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

on the road

At the airport, seems I missed Mari, but the security line got too long and the time to boarding got short. goodbyes stack up: spent language, brief embraces, and what is felt? leave-taking, wet tarmac. quiet hollow winds scoop up surface moisture and make prolapsed thunderheads that range to the east. offshore is clear. aching jaw. writing of future is fiction, drawing on the past only sustains the image of actuality. writing the present kills precisely what needs to be written about. no substance. I don’t recall the instance: the first time viewing a perspectival convergence to see what coming, what is growing larger. at least understand that inside the motive drift is a tidal current pulling on all bodies. keeps them orbiting. and crashing together at various speeds. escaping those instances leads to interstellar space. cold, dark, entropic feeding on any warmth and life. (recall or even behold The Steppenwulf).

airport. Friday afternoon, flight to Brussels will be full of EU VIPs returning from the hinterlands. at least the roving middle-class managers: small vips.

while the news from the US becomes more and more grim. the Steve Kurtz case would be laughable except that it is only the beginning, and it is nothing to the FBI and CIA. it appears there has been a deep culture shift in the mentality of Amurikans. bunker-mode hardly explains it. it smells like fear of living. and the need to brand every small gesture as ‘with us or against us’.

another airport. looking at things in that critical view. looking at the Other passengers with kindness and empathy. why are we all here?

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

34-year cicadas

half-way around the world from the second return. 34 years ago. I was 11. deep in the Maryland countryside. the only thing that foreshadowed the intense development that has taken place in the last 34 years was the publishing of the Montgomery County Master Plan no doubt bought by The Developers like the Kettler Brothers who made huge profits constructing the “new town” of Montgomery Village, complete with zoning and covenant laws so tight that every one was happy.

Today, about two-thirds completed, Montgomery Village is a family-oriented, totally planned, residential environment, close to the burgeoning technical research office industrial “1-270 Corridor.

anyway, the memory of those insects in the woods, the wild woods where I played for days and days through summer sultriness. going far afield, looking at a map, well, the mysterious places were not so far from home, but going down the hill, past the pond, on the earthen dam, up the far side of the valley, past the bank full of terrarium-populating mosses, up to where the first field opened up. this field was most often fallow, while the next was almost for corn. corn that grew eight, nine feet tall by July or so. with leaves that would cruelly paper cut if brushed wrong. leaves that hid us from the dogs when we played hide-and-seek with them. making them sit at the towering green edge, stay Lady, Rusty, stay! walking quickly through the rows, getting as far away as possible, then whistling for them, and crouching silently listening while they ran barking through, high-speed, until they caught our scent and bounded up with barks and slathering tongues. don’t remember how the dogs dealt with the cicadas. I remember the noise and the malevolent-seeming red eyes. at 11 years old.

posted
  • place: Tallinn, Estonia

back & forth

En route to Tallinn.

Last time here was with Stefan in 2000, the fall, meeting Ivika. I guess I was teaching at the Academy in the fall of that year as well.

Super sea cat, Italian boat, like a huge speed boat. Stupid interview in bad English on Finnish raydeeoh. No translation. The Cranes. The deejay is pointless.

This way of blogging is pretty lame.

Like writing in the notebook.

The hydraulic properties of water are very much felt with the cleaving of the water by the ship, it hits the waves, and there are sharp shocks. Sky-sea interface, back to the infinite half space concept. Sailing between two infinite half spaces. On one, through another. Heavy traffic here in the Baltic. Cats, freighters, ferries, tankers, roro’s, containers.

Ivika meets me in the terminal with blond hair. Looking very different than the last time when Stefan and I popped over from Helsinki for a day visit back in 2000. It’s brisk out. We walk from the harbor to Mare’s flat in the Old Town, in a 13th century building. 51 Pikk Street. Beautiful space with a sauna even. The city has rapidly changed from the dour shabby outlook of Soviet times to the slick consumer surface of globalism. And is still transforming. Watched by the glazed and red eyes of the drunken Finnish tourists. And somewhere, by invisible rich business-men between their buying and developing spells.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

locative?

smartmoblogsociallocativefictiongpsteredmedia creatures feeding one on the other, in a frenzy of “what’s next that’s cool” and built for speed. (which ultimately will move ‘it’ on to the next “Next Big Thing.”) seems like another wave of meme-hype reverberating around the extraordinarily limited space of global telecom networks (in collaboration with military satellites). is the price to be paid so removed and hard to comprehend? seems so. I have run across exactly zero critical words about this phenom. instead a flood of vacuous phrases and spin terms that are kept afloat in a social sea by the flatulent buoyancy of affluence, global capital, and ex-military industry. STILL. “radical decentralization” for autonomous consumption of text, image, audio and video — the re-presented and ultimately consumable world. autonomy for re-presentation and re-production of reality — one that fills the belly with gas and the head with language peddled by those same tired techno-utopian spin-doctors. technology always looks its ubiquitous best in the eyes of the über-class. as I click through the verbiage at locative.net (no longer extant) it feels like RedHerring from 1999 or so — so much interlocking terminology leading in a head-rich circle of hype-logic. headmap drops phrases like “everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached,” “every place has emotional attachments you can open and save,” and “life flows into inanimate objects.” and behind these words (more and more of them) there is no awareness of or anticipation that there was/is an essence that is a substrate for knowledge and abstracted/systematized human apprehension. that something comes before knowing. and the vitality-draining construction of a Babylonish Tower is an ongoing exercise that society never quite purged from its mind. the path that re-creation bumbles along is not the same one as creation. not even in the same forest.

When people consider the dangers of the chaos of a free intensely networked spatially augmented world, they should also consider that like all technological advances it offers tools to both sides of any argument. ‘ends appropriate means’ may seem ominous but the ends can just as well be social advancement. Even in a critical situation, disaster response and recovery in a world of spontaneous peer to peer mesh networks, running evolved social software, seems like a sane option for coordination of local efforts to recover and help from outside. The homeland security initiative raised the point that a citizen owned spatially aware communications network could be invaluable in a crisis. — headmap.org [ed: dead link] ideolog

what kind of crisis? when shopping is compromised? what can be meant by the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘homeland security’ being used in the same context? and, invaluable to whom? a threat to the status quo? or is there a radical suggestion that the masters tools be used to displace the master? funny, though, the effect of wielding a tool is perhaps the same, regardless of the wielder. that is, on the wielder, not on the hapless victim!

and what if, just what if these technological deployments are subsequently used for command-and-control, will everyone be surprised and taken aback? gee, we never imagined…

and the other core issue — whether you believe that all things are connected by a relatively un-knowable (or un-circumscribable) substratum or whether you consider that phenomenal existence is populated by discrete and completely independent objects, actions, and beings. that driving an SUV in Chicago rush hour has absolutely no connection to the presence of an M1 Abrams tank parked on a bridge outside of Falluja. that typing these words on this keyboard into this device has no connection with degradation of ground water in the Kwale region of Kenya from titanium mining.

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

making soup

another shot at making lentil soup. free-style as usual. garlic, onions, carrots, curry, red Spanish peppers, stock, bit of oil, and the lentils. probably missing something. but it will get me through a week or so of non-bourgeois eating. while shuffle-playing the entire audio contents of the hard drive. samples from the randomsystem gig, from downloads, from quicktime files, and then some. mix. what is it about the remix, smaller and smaller samples. as time progresses. sampling. it is the gradual filling in of the social Wall around idiosyncratic being, at the same time the wall is being eroded by the simple action of entropy.

burning a candle in the sun, just to get rid of it. to be rid of, to consume, to use up, to finish. instead, to synthesize, to accumulate, to acquire, to gather together, sort, label, order. input-process-output. may as well let the days drain down to nothing. dry of time, dusty. sneeze in the sun again, twice always.

boat-spotting. is it the boats, of the phenomena of the boats moving through the water, the huge size disrupting the incompressible fluid, pushing it up, away, but never compressing it. potholes form this way. starting with a small crack, it fills with water, a tire rolls over the crack at high speed, something like a hammer coming down. the water has no place to go, but remains incompressible. it has to go somewhere when pressed down from the top, so there is enormous pressure on the side and bottom of the crack. it slowly expands, or rapidly, depending on the strength of the paving material, the rolling pressure of the tire impact, and the persistence of water. ever done a belly flop or slapped water flat with your hand, hard? like a brick wall. that’s what happens to bridge-jumpers. ouch.

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

moving from anyware to randomsystem

anyware went down last night, IRC and all, but it was not a very satisfactory event from my impaired vantage despite the high level of network activity. I should not have joined in without a better understanding of the arrangements: I didn’t have access to enough of the program information until very late. and when I started delving around, I couldn’t figure out how I could jump in. still learning how to be a participant: another one of those things where I will not appear in the program credits, the paper propaganda, or banner headlines: despite ‘being there’. perfect deployment of tactical media in networks: avoid PR whenever possible. made it as far as to edit the wiki pages, though it ended up that my time-frame, being the most easterly of participants, except for someone in Tokyo, and having an early flight to Oslo and Kim’s randomsystem workshop in the morning, I couldn’t reasonably be online streaming when NYC prime-time hit. bummer. the shareNY crew was having fun, though, would have been nice to be there. a solo node in the network is often compromised unless network connections are strong.

was thinking this morning on the way into town on the early ferry that I function best when there is a clear understanding of the particular social framework within which a particular event will be operating. not that there is a need to actually operate inside that framework or even respect it, it just gives a more comfortable starting point. a bit like what happens when one has not been yet introduced to a stranger, and the specific opportunity for a self-made introduction passes, there are those awkward moments of disconnected collective dynamic. an unbalanced flywheel, hlaup, hlaup, hlaup. this principle inserts itself into many diverse situations. object making: knowing the film and developer (paper developer, paper, and enlarger); knowing the duration for a time-based medium; knowing the network architecture, connection speeds, firewall configurations, and available bandwidth. I tend to set those most base parameters, then leap into the project, feeling free to proceed intuitively and creatively.

these thoughts deserve more exploration, but I now have to read the article Open Content and Value Creation that was suggested in preparation for Kim’s workshop. seems like he is not ‘just a musician,’ but is into some good hard-core social criticism AND mapping out alternative ways of going.

Bjarne meets me at the hotel and we go to the new Atelier Nord offices to meet Atle. good to catch up with him. been a long time since being in Norway, and now he’s the Atelier Nord director.

evening performances at Blå alog and Next Life, around the corner from NOTAM, finally find Alexander, the festival-meister.

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

earth-sky convergences

canyon face in there. juniper there, grass, cedar, sage, rock, rock face. having a gravity. yesterday taking another side slot-canyon, up and up to gain the bench-top over-looking the campground. find two un-matched halves, elk antlers, 7-points each, so, 14-point animals. one almost as tall as Loki. after seeing the bighorn sheep kill earlier in the day, lower jaw crushed, nose chewed away. the mountain lions have things pretty good, except for the constant interference of humans into their wide-patterned space. Loki playing in the dirt. part of the time, this seems problematic, the play seems to be generated from a vacant boredom that I can’t fill, nor would really choose to, other times, it seems to be holy. god-inspired, god-directed, god-sanctioned play that is of evolution-leaping intensity compared to the Game-Boy. what a stupid vapid name for an object devoid of any redeeming spiritual value. a generation of gamers swallowing simulations, and the entertained. faugh, what will come of that? everything is boring. speed is fun. simulation is way better than the real thing. not sure that this auto-adapter is running right. worked on the plane, but now, not able to concentrate anyway, on anything, too stressed about being a dull parent. maybe starting to count days until this phase is over. but next week back to school. teaching again. reading Lemke’s draft of a concept of “traversals” — recalling a flash of text that dropped into one of the Solstice videos that I made in Iceland. traverse no zenith. so it goes. battery runs low. no satellite uplink anyway, so bloggish reflections are useless. darkness falls. I will sleep on the ground tonight, and hope for the best. something nervous, but not for any good reason. with towering face of sandstone leaping to converge with rotating Milky Way.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

event horizons

peristalsis. purge that machine could never achieve. only Light is left. full moon, pull neck back and gaze up. perihelion. azimuth. traverse no azimuth. an old phrase that crept into mind during the winter nights of Iceland. only words here, no blog. no trend-spotting, no riding choking waves of socialized enigma. only transience.

the governor of Colorado says that 300 million in state debt will come from higher education. (because the higher-education sector opposes his policies.) so, I begin to pack bags and chart routes to familiar and unfamiliar ports starting in July. Leubeck will be one stop. there will be many, as it was before. nomadism becomes a partner with networking. and the antithesis of successful integration into the system that I was programmed to perform in. outsider art.

letting notes get more and more cryptic and indeterminate. as a result of the floods of noise that arise when static social embeddedness increases. walk with the flux. feed on the flow, drown in the flood, speed up to “c,” and watch it all reduce to null. flatten and spread into a now of forever. and a place of only here. singularity. trip on event horizon, bruise the shin even as the Lights go out.

dream-forge. and the realization that only great loss, those shivering moments caught replaying between dream and dream, will transform, or, no, they will not. they will only amplify the emptiness. there is little left to do.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

eclipse

Partial solar eclipse near sunset. Under the trees at maximum, the ground is scattered with crescent suns. Recalling the family history of eclipses. Used to note on my resume—that I have experienced 12 minutes of totality during the first 25 years of my life. That’s 12 minutes of time, accumulated during 5 total solar eclipses where the sun is completely covered by the moon. in order to experience this, one must be in a location that happens to be on the center line of the eclipse path. this is a swath of land about 40 miles wide and several thousand miles long along which the deepest shadow of the moon is cast during the eclipse. the shadow traverses this path at very high speed, so that any one point on the line receives a maximum of four to five minutes of total shadow. totality is a natural phenomena not to be missed, if one has the opportunity to travel to a point on the center line. my father happened to be an amateur astronomy buff who took me to 5 eclipses. his interest seemed to be mostly technical, it was driven by the desire to construct equipment to record the event in a variety of formal ways, followed by a focus on the actual recording of the event, and lastly by the intensity of the natural phenomena. the eclipses I experienced were in the company of groups of other amateur astronomers for whom the event was again, primarily a scientific phenomena. there was little if any discussion as to other aspects. although, it is very true that during the time immediately preceding second contact — when the moon’s leading umbral (shadow) edge actually overtakes ones position — and third contact, when the trailing umbral edge passes by, there is a palpable sense of hysteria in the air. darkness at mid-day, a black flaming hole in the middle of the sky, dogs howl, birds stop singing, and people are afraid. reductive science eases the throat-hold of rationality on the situation. leaving the throat to growl, howl, and squeal in guttural reaction to an event that presents the world as it should not be: paranormal.

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

essential motion

One more month in Europe. Juggling airlines reservations.

He felt as though he were leaving himself behind, and by giving himself up to the movement of the streets, by reducing himself to a seeing eye, he was able to escape the obligation to think. … The world was outside of him, around him, before him, and the speed with which it kept changing made it impossible for him to dwell on any one thing for very long. Motion was of the essence. — Paul Auster



Here, another different workshop. Immersion with two students. Allowing things to float, travel, reaching points of departure and arrival simultaneously. Hours of exchange. And not on the road. Too short a trip. On to Oslo. And on and on and on. Concert for New York City. The spectacles of stardom. And the spin makes the world stop.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

lapping

talking to myself, fighting for space in the swimming pool. the last month, between jumps away to other locations, been pushing the physical envelope. up to 3000 meters a day in the pool. 2500 seemed very nice, 100 lengths, 50 minutes, roughly a meter per second. then, why not go for an even hour of exertion. somehow this seems to have put me in an entirely new mind-state. can’t quite tell, but seems to have made more aggressive? hmmmm. aside from the constant psy-ops of dealing with the scissor-kicking grammas and kamikaze grampas in the fast lane. there actually IS no fast lane. the pool, when not hosting the ubiquitous swim-teams, is roped with 2-lane-wide segments, where supposedly one should be doing slow counter-clockwise circles, down on the right, back on the left. there is no idea of segregating each of the three double-lanes for different speeds of swimmers, so I just choose the one with the fewest swimmers, and start off by going up and back in the center of the double-lane. this is only problematic if there are already swimmers of widely varying speeds, causing the need for two people passing at the same time. that and people who just aren’t aware of anybody else in the pool. if there are only three or four other people slowly doing breast-stroke laps, I force the situation by taking up half of the right lane, and swim up and back. my speed is anywhere from 2x to 5x the speed of the others with the rare exception of a real swimmer, in which case I can match anybody but the fastest young men swim-teamers. either way, I have to stay very alert for new swimmers coming into the lane who assume that everybody is going slowly, counter-clockwise, and the kids cannon-balling off the sprint-blocks. usually a few dramatic kick-turns lets folks know that I just want to have a quiet workout. a few times there have been aggressive men who join the lane and play chicken, sometimes I have actually swam under them head-on. mentally I rationalize the whole stance that the management COULD allocate lanes by speed. but I know this is an impossible concept for the leveled and overly-socialized culture to even consider the segmentation by physical ability. Nordic plain-ness. so, I just act like a foreigner. why not, I am one.

wandering between school and the flat that is home. like so many of the other flats I have stayed in during the last years. cable teevee. which is a magnet. would much rather be listening to public raydeeoh, but I never did make a habit of carrying my Sony shortwave after starting out on this long road 6.5 years ago. rather find my network connection and tune into KCRW or something decent in the way of music. like the special ARS01 version of Ambient City radio — a comprehensive history of ambient music featuring my old favs like The Hafler Trio and Kraftwerk. no DJ, just CD after CD. for a month or so. that’s cool.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

birthday

birthday comes and goes, a couple calls and emails. that I am here in a small flat in Joensuu defines my relationship with birthdays. they remain quiet events. my self does not connect with the idea of aging. just another phase of coming and going. and except for the impression of increasing speed, time is unchanged.

falling asleep dangerously in the mid-late afternoon. miss swimming. can’t open eyes.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

7-11

already settled. sort of. in a student dormitory, probably old enough to be the father of most of my neighbors. weird to be here. consolations come in the form of a high-speed connection in the small 30-square-meter (322 square feet) flat. shoe box, and expensive. one workshop done.

this arrives via the [7-11] list:

There are moments when all our mental and emotional powers are acutely heightened and seem suddenly to blaze with the bright flame of consciousness. At such times, as if overwhelmed by presentiment, a foretaste of the future, something prophetic is envisioned by the astonished soul, and one’s whole being longs to live, cries out to live, and the heart, inflamed with a blind, fervent hope, invokes the future, despite its mystery and incertitude, its storms and tempests, if only it be life. It was just such a moment for me. — Fyodor Dostoevsky

posted
  • place: Brussels, Belgium

tech-no-madic meditations

On the road again / Going places I’ve never been / Seein’ things I may never see again / I can’t wait to get on the road again… — Willie Nelson

This unfinished sketch of text, expelled in November 2000, is a small surfacing of themes, presences, and fragments from a realm of hyper-presence and the author’s self-proclaimed tech-no-madic wanderings in the northern hemisphere at the end of one millennium and the beginning of another. Performance art enters the field of words as an action to be redefined as following:

Beginning with art
Art is an accumulation of ways of going and ways of doing. Art is the configuring of energy flows in a lot more than ten thousand ways in order that they become part of a transmitting dance, a dialectic movement of energy between beings. Those configurations are mediations positioned between two beings: they are carriers of energy from one to an Other and back again. The movement of these mediated or packaged energies is the essence of creativity. Creativity is not a peak experience, it is continuous and powerfully cyclic. Blocking energies is anti-creative and ultimately a blocked state may not be maintained when confronting the natural movement and flow of energy. Blocks appear to be placed by a manifestation of consciousness which disregards (or has learned to disregard) ambient and raw chaotic energy movements.

Leaving Newton behind
There is no reason for us to slog through a life that is subjected to materialistic 17th century attitudes and mechanistic points-of-view. Mechanistic (Newtonian) physics is an observational model, complete and self-contained under very limited conditions. Its applied pinnacle is the Age of Industry. That age represents the peak of exploitative systemization and ideation of rational thought. more “tech-no-madic meditations”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Lev’s edifice

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

notes on creativity

most of the texts that I have been absorbing in the last weeks deal with creativity as a discontinuous (non-cyclic) and anomalous event rising above the normal “level” of daily life. this view is an obvious artifact of materialist thinking that treats life as a linear (singular) trajectory and that the expressions of that living can be wholly reduced linguistically to various statements and formulations. accepting that this view IS true within its own limited framework (the history of rational thinking), a critique would have to deconstruct the whole facade of Western philosophy in order to make a substantive attack on the position. this writer is neither qualified nor interested in making such a frontal attack which would simply be tossed aside in the dumpster of academic discourse. instead, understanding that to even name a philosophy or a philosopher that stands supporting that edifice would only give power to a system that I believe is fundamentally flawed, I have chosen to proceed intuitively, and perhaps poetically, making enormous and possibly scandalous generalizations, leaving the normative conventions of the English language behind, and simply dive into thoughts that are reflecting through waters muddied by 42 years of thrashing around in a world that seems more intense and striking everyday. by this methodology, combined with a desire that these texts be only the opening for a dialogue with the Other who might come on it, here in the sea of hyperspace, I will begin. more “notes on creativity”

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

spinal slug

yesterday slips into today. in artificial suspension, missing my job, my mission, to network. floating between things. so. and the days get longer. and Berlin looms. keeping wits and senses completely unpretentious. aware that ALL contacts need to be sustained with good information flow. the extreme movement requires high-volume information flow. (like fast-moving animals have highly developed nervous systems for receiving and processing sensory data). speed is related to nervous system. the faster the nervous system, the greater the organism’s potential for terminal velocities! and the hard-wiring of the back can’t take the speed anymore.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

doctoral registration

out to the University to register as a Doctoral student. the process took all of 15 minutes, and cost nothing. once accepted to a program (in most of Europe) the actual schooling is free. there is only the optional USD 80 annual fee to join the student union TOKYO which provides health and dental insurance and a variety of other discounts. unfortunately, as a doctoral student, I can’t take advantage of the 50% reduction in travel around Finland :-( student again — after a decade of being a teacher. with not too much to show. need the time to reflect. though I seriously doubt there will be such kinds of time, with the life-acceleration that seems constant (not constant velocity, but acceleration). soon to reach the hyperLight speeds and make a transformation. is this possible?

posted
  • place: en route Prague, Czech Republic - Helsinki, Finland

Bauhaus

back in Helsinki already. offline for almost seven full days, barring a short peek at email on the 11th from the center for Contemporary Art there in Prague, sandwiched in between a hectic schedule of meetings and discussions with the cafe9.net crew there. so much going down that it is TOTALLY impossible to make flowing sense or documentation of anything! stumbling back to Helsinki, on the screaming wind of jet streams, to the top-floor rabbit hutch I am soon to bail out from. head out back on the road again. Dresden, Leipzig, Dessau, Bauhaus. Kurt Weill and Walter Gropius, Kandinsky and Brecht. and wet historical sex.

This is the life of man on earth but of darkness we come at birth
Into a lamplit room, and then
Go forward into dark again ….
Now a man don’t mind if the stars grow dim and the clouds blow over and darken him As long as the Lord God’s watching over them, keeping track how it all goes on. But I’ve been walking through the night and the day
Till my eyes get weary and my hair turns grey.
And sometimes it seems maybe God’s gone away
Forgetting the promise that we heard him say.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
And we’re lost out here in the stars,
Big stars, little stars, blowing through the night.
— Maxwell Anderson

massive flows of people in the brisk air, crossing stone-line spaces in complete human order. while I sit in a silent room, drifting through remote lives, remote life. so many points of presence in the matrix, the embedded volume of life, that calculation has to be estimated, by orders-of-magnitude, unspecific, prone to inaccuracy, messy guess-timation, and catastrophic over-runs and under-flows. slipsticks drove WWII efforts of calculation. slide rules. painted, demarcated bamboo slivers. then came the electronic calculator that I desperately needed after one semester at CSM, exams were constructed with a calculator speed in mind, so, the slipstick had to go, had to spend five hundred on a TeeEye-71 magnetic-card-programmable machine with advanced scientific equation features. playing land-the-lunar-module on it, same as on the main-frame over in the Green Building.

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
  • 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

dreaming

last night a dream which apparently wakes me in the moments of night when all things are still. somehow I suffer the injury (surgery) where, well, as though I was lying down, and a infinitely thin guillotine traveling at hypersonic speeds about one inch off the floor (and parallel to it) slices through me, shaving my back off to the depth of an inch. I don’t actually recall how this removal happened, but only the sensation of standing, walking, and being very conscious that I would have to take care of bending over, or of lifting things, else my internal organs come gushing out. hmmm. get up, go to school early, and, with a small group, push through a dynamic conversation that seems able to carry its own life. afternoon is spent copy-editing Antje’s thesis abstract with her. ragged clouds, some with a menacing though short-lived blackness, rake across the city from west-south-west, the air is clear. a bit like one of those days in Iceland in June or July.

posted
  • place: Eindhoven, Netherlands

God is stationary

Flintstones on the box. there are mirrors everywhere, open windows on the particular and legion manifestations of media. internally there is no will to filter. at least. there needs to be a noise flood. filler.

… are we about to lose our status as eyewitnesses of tangible reality once and for all, to the benefit of technical substitutes, prostheses for all seasons which will make of us the ‘visually challenged’, living off sight handouts, afflicted with a kind of paradoxical blindness due to overexposure of the visible and to the development of sightless vision machines, hooked up to the ‘indirect Light’ of optoelectronics that now completes the ‘direct optics’ of sunLight or electrocity? — Paul Virilio

God is stationary, we are in motion, and all at different speeds — the apocalypse is a simultaneous event, though it appears to each individual to be operating at a different time (the end closing in) it is a cumulative moment that comes for all as the same characterized and relative event (horizon). I can see it now. time folds, trajectories are supra-curvilinear, non-Cartesian, and they will all intersect, simultaneously, now or then.

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

milk coronet

Sunday. St. Olavs cathedral is over there. as I look out the sixth-floor windows of the Academy office. sunLight coming over the hills to the south illuminates the row of buildings along the fjord. the far side of the fjord is bright, too. mind is flat. with all the activities that churn and churn the mind. silence is broken by whining hard drives and other high-frequency beings. outside is behind glass. inside too.

AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science) is undertaking its last meeting of the 20th Century. I recall going to one of those meetings in Boston when I was just 14, accompanying my father. photographing the Vice-President, Rockefeller, giving the opening keynote speech. later going to see Arthur Fiedler perform with the Boston Pops (he was sick, so had a replacement, could it have been Seiji Ozawa?). we ended up sitting next to Dr. Harold Edgerton, the famous physicist from MIT who developed the electronic stroboscope for making ultra-high-speed photographs. My father knew Edgerton from when he was working at the Radiation Laboratory at MIT. Harold gave me a signed copy of a postcard reproduction of his famous image of the milk drop frozen like a royal crown. Edgerton was one of the founders of EG&G, a major military-industrial corporation.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

signifier

the weekend flies past. Sunday evening. Thanksgiving holiday weekend now in to its end. the rage of shopping has begun in Amurika, no doubt. where the signifier, money, begins to move at a speed precisely resonant with Buddhist prayer wheels, somewhere in Kathmandu. and the dying winter spirit year begins to shudder, pockets empty of change, debit cards shift magnetic charge, e-cash re-arranges binary form, and we all move one more shuffle, one more tank of gas, one more hamburger closer to an imagined End. end of digestion, end of palpitation, end of mastication, of flagellation, of invocation, of alienation, of sensation. no more hanging out watching this torso or that thigh. time to get tough, do basic things. learn to prepare bodies, prepare minds, prepare spirits. else be unprepared for the tests coming just over the immediate horizon.

posted
  • place: en route Selkä-Sarvi - Kemi - Helsinki, Finland

winter is here

Eero wakes us up early, as agreed if the storm is getting serious, the wind velocity threatens to rise to 20 meters/second or more (75 km/hour), and the boat is not safe for much over ten at all. we quickly gather our things, prepare the boat, and with a definite level of tension, head out towards the mainland. the ocean is extremely choppy, with wave-sets coming from several directions at once. the proliferation of islands and skerries seems to cause very complex wind and sea dynamics. Eero says that we will go back to the island if it gets too bad. it is cold. the sea is gray under the low clouds. we finally arrive after a rough ride of 40 minutes. Jussi, the keeper of the maritime station motions us through the window of the tower to come have coffee with him. I end up doing a portrait of him in the tower.

portrait, Jussi, Harbor Master, Kemin satama, Lapin lääni, Finland, October 1998

he is a sea-faring man, it is clear to me. he has the eyes of a sailor, eyes that are clear and that are focused on the horizon. he shows us that the wind speed indicator is showing only around 7.5 meters/second at the moment. we are lucky. while we are in the tower, it begins to snow. the first snow of the season. winter is here. no turning back. we say goodbye to Jussi and then to Eero, and drive towards Kemi, stopping in the forest by the sea to get a shot of the snow which Sanna has been waiting for. end up sitting talking for five or six hours, we haven’t anywhere to go, and it is comfortable and warm in the car.

finally, in the early evening, we drive into Kemi and sit in a pizza place for some dinner before Sanna drops me off at the train. when we leave the pizza place, it is snowing hard. I board the train, secure a bunk, and Sanna drives off to Tornio to do her editing.

posted
  • place: Selkä-Sarvi, Finland

wood-fired sauna

before the sauna, Selkä-Sarvi, Finland, October 1998

Sanna goes on to Tornio to pick up the video camera and the car, while I hang out at the Kemi library and read magazines. we did not have a good night. I never sleep well on the train, though I prefer to take the night train to or from the north — the day train is paralyzingly boring and tedious. I end up in the bar on the train writing manically through much of the night, and finally crawling back into bed, exhausted.

I recall Riikka’s dream from Grenada. How the aliens abducted her and flew her out to a place in the desert (recalling the outlines of the mountains). And then began to tell/show her about the rods embedded in the earth there. Sticking a meters out of the ground, they were semi-metallic – (semi-conductors) – that went several kilometers deep into the earth. Through the natural high-intensity of the earth’s magnetic fields there … and so on … Electromagnetism.

While I lie here almost naked in a small moving room on a train, the Santa Claus Express. I should be screaming with laughter. Train #69, The Santa Claus Express. Heading north. A woman-girl fast asleep in the other narrow bunk. She sleeps, and my hair still falls out along with the dandruff.

Gotta piss. Maybe head for the bar. Do so.

Here, I’m from a different planet. Fuckin’ heading north to the fuckin’ unknown. Coasting into the fuckin’ winter of my life on the Santa Claus Express. Sober (a shot of Tequila?). Hardly moving. Hanging at the bar. The train has stopped, but nobody has noticed. (Has somebody pulled the brakes?) No fuckin’ way. So it goes. The Others sharing the space here continue to paw their way through life. Unable to sleep, I come here. Just to write as I have so many times before. These thin contrasty lines that keep only part of the self alive.

Approaching a station. Jarkkala or so, couldn’t understand the announcement, an automated woman in Finnish, Swedish, and English. She tells us where we are. The train moving slow. The moving only a shaking back and forth. Nothing else. Blackness outside. Black clothes on. Suddenly I think we have changed direction. While the drunken Finnish fellows sing English (Amurikan) songs. (We have come to Parkano, or somewhere). Another place name. In between coming and going. (I am lost again!) The fellows get louder and louder. And it all goes on (hyvää, hyvää, one says, trying to break in and tell something. joka paiva ja joka ikinen yo.) Military guys, well, still wearing fatigues. hair stringy and dirty. sticking straight out around the neck like the bearers slept with head dropped straight back, slack-jawed, mouth wide-open gulping air like a gaffed cod. eyes glazed under crusted lids. (Can I remember another life, other from this one, here, now?) doubtful. Buried in the detritus of present saturated busy-ness. The boys singing “rollin’ on the river.” And counter voices lifting up — so all conversation eventually stops, is subsumed: they either sing or sit in drunken silence.

I wobble back to that small moving room and squeeze into her bunk. There’s no room. She sleeps. and I think about sleep and movement, and what comes at the last stop. Kemi finds me still awake and wired at high latitudes.

she picks me up from the library and we head to the harbor at Aljo, where we meet Eero, the ship captain and park ranger who will take us to the islands for the night. the boat is a ten-ton speed-boat used for patrolling the area of the national park and conducting research. I study the charts and instruments carefully. We visit two islands first, Sanna making several shots. The main reason she wanted to come and shoot was to capture some scenes of bad weather for her video, which was shot so far under mostly ideal weather circumstances. This is the last weekend Eero will have the boat in the water until next year. The sea here, not being very saline, with the temperatures in winter well below zero degrees Centigrade, freezes with up to a meter of ice. The islands are accessible by ski and snow-mobile by Christmas, although people seldom visit them. As we sprawl intertwined in the sauna, we are talking about how the entire scene is a perfect script. Our long running conversation of the day which has traversed so many levels of emotion and situation; the abrupt shifts of sensuality and language whenever Eero enters the scene; the powerful physical setting; the drama of the weather which eventually threatens to strand us on the island for an indefinite period, the traditional wood-fired sauna — something which is always special to me, as well as to every Finn, and so on. bodies steaming in the night airs.

posted
  • place: en route Köln - Kiel, Germany

northward again

Moving again. North, away from spring. Fragments of the world do not add up to anything that is expressible. Tractors in the fields. Greening. The greening of the world is not fragmentary, but is pure (I want new words and ways of moving them to the page). Tired of the same places, I guess, but the same friends bring a special closure to all movements, the small circles that can be memorized, closed, and stored away for next retrieval. Kiel is not so large, and it is easy to find the Muthesius Hochschule where I meet Hubertus in the late afternoon. The flat where I will stay for the duration of the workshop is in a special building of the Christian-Albrechts Universität zu Kiel. It overlooks the harbor. Here I am , another seafaring situation, on the main harbor, and not far away, the Nordsee-Ostsee Kanal. Here is another history of the War, the U-boat, untersee boot. A large cruise ship moves by the window, heading for Gotebourg. A few people are clustered on the top decks while Irish farmers protest cuts in beef production and silent pictures from a tornado in Minnesota play on the feed line into the room. Suspended dis-animation, curious. Palestinians chant and throw stones on the West Bank. Israeli soldiers shoot them. When does this end? Is this only ignorance to think that these things can be overcome? Teevee.

We go to dinner, all the while discussing the critical issues of being. Hubertus started here two years ago as Director of the FORUM, an interdisciplinary program of lectures and workshops that runs parallel to the regular study program in Design, Fine Arts and so on. Something of a unique program where he is given almost complete autonomy to bring people in — the students don’t realize the luxury and possibility, especially given Hubertus’ massive personal and professional network and his own significant professional output. Paying for dinner, his credit card is rejected apparently because of a problem with the dates on the local dial-up machine and the central computer — it seems the central computer had not yet had its clock adjusted for DayLight Savings which went into effect last Sunday at 0200. Is this a foreshadowing of the Millineum Bug? It is easy to be pessimistic about all this. Technophobia aside, human nature fore-fronted; it is fallible, grotesquely so, not much thought needed to figure that. Has the world ever been in mass chaos? Perhaps in the Plague times, although that was very much a process with a discrete temporal vector pre-determined by a combination of transport speeds of the time and the latency period of the Plague itself. Now, given the immediacy of computing, and despite the fact that computer networks are not everywhere on the globe, they do control aspects of life that touch almost every human being through an instantaneous Butterfly Effect. If, for example, anything in the chain of production of wealth is disrupted, the entire chain reels from the effect … What is the minimum percentage needed to affect the whole chain? How sensitive is modernity? (Can we look at Yugoslavia as an example, or Somalia, Japan, elsewhere?) Is it a card house?

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: en route Düsseldorf, Germany - Vienna, Austria

detours

What is it that we need in life? What is it that we are constantly grinding after in a state of calm and casual disinterest? What do we care about?

Heading to Vienna now. Another stop. Various plans have been detoured, so it appears that the entire month of March will be something of a vacation, so I need to make it that. And not stress so much about it. Back to work at the end of the month in Kiel after some relaxation and conversation and pleasant diversion. Nothing terribly productive, or labor-intensive. Besides, who cares anyway? Planting future seeds, but these seeds need the kind of regular tending that only an idiot would endure. I think I will really try to concentrate on, huh….? Doing my own thing?

Discovering that my abilities with the machines are much more limited creatively than my ideas would suggest. I freely admit that I am no expert on many software platforms, and really am not so good at producing finished work. The only decent work I have done digitally are the video pieces produced on the Avid system I had access last summer to at Polar Circuit in Tornio. In that instance I had dedicated access to a system for three straight weeks, with no real interruptions. Other attempts—especially with audio, which I aesthetically am quite tuned into—seem to stumble on software and consistent access issues. An inability to concentrate on production versus organization of information also seems to be a hurdle that keeps me from moving forwards.

True to other times, there are snow flurries between Nürnberg and Austria, in this bit of higher country. I recall two years ago, passing this way in April—as documented in this very travelog—snow and slow going for the track construction that is ongoing now. They are in the process of constructing a new high-speed line between Würzburg and Vienna.

posted
  • place: en route Baltimore, Maryland - Keflavík, Iceland

ego-centricity

Somewhere over the North Atlantic or so. A feeling of stress. I recognize that the ego is driving my work and my existence at the moment, and has for the past years ever since I became aware of a difference between motivation, greed, selfishness, ego-centricity, altruism, speed, attention, concentration, giving, etc. Is it possible to harness this beast and bring it to be in service of productive living? Or do I have to destroy it and the self in order to come to some freedom of being? I know that it must be left behind, it is a shell, an artifact of the presence of the body, the incarnation of being … An illusory state of requisition and need that pollutes what is meant to be a transitory and pure experience of living in this world. It forefronts my existence. Keeping the few genuine qualities that I do possess out of balance and … (never finished)

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

snow

a long bike ride with Bill today, I am pretty beat, but it felt good. out of shape. body wishes it hadn’t been abused. and tomorrow the weather turns BAD, at least that is what threatens, the clouds spoke so today during the ride. it was warm, but the clouds said SNOW! all positions are necessary — if only as place-holders for multiplicity/plurality. ALL positions are necessary. the exhaustion of no meat in the belly raising the exhaustion of raising a text to some reasonable being. as here in the restless night. pen-point scraping with an astonishing speed. driven mind-to-hand. and the frustration of un-pointed being. unfocused being. keeps me from seeing. and the restless night continues. I tell Linda that people should begin to LOOK at the world that is moving by, and really look at it with a quiet mind and then form their own opinions about how it is, rather than having the media — a cesspool of secondary opinions and observations — drive what they believe they are seeing.

sotto voce: a small fragment that fell onto a page that I constructed at least 25 years ago, maybe more, yes, more, I was only ten or eleven years old. going on a picnic at the county fairgrounds with the school patrol group from the elementary school. the school patrols would help students cross in front of the bus when riding home, and do other functions like raising and lowering the national flag each day (with requisite protocol). I was the sergeant of the Patrols, with a green pin, and I took the minutes of the monthly meetings. we went on this picnic where there were students from many different schools. I wore hounds-tooth bell bottoms. I remember meeting other students who would later, when I began in Junior High School, become close and long-standing friends. Gary and Bruce, from the same school that Trisha transferred to after third grade. that one day out from the rural school I attended began an opening into the greater world that has never since stopped.

my mother responds with this text:

Yes, I remember that day too. I was there and in charge of these thirteen sixth graders from the rural elementary school. I had to be sure they each got a hot dog to eat and a ride on the Ferris Wheel. The biggest job was to get them all back on the right school bus. Those good old days!!!! I still hear from Officer Gililand who was my boss from the police department. I also remember that year at Science Camp when I was to pretend that I didn’t know you. So that you could feel the freedom to be yourself and I could be free to be myself. I always had a great time after all the sixth graders went to bed. We used to leave the camp and go in town and get a real dinner and sometimes go to a movie. We would square dance until it was almost time for you kids to get up. Hey, boy I always had a GOOD time!!! This is the side of your Mother that you did not know about.

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: Boulder, Colorado

über-conservative

Brilliance of fall, cleaned air with a bit of refractive moisture. Snow draping Longs Peak down below the tree line, not the first, not the last time. I have watched this translation of condition creep down the mountains many times before. What will this winter be? Different and the same as others before. Only half will be at this latitude, the rest will be at a latitude that can make the nose bleed with cold. (some planes now have a continuously-updated screen playing where there is a rough icon of a plane moving across a pixellated mapping of the world, screens refresh with various scaled views as well as the outside temperature and ground speed) Outside temperatures, at least the numbers converge from Fahrenheit and Centigrade around minus 45, and at 10,000 meters, the outside air, screaming past the fuselage at 600-plus miles per hour, is around minus 50 or even higher. I theorize on the effect of instant exposure to that environment. The speed of the air. And the cold. And the lack of oxygen. Instantly stripped of any clothing, all limbs wracked to the extreme of their movement, probably beyond, burning frostbite, deep frozen skin, blood exploding from the lungs, acute edema, pressure drop, nitrogen bubbles popping in every vein, and the disorientation of minutes of free fall into a freezing sea.

But I am not flying at the moment. No reason to be developing that line of thought.

I am sitting in the ITS Fine Arts lab. Class is finished. Audio coming from the Internet is ambient from the streets of Bombay. This medium stretches itself. It is late. A good day, although I recall a night of little sleep. I am intent that the possible visits of Tapio, Susanna, and Brad be smooth ones. Meanwhile, my status at the University is determined by a rigid hierarchy of time, influence, and power. And I was even told point-blank by a nameless member of the administration something along the lines of we don’t recognize part-time faculty. Pretty short-sighted and über-conservative. Academia has taken the institution of tenure, once considered the bulwark of academic freedom, and has turned it into a device for maintaining a stultifying status quo. The vast majority of tenured faculty seem not to use their positions in a proactive sense — to challenge that status quo.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

dinner

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.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

creative potential

0300 and I am just thinking of going to bed. So I do, and now it is 1300, and I am in the middle of shaking down the AVID video system, preparing to do some video work this evening when the sun moves to the north. Unfortunately the studios are on the west side of the building and they have not installed window shades yet in the new building, so things are awkward for serious work. I feel as though in an electronic haze. Like these machines that I am surrounded with are sucking the life out of me, despite the “creative potential” that they represent. I am rather desperate to get something done, but this phantom of doing rather than being seems appropriately distant and immaterial. Discussions take place within the context of the spectacular array of equipment available to us here at the college. This is a familiar sight in, Finland — colleges and university (and, for that matter, high schools) swimming in a sea of technology that would make folks at most other universities salivate profusely. For a student base of under 200 students, many of which are involved in other areas of study, there are four AVID production studios, several analogue video editing suites (Betacam included), numerous large MAC and PC-based studios and facilities totaling around 70 machines, full-blown TV and sound recording studios, cameras of every variety, totally new buildings wired with high-speed LANs, servers for the internet, and so on… The downside of this is the problem of getting qualified and creative instruction for the students. At every institution that I have either visited or lectured at, I hear the same complaints from faculty and students — that there is a shortage of funding for getting teachers in to these same schools. I will probably do a tour here in the spring, doing short teaching gigs at about six different schools scattered across the country. For me it is a good opportunity to teach in good facilities and with eager students, and for the schools, the exposure to outside influence seems essential. Those of us who are here for the Polar Circuit project are constantly amazed at the open-ness shown here — the project itself is a miracle of conditions that would be difficult or impossible anywhere else. A bunch of crazy artists given carte blanche to use a fantastic array of tools that would otherwise lie dormant all summer, and the school opens its doors completely to us, offering everything including an enthusiastic handful of students who are taking good care of us.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

two or one

fortune cookie:

Two small jumps and sometimes better than one big leap.
Lucky Numbers 2. 10, 20, 24, 33, 44

Out on a hike with Janet and Jazzie around the Inscription Canyon area north of the house here about ten miles. A day where things look alive and still. Jazzie, the Aussie (Australian Sheepdog), is a live-wire, sharp and witty.

Making this walk reminds me of when we were kids, going up in to the cornfields behind our house with the collies, Lady Jane, and Rusty Nails and playing hide-and-seek with them in the towering stalks of silage corn. Conversation being played out on different backgrounds and at different time of life. How things change, how they remain the same. We read the writing on the rock in tones of age, time, and especially, place.

Yesterday was an exhausting day working on three people’s Macs, swimming, and then driving round trip to Phoenix to pick up Casey (my niece from California). Driving fast. Something I have noticed about the US recently, that people are really driving much faster than either the posted speed limits or what might be construed as safe. The fifty-five mile-per-hour speed limit is a thing of the past. No more savings needed. Oil seems an inexhaustible resource to Americans once again. I wonder how it will be in the future. For my child and the other children of today.

I talk to George on the phone today. I guess the last time was back in October or so, from Stefan’s place in Manhattan. The difference between our long virtual conversation and these short ‘real’ ones is immense. But of the substance of the difference I am not able to dissect. Like walking in the land today. Under Granite Mountain behind the folk’s house.

I feel almost completely cut off from the land, in a way that I have not felt before. It is truly strange. Yet familiar. As though I am drawing away from the being-ness of it all. And simultaneously drawing into complete alignment. I go to look at the stars and I realize that I am seriously slacking. have only made a couple hundred dollars in the past month. here under the winter sun. and not much future happening yet either. not hustling enough.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

star-gazing

Late in the evening I drag out my father’s smaller telescope (a four-inch reflector) and set it up on the built-in pedestal on the small round flagstone patio to the south of the house. It has a tracking motor in it, and actually is quite a good device. Marvelous to look at Jupiter and Saturn, and simply cruise along the Milky Way. When they moved here 13 years ago, the Light pollution was practically non-existent, compared to now where even the small town of Prescott has thousands of bright street Lights. Although it is beyond the near horizon, there is a substantial glow. My father chose to live here primarily for the clear night skies for optimal viewing. Progress impinges on dreams. He doesn’t do too much observing anyway, as he is too busy maintaining the house and trying to finish his larger 14-inch computer-driven telescope. The means obscure the goal? At any rate, I enjoy scanning the heavens, and I highly recommend the activity — if you ever have the chance to use a telescope, do so. To see the rings of Saturn crisp and clear. The planet hanging like a cut-out mobile with its moons. Jupiter massive, striped, accompanied by many moons, the four major ones can be seen as planets in their own right, disks lit by the Sun and the reflected glory of their huge partner… I got another good swimming workout in today. Two more days of it before hitting the road again. I like getting into half-way decent shape before jumping back out in to the world. Wish I had my mountain bike with me here — there are so many place to ride, and I have hardly done any hiking. Mediated by speed! More mediation. Telescopes. All this material intervention! It is everywhere!

posted
  • place: en route Stockholm, Sweden - Copenhagen, Denmark

fast trains

Already I am back on the X2000 train heading for Malmö. The boat docked around 0830 this morning and I made a race across town via the Metro to the Central Station. I didn’t want to miss this one, as it would affect whether or not I would be able to buy Björn a beer this afternoon in Copenhagen. The X2000 service is among the best in Europe, as far as I have experienced of high-speed trains on this and other trips. I always enjoyed the TGV (Train à Grande Vitesse) in France, but I never got to ride them First Class, so I don’t know about the service. Anyone traveling in Europe with a 1st class Eurail pass should be sure to look for these trains and try the ride. (Look for ICE trains in Germany, TGV and EuroStar in France, Belgium, and London, and X2000 in Sweden — I think Spain and Italy have inaugurated their versions, but I have no experience with them.) On the X2000 they serve excellent meals and there are free headphones and friendly personnel. I found the only flaw was the constant beeping and ringing of mobile telephone calls in a car half-full of Swedish corporate managers. Such is life.

Today the weather is better, and here in Sweden the trees are almost completely sprung. more “fast trains”

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

digital working

Saturday morning, I get up earlier, as there are a thousand things to be doing, the problem is that there are so many people to visit, that if I do that continuously until I leave, then I get no additional work done — which may be the case anyways since I am still having software problems (Deck II and SoundDesigner deauthorize whenever the machine is shut down — a huge problem, considering that there are only a total of three authorizations possible, faugh!…) It’s always something. And I need to make my reservations on the Silja boat to Stockholm, shop for food, get something for Loki, on and on. I do not understand how it is to produce work anymore. Time has been so fragmented and broken in this travel, and, as well, having no place to base myself, I would need three more weeks at MUU to get a finished dinner piece done … It has been good to get back up to speed on the sound system, and begin to recall all the possibilities of sound editing. Makes me hungry for more … I eventually get everything in order and begin assembling raw material from the Dinners tapes that I have carried so many kilometers.

posted
  • place: Stockholm, Sweden

ArtNode-ing

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!

posted
  • place: en route Copenhagen, Denmark - Malmö, Sweden - Stockholm

control freaking

Another long day. This morning Björn and I were up at 7:30 to catch a bus to the hydrofoil to Malmö, and then another short bus ride to the Academy. The hydrofoil took only 45 minutes and cost an astonishingly miniscule 15 DKK (= 3 USD). Competition in action. The Malmö Academy has exceptional facilities in an entirely new building. Everything was highly organized and secure with locks on all door except for the bathrooms. I was scheduled to give a lecture at 13:00 and I indeed did do just this. They have a decent lecture room with a video projector and assorted techno-goodies except for the fact that one amp channel and speaker had been fried, so I had to play video and audio works on one channel. Such is techno-life. My host, the Academy Principle, Gertrud Sandqvist I had met last year at the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Art and Technology in Helsinki. At the lecture she sat in the front row, not particularly unusual until the question-answer session at the end — she mediated between me and the students, choosing students, modifying their questions, and ”interpreting’ my answers for the students. More than odd, it was quite an show of the psychology of control. She seemed unable to allow the students to interact without her dominance. Sad for them. I understand now her reputation which is not great, on this very issue of control-freak. Oh well. Björn meanwhile was meeting some former students. We ended up taking different trains — I had the First Class EurailPass, and could ride in style, though flat broke.

At the moment I am sitting comfortably on another one of these new high-speed European trains. This one the X2000 from Malmö to Stockholm. First class, they even serve a dinner. Not bad. I sat across from a senior Quality Control engineer from Eriksson, Inc., one of the largest companies in Sweden dealing in telecommunications. We had an interesting conversation about technological developments in Scandinavia and Europe, as well as photography. Already here in Scandinavia things have a feeling of organized and peaceful order, with a level of social wealth that is simply not available further south in Europe. There is far more competition in the telecom business which is bringing (for example) good internet and telephone services at reasonable rates. Education is well-funded (though conservative) without the need for academics to be constantly begging for national resources.

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

Es ist genug

Made it to Aachen in about 5 hours from London, not counting an hour layover in Brussels and the time change from the UK to the continent. The ride on the Eurostar was impressive though a bit disorienting when the train peaked speed in the French countryside at 300 kilometers-per-hour. I felt a bit queer and got worse when looking out the window. Other than that, though, it was quite the techno-experience. The tunnel was invisible in the darkness and mirrored windows except for the occasional small green light that flashed past. The terminals at either end were basically nice airport lounges with plenty of stainless-steel, white, and techno-gray accouterments. Staying with Günter and Christina (and their newest addition, Mary Manon, a sweet bonnie bairn, just born on January 4),

friends from Avantière days in the late 80’s, early 90’s, right when I was moving to Iceland. Avantière was an artist group loosely organized by the Aachener artist,

Hans Werner Berretz who I first met when visiting Maastricht with Stefan back in 1988. Manon is named after the daughter of Alma Mahler, the former wife of the composer Gustave Mahler, who was married at the time to the architect Walter Gropius. Sadly, Manon died at age 18. The composer Alban Berg was so taken by the tragic passing, he wrote a violin concerto in her memory, dedicated to the memory of an angel. He died shortly after finishing the composition.

In the spring of 1935, however, he interrupted that project to write his Violin Concerto that had been commissioned some months earlier by the Russo-American violinist Louis Krasner but was directly inspired by the tragic, sudden death, in April, of Manon Gropius, the 18-year-old daughter of Alma Mahler and her second husband, the famous architect Walter Gropius. Berg usually composed slowly, but in this case he worked quickly to create a memorial for the dead girl (the concerto is dedicated “to the memory of an angel”)—the complex masterpiece was fully sketched out by July and completed on 11 August. It is one of the greatest of all violin concertos and one of the most moving of all 20th-century compositions. Its four movements are paired into two larger parts. According to the composer and scholar George Perle, the first part “was conceived as a musical ‘portrait’ of [Manon Gropius], the second as a representation of catastrophe and, finally, submission to death, and transfiguration”. The vivacious second movement makes use of an Austrian folksong; the third contains the shattering climax that represents the girl’s death; and the fourth, based on Bach’s harmonization of the chorale Es ist genug (It is enough), is a prayer for deliverance from earthly suffering. By scoring the chorale for woodwind, Berg creates an organ-like effect. There are two variations on the chorale melody and brief, touching reminiscences of the folksong and the chorale, and then the Concerto ends quietly, like a soul finding rest. — Harvey Sachs