Solstice has taken on special psychic meaning for me since I moved to Iceland, and the Summer Solstice is actually a heavy time in that it is the moment when the days begin to contract until they vanish into the blue-blackness of the Arctic winter which is a complete immersion. Total immersion in a substance that is anti-Light, a Light that pulls one deeply into the earth from the other hemisphere, the one that is facing the Light … Somehow, although the landscape here is apparently vast and constantly receding from the eye, there is another aspect to it, that of closeness. When the wind dies down, and often wind still is characteristic of the midsummer sunsets, the surrounding space contracts until it appears as a room, a geometrically bounded space converging on the eye. It is knowable in a Cartesian way, within the span of the body. This is exactly what happens where I am restlessly pacing. The edge of the cliff 200 feet down to the ocean appears as clear as the corner of a room. The grassy hummock behind me is etched with a clarity that makes it sensually two dimensional. The sky is just … there. Waterfalls, where streams fall down the cliffs that line the outer few kilometers of the fjord, can be heard clearly though they are at least 6 kilometers away. They are … there. Distance is relative or just doesn’t seem to factor in perception.
Well, I leave London, thankfully taking a taxi with Joanna to the Underground station — she was heading out for a meeting her Open University students, and I am carrying the full compliment of my belongings because I go direct from Bath to Heathrow for the flight to Iceland tomorrow morning. I transferred at Paddington Station to a train to Bath, arriving after some delays around 1330. Taxi to the Bloomfield Hotel (the organizers of the digital chaos cyber conference are covering my expenses — other wise I could not have afforded to even come out to the conference — thanks!). Rail tickets here are expensive like in the US, and I am rapidly running out of money. I am afraid that each time I use my Visa card it will be rejected or so. I drop my bags and with the sun strong enough for me to break a sweat, I walk into the center of town to find the Hub Intercafe, the headquarters of the Conference, where I meet Stella who gives me a Mac to play on while waiting for Johanna Nicholls and Heath Bunting to show up from a meeting. Still had trouble logging into my home server in Reykjavík, but I finally succeeded after remote-logging into one in Colorado, dropping into the Unix shell there and connecting from there to Reykjavík. Don’t ask my how or why it worked when a direct connect didn’t … Not too much mail had built up, but it was good to check it anyways. Heath and Johanna showed up shortly, and I met a few other of the digitalchaos crew — Stanley Donwood, Stella (the hostess at the Café when I arrived) and so on … Heath was interviewed on the radio by telephone at the Hub, and after that I had a beer with Johanna then took a leisurely stroll around Bath as there were a couple hours to kill before the evenings activities.
We have flown through the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes — But have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth as brothers. — Martin Luther King
For the dinner convocation that I called for the evening, I make a very short toast that began with a quotation from the German writer and activist Martin Buber and continuing along the lines:
I would propose that we seek to consummate and consecrate the possibilities of technologically mediated communication through the power of this genuine dialogue. Let this Dialogue begin! Bon Appetit! I wish you good speaking from the heart!
Heath did put up a small gallery of some of the participants at the festival (I’m the last to the right on the first row…), but this poor shred of cyberspace has long since vanished.
Up at 0800. I wake even earlier, but stay in bed relishing the lack of movement and the quiet. Volker comes back for breakfast, and begins to make some calls to see what is to be recovered for the evening performance/lecture. It is possible that there may be some few people there, so I will do what I have to do. Which is, let’s see. We stop by at the beautiful restored farmhouse of Rolf Hinterecker (the Director of the Ultimate Akademie) for a chat and then head back home where I simply collected my concentration for the performance.
Performance/Lecture at the Ultimate Akademie Köln: This event was a challenge for me from the moment I scheduled it when passing through Köln back in early April 1996. Normally I would rather do a formal and structured lecture at the schools I visit. I knew this would not be the way to go at the Ultimate — with its close association with the Fluxus movement — I knew that it was an opportunity to try something that would possibly be scandalous at a ‘normal’ school … I knew, for myself, it was a challenge, it had to be a challenge. The primary problem internally was to completely remove myself from any pre-tension that might arise by attempting a performance that did not emanate direct from my internal energies. Pretension is a form of energy that, for me, has a significant negative resonance. I think it is one reason I have never enjoyed theater very much with the enormous pretension within the actors who have to Act. I would like to do three or four things this evening. 1) Cut and eat an apple 2) Name the Places I have been since leaving Iceland on the 22nd of June, 1995, the Summer Solstice, and name the people whom I have been with 3) As I am a traveler, I am a carrier of information and stories from place to place, I would like to find out about you, hear your stories that I might carry them on the the next destination. To name some of the attendees: Pietro, Hans-Jürg Tauchert, “couple of names of couples for a couple of talking travelers relaxing,” Detlef Brezel, Mimi Flick, Skulli, Rolf Hinterecker, Volker Hamann, Paul Virilio, in kind …
Volker and I laugh that in the middle of the performance, Rolf, in an increasingly agitated state suddenly asks “when are we?” as I am reciting three hours of people and places in order of the year’s movement. Without breaking my stride, I say “October,” and continue on for a couple more hours as the space darkens in the twiLight.
posted
place: en route Järfälla, Sweden - Turku - Pori, Finland
Thankfully, this morning, Martin decided to drive me all the way to the Silja terminal, about 30 minutes away from Järfälla in Stockholm proper. It was raining heavily, and that would have been an added hassle to make the two train connections and a 500 meter walk to the terminal. At this moment, I am on the Silja Lines MS EUROPA, heading east across the Baltic which can barely be seen out the windows in a brilliant dense fog. I am happy that the boat has a few electric plugs available for me to use with this machine, as my battery only lasts about twenty minutes these days. (Somewhere in the background the World Cup in hockey, between the Czech Republic and Canada is playing itself into a frenzy). Strange energy running on the ship. Finns all around, of course, along with a real variety of folks. A tribe of freaks from the UK with dreads a meter long and jack boots taped together. Not a band, just a tribe heading god knows where. In the huge cocktail bar trimmed in granite, with laser Lights and all, a Finnish honky-tonk/tango band just started up, people are dancing! It’s early in the afternoon. The ship is moving through dense fog, and I have a bit of a feeling that I am in a TwiLight Zone. Downstairs is a shopping mall and, among other consumptive enticements, a MickieDees at which, to be truthful, I will probably have a Big Mac at later. The tango dancing is getting more frenzied, lemme outta here! The traveler, in this age, at least when moving by the techno means of the day, often must surrender him/herself completely to technology. Boarding a boat, a plane, a train, bus, u-bahn, subway, tram, and so on, at that moment, biological life is given over to an Other that is usually faceless and who, him/herself, navigates the space-time of movement in a way that is more or less mediated by technology. What of traveling with the old ways. Walking? I did have that walk from the Barkaby train station back to Martin and Selma’s place two nights ago, as the last train arrives after the last bus. Seven kilometers or so. Puts the reality of sore feet into the technological equation. (fog horn blows). After arriving at the port of Turku I make a quick transfer to the train to Tampere. The train ride puts me into a state of floating awareness. Perhaps this is because when on a train, either one sits so that all things are falling away or so that all things converge. Or, floating because I was on a boat for ten hours. Whatever, I suddenly was aware that I had re-entered the Arctic Realm again. Not sure where/when the dividing line was passed over, but it had been crossed. Perhaps it was the visual experience of watching the twiLight come to the land. I write:
Darkness is blooming from deep under the earth. There is not yet much of it to be seen, but it is there. Driven deep by the reversal of energies that comes each year. It starts at the base of the biggest fir trees, waiting for the right moment when no one, no thing is watching. Creeping upward at the instant one turns away from meditating on the possibility that it may get dark — at some distant future moment which might be an eternity or no time at all. There are times when any thought of darkness becomes impossible. Absolutely beyond the sensual capacity of a human be-ing (and only other things are left to know what will eventually happen, not humans). But, now, darkness is entering the houses, slipping up the trunks of the trees, and spreading through the loam of needles that receives in silence below the green canopy darkening above.
Changing trains:
Tampere
Darkness has consumed the railroad tracks, but the sky has not lost its Light. The Darkness will eventually consume, devour all things touching the earth — phone poles, even the high-strung wires will be turned to total blackness. But the sky will not succumb. Here in this Place. (I feel that I am in a place, a place new to me. A foreign place. A strange place. But a comfortable place.) I am a traveler. I travel. The artificial Lights outside the train window are being sucked into the Darkness. Man produces Light, or, perhaps, only concentrates it in one place or another. But the Darkness consumes it. (Still the sky is Light).
Vammala
My eyes are so tired that I cannot see what I write when the train is moving. My eyes start to jitter and shake. But now we slow to the station at Karkku. In this place, Darkness has almost won. The trunk Light of a car Lights hands and torsos loading luggage, but then all Light is consumed. The sky is now at risk. At 10:45 in the evening, five degrees south of the Arctic Circle.
Harjavalta
Perhaps the conductor of the train and I are the only ones in existence now, except the others who wait. The conductors wife, she waits. Perhaps watching teevee. Programs played by people who no longer exist or maybe never existed. She watches and waits. His children are already asleep, they have entered the Darkness of Night.
Pori, finally, Kaisu there at the station. Kauniita unia (Sweet dreams…)!
Another long, interesting day. (Starts off: girl dressed in black on the train into town with a rhesus monkey on her back reading Kalil Gibran’s The Prophet). I went directly over to meet Mats at ArtNode in the afternoon. I never got a good connection working, though Mats was generous enough to let me hack for a few hours. It seems that their access provider doesn’t have a good server, nor do they give good technical support — I was suspicious that it was a problem with the PPP configuration and the modem init string. At any rate, I was able to download what email I had waiting and upload the string of messages I had been nursing along the past ten days. However, Fetch wasn’t working, so I couldn’t upload these very pages which was very irritating as I need to update and renew these to make them even marginally interesting … So goes the InfoSuperCrawlingWay… Email brings this from Gunnar Viglunds, a former student of mine in Iceland:
Information is not knowledge, Knowledge is not wisdom, Wisdom is not truth, Truth is not beauty, Beauty is not love, Love is not music. Music is THE BEST
this from Mr. Halfler Trio hissef, Andrew “don’t-find-me-and-I-won’t-look-for-you” McKenzie:
… he who is in you is greater than than he who is in the world … [1 John 4:4]
and this from the painter, Carol Sutton, in Toronto:
No foe, no dangerous pass, we heed,
Brook no delay, but onward speed
With loosened rein;
And, when the fatal snare is near,
We strive to check our mad career,
But strive in vain.
Could we new charms to age impart,
And fashion with a cunning art
The human face,
As we can clothe the soul with light,
And make the glorious spirit bright
With heavenly grace,
How busily each passing hour
Should we exert that magic power,
What ardor show,
To deck the sensual slave of sin,
Yet leave the freeborn soul within,
In weeds of woe!
— excerpt from “Coplas De Manrique (From The Spanish),” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
I then went directly over the the Academy and found the performance space without much difficulty. Bettina will be sending me the name of the artist — the title of the performance was “Body as Space.” Mats Hjelm was there, and it turns out that he is working in the Video Department there at the Academy. Also in attendance was Monika Larsen-Denis, who studied up in Iceland at the Academy a couple years ago. Bettina and a friend of hers and I hung out after the performance talking with different people, and then headed to a noisy/hip/cool bar in town. I just made the last train from Stockholm to Barkaby that evening, but that arrived after the last bus ran, which meant I was destined for sore feet after the seven kilometer walk back to Selma and Martin’s place. Ouch!
Well, let’s see. Long day today. Started out at the Breaking Eyes show at the new space Fargfabriken. Tapio Mäkela of MUU Media and Jeremy Welsh were curators of the show which included works by Andy Best & Merja Pustinen, Mats Hjelm, Simo Alitalo, Marita Liulia, and Palle Torsson among the eleven works by fourteen artists. They had a PC connected to the internet, so I was, finally, able to at least check my mail, and fortunately there was nothing of great importance… I also took a detour to Galleri Index which had a small show of photographic works by Larry Clark, Collier Schorr, and Søren Martinsen. Clark’s work was from the Teenage Lust in Tulsa (is that the right title?) era, while the two other photographers were showing recent works. On the way back through the Old Town, I took a detour down along the docks where there were a number of warships docked. One, the HMS Gävle, was open for the public viewing, so I made the circuit of the deck, looking at the weaponry of the King, and wondering why these objects of war still draw me to their clean functional forms. Is it a mute feeling of satisfaction that the horrors of war have not sullied the tidiness of technology?
Objects change Objects have limits Objects have meaning Objects exist in Time Objects carry content Objects exist in Space Objects have form Objects are found Objects are (not) recognized Objects are watched Objects are worshiped Objects are held Objects are described Objects are used Objects are manipulated Objects are bought Objects are sold Objects are coveted Objects are represented Objects are synthesized Objects are consumed Objects are destroyed Objects are transformed Objects are remembered and forgotten (Human Beings are Objects)
I then walked up to Galerie Roger Björkholmen, where there is an exhibition of work by Olof Glemme (the other half of the photo department faculty at Konstfack), I happened to run in to Mats Bróden, one of the founders of ArtNode (finally!). We made arrangements to meet tomorrow in the afternoon at their office. I also gave Bettina Pehrsson at Gallerie Nordenhake a call to see if there was anything else I should check out in Stockholm before I was to leave on Sunday. She suggested that we meet at the Royal Academy tomorrow evening for a performance by the students of German performance artist, Ulli (I have to update his name, sorry), who was in Stockholm at the Academy leading a ten-day performance class. Okay. and Annika Eriksson at Galleri Andréhn-Schiptjenko has a video installation of a performance by the Telecom Brass Orchestra.
posted
place: en route Rösrath - Köln, Germany - Vienna, Austria
I arrived from Köln to Vienna, following the long train ride through the German heartlands. Passing by Nuremberg, I thought of hopping a train to nearby Bamberg, the home of the work The Bamberg Apocalypse an altar-piece I have wanted to see for some time, but, no time for that now. It was snowing heavily from the Austrian border on to Vienna. I made it to Mathias and Sylvia’s place with minimum problems and was happy to stop moving after the ten hours on the train. It will be interesting here, I can see that. Vienna is a special place that is/has been balanced on many borders and frontiers. I won’t have much time to work on the digital audio piece, especially between visiting people and getting over to Hungary to visit ArtPool and Kesckemet, but will at least get a start on it, and hopefully continue the work later in Helsinki. I look forward to the next days — and discussions on audio art, radio, and networking.
The gray smoke drifted the gray that stops shift cut tangle they breathe medium the word cut shift patterns words cut the insect tangle cut shift that coats word cut breath silence shift abdominal cut tangle stop word holes. — William Burroughs
I begin to understand what must be done. Pure incantation, pure consciousness, pure un-self-consciousness, pure impulse, pure way of going. In the interstitial moments between things, thoughts, and seeing, another way of being must be cultivated. Awareness full into each second. There is no time for replaying, no second chances. this is IT!
It’s quite cold, and at times there is a bit of snow falling, we make a long walk through the marketplace and flea-market, on to the First District, a stop in the café in the basement of the Weiner Secessionist Museum, and the long walk back to the flat on Sebastianplatz. We spent an hour online, I showed them my web site, although the connection wasn’t particularly fast, and they ended up casting an I Ching with the question poised What will happen to us in Japan? They are leaving in August for a four-month sabbatical at a house in rural Japan with a view on Mt. Fujiyama. Tough life! Progress was the return, but the I Ching cautioned about a return crossing on the Great Water (good thing they fly via Siberia and not the Pacific Ocean!). This evening we caught the film Chungking Express with Fatih and Roberta, friends of Mathias and Sylvia who will be sharing their new studio space. Visually the film had interesting camera work and post-production technical manipulation. The story was the familiar one of young loves and losses and lives. After the film we had a drink at the bar Trapant, a ultra-cool hangout featuring 60’s sci-fi video, funky music, and a stripped-down urban nihilistic 50’s architecture. Hmmmm. Taxi home, the black driver groovin’ on techno-reggae. After all the walking earlier in the day, I didn’t complain when Sylvia decided to cab it. Now it is two ayem, and I crash, leave these click-clacking keys for the morrow.
I had wanted to add some kind of documentary section to my Web Space detailing my current three-month travel in the US, but access to the Internet has been spotty, and right now I have just gotten dial-up access through Internet Express, a small service that has around 5000 clients and serves Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.
I made a page that lists some current networking projects (no longer extant).
Dinner conversations, digital fragments from an ongoing audio project of dinner recordings will be featured here as soon as I have the chance to get some converted from analog cassette tapes to digital files…
the neoscenes web space gathers its first hits — don’t remember exactly when I first uploaded some pages — and no archive of that time either — pity, didn’t have enough memory then! ;-0 ooooooooo
