posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Peter Lamborn Wilson 1945 – 2022

Dammit. Another passing. Peter Lamborn Wilson, aka Hakim Bey. Got this news and the following remembrance today from friend Konrad Becker, founder of Public NetBase in Vienna.

death

Peter Lamborn Wilson died in his apartment in Saugerties in upstate New York last night, reportedly from a heart attack.

A “Cyberguru” in the nineties he had no email address and wrote his pieces by hand, or on an old typewriter. With 70+ books and titles like Pirate Utopia, he inspired several generations. However, his visceral abhorrence of digital media was softened by his clever use of resources in a digitally savvy environment. As the author of Temporary Autonomous Zone he was guest at the inauguration of Public Netbase and a regular visitor here in Vienna.

Sadly, despite his personal integrity, his fame and colorful queer identity also triggered offending smears and innuendo hard to oppose. In his last months he spoke self-deprecatingly of himself as an old hippy, maybe he was, I just wish there were more of this kind. While many drift into senility in their early forties, he was bright as a button until his last day and had more clever things to say about the electronic media realm than most of the new media experts I ever met.

Following up on his contribution to the book “Digital Unconscious – Nervous Systems and Uncanny Predictions!” and with the support of Autonomedia, Felix Stalder and I ventured into a series of deeper inquiries into the fabric of media un/consciousness.

There is a general narrowing and flattening of the imagination due to the global spread of consumerism and the increasing abstraction and quantification through which the social world is constructed. PLWs work can be understood as an exploration of alternative ways of being in the world that could offer escape routes.

We, by way of Jim Flemming and Fred Barney Taylor, conducted the last interview just a few days ago. In his last interviews he liked to talk of the end of the world which he defined as an ongoing process. His lucid analysis of what went wrong in the last few thousand years was never defeatist rather it was a call to arms.

As he liked to say: Even if you are going to die tomorrow, plant a tree today. The rebellious spirit of PLW and his alter ego Hakim Bey will be immensely missed.

His essay T.A.Z.: The Temporary Autonomous Zone, Ontological Anarchy, Poetic Terrorism condensed and articulated some core essences of my learning facilitation and media arts praxis while simultaneously atomizing it into a negentropic flow. I ran across it as I began to engage in the European context of media criticism and activism in the early 90s. The Anarchist Library has a wide selection of his other writings well worth perusing. A second fave selection is Overcoming Tourism which strips away the hollow shell of elite migrations of consumption, leaving the displacement of the soul as the core value of movement. Its modest goal … is to address the individual traveler who has decided to resist tourism. Thank god!

Knowing there were thinkers and writers, articulators like Wilson out there formed a supportive web of like-minds when the difficult situations arose in the facilitation of open systems, autonomous zones, wherein spontaneous creative action was not simply welcome, it was the essence of be-ing in such a zone. A few of my own reflections on the TAZ along the way.

posted
  • place: The Bubble, Colorado

a TAZ is born?

Meaning of Information Technology:

dateline, Boulder [AP]

Students take control of classroom, locking door, and start teaching each other Chinese, making cut-out collages, doing homework, puzzles, editing music, watching “Portlandia”, and, most of all, talking to each other, interacting. Beautiful to watch. Nice to participate in. Didn’t record the results, but hey, you had to be there!. The vacuum of the Boulder Bubble is reversed and instead turned into a high-energy source.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

metrics

responding to Roger Malina on metrics on the New-Media-Curating list:

sotto voce: A metric is a standard, and a standard is the fundamental building-block of a (our) techno-social system. We cannot have a techno-social system without standards, so the question becomes how many, how expansive, and how standard? Whenever standards are applied to a system, the system decreases its degrees of freedom and complexity, and increases internal control-ability for the duration of that the system maintains and applies the standards (which corresponds to how long the system has had access the a surplus energy to maintain the order that is required to apply standards).

If we seek for a ‘global’ standard when we have only, say, a national standard, our system will be poorer in its potential for creative innovation. As standards are applied more and more widely across systems (thinking of the development of global standards (i.e., telephone plugs)) idiosyncrasy decreases and the opportunities within which we encounter the un-expected decreases: (oh, as techno-road-warrior I can plug my modem in where-ever I travel, that’s cool — to maintain my position in the techno-social system I need this ability!). one positive aspect, however, occurs when (fewer) standards of a more local sense are applied, there are more opportunities for interstitial (TAZ’s) to arise simply because there are more interstitial gaps within/between larger standardized systems. more “metrics”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

the price you pay

in response to this question posed by Annick Bureaud on the [new media curating] list (in a discussion about access to digital information):

The question might be : how much do you (really) pay in order to get access to an online document, how much the people who have worked to provide the access to this document are paid, who (ultimately) pays for this service?

sotto voce: The cost (what you pay) is directly correlated to the depth of your embeddedness, your degree of participation in the techno-social system. For example, to simply ‘own’ a laptop, I calculated over the past 15 years I spend around USD 120 / month. This does not include cost of upgrades and peripherals, telecom, electrical, or other costs. This is only having the machine sitting on my lap. Of course, to participate in the techno-social system more “the price you pay”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

another TAZ?

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

posted
  • place: Köln, Germany

netart 2007 – Feraltrade

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich https://www.feraltrade.org/

Again, a complex year for net art, looking at the divergent and still diverging fields of creative production within global networks. This year’s criteria of “Embodied Praxis” was complicated by the arrival of the much-hyped Second Life on the main-stream media stage. But material and very human networking trumped the attenuated virtuality of SL. Making a functional parody of globalized capitalism, Feral Trade seeks to stimulate a direct distribution network that follows the connections of existing social networks. It takes advantage of the un-mediated plurality of human networks and personal connections and constructs a direct affront to the anonymous standardization of global trade. It opens a small crack in the facade of globalization where autonomous collective be-ing can be activated. As a classic example of a TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone), I hope it takes hold to become a permanent presence that de-powers the dominant and monolithic capitalist structure. At the very least, it points out the deep lack in that structure, and this is a critical starting point for evolutionary changes in human relation.

An honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call:

This project emerges out of the long-term network practice of artist Isabelle Jenniches who has in the past worked in a wide variety of creative net-based activities. The particular piece, “The Call” is one of several process-oriented projects she has initiated that depend on the availability of generic user-controlled Internet web-cams. The works are constructed over a long period of time — time spent watching the selected scenario, remotely — life-time spent observing the world. Thousands of images are made during a methodological process of deep-looking through this mediated network eye. The extended seeing and repetitive digital stitching operations on the thousands of gathered images acts to frame a meditative daily routine. The cumulative practice approaches the classical Zen expression — “there is no web-cam, there is no PhotoShop, there is only the Void” — and it arises through the post-Cartesian possibilities of a commonly accessible network interface. Formally recalling David Hockney’s early Polaroid SX-70 time-space collage work, “The Call” is an intimate and intense personal vision of a scope rarely manifest in the click-through eye-candy world of the net.

posted
  • place: Sydney, NSW, Australia

salvage

hmmm, combinations of local circumstances impede encounters. structural deficiencies route possible crossings into different spaces. turtle-like, looking out onto a complex and unknown landscape and socio-cultural milieu.

find any openings for contact, sussing-out, phishing, checking in, checking out. finding where there is a break in the construct, gaps. small TAZ’s crouched and ready. intervene, connect.

and on another note entirely. sadly, transcendentally. hearing on the underside of the planet. or the reverse top. as shadows point to Antarctica. another giant come to an end in this world. how to expect that another world is? or that there is some way of standing in both for more than a while.

So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five style=

posted
  • place: San Francisco, California

Aural Degustation

long day in the city. starting in the United Nations Plaza which is, definitely a coagulation of spirits. first scenario visiting the eye on regaining ground-level from the Civic Center BART station is that of a seagull in the process of eviscerating a live pigeon. by the time I film, the pigeon is dead. the second scenario: to kill time, I drop in at the Asian Art Museum where the guards start to check everything in my backpack and begin to recite a mantra of all the things that cannot be brought in or used or done (or thought!) in the Museum. I stop them, and say that I am not interested in participating in their particular little corner of the social system, pack my bag and walk out. and head back along streets brimming with urine-reek, the displaced homeless, flophouse hotels, and so on. at a stop Light, a woman standing next to me asks the world in general how can I restart my career? I look at her and say I was going to ask you the same thing! it is clear that social empowerment is at an extreme low here in the center of San Francisco.

lunch with Casey, and on to a rendezvous with Sophea and Amanda. a double espresso puts an edge on the afternoon. on the way, evidence of a TAZ is spotted: a good omen! although the juxtaposition with other street scenes previously experienced in the day raises many questions about the way a TAZ might be expressed in this time, in this socio-political system.

on to Whole Foods for breakfast provisions, Casey goes home to study, we head back to Amanda’s place to prep for the trans-national breakfast with the Sydney

and Adelaide crews at 1630 local time. the breakfast — French Toast, fruit compote, pashed (!) potatoes, and champagne is streamed and rebroadcast on free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY as part of the live_feed: Breakfast Radio streaming project. the overall performance was initiated by Andrew Burrell and the Hybrid Radio Research Group as part of the Aural Degustation: Tasty Bites to Feed the Ears exhibition at the SCA Galleries at the SCA in Sydney, Australia. participants included: (in Adelaide): Mimi Kelly, Sasha Grbich, Jen Brazier, Heidi Angove, and Tamara Baille ; (in San Francisco): Amanda Hendricks, Sophea Lerner, and John Hopkins; (in San Diego – special telematic drop in): Amanda MacDonald-Crowley; (in Sydney): Lia Smith, Amber Moloney, Clara Chow, Bjel Bakker, Belle Brooks, Heidi Abraham, Sach Catts, Alli Barnard, and last-but-not-least, Andrew Burrell.

our audio:


(02:05:00, stereo audio, 121 mb)

posted
  • place: Soumenlinna, Finland

nomadology

Slogging through the people database/archive: updating addresses, web sites, emails, along with short are you alive? messages that pulse out into the network. To re-establish long-quiet pathways, to cut dead connections, and to establish new conduits and nodes. And so, run across things, reminders, blips, clicks, and pops, along with re-radiations, re-compilations, and re-mixes. Not sure what the outcome is, but, for the archivist, having an archive that is up-to-date is a critical condition to maintain along the with connecting to the actual people leaving archived traces.

Continuing to gather video material. Running into new material, the old resting in peace, on idling servers.

These nomads chart their course by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics – and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, and surprises. — Peter Wilson, TAZ

Dinner last night with Sophea, Teemu, Andrea, and Alison, followed by the usual race for the ferry.

Early bright morning ensues, not much later. Up with the sun, a serious matter in springtime at this latitude. What else to do: Todaze slip in yesterdaze. Time to leave a new pathway into the space of dreams.

posted

1 + 1 = 3

[ED: This is the third report on selected actions and flows in the neoscenes occupation (nso)[1] network, published in acoustic.space #4 (2003 ISSN 1407-2858). Since the last report, learning and networks [2] in the acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858), nso has spun off two major networking projects and is constantly involved in a heavy creation-filtering-redirection of network energies on a sustained multi-channel and daily basis. This article will briefly look at these two projects, “expand” [3] and “<di>fusion” [4], and it will comment on the matrix of practice that the projects grew from.]

acoustic.space #4 (2003 ISSN 1407-2858), Riga, Latvia, November 2003

One of the biggest obstacles to finishing this article is trying to carve out a piece of time away from network and face-to-face communication just to write it! This fundamental dilemma lies at the core of neoscenes — why take time away from attentive one-to-one distributed action for anything related to re-production, re-creation, or re-presentation? For a network to remain healthy and thriving, it demands a flow of energies from node to node. There’s no time to spare. neoscenes prefers person-to-person as the core tactical expression of networking — neoscenes avoids centrally organized media and PR-related activities whenever possible. acoustic.space is a fine exception because of close linkage between paper artifact and the lively network-of-praxis that generates it.

So it goes.

By nature, networks are human-scaled and exist in human-scaled time. They develop at the speed of life. neoscenes was never a fast solution caught in the cross-fire hype of media-convergence-mania: and it definitely didn’t burst in the dot.com vacuum. neoscenes is dot.net [5]. The slow evolution of the neoscenes network is a vehicle for learning, creating, and sharing that does not seek stasis, spectacle, or speed. more “1 + 1 = 3”

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”