posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

going to the mat

It’s difficult to write these days. Internal monologues are focused on figuring out how to pack up life asap. It’s a bit strange to say that the past four-plus years is the longest I’ve lived in one place continuously since leaving my parents home at 17 y.o. And further, it’s one of the few periods of time that I have had *all* my belongings in one place and (mostly) out of boxes. The majority of my adult life, my stuff has been in a storage unit somewhere—New Jersey, Prescott, Golden, Boulder—or in someone’s garage or so. Uff. Packing the entire archive back up seems absurd as it was hardly accessed in the time it was out of boxes. A useless pile of detritus. Why, why, why subject myself to the ignominy and energy-waste of maintaining something that I’m the only one who has an interest in it?

Now Reading: Absorbing the epic six-volume autobiography, Min Kamp, from Norwegian, Karl Ove Knausgård. At Zander’s recommendation, and then, once I started and realized that I actually was in the same locations at the same times—Bergen, Trondheim, Stavanger, Kristiansand, Oslo—as Karl Ove back when I was spending a fair amount of time in Norway in the late 1990s and early 2000s. A compelling read.

Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle: Book Two: A Man in Love. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 2. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 573.

I recently checked in with Julia, my former CGS intern. She’s a Mines (hydrogeology) graduate, who has, wonderfully, found a shared pathway to follow her bliss. She and her boyfriend, Torin, also a Mines alumni, have taken their connection with yoga to a higher level, gaining the necessary credentials for teaching and are planning to go international with that sooner than later. They have also started a YouTube channel—Wellbeing Cafe—already with a huge number of yoga routines and a variety of other material. Very cool to see this transition.

Somewhat disturbing to me, though, is that part of this personal evolution is almost forced to take place within the sphere of social media, especially YouTube, given the oligarchic control that it exerts on any and all users. That and the insertion of ads that cannot be cancelled or avoided—all of them utterly useless and annoying—until the channel receives a minimum number of subscribers (1,000). At that point the channel owners can at least select when the ad is played. Otherwise, one will show up in the middle of a yoga sequence or more often. I was stuck with one that played for ten minutes. Finding an independent pathway to socio-economic viability is challenging for their generation. They could have gone full-engineering and been working in a (potentially) stifling ‘regular’ job with deluxe cash flows. But they are cognizant of the lives of some of their cohort who are extremely unhappy (and unhealthy!), coasting along on that trajectory. Given the wider-scale complexity of what is ‘going on’ in late-stage Empire, best to work at basic life-skills like body-health, psycho-spiritual development, consumption habits, community-building, and look to develop trajectories that are beyond the reach of Empire (if that is possible in this new-ish multi-lateral oligarch-and-authoritarian-driven global power struggle).

Later, I juxtapose those assessments with the swirl of jagged thoughts and impressions that are filling my consciousness: monkey-brain on amphetamines, faugh. Complexity increasing, logarithmic, with age (of Self and Empire), while neuronal synapses are dulled, blank. Is this what life *is*, or what it becomes when attention is shredded by too much stuff? Packing boxes, why hold so tightly to this stuff when it will likely sit in those boxes for a long time. Possibly for the existing life-time! Having is a form of suffocation, burdened by excretions of other lives, but mostly my own. Giving is an exhalation, from the deep belly, giving inspiration to the cosmos.

Venus is high and brilliant in the evening, Saturn much less so in the sunset’s glare, Jupiter, Mars high with the waxing, near full Luna, invisible-but-present Uranus. I regularly take a late night stroll around the property before bed, no matter how cold. Waking the deer snoozing in the openness, their greenish-yellow headLight eyes blazing in my headlamp. First encounter, the eye pairs rise vertically, then, after staring, frozen, as the LED supernova waxes, they bolt to the tree line or across the street to a neighbor’s yard. Occasionally, a tinier pair of eyes, one of several feral cats that are encountered, or, rarely, a fox or skunk. So far no encounters with the large carnivores that do frequent the area: bears and mountain lions. Much of the walk is without the headlamp on, and aside from the always-on brightest-Light-within-several-miles that my neighbor installed a year ago, it’s dark with the brilliant streak of the Milky Way in all its offset-rotational glory.

A 30-minute call with George, I feel rusty, awkward and jumbled. He and I never developed an audio tele-presence connection, given the logistics and expense back when. Our connection was forged across some immersive instances of intense f-2-f interaction. After those formative encounters at Mines and in Santa Monica in the early 1980s, and aside from one more f-2-f in 1989, it’s always been text. Hand-written or typed letters through the post, then email, and these days, texting. I wonder if we will ever cross physical paths again in this incarnation. Doubtful, especially when I remove myself from this nation, and head for another, though there are no guarantees of anything anywhere anymore.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

pulling plugs

Can you make a harsh illustration about leaving Twitter because of its toxicity?

I finally pulled the plug on Twaddle, aka eX, deleting my account last month. Long overdue, and I would call on anyone else who is still propping up one of the least socially-conscious oligarchs on the planet to cease-and-desist. Meanwhile, I’ll cheer that misfit on to Mars. As for the rest of them, well, let them eat cake.

Back in the ‘aughts’ I routinely early-adopted social media platforms to maintain current experience for my teaching on what was then still called “new media”. A decade into the World-Wide-Web, 2003 or so, Web 2.0 had arrived, signaling the evolution of general ‘interactive’ web platforms that allowed for user-driven and collaborative experiences. Web 2.0 transformed the internet from a generally static platform into a space where users could dynamically create and share content, but its rise also brought about critical (social, behavioral, personal) concerns that I explored in many of my workshops and lectures. This era’s defining features—social media, user-generated content, and algorithms that tailor information, and now AI—have amplified both personal expression and misinformation, often blurring the lines between fact and opinion. While Web 2.0 promised a democratized digital space, it has led to powerful tech companies amassing vast troves of user data, raising privacy issues and consolidating control over information flow, features almost completely unregulated in the US. Surveillance Capitalism anyone? Algorithms designed to maximize engagement have also been criticized for promoting social echo chambers and polarizing content, contributing to social divides. It’s all about eyeballs in the ‘attention economy‘. Through their perversely inverted efforts to be user-centered, the oligarchs of Web fostered a landscape where manipulation, privacy concerns, and misinformation are increasingly prevalent: it’s user-centered alright, but the user is merely the object of extracted wealth.

Yup, here we are. I hadn’t been active on Twaddle for some years aside from attention paid to the CGS work account up until last year, and a very occasional glance at my feed. It was functional for a time, but the ‘new ownership’ indeed sent it to 100% shit, stimulating the departure. The entire arc of evolution completely confirmed my hypothesis how those who control a communications protocol control both the form(s) and content of the communications occurring. Not only that, but the protocol and its ‘owner’ actually tap off a certain amount of power—real social power—from those using the platform. The X possessor is a case in point, and a case that threatens the stability of the social system. I long ago departed from FazeBuch (2010) and mostly from InstaHam (still have an account but don’t post and rarely look at it).

What about BlueSky and Mastodon? They provide more direct user control without a central governing entity. Back to distributed models versus centralized models: a deep conflict that’s been raging since computing began!

Of course, in the end, there is no privacy left in the US social sphere. What you consume—from food to media, everything; where you go; who you communicate with; what you say; what you do; how much money you have; what medical issues you have; where you work; what you studied; your interests and beliefs; your voting history; your criminal and court records; ad infinitum …

Not only that, all those terabytes of data are subpoenable in a court of law: What’s your level of confidence in the justice system in the US these days?

On the related topic of concentration of wealth, that this infographic is more than ten years out of date makes it even more disturbing:

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

Letter to CSM COO

[ED: After meeting and talking to Kirsten Volpi, Mines COO/CFO, at a faculty barbecue, I had some follow-up comments for her on being an employee at Mines. Especially relevant was the issue of tele-commuting, although we happened to be still some few months before the Covid cataclysm. We, the staff at the CGS, had been lied to by the former State Geologist, Karen Berry, who told us in a staff meeting that Mines did not allow any remote working, apparently because she didn’t want to allow it. The rest, as of March 2020, is history. I worked four years 100% remote until retiring, no problem.]

Hi Kirsten:

My comments here fall broadly under the ongoing topic of employee retention—an important interest for institutional management—that President Johnson mentioned at last Friday’s staff plenary session. I would hope that perhaps they might shed some anecdotal light on that critical issue from the point of view of an employee. I write as an alumni and a three-year administrative faculty member; and, as someone who cares about the place I work, the people I work with, executing my job with a high degree of professionalism, and the value of work/life balance.

Following up on the question I posed during the Faculty/Staff plenary regarding ‘remote working’, I would offer that if you are considering any staff participation in policy-making around this issue, I’d be happy to contribute my expertise to the discussion. I was surprised when you stated that there was no policy and that some people *were* actually telecommuting. We have been told by our so-called “manager” that it is a Mines policy: remote work is absolutely *not* allowed (thus my original question). And I note that recently one of my professional colleagues left the CGS because of this arbitrarily fabricated limitation. There is substantial research available on the subject that confirms that flexible working conditions augment productivity *and* job satisfaction. They also improve the ability for employees to fond and construct healthy work/life balances.

This brings me to a second point. When I was on the faculty at CU-Boulder, I noted that there was the Ombuds Office (https://www.colorado.edu/ombuds/our-services) that allowed for confidential tabling of any university-related issues. I feel that Mines is deficient in this area—that there is no equitable means for addressing the complex issues that may arise—especially as the school is expanding so rapidly. There is the confidential CARE system, but this seems to focus on student issues, not the wider spectrum of institutional dynamics. Perhaps the ombuds model should be considered.

Moving on, I will relate a couple example of negative issues that I have witnessed as directly impacting both myself and my colleagues at work, both which exhibit a flagrant disregard of staff and their well-being. There are others.

The CGS is located in the Moly Building which is currently under heavy construction and has been for the last eight months. The entire project was ‘presented’ to the staff essentially as a fait accompli. What little information that was passed to us was in a two-line email format: this is what is happening, deal with it. Further occasional emails dealt with the absolutely minimal warnings that understated risk to life and limb if one walked outside the building, ever.

Our first real experience of this particular ‘development’ project was to arrive at work to watch 15 100-year-old trees ripped down and sent to a landfill, while a large and well-established natural riparian area was eviscerated with heavy machinery. That area served, among other functions, as a buffer between our offices and the loud traffic of 6th Avenue, as well as, more importantly, a small but rich wildlife refuge. Given that Mines now has the word “Environment” in its tag line, we found this a richly disturbing irony. The water flow of that riparian corridor was completely disrupted by a typical ‘modern’ solution that shunts surface drainage from areas where it normally would be absorbed into groundwater. I could go into much more detail about available knowledge that demonstrates development does not have to mean utter destruction of a landscape. This violent construction process continues to this day with zero consideration or opportunities for any expression from our staff, despite the persistent stress of environmental destruction, noise, dislocation, delay, and general chaos.

Moly Building destruction, Colorado School of Mines campus, Golden, Colorado, January ©2019 hopkins/neoscenes.
Destruction around the Moly Building, Colorado School of Mines campus, Golden, Colorado, January ©2019 hopkins/neoscenes.

There is a concept called ‘participatory design’ which operates under the principle that those who are to use the designed object or environment are given an active role in the design process. This is a crucial dimension to truly sustainable development. In this particular situation, however, the feeling is that there is no recourse, no mechanism for ‘speaking truth to power’. This is a sure way to cause those who can to move on to more humane working situations to do just that. If such a feeling is the dominant modus, an institution will be in constant internal conflict with its own potential (humane) success. I see this on a daily basis among my colleagues, how these small things add up to embodied stress and dissatisfaction.

The next step in this destruction process was paving over what remained of the open area bordering the riparian zone, so not only did we lose the buffer of trees, but then a vast sheet of unshaded black asphalt was installed that, among other negative effects, markedly increased solar heat buildup immediately outside our entire wing of the building. Car windshields reflected glare directly into half of our offices for much of the day. These are two tiny details, but it is in these details that makes a difference: there are many more that I will not enumerate here. There are ways to pave an area that allows for stormwater percolation using perforated pavers among a variety of other solutions.

The parking lot debacle segues into the second issue. Admittedly, the CGS is a bit of an orphan child at Mines, and this aspect came into sharp focus when the dictate came down to us from above that our parking lot fee would double from $265 to $497 per year. Not only that, but the lot is now requiring a ‘reserved’ permit that restricts the user from parking *anywhere* else on campus, despite the high cost! Our work flow at the CGS is not so similar to a ‘regular’ staff member in that we do come-and-go a lot, often with field gear, attending off-campus meetings (on campus meetings are even more complicated in that it can take 20 minutes to get somewhere on campus on foot). I’m wondering if the time lost to walking too and from personal vehicles is to be deducted from *my* time or from the institution’s time—if I do pay more to park, the institution wins on both counts, my cash *and* my time. I personally decided to subtract *my* cash completely from that picture—by canceling my parking pass completely, in protest—I will follow your advice on the second factor. I happen to live in Golden, though, and can bike commute, while most my colleagues have significant car commutes. Many other staff folks dropped a tier or cancelled, tired of being cash cows with no good alternatives. Some of the few who went for the higher fee did so because they were afraid of the risk to their cars and personal safety as has been demonstrated most recently in the area. Given the fact that no one else will be using this lot aside from folks working in the Moly building, the occasional contractor, and perhaps a few Facilities Maintenance folks, it would seem that this decision to double rates is a shameless and rather ignorant grab.

I know this may read like an editorial, but that’s because, in part, I was a Special Editor for the Oredigger, back when. And while I would like to think that this letter will have only positive outcomes related to my employment here, sadly, I am not confident that. Being a squeaky wheel—one that actually cares about the institution, its legacy, and the people working here—will perhaps ultimately cause my departure.

At any rate, thanks you for your time and consideration, I would reiterate my interest in helping develop an up-to-date policy for telecommuting (noting that my father authored a number of reports out of the White House’s Office of Technology Policy on tele-medicine among other tele-processes *in the early 1970s*). It’s about time!

Cordially,

John Hopkins, BSc, MFA, PhD

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

MiT: privacy (and reflecting on presence)

Drop in on Diane’s MiT class this morning in the large ATLS100 lecture room — she’s covering privacy issues. Huge class — I think she’s got more than 100 students enrolled. Quite different than my section of 38.

Surveillance, privacy, monitoring, searching, tracing, 1984, algorithmic filtering and screening of dataspace (face recognition, etc), Mugshots; the students had an assignment to do a name-search on a partner to find out as much as possible. Sitting near the back of the room, a majority of students are paying almost no attention to Diane — instead doing the usual retinue of screen-based tasks — other homework, Facebooking, shopping, and so on. This is disappointing in that it highLights the contemporary situation where even a highly-rated (entertaining!) university teacher is not really engaging the students. In a class of one hundred, filled with mediating screens, what should one expect. Human engagement between teacher and student has been lost in the shuffle of money/power that has become US academia.

Presence is projected out from the Self in a variety of ways — mediated and unmediated, well, always mediated by something: body heat by air (as thermal energy arising from energized interactions, catalyses, and transformations within the body). Presence is more and more being pushed (expressed) into what may be called technological networks. Distributed into more and more finely atomized (digitized!) fragments, and more and more widely distributed in both space and time. Coded, derived, lost in the data-space. When presence is so diffused into that space, we lose what we have here, now. Gone. No chance for an energized encounter when Selves are all pointed away from each other and thoroughly atomized…

posted
  • place: en route Ukiah - Eureka, California

Saturday, 15 September, 1962

Clear

Up at 0600, ate in the room & called home. JCH answered & I spoke to JCH; LCH in town at BU. Walked south to the Texaco Station and rented a car, drove down to river and obtained a rock to put in the patio. Stopped at Storage warehouse and removed 5 boxes; one I checked to Seattle, one to Mrs. McRay, and 3 to the Library. This cuts down what is there considerable. Visited Mr. Holland and Lina, drove out to the cemetary, and left on the 12:35 PM bus for Eureka, arriving at 5:30 PM. The ride was wonderful — thru the redwoods.

Picked up some bread & butter, etc, fixed a few sandwiches for lunch tomorrow and ate in my room.

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

endings – Day 11 – eNZed

Whanganui, New Zealand, December 2010

I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.

There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.

Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.

It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.

The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.

Can’t wait to get another dose of NZ!

posted
  • author: Eric Kluitenberg
  • place: Amsterdam, Netherlands

Distance versus Desire :: Clearing the ElectroSmog

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

ElectroSmog and the quest for a sustainable immobility

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

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

posted

affects and intentions

The idea comes that I can place different narratives and sonifications in the aporee context, making a global mapping of ideas mixed with sounds mixed with voices. But somehow this seems flat. Not that the platform lacks some aesthetic appeal, but the tendency would be to continue the same old process of archive-building (with the same old criteria of acquisition of material). Or, I thought about making a performative series in the Speakers Corner in the Domain. Still, the best idea to this moment is the one where I would simply engage with this material with one Other, expanding on it, presenting it in a dialogic setting, and reproducing that. Or this dialogic situation as a live performative undertaking with an audience.
more “affects and intentions”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado - Berlin, Germany

Migrating Academies: Régime

migrating academies: regime, Boulder, Colorado - Berlin, Germany, November 2008

Migrating Régime begins in Berlin. (a photo from Edwina of a group interpretation of the dialogue assignment, hmmm?) I run a seminar/performance/facilitation on Monday, and will be randomly intervening during the week. not as fun as embodied presence, but hey, what can be done. so, from Boulder to Berlin. the next best thing to being there… so, about presence:

The expression of presence is an essential characteristic of the self-organized body-system. Presence is the announcement of be-ing and viability and requires first an inflow and then an outflow of energies from the body system through the conversion of energies from one form to another. This conversion process alters the entire fabric of local existence. Migration of the embodied and energized organism changes everything around it. What do you change around you? What is changed by those around you?

Shared presence is a dialogue of transformation and change. It is the crux of be-ing.

Vm
P
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(00:03:45, stereo audio, 9 mb)

or

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Remote Presence :: Streaming Life : info

[ED: Relevant to the recent “pulling plugs” post, and whilst migrating some workshop documentation from the static neoscenes site to the blog, here are the deets for a one-week workshop I facilitated in Helsinki in 2007—squeezed in between another workshop in Sydney and lectures at several universities in San Diego, Santa Barbara, London, Amsterdam, and Kiel. Busy times. (An associated essay In The Presence of Networks: A Meditation on the Architectures of Participation was published in the festival publication (pdf download)).]

Welcome! Following is more detailed information on the workshop presented by John Hopkins and brought to you by the pixelache2007 festival and Artists’ Association MUU in Helsinki, Finland.

Dates: March 21-23 & 26-31, 2007
Location: MUU gallery & Media Base, Lönnrotinkatu 33, Helsinki, Finland
Daily Hours: 1030 to 1630
Final Event 31 March, 2007, 1700 – 0200

SHORT DESCRIPTION:

In the ubiquity of networked media spaces where we distribute our wireless lives, what happens to our creative processes? How may we build a functioning architecture of participation for productive collaboration and interaction between the Self and Others?

This dynamic workshop will bring participants to a new state of awareness about their own creative practice. It will accomplish this through an exploration of human collaboration and connection within the space of networks. It explores conceptual and practical issues around creative engagement, culminating in the hands-on production of a live and online streaming-media network event with global participation.

PARTICIPANT PROFILE:

With an engaged and holistic approach to facilitation, the workshop is ideal for individuals working in any discipline; it is designed to draw in a wide range of students, from those working with ‘traditional’ art materials, independent artists working in new media OR old media; VJ’s and DJ’s; media, design, film, and art students; media art producers and directors; network technologists and designers; culinary, engineering, and IT students; collaborative software developers and users — all of these will gain a powerful perspective on their own creative practice. The workshop is open to anyone with an interest in online collaboration and creative engagement at both a local and remote scale. There are NO technical background requirements. People with previous experience in streaming media, performance, digital audio and video, VJ work, etc, who wish to push their practice to a new level are also welcome.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own creative works, backgrounds, networks, and impulses into the situation to maximize the potentials of open peer-to-peer engagement. We will finish the workshop with a re-vitalized creative practice, a new understanding of collaborative dynamics, and a deeper understanding of a wide range of technologies available for creative networking.

A maximum of 15 participants will be chosen from applicants with the idea to bring together a wide spectrum of cross-disciplinary energies.

TO APPLY:

!!!TOO LATE NOW, BUT IF YOU REALLY WANT TO DO THE WORKSHOP, EMAIL US
neopixel [at] pixelache.ac
THERE IS A WAITING LIST, YOU MAY YET STILL BE ABLE TO ATTEND!!!

THE DETAILS:

This workshop moves from concepts and theories of creative action to the actualities of a sustainable creative practice mediated by technological and human networks.Online collaborative visual/sonic activities and platforms succeed when facilitators/participants understand the dynamics of human network-building as well as the possible technologies involved. The politics of collaboration underlie much of the potential of technologically-mediated social interaction. We will address the complex social politics of technology and build a powerful model for the critical and creative engagement of media of all types.

There will be a substantial exploration of the subjects of:

  • – tactical media
  • – creativity
  • – social networking
  • – design of sustainable systems
  • – principles of human engagement
  • – networks vs hierarchic systems
  • – ad hoc networks
  • – human presence as mediated by technology
  • – social politics of technology
  • – technologies/skill sets engaged will include: audio and video production software & tools, VJ software, streaming media solutions, open-source platforms, protocols, physical computing, live performance platforms & tools, synchronous communications applications

The final day on the workshop will be a public/live/online event. It will be a multi-channel multi-screen collaborative happening with live/local and online/remote performance components coming together for several hours in a relaxed and experimental atmosphere. Workshop participants will not only develop content for the event, but will help facilitate all aspects of it including the technical infrastructure, the local ambience, and the remote coordination. A number of local artists will be invited to participate with sonic and visual inputs, along with remote streams coming from New York, Montreal, Sydney, Los Angeles, and other locations.

In the search for Architectures of Participation, the workshop:

  • – examines a wide range of issues beginning from a fundamental definition of technology through to absolutely contemporary technological developments that affect socio-political and cultural scenarios
  • – presents a highly-developed model for comprehending the complexities of human presence and creative action in the contemporary world
  • – facilitates deep dialogue on local social/cultural/technical issues along with other issues relevant to participants
  • – establishes a broad-ranging, inspiring, and critical context for engaging a wide variety of technologies
  • – provides a powerful context for self-development and development of collaborative activities by presenting and subsequently exercising fundamental skills and awareness
  • – provides a comfortable discursive space to explore a wide range of historical and contemporary developments of art and science
  • – maps out connections between creative processes and technological mediation
  • – develops a deeper praxis-based starting-point for participants, helping them identify their own creative sources and tendencies
  • – involves practice-based exercises to develop personal creative focus
  • – provides a supportive atmosphere for rapid collective knowledge-building and collaborative sharing

Bio for John Hopkins:

As an active network-builder with a background in engineering, hard science, and the arts, Hopkins practices a nomadic form of performative art and teaching that spans many countries and situations. He has taught workshops in more than 20 countries and 50 institutions across Europe and North America. Recent streaming performance nodes include Berlin, New York, Sydney, Helsinki, Riga, Amsterdam, Strasbourg, Santa Barbara, Winnipeg, San Francisco, and, of course, online. He studied film with renown experimental film-maker Stan Brakhage in the late 1980’s. He was recently artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology in Helsinki, Finland. https://neoscenes.net

Brought to you by:

This workshop is a collaboration between: pixelache 2007, Artists’ Association MUU, and neoscenes.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

distributed empathy

living on the back. no longer an upright animal. except part-time. and no driving for another couple months. perspectives are limited. constant aching. phone calls with empathetic Others, emphasizes the distance of distributed being, how help is only visceral. hmmmm.

posted
  • place: Fort Myers, Florida

church

church and a Sunday dinner. eating far too rapidly, though, a family thing. recalling one Thanksgiving with about 20 people or so where from sit-down start of the meal to clearing the after-dinner coffee cups away took less that 40 minutes. not so much enjoyment of the food at the table, just stress about getting finished and eating enough to make it worth it. hmmm. but good food none-the-less. the church service includes a long-distance live phone patch to the minister’s son who was in France studying as a missionary soon to be going to Senegal. a surprise connection on Father’s Day facilitated by one of his assistants.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

TRyPTiCHON

TRyPTiCHON performance, Helsinki, Finland, April 2004

===WHEN+VvHERE===

Sunday, 1200 noon 04/04/2004

Kiasma Theatre (doors close when performance starts)

3 euro entrance

===WHO===

live locative media and dance performance by manu / mukul / muth
with: Hanna Ylitepsa (choreography and dance); Gavin Starks (roaming narrator); Camalo Gaskin (costume and tent design)

featuring walks through Helsinki by John Hopkins, Mariko Montpetit, Nick Grindell, Hermanni Ylitepsa, Voytec Mejor
more “TRyPTiCHON”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

time again

long telephone conversations ensue, maxing out my 3000-minutes-a-month-nights-and-weekends limit. and be-ing in this house again. hmmmmmm. histories and futures converge, cross, fade, re-emerge, flicker behind passing tree branches, hung with prayer ribbons, over-arched by sky and sun. some of the colored strips, embodied prayers, are tangled in the branches.

particular depths of connection simply remain outside my normal thought patterns. (survival) stress is a key factor in limiting the pass of sensual energies. but that same stress raises the intensity of some flows. in or out. no clear. thing. but if the confident line goes. and the Others in suffering lift hands in supplication or praise. then the channeling must continue. so to speak. a description of contact with the Dalai Lama seems to confirm all this stuff. well, that was known, assumed, and those levels of electricity are ambient around us every moment. just switch on the juice! in the Sun, in the Sky, in the Ground, everywhere. not a naturalistic thing, simply in all things, blanket, in all dimensions, irrespective to the model system applied.

and seeing how the Other lives. watching that in a distant and rigid side-ward stare. no, just seeing the fragments float past eye from time to time. and time again.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

convocations

many dinners and convocations, keeping me charged. keeping me going. inspiring, humbling, the imperative of being here now. and doing, living as much as possible. telling stories, and listening as others seek to place themselves in the midst in their own lives; being aligned with the flight of birds. or speaking their mind, speaking their spirits. so it goes.

video conference with Loki. and I meet Wally the plumber, and Dancer, the hair stylist. local Colorado folks. the fabric of Amurika is never what it seems from the distance of the other continents…

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

connections

a strange evening of networking tonight. connecting with Janet first and Doug on MSN Messenger, briefly, then with Doug on iVisit, he brings Bard, an old friend online from Seattle, the Bill and I try to connect via CUSeeMe, that doesn’t work, so I talk him through iVisit where we meet briefly, and in the mean time, after Doug and Bard leave, first Dana shows up, with tonsillitis, and then a fellow that had joined the online bed-in for peace (out of New Zealand) last weekend, connected, he’s an engineer for the Pakistani Army in Islamabad. wild combination of connections. Seattle, Washington; New York City; Westchester, New York; Islamabad, Pakistan; Livermore, California; Chino Valley, Arizona, all to here in Carelia.

posted
  • place: Joensuu, Finland

bed-in for peace

screenshot, bed-in for peace, 19 October 1998, [Joensuu, Finland]

snow. several chunks of corn snow came with the wind from the north of Siberia, across the Barents Sea. shredded clouds, with sun in between, took all the leaves down without touching them once. from far away, tele-presence. so far, invisible.

meeting with Mindaugas, first, early in the week, on IRC, while we were both streaming video to each other, then, later in the week on iVisit during a performance that Andy and Amy were doing from New Zealand — a bed-in for peace. after spending much of the week exploring some technologies that are not implemented on this site, and poking around the site making needed corrections (mostly in the code).

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

burger

barely time to. most of the day in my Lasipalatsi office working online. remote communications and tele-presence. late dinner, no, another hamburger. uff.

posted
  • place: Tornio, Finland

busyness

Rasa and Raitis arrived last night, and today is filled with the energy of them starting their two-week workshop in streaming media. plus the busy-ness of continuing my installations of network administrative software around the Macintosh net. Stef calls from Manhattan, and right after, Sanna calls from Helsinki. I was able to fix Annika’s printer, solve a hub relay problem, reformat Bernice’s computer, go swimming and shopping, and make some calls re: Cafe9 plans. many emails. words with others. thoughts. a full day, leaving me tired-eyed and exhausted now, and it is only Monday.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

-20C

Sanna misses the ferry. -20C today, with some wind and that special crystalline fog/snow blowing all around at ground level with the sky overhead a pale steel blue. the harbor is so packed with ice that the ferry grinds to a halt almost — stops processing the VR data projection that tells us we are traveling through a crowded harbor outside of the iced-over windows. already the telephone becomes a more active techno-tool in my life (can I remember when I started email?) getting calls, making calls. from wherever to wherever. how will this alter relation and presence? Café Soucis for lunch, walking around is a brisk event that holds a bit of seriousness in it — will I make it to the next warm point? checking into Finnish tax situations. filing in many countries this year, with MB’s help in Iceland.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Gaia-skin

back here. but only in time to head to the next destination. and a little time to live in dreams and aspirations before heading to the next destination, again to the far north, Trondheim. it becomes abundantly clear that my traveling retraces the Vikings more often than not. maybe I need to visit the Orkneys and the Faroes, and breath the air on the strand of Jutland, and move up the Volga to Moscow or across the Mediterranean to Constantinople. travel like that is nothing and everything in this age. easy in time, but not. to pay for the few moments in the screaming air high above the Gaia-skin surface one works and saves the little trade-notes for a week, a month? so the labor of travel is not the ease of stepping on a riveted and welded tube of alloyed metals and sitting in an engineered chair receiving drinks and food from plastic-faced souls. instead, it is woven into the routine of life in the largest scale. it is a way of being, travel, and has gotten neither harder nor easier in the intervening million years since folks have been cruisin’ around, bipedal. broke down finally and bought a mobile phone. Nokia. why. couldn’t live without it.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

stupid bowl

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

posted
  • place: Reykjavík, Iceland

Fax You catalog

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Night of the Arts @ the Academic Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, 25 August 1994

In the spring of 1995, I was back in Helsinki teaching and UIAH/TAIK (University of Art and Design) — CAP (Computer-Aided Photography) Lab, and with help from Visa and funding from FRAME, I produced a 200-page photocopy documentation (pdf download) in an edition of fifty from the incoming and outgoing works at the Helsinki end of the performance. It was distributed to all the participants as well as a number of pertinent archive sites around the world including the ArtPool Research Center in Budapest and the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. If you are interested in a copy, please contact me — I will pass one of the two or three copies that I have left along for U$D 500.00 postage-paid.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Fax You essay

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Project: Classic Fax

an essay by Jan Kenneth Weckman

Complying with the well-known maxim of McLuhan, that “the medium is the message,” nearly one hundred years of Modern Art has sustained the idea of a progress towards the self-referencing of the art object.

By sending pages chosen by the public behind the window of the academic bookstore from the drawing book of my son, Jason, I have acted out this slogan as a gesture of good-will towards those artists and writers who believe that through some event where “you take something, do something with it, then do something else with it,” you will reach a new level of conceptuality and artistic energy.

There are, of course, several complications to be analyzed in this event. Since the “now” of the avant-garde transforms into other moments of “now” in materials, vehicles, models, and codes, I see the medium in this case (the material and the vehicle of the fax transmission) as a remnant of the manipulative act of painting as an art. This same manipulative act it shares with photographic, lithographic, and photocopy working.

Images are produced by different configurations of material and vehicle. Meaning is produced through an agreed-upon common medium. The agreement is a sensual as well as a conceptual (historic) precondition to communication.

As I am only responsible for the decision to take my son’s drawings and use them as eligible imagery, separating the images transmitted from the vehicle transmitting gives a visibility to the classical notions of medium and message. That all this takes place within a larger field, that is, the World of Art, is not approachable for analysis within the event itself.

Any carrier of meaning which becomes an argument through its function of displacing something from one medium to another, resides within this classicism of the avant-garde.

The event could consequently be considered as a continuation of the tradition and craft of image-making that began in the ancient times of the cave-painters, and continued unaltered through Poussin, Cezanne, and Warhol.

In this context, writing is seen as evolving from the vast resources of an explicitly apprehended world, developing into a symbolic and systematic way of producing events and meaning. Human vision and human imagery is the facade of this relatively unlimited resource, a proof of which is pointed to by the technologic event of the fax-transmission.

The historic commonality of image-making and writing is well presented with the electronic techniques of the Fax. Thus is gives a thrust towards another angle: the non-classic fax project.

posted

Fax You performance

Fax You cover, Helsinki - New York, August 1994

Fax You performance, Academy Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, Night of the Arts, August 1994

Night of the Arts @ the Academic Bookstore, Helsinki, Finland, 25 August 1994

The Fax You project, sponsored by The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange and the Academy Bookstore, took place in the front window of the Academy Bookstore in Helsinki and the HERE Art center associated with the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater in New York City. One evening at the end of August is a special one in Helsinki called “The Night of The Arts” where there are a variety of cultural events, Fax You was one of them. I was invited to participate by Visa Norros, the artist organizing the Finnish end of the event. Visa is an old friend who I first met when he was a visiting lecturer at the Icelandic College of Art a few years back.

Night of the Arts audience for Fax You are engaged and intrigued by the content filling up the windows of the Academy Bookstore in central Helsinki. Starting around 1700, we established contact via fax and telephone with the folks New York and at 1800 began the project with the first documented trans-Atlantic I CHING casting. (Well, as a late post-script here, I would defer this honor to a performance arranged by Roy Ascott for the Ars Electronica Biennale of 1982 where artists in a number of locations in the US and Wales were linked with terminals. They then did a casting which signified “CHU” or “”Difficulty at the Beginning”…) We, on the other hand, alternated cities for each consecutive cast of the three coins, generating the hexagram “The Power of the Great” which energized everyone during the next six hours of hectic activity. Some of the photos below done at the Helsinki end of the event show the situation as we worked in the windows of the Academic Bookstore. In my view, one of the more important outcomes a project like this is the establishment of some kind of lasting connection — else the electronic performance be simply an act of artistic spectacle.

Participants List

Curators: Julia Kauste (New York), Visa Norros (Helsinki)

New York
Julia Kauste, Steven Johnson Leyba, John Reaves, Emiko Saldivar, David Factor, Dayle Vilatch, Christopher Barker, Adrian Klein, Patricia Tallone Orsoni, Steve Bradley, Genie Nable, Marilyn Mullen, Cynthia Pannucci, Paul Pierog, Lotte Kjaer, Sandy Spreitz, Miran Kim, Jeff Severtson, Bob Laluey, Lisa Roberts

Helsinki
Visa Norros, Andy Best, Johanna Gullichsen, John Hopkins, Anders Tomren, Jan Kenneth Weckman, Anne Tompuri, Annu Vertanen

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland and New York City, New York

Fax You announcement

The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange (FRAME), in cooperation with the Academic Bookstore, will organize a fax art happening with artists in Helsinki and New York.

Concept and Theme

A trans-Atlantic happening in which artists based in Finland cooperate with artists based in New York with the help of telefax as a medium of communication during three hours. The goal of the happening is to promote interactive art and communication beyond the boundaries of space and place, to experiment with the communication media, and to study alternative applications of telefax.

The act of making art is part of the happening: works are to be created during the happening. Artists add on top of each others works and comment on both the individual works and the surrounding environment. Photographers, who document the happening in both cities transmit impressions of the situation and atmosphere over the Atlantic. Authors and poets who present their works during the Night of Arts are welcome to participate in the fax happening. The artists work collectively in small groups. Trans-Atlantic working groups are encouraged.

Time. Place. Context.

Thursday the 25th of August, 1994 is a special night in Finland. The Helsinki Festival organizes together with the Academic Bookstore the Night of Arts. Most galleries, museums, theaters and shops in the city center keep their doors open until late into the night. Painters, graphic and performance artists, sculptors, singers, musicians, authors and poets perform for free in the streets and in the places mentioned above. In Helsinki the Fax Art happening is organized in cooperation with the Academic Bookstore from 10 pm to 1 am. Respectively in New York the happening will take place between 3 pm and 6 pm in an artists’ studio house.

Participating Artist

Novelists and poets, photographers, and 8-9 visual artists in each location.

The Medium and Necessary Equipment

Three telefax machines, two copy machines, two overhead projectors and a computer with a fax modem. Basic equipment will be provided by the organizers, however, artists are welcome to bring their own materials.

Bulletin

FRAME will document the happening in the form of a bulletin. It will be printed in five hundred copies and distributed to selected museums and galleries all over the world. The bulletin will consist of graphic, literature and photographic art works created during the happening.

Curators

In New York: Juulia Kauste, M.A. in Sociology of Art and Culture, M.S. in Urban Studies. She works as an Executive Director for the Finnish Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York.

In Helsinki: Visa Norros, graphic artist. Studies at the A. Tuhka Printmaking School in Helsinki; and at the Graphic Studio in Jyvaskyla, Finland. Internship at the Lithography Studio of Auguste Clot et Bramsen in Paris, France.

Sponsors and Organizing Parties

FRAME, The Finnish Fund for Art Exchange, was founded in 1992 to make Finnish Art and photography better known abroad. FRAME operates under the Fine Arts Academy Foundation. The Foundation’s board consists of twelve members. Three are appointed by the Ministry of Education, one by the City of Helsinki, three by the Fine Arts Association of Finland, and one each by the Artists’ Association of Finland, the Finnish Painters’ Union, the Association of Finnish Sculptors, the Society of Finnish Graphic Artists, and the Union of Finnish Art Associations.

FRAME works in collaboration with the key art museums and galleries, art organizations,and individual artists in Finland. FRAME also carries out special projects in collaboration with foreign exhibition organizers.

The Academic Bookstore is characterized by large figures: a sales area of 2,800 square meters on three floors, 8,000 meters of shelf space, some 140,000 items, a stock of over 400,000 book titles from 23,000 different publishers in the computerized register, over a dozen different languages, more than a million books in all … All of this is managed by four hundred people. These figures make the Academic Bookstore one of Europe’s largest and most diverse booksellers.