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

from Story Club

[ED: Edited to clarify sense and meaning. It will likely be edited after posting as well.]

George, you know me as something of a cynic, and while I have always admired you and your trajectory, and what you have accomplished over the past 45 years, I’m afraid that I disagree with the idea that culture (cultural production) can save our society from what is, perhaps, an inevitable trajectory. Having just finished reading

Klemperer, Victor. To the Bitter End: The Diaries of Victor Klemperer, 1942–1945. 1st ed. Vol. 2. 3 vols. New York, NY: Random House, 1999.

and

Klemperer, Victor, and Martin Brady. The Language of the Third Reich: LTI Lingua Tertii Imperii: A Philologist’s Notebook. Bloomsbury Revelations edition. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013.

I was reminded how culture is often (always?) overtaken (taken over?) and becomes an extension of the dominating state (or power in control of the state). While throughout the Third Reich, there were countless small acts of kindness in the face of extreme social oppression and control, this did not stop the juggernaut of singular human pathology turning the overall society into a violent (Nazi) killing machine. And along with the killing, that machine simply subsumed cultural production. Remember book-banning-then-burning? Oh, wait, no need to remember, I can read about the banning here, now!

The foundation of the Amurikan system since WWII is predicated on an often-hidden-but-often-expressed element of violence that has superseded any prior Empires by orders of magnitude. We are of that system, and fully immersed within it. Think of both our long-ago stints in service of the “Imperialist Vanguard”!

I do truly hope that your optimism is not misplaced as we seem to slide into a vortex quite similar to the many vortices experienced by humans in the past and/or in other places. I often have the feeling that so many people in the contemporary developed world are so fully immersed in the consumption of mediated constructs of the world that unmediated, meat-space, direct apprehension of the world has been lost or at least stripped of its value. This would include direct face-to-face engagement with proximal Life (not in films, not online, not in books, but in direct expression and embodied impression). This is a fundamental of community that has been severely drained of vitality … by, for example, ‘social media’. Vitality going down the drain, along with the fundamental structures of a sustainable society.

In a way, the power of Klemperer’s diaries, as written/mediated, contradict everything I have expressed here and do support your core idea, as they were ‘simply’ his writings—detailed daily reflections on events and feelings in his more immediate surrounds—that, through his perseverance, made it, bound, to my bedside table. Thence, in hand, giving rise to change within my embodied system. However, the time I spent reading them, well, would it have been better spent helping a neighbor (as I have been helped on occasion during my recent rural existence)? We cannot have anything approaching a democracy without community, and neither can we have a just or truly diverse society without the repeated, crucial encounter with the Other: open, embodied, hypostatic, indeterminate, unscripted, and imbued with the active presence of change. (Again, I contradict, yes, writing can do this, any mediated fragment of culture can do this, but …)

Hope this jangling screed doesn’t come across badly. Maybe I should have kept it in our private convos, such as they are! You know my respect for you. So it goes.

to Story Club, and Prof. Saunders, December 2024.

Perhaps this points to the idea that there are only small acts of kindness. That there are, in perceived reality, no societal, cultural acts of kindness. That tribal is tribal, clan is clan, and the will to survive in that exclusive social configuration is primal and primary. Altruism, while potentially able to bridge particular rival societal strictures in particular instances, is not able to change wider societal trajectories. This may be the source of liberal failure: imagining, falsely, that it is possible to do what is not possible, taming animal nature. Perhaps this impulse is simply another expression of human hubris. It also may explain the sudden withdrawal of (many) liberals from the scene in the moment, in the face of that wider swell (tsunami!) of societal grievance led by … a singular pathological will-to-survive. This retreat may have a texture of localized kindness, wonderful! But cataclysm at the more global scale may be inevitable. Indeed, at the psycho-spiritual scale maybe this is what Life is: the challenge to find a(n internal) energy source for the expression of kindness in the cataclysm. Not sure I personally have the capacity for this anymore, but that is another issue.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

quick comment

sotto voce to brainstorms on the question of people’s music-listening habits: I reflected obliquely on this question in my dissertation, examining the concept of radio as a cultural ‘amplifier’ operated centrally (more or less) with the effect of inculcating cultural sameness and diminishing cultural idiosyncrasy — the technology aiding in the ‘formation’ of a collective social fabric. I find that, broadly speaking, there is a continuum along the axis of people who seek difference and those who avoid difference. I also have friends who are still listening to a narrow selection of music that they first were immersed in in high school. And others who are still hunting for new and interesting (to them) things to listen to. It’s a curious phenomena, but I believe related to those two basic factors — the imposition of the effects of a (variably)-centralized technology on a social system, and, again, individual capacities to accept or reject (or just be comfortable with) difference. (And, yes, Ari, it’s not about ‘better’ or ‘worse’, imho, just difference or sameness.)

(And, the over-riding question of capitalist profits on cultural production buried in the middle of the pile of “stars” that we are routinely presented with through those amplification machines) …

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

ruminations

As I catch up, year-end, on a variety of old and new postings from folks, I engage in a blurred comparison process: between what they write (and illustrate), and what I write (and otherwise mediate via image and sound). A number of folks have jumped on Substack, or podcast subscription platforms. It’s hard for me to think about a paying subscription, though, as the monetary side of life is so … sensitive. And I haven’t received a penny in the last decade on my site. How to barter for access to their creative content? Perhaps I’ll raise the issue with some of them. How about a vintage photographic print from my archive for a year’s subscription?

Most others I know have a public (written) voice that is quietly friendly and ultimately readable, compared to mine. I explicitly recall a couple conversations with Norie, my PhD adviser, who said “Be kind to your readers”, something I appreciated, but honestly didn’t understand how to implement. There was and continues to be a profound internal pressure to simply get ideas down in the most precise way manageable with my particular (untempered) linguistic skill-set. As an editor I can clean up an unholy mess of words that someone else has regurgitated, honoring their ideas and intentions and making a kindly and readable text. My own ruminations, while well-edited, have only been subject to a precision test, not a ‘kindness’ test. That test, in itself, is reasonable, but tends to forge a dense, leaden text. My general excuse: texts that I have had to fight my way through understanding very often have been the most rewarding to and impactful of my worldview. Of course, I can’t make any such claims as to my own obfuscations. Giving back the energies of what I have received? Hardly. Ugh!

At any rate, George has now embraced substack with his Story Club; T.C. and her husband Dave continue documenting their interesting life between Alaska and Colorado with the Adventures of the Odaroloc Sled Dogs; Owen documents every day from Finland, India, and elsewhere with a short text and image, and has for the past decade; Christie and her friend have their Emerging Form podcast; Zander started Buzzcut both also on substack. Adam has Datatheism; John Hays has Relative Something. As a vital community exploring the sonic world, aporee::maps continues to evolve with more than 58,000 field recordings. I managed to contribute only a handful during the year, with my total around 1,700 since 2008. Just recently the World According to Sound (co-founded by talented public radio sound peeps Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett) announced an interesting calendar of live 90-minute binaural podcasts — Winter Listening Series — digging deeper into sonic phenomena beyond their shorter podcast series on sound. And, while I’m at it, Radio Web MACBA: a non-profit, cultural communication radiophonic project based at MACBA Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, hosts more than 800 podcasts covering the heights and breadths of radio beyond radio. Oh, not to mention the trove of 400,000 sound recordings from before 1926 that have entered the public domain as of last week. Finally, Lloyd Dunn, formerly a Tape Beatle, continues releasing his rich sonic and visual work on nula.cc.

Then the next anniversary of Art’s Birthday is coming up on 17 January …

If I had more time, I guess I could be rooting around endlessly online, posting a more full review of these and other voices. But then, how would I get any of my own work done? I wonder: what is the ratio of humans to verbiage? And, what was it before the Gutenberg press, before the typewriter, before the PC, before the iPhone, before Fazebuch?

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

latter day musing

Teaching is not a behavioral product. It is a lived praxis. (How many times have I used that phrase in this blog? lived praxis). But how to explain a failure, a collapse, an implosion in the learning process? What are these manifestations in life? Recovery from collapse is certainly a learned skill with an ultimate value in life. But irruption or, worse, a slow, tired, wheezing descent into nullification: now that’s some bad shit to deal with.

Taking on a learning situation as an open system—open to change and influence—as a temporally circumscribed instance in a long continuity of flows, of life, this is a singular process to face.

Isn’t it such that knowledge comes from the lived process of experientially reduced and filtered sensual input? Failure loses any negative connotation when considered simply as one path in the infinitely variable flux of sensual experience.

This text started out as a brief meditation on past instances of perceived failure to imbue knowledge — or, to simply imbue lived experience. It surfaced in the context of the widespread, forced turn to remote learning as other forms of proximal human presence become untenable for viral risk. As long as the alienating loss that is implicit in the mediatory technology is recognized and qualified, the remote presence+absence, taken together, may at least sustain some human connection. The loss, however, has profound affect on life.

Lacking the mental focus to continue along that line of musing, I instead jump to the present: which hides and reveals itself. Possible trajectories, once solid, shimmer and vanish: fata morgana, fata americana, fata mondial, fata cosmologica. Other trajectories suddenly loom, darkening, from root chakra, muladhara. And yet others take on material forms: structures, potentials, spaces, and energized flows: water, air, and earth. Eyes open to another spectral zone, seeing mind in things.

The oracle will be cast, commentaries and interpretations will follow, those with ears will hear, eyes will read, if subscribed!

posted

the human use of human beings …

Wiener, N. 1954. The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

Memory says I could not understand the meaning of this book in the first times I picked it up, browsing through my father’s library, looking for something to take back to the cool basement rec room to read on a sticky-hot rural Maryland summer day. I was maybe ten years old. It was the cover, in part — quite different than the drab math, engineering, and analysis tomes — that made it at least seem readable.

We are swimming upstream against a great torrent of disorganization, which tends to reduce everything to the heat death of equilibrium and sameness described in the second law of thermodynamics. What Maxwell, Bolzmann and Gibbs meant by this heat death in physics has a counterpart in the ethic of Kierkegaard, who pointed out that we live in a chaotic moral universe. In this, our main obligation is to establish arbitrary enclaves of order and system. These enclaves will not remain there indefinitely by any momentum of their own after we have once established them … We are not fighting for a definitive victory in the indefinite future. It is the greatest possible victory to be, to continue to be, and to have been … This is no defeatism, it is rather a sense of tragedy in a world in which necessity is represented by an inevitable disappearance of differentiation. The declaration of our own nature and the attempt to build an enclave of organization in the face of nature’s overwhelming tendency to disorder is an insolence against the gods and the iron necessity that they impose. Here lies tragedy, but here lies glory too.

Wiener, N. 1954. The human use of human beings: cybernetics and society. Garden City, New York: Doubleday.

posted

imagination morte imaginez

One of my favorite Beckett pieces:

No trace anywhere of life, you say, pah, no difficulty there, imagination not dead yet, yes, dead, good, imagination dead imagine. Islands, waters, azure, verdure, one glimpse and vanished, endlessly, omit. Till all white in the whiteness the rotunda. No way in, go in, measure. Diameter three feet, three feet from ground to summit of the vault. Two diameters at right angles AB CD divide the white ground into two semicircles ACB BDA. Lying on the ground two white bodies, each in its semicircle. White too the vault and the round wall eighteen inches high from which it springs. Go back out, a plain rotunda, all white in the whiteness, go back in, rap, solid throughout, a ring as in the imagination the ring of bone. The light that makes all so white no visible source, all shines with the same white shine, ground, wall, vault, bodies, no shadow. more “imagination morte imaginez”

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The (Tantric) Science of Sound

by Rooji Saluja

In tantra, there exists an entire science that makes use of sound energy in spiritual practice. Mantras are sonic vehicles that encapsulate mystical energy and direct it towards specific aims.

How does sound affect us? Try this. Close your eyes and imagine screeching cars, blaring horns and hooting train carriages. What do you feel? Your pulse quickens, heartbeat races and blood seems to be gushing towards the heart. Now change the scene. Imagine the sound of water gushing gently over the pebbles, and a thousand anklets beating against the soft wind, in tune with the flowing stream. At once, a calm, serene feeling takes over, lulling your senses to a soft awareness. This is the magic of sound.

Vedic scholar and author Dr David Frawley in Ayurveda and the Mind argues that there is a background sound pattern to our consciousness. It may be a song we have just heard, or the sound bytes from a painful or pleasurable event. Some movement of sound is always going on inside us. Like rhythm in music, it determines the rhythm of our consciousness. Furthermore sound is the vehicle for emotion, which we can either reinforce or release. We sing with joy, shout in anger, cry in sorrow and groan in pain. Thus each emotion corresponds to a particular kind of sound, and intensified emotions usually demand stronger sounds. more “The (Tantric) Science of Sound”

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BLANDISM: A manifesto / a womanifesto

Now that all sections of humanity have discovered the enabling power of political correctness we, the artists, have made a conscious decision to join in this admirable trend.

By a process of elimination of all and any other alternatives we, the undersigned, have concluded that political correctness is, above all, wisdom. We are therefore forever determined to eradicate all references within the creation of our work to Sex, Religion, Political commentary, risqué humour[1] and satire and any other currently considered; or yet to be considered, inappropriate subjects.
more “BLANDISM: A manifesto / a womanifesto”

posted

ipse dixit:

New York Times comment:

Just as a mass deflects the space-time continuum around it, every organism changes the flux of energies it is immersed within merely by its presence. Ecosystems are simple models of the complexity of inter-relation that the presence of Life brings to the planet.

Humans in their current numbers – attributable to ‘easy’ energy access (resources) – are clearly affecting the entire global system. Bolstered by a glut of consumable energy sources that allow us to propagate in unprecedented numbers, we are causing a shift in global energy flows paralleled in scope only by the rise of Prokaryotic Archean life-forms.

Our ‘management’ of the ecosystem, despite the occasional successes of a holistic systems thinking approach, is based on reductive models that can never fully anticipate the range of effects exerted on the global system.

Living organisms react to abundant energy sources by reproducing; when energy sources disappear, species numbers collapse. It may be that the planet will simply have to abide the burst of human population and its attendant systemic change. Once the species has consumed all easily accessible energy, a gradual (or precipitous!) drop in human numbers will follow, and the global system will take on yet another character, managing itself very well, thank you. Life will continue, projecting itself into the future with astonishing vigor, even ferocity, until the planet and the solar system get subsumed.

So it goes: https://tinyurl.com/hfpregr

posted
  • place: Copper Basin, Arizona

more on the archive

A bit overwhelming, faced with thousands of images and texts in analog form. How to go about it, especially as there is no possibility of waving hands and all get transformed to digital gems. Dross versus age, time, and energy. And the solitary process of culling, ordering, and such. The application of a system upon that which has no system, or has an unusable system for the future. More order where there is less, more simplicity where chaos has lent an indeterminate complexity. And many holes in knowing what is what. The flesh-and-blood memory storage devices have dissolved in flame. So those faces from 60, 70, 80 years ago are now unknown by name, though the far-ago visages are here re-membered in form.

Only so much life-time/life-energy is available for these tasks, this remembering. Time spent on looking backwards is time not spent in the moment looking around and participating in the immediacy of creative action. But an inertia is building to return to works on paper, in large format.

posted

The Honey Funnel

Recently ploughed and deeply rutted
With dangerous streams to the left,
We raced toward the honey funnel.

The pig’s head, now bright
As a champagne breakfast, was stoic
Having long since passed its live-by-date.

Whilst all the while the parachuting monkey
Priest
Dangled ‘neath the folding feeding chair that
Once was new but now
Was as redundant as a flock of stilled hyphens.

I’ll rescue you from this!
But first I must outrun
The tweedy jacket’s froth
And show my wife my love
Is stronger than my will
To saturate the keening krill.

Yet torn by hurried hurricanes
Of doubtful origin
We stumble
For lack of stable
Purchase
and Original
Epiphany

Venice, Italy, 11 October 2015. For the 2016 centenary of DADA. Written during a residency at the Emily Harvey Foundation whilst suffering a hangover and serious Internet connection problems.

posted

Treasure

I grew up in the nineteen forties in a village at the edge of the New Forest in England, on the other side of the road from the bungalow in which I was born there were two massive oak trees, beneath and beside the oak tree on the left was a holly bush, we would cut berried twigs from the bush to decorate our home at Christmas.  When I was five or six I crawled into the space under the holly bush and there I found a small round tin that rattled when I shook it.

“Treasure!” I thought. The tin was rusted shut, it had obviously been lying there for quite a while. I did, after some considerable effort with a screwdriver, get the tin open and inside was … a set of false teeth!

posted

The Field of Attention, The Field of Flows

Slipping through a day, from dawn to late evening, time is a field of flows. Attention calls flow from its progress, delineating it temporarily as distinct and heterogeneous. Pass through attentiveness, and one arrives at the granular curtain of awareness. Seeing both detail and the full over-flow of being.

Fighting to maintain constant attention to lived life. Back to breathing?

An attempt to address the title of this blog entry. Entries arise from these titles. Titles self-generate from the textures of living. Entries are attempts to address the titles, to address the textures of life, to form a text: a reduction of life. A tautology of be-ing — writing about be-ing — a pleonastic embolism destined to disrupt attention, flow, and life itself. And yet these become normative to the social. Normative to the day of lived-life, pried from living body, in service to social presence, social acceptance, and social ‘success’. If only all the world were ignorant of Plato!

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Everything in the universe

Everything in the universe, and everything of man, would be registered at a distance as it was produced. In this way a moving image of the world will be established, a true mirror of his memory. From a distance, everyone will be able to read text, enlarged and limited to the desired subject, projected on an individual screen. In this way, everyone from his armchair will be able to contemplate creation in its entirety or in certain of its parts. — Paul Otlet

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

the big road

Coming soon to the Digital Drive-In terminal nearest you will be the traffic reports direct from America courtesy of the artist John Hopkins who will be rolling west on The Big Road during the month of August. There is always something happening out there on the road and The Big Road will bring it web-direct to you. From road kill to hamburger prices. And you thought Route 66 was just a song — it’s where you GO!

This project brought to you courtesy of Tapio Mäkelä and Terhi Penttilä curators of the MUU Artist Associations Tenth Anniversary Digital Drive-In project. and is dedicated to those with whom I have rolled across the face of this place on four wheels with hydrocarbon fires burning — 01 August 1998, somewhere in Amurika

posted
  • place: Arvada, Colorado

FYI – thesis stats

Words 62396
Unique Words 7990
Characters 389373
Characters In Words 311542
Sentences 3469
Average Word Length 5.0
Average Sentence Length 89.8
Average Words Per Sentence 18.0
Long Words (7 or more characters) 18833
Short Words (3 or fewer characters) 25362
Syllables 107416
Monosyllabic Words 33568
Polysyllabic Words (3 or more syllables) 13738

Automated Readability Index 11.1
Coleman Index 12.0
Coleman-Liau Index 13.6
Dale Chall Readability Index 10.4
Dale Chall Readability Grade Level 16
Degrees Of Reading Power (DRP) 72
Degrees Of Reading Power Grade Level Greater than 12
Fang Easy Listening Formula 13
Fang Easy Listening Interpretation Standard
Farr-Jenkins-Patterson Score 36
Farr-Jenkins-Patterson Reading Ease Difficult
Flesch Reading Ease Score 43
Flesch Reading Ease Difficult
Flesch Reading Ease Grade Level 13 to 16 (College)
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11.7
Flesch-Kincaid Reading Age 16.7
Fry Readability Grade Level 14
Fry Readability Reading Age 19
FORCAST Grade Level 11.9
FORCAST Reading Age 16.9
Gunning Fog Index (FOG) 16.0
Gunning Fog Reading Age 21.0
Henshall formula 533.8
Johnson Readability 46.2
Johnson Grade Level 8 or higher
Lexical Density 12.8
Laesbarhedsindex (LIX) Index 48.0
Laesbarhedsindex (LIX) Readability Difficult
Laesbarhedsindex (LIX) Grade Level 9
Linsear Write Readability 13.0
McAlpine EFLAW© Test 25.3
McAlpine EFLAW© Readability Very Easy
Miyazaki EFL Readability Index 36.6
Power-Sumner-Kearl Grade Level 7.0
Power-Sumner-Kearl Reading Age 12.0
Rate Index (RIX) 5.4
Rate Index (RIX) Grade Level 11
Raygor Readability Grade Level College
SMOG Score 14.5
SMOG Index 14.0
SMOG Reading Age 19.0
Spache Readability Index (Original) 4.3
Spache Readability Index (Revised) 3.7
Wheeler Smith Index 52.2
Wheeler Smith Grade Level Greater than 4

posted

chilly morning words

Chilly morning words form. Brushing away the crust of ice formed by dreams of last night. And other morning words of resolution. Or just thoughts. Words. With cornbread heating in the oven. New warmth diffusing into the food-stuff. A morning. A morning. Words melt, spill, tremble. Waiting to drop into space. Formed from symbols that litter the mind. And then, the thoughts on resolution. the accuracy of the human animal sensibilities.

And all that.

I run, minded, mindful, of the past and what. is. not. yet. The recent spins into the places of spinning. Words traded with new Others. And Others becoming newer in closeness.

I write like this in the morning. And let mind wander. The discipline lies alone in the be-ing. Not much else at all. But. I find no pointedness here of objective. To explore in these words. At least, I see none yet. Retrospective. And this such that we create more than we may know at the point of creation. Why is this: some disconnection with the creative self to be unfolded at some later time? I know of all which I have created at some points. Some electric instances. but of this, life remains unknown.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Nordic Nazi recollections

Hitler’s worldview included copious referencing of Nordic creation mythologies (thus his love of Wagner!). One consequence of this obsession was the emergence of strong pro-Nazi movements leading up to, through, and most disturbingly, after WWII in all the Nordic/Scandic countries (Nordic countries comprise all the Scandinavian countries (Iceland, Sweden, Norway, Denmark), plus Finland). Some Icelanders eagerly supported these Nazi ideologies — documented in black-and-white images of uniformed goose-stepping rubes on parade in downtown Reykjavík before the 1940 British occupation, and the refusal of Icelandic authorities to allow African-American soldiers into the country during the later US occupation. These warped sympathies have persisted right up to the present time: a fact that was brought to my attention by a sequence of articles published in Iceland’s main national newspaper, Morgunbladið, back in the early 1990’s when I had recently immigrated to Reykjavík to take up residence with my future ex-wife, an Icelandic psychologist who I had met in Germany a few years previous. The current events in Norway bring all this back to mind, again… more “Nordic Nazi recollections”

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Migrating: Art: Academies: done

MigAA book cover (pdf download)

After eight weeks of intensive effort, sometimes re-writing almost from scratch a wide range of (English-second-language) articles, essays, and academic papers, the second and final book from the MigAA project is done and at the printers. Bravo to the Alfa60 designers, Joseph and Lina in Vilnius — perhaps this book will win awards like the last one did! And big kudos to El Jefe, miga, without whom, none of this would have come to pass, none of it!

This is the jacket blurb I wrote in ten minutes — the day Lina was sending the book to the printers! more “Migrating: Art: Academies: done”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Art and Teaching Philosophy

ART

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged and immersive pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated and directed by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a humane seeking: to engage in a dialogue of energies with an Other. Finding a proper pathway for those energies—transmitting: simultaneously receiving the expressions of the Other—this is the moving act of creativity. Creativity is the charged flow of energies between and through the Self and the Other over relative spaces and times.

These two proto-definitions are the basis of my art and teaching praxis. more “Art and Teaching Philosophy”

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

garden house

tippling, tripling, toppling, tanking. what to say. when texts compile, and interesting meetings line up, and projects pile up, and such like. Kiel is busy, but folks are not feeling too well, sick baby, very sick parents, and suchlike. so I work on remote things, prepare for several upcoming performances, and network. clean out and organized the garden house, at least round one. the roof needs some repair, so, will have to look after that on a future visit. the Polish guys are really messy in their working habits. next round with the final remodel of the upstairs bathroom, hope that will change. yeah, helping out as possible.

posted
  • place: Bedford, New York

the travelog

catching up with the kids to see how they grow. and plenty of chances to participate in the raptor hunting/feeding events despite the icy snow and such weather that I’m not so used to.

prepping to leap? or to merely stand still, justly, or, perhaps, verily. I do say unto you. all these texts and images. 2007 will be the peak year for the neoscenes travelog. it can’t become a more time-consumptive project, or, god-help-me, it’ll end up nah’ good for da body in this in-car-nation. counting the hours? counting the ROI (return-on-investment)? the social benefits that arise from this work? practically infinite for the first question, practically zero for the last two. and with significant chunks of life-time going in to this, and nothing coming out from it. why-oh-why do I persist? bulldog jaw spasms onto the carotid.

The act of seeing (active) gradually changing in the act of looking (passive) is exactly what modern global capitalism is doing with human mankind. By replacing the means to create a life (rurality, agriculture, self-protecting, autocratic societies) with the means to earn a life (industries, labour, rent, mortgage, salary, funeral insurance), the emphasis slowly drifts from the active sense to the passive sense. This is exemplified by the way the internet developed from a research instrument to an entertainment device. In this process which lasted a surprisingly short time of about ten years, the presence of the web turned from a small interesting peer-to-peer group to a huge beast of millenarian proportions. The monster as the natural companion of a gigantic destroyer. The spider’s web is eyeing the world , the eye lost its vision and is multiplied inwardly on a enormous scale , blinded by its own image like the drowning men filming their own drowning in a drowning world. — A. Andreas (cited from nettime)

posted
  • place: Stepney-Limehouse, London, England

Valentines

White Heliotrope

The feverish room and that white bed,
The tumbled skirts upon a chair,
The novel flung half-open, where
Hat, hair-pins, puffs, and paints are spread;

The mirror that has sucked your face
Into its secret deep of deeps,
And there mysteriously keeps
Forgotten memories of grace;

And you half dressed and half awake,
Your slant eyes strangely watching me,
And I, who watch you drowsily,
With eyes that, having slept not, ache;

This (need one dread? nay, dare one hope?)
Will rise, a ghost of memory, if
Ever again my handkerchief
Is scented with White Heliotrope.
— Arthur Symons

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

the Great Society

on the way back from Phoenix, a stop at Arcosanti, which seems to be tired and spent, not so much changed since I visited about 20 years ago. some of the constructions seem to be very comfortable places for living, but overall, the infrastructure is marginal.

tripping onto small chunked bits of left-over text, text that was not consumed by the vacuum-cleaner of the ages. text that is left-over to be digested and re-formed by the reader who is a writer at the same time as reading. consume, re-form, re-contextualize, excrete.

The Great Society arose through the discovery that men can live together in peace and mutually benefiting each other without agreeing on the particular aims which they severally pursue. The discovery that by substituting abstract rules of conduct for obligatory concrete ends made it possible to extend the order of peace beyond small groups pursuing the same ends, because it enabled each individual to gain from the skill and knowledge of others whom he need not even know and whose aims could be wholly different from his own. — Friedrich Hayek
posted

The Birth of Beward, Blimey!

I cannot remember exactly when and how it was, but somebody at some time in the past century invented e-mail. And while members of the general public used the new toy to lure naive little girls in the thick of the woods or to circulate ads of penis enlargers, other more enlightened individuals were chatting day and night on esoteric subjects such as Dodo’s bird watching in the Gulf of New Papua or George Papanicolaou’s Pap Test. Rod Dave Summers and me, instead, were getting tired of endlessly discussing Spike Milligan’s misspellings in the Goon Show scripts, so a new technological version of an old loafer’s game was devised out of thin air: let’s write a poem together, one line each, until we get fed up with it. Not a simple love poem, mind you, or a small existentialist haiku, but a whole epic poem, a noisy warmongering Viking saga that would take years to write through snail-mail exchanges, but only kept us busy for a few, em, years with the mighty super speed of e-mail: one line a day keeps the docker at bay (or something along these rhymes).

A Lennon-McCartney collaboration it wasn’t, but pretty jolly smoothly it flowed, my flawed English ironed and chiselled by Rod Dave, the story quickly taking quirky, qwerty and qzerty turns into the historically improbable and the outright obscene. The Surrealists called it the Exquisite Cadaver, we nicknamed it the Necrophorus White Pudding (ain’t as good as it used to be, is it?): we tried to squeeze as many personal obsessions per line as permitted by the laws of decency into tight couplets, triplets, quadrigae, freemason free meters, inept ad libs, never really bothering to check a medieval tome for the true gynaecological treetop of our Nordic hero. We deemed it more important to state how much Bew liked M&M chocolate drops (we all need a sponsor) and to indulge in graphic descriptions of Regal copulations on ice and Lego theme parks. We also cheated a lot, doing more than one line at a time and ripping whole paragraphs from Doom Metal songs and exotic weather forecasts. So how did this bloody Beward saga really begin, for gossip’s sake!? I don’t know.

Vittore Dave Baroni,
4th of July 2006

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Rexroth

Mr. Sobol, while mentioning his wonderful gigblog, finds resonance in my travelog and the work of Kenneth Rexroth, and sends one of Rexroth’s works along.

Inversely, As The Square Of Their Distances Apart

It is impossible to see anything
In this dark; but I know this is me, Rexroth,
Plunging through the night on a chilling planet.
It is warm and busy in this vegetable
Darkness where invisible deer feed quietly.
The sky is warm and heavy, even the trees
Over my head cannot be distinguished,
But I know they are knobcone pines, that their cones
Endure unopened on the branches, at last
To grow embedded in the wood, waiting for fire
To open them and reseed the burned forest.
And I am waiting, alone, in the mountains,
In the forest, in the darkness, and the world
Falls swiftly on its measured ellipse.
* * *
It is warm tonight and very still.
more “Rexroth”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Vulgi opinio Error

speaking of modern, post-modern, along with avant-garde, and such terms… some very abstract musings:

I am wondering if there is a connection between the concept of being ‘avant garde’ or ‘modern’ with a basic concept of being: where confronting the unknown is a test of the embodied self (the full set of abilities to deal with the unknown). Certain kinds of people can deal with the unknown better than others. Fear is a definite factor, but so is basic psychic ability.

Of course there are many facets of the unknown, but it can be defined as the sensual/sensory apprehension of any previously un-experienced energy flow. For example, in a materialist/physical sense, someone with a strong body constitution is better able to confront the unknown (unpredictable enemy, new viral infection, can move further in order to ‘find’ the unknown more easily).
more “Vulgi opinio Error”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

womanifesto

my entry for the exhibition womanifesto Procreation/Postcreation in Bangkok that Varsha asked me to join — turns out that she uses the simple entry as a main element of the exhibition poster, invites, and publication (it’s the spiral line of text)!

____________________________________________

procreation:

creativity is energy-in-motion

the essence of motion, movement, is energy

the quickening of the spirit

a look around to apprehend the Other

a dialogue begins

small flows of energy between two

fundamental creation, life

one plus one equals three

primal phenomenon

__________________________________________________

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

proto definitions

The end of this year approaches. I jot down some definitions for class:

Proto definitions:

digital art — artifacts/performances enabled by a digital device

(computer)net art — art(ifacts?) on the net (what’s the net?) Internet? Any network?

web art — specific art(ifact?) for viewing on the WWW (and possibly interacting with that remote dataspace)

networking art — art activities that take advantage of, or use the concepts of, (human/technological) networks; use of those spaces for active expression (creation of spaces for others to create in). the network which is an extension of the socialized being

mediation — the act of standing between; a carrier; that which carries from one to the other. a bridge across/through the sensual world standing between the Self and the Other

media art — artifacts created via (traditional, analog) media devices

multimedia — more than one media

Keeping to several centers, not comatose in any of their distributed flows. Understand that now the up-springing source for the publicly “creative” work is something of a distortion created in the fabric of childhood (listen good parents) — that reverberates in the fractured pattern of shot-gun-fire in a rock canyon, each present de-formation of being expressed across the local social matrix is a hard surface that often will reflect and repel energy of any kind. The curling whine of ricochet as peeled-sheath bullet changes trajectory and spins to a sonic resonance within ear.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Carillion article

for the record, as the university (of Colorado) no longer publishes nor maintains the archive of this magazine, this is the text of an article done by a CU J-School graduate student, Nicole Gordon.

Visiting artist John Hopkins explores relationship between art and technology

After twelve years of living and lecturing in Europe, digital artist John Hopkins is back in the United States. He’s no stranger to the University of Colorado at Boulder; in fact, he earned his master of fine arts degree from CU-Boulder in 1989. These days, however, Hopkins has returned to campus as a visiting artist rather than a student.

“I’ve always had a deep connection to the physical landscape of the West, and intellectually I find Europe stimulating,” Hopkins said. “I’ve attempted to have both, though in the end, physical location is not always important. What is of primary importance is surrounding oneself with humane and positive people — then anything is possible.”

Hopkins’ interest lies at the intersection of art and technology. He describes his work as “art that is not artifact-oriented, but delves into the unique communicative aspects of global networks.”

“John Hopkins has a long-standing commitment to the art network,” said Jim Johnson, interim chair of the Fine Arts Department. “He brings to the department a dedication to art as an ephemeral human process and his work in the digital community has been a natural outgrowth of that dedication. He has inspired numerous art students to pursue art in the real context of one-to-one communication as opposed to the conventional and isolated production of precious objects.”

Hopkins has been a professional artist since 1985. His career has taken him to Iceland, Finland, Norway, Russia, Switzerland, Germany, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, and Austria as a visiting artist or guest lecturer. His art has been recognized at the prestigious Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria and he has works in numerous private and public collections, including the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris and the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York City.

At CU-Boulder, Hopkins is teaching introductory and advanced digital art classes, as well as working on individual projects with students and doing international performances.

One of his most recent projects at CU-Boulder, in collaboration with students, is a live, online open-platform happening for creative expression and action called di>fusion. The project, which can be experienced at https://neoscenes.net/projects/difusion1/, simultaneously occupies global network spaces and local physical space with collaborative performance, sonic, music, disc- and video-jockeys, text, poetry-slam, and video events.

“I have done similar projects with students across Europe,” Hopkins said. “And indeed, projects like di>fusion are only partially geographically grounded. Much of the project happens in the space of networks, so there are participants and audiences in many locations.”

Hopkins studied geophysical engineering at the Colorado School of Mines as an undergraduate and worked as a geophysicist before pursuing his art career. He says that art and science aren’t so far apart.

“I worked with electromagnetic fields in geophysics, and I’m basically doing the same in art,” he said.

After receiving his art degree, Hopkins found that the European cultural scene suited his ambitions.

“During the decade of the 90s, while the United States was heavily involved in the dot.com bubble inflation and bursting, there were others in other locations who were looking more critically at technological innovation and the rise of global networks,” he said. “These critical views were often coming out of creative cultural research in Europe.”

Hopkins also noted that funding for arts and culture in Europe is much greater than in the United States.

“There have been many opportunities to get funding for creative projects that could never be realized in the U.S.,” he said. “Scandinavia is generally more advanced than the U.S. in terms of technological implementations society-wide, so naturally there were many interesting things happening on the cultural side related to technology.”

An experienced teacher, Hopkins says that he is committed to the dynamics of the learning environment as a critical and important facet of his work.

“I seek to create vital learning spaces — conceptual and physical zones where the exercise of free expression and spontaneous dialogue take place,” he said.

Examples of Hopkins’ work and more information about him can be accessed on his personal Web site at https://neoscenes.net.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

I couldn’t understand it

my primary work when one calls it that, is the work in fundamental critique of the (meta)structure(s) that we are embedded in, in this sensual reality. it is not about the exigencies of work. It is mounted not in opposition, but in simple meeting-along-the-road. confronting that which manifests in the daily movement of life in life.

and I am astonished to discover that some of my students can’t read basic texts without simply quitting and saying “that was a terrible paper, I couldn’t understand it.”

I was WAY TOO EASY on the students I had this term. just not wanting to push them too hard. and that seems a big mistake. that they do not positively thrive on taking reign of their own progress, education, and enLightenment. not near rigorous enough. no toughness. but do they really need it? is this a condition? is it related to the social structure in which they are immersed? one where many of the human relations are mapped into incredibly convoluted and warped pathways. being graded. a scientific method, and a supreme lack of genuine dialogues. balanced flows. but is it worth it to try to change those flows? there are the hints of value. bright value, value that will float above knowledge, be a Lightness in life, perhaps. but the risk and inertia to overcome seems irresistible.

I mean, who IS the prophet in this time? Lennon has passed, Coltrane, Davis, Marley, and a hundred others, from all places and ways. but all on the same pathway. is it inside of time or outside? if not inside, then it is everywhere perhaps, or concentrated in one place. concentrations raw enough for the human to sense. and delve into. that we are not able to see the scale of all.

make assignments — for example, journal entries, no less than 40 entries with no spelling errors during the semester. ouch. but they need the discipline side. in Master Printing, I had the manifest tools, process available. with the computer, and the network, more difficult to pinpoint the tool and the process. but the practice, the living praxis, is the core/key.

for example — present the Apple iTunes screen “visual” algorithm. what is the politic of that? who made it? is that person an artist? basic questions to get things started. but on to harder ones. yeah, like pick an inspiring web space and describe why, in 500 words, it moves you. as a journal entry. with no spelling errors.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

silke texts

got a phone today. back to mobile living. way-points. stadia. and organizing life. measuring all things. and along comes a small hypertext work, notes on networks. I call it the silke text — it was composed a couple years ago for a magazine published by a grad student at the Muthesius Kunsthochschule in Kiel (one of the most obnoxious students I have had the displeasure to work with). I made it into another one of those hypertext strings that connects with the travelog. wormholes.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

here

twists and turns. waking before the early dawn to see the cloudless sky painted in many colors. silence broken by the furnace, and the cat who, once she realizes anybody is awake, begins to yowl for food until she is fed. Sage, on the other hand, waits patiently in her kennel until liberated for a morning potty. go potty, Sage! and she races out into the back yard, bounding over the catclaw and prickly pear to find that right spot in the morning chill. dawn. getting up before dawn is special. it’s easier when dawn is at 1100, but here in the south lands, it means getting up at 0630. in the quiet.

chapter has changed. this text probably has to end in the form of a travelog. as I will not be traveling much in the next months. 12 years of European holiday behind me. now back to the reality of life in Amurika as I have often quipped. the media portrayals in Europe of the US situation are extreme and narrow. just like the views of the rest of the world here. the only difference is that re-presentative imaginations dominate people’s lives far more here — giving a distinctly shifted absence to every thing and every event. and every facing of the Other.

shopping defines much of being. I shop, therefore I am. walking by the bell ringing Salvation Army guy. I am already digging into my pocket before I get near. 27 cents. I catch his eye, smile, and as I turn away, he says, bless you. I go shopping. I missed yet another chance. the substitution of money for less mediated (and less socially structured) exchange is a loss.

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

learning and networks

[ED: This brief essay, addressing concepts of learning within networks, appeared in acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858) is a follow-up to the introduction of the neoscenes occupation project that appeared in acoustic.space #2 (1999 ISSN 1407-2858).]

acoustic.space #3 (2000 ISSN 1407-2858), Riga, Latvia, September 2000

It is encouraging to note a growing awareness within the ECB, BIN, NICE, and other cultural networks regarding the critical importance of education. There is much work yet to be done, however. The present focus of attention within cultural organizations seems to be on fund-raising efforts and the associated (often short-term) practical challenges to survival. Of course, these are very important tasks for assembling viable systems, and, to be sure, issues of funding and political presence are critical to the existence of physically localized organizations. This brief essay is not meant to be a critique of the realities of existence! But at the same time, if cultural networks focus single-mindedly on fiscal and structural issues, there is a real danger that their long-term vitality may be jeopardized.

The open engagement of the local and remote communities in organic and transformative learning is a key for the long-term viability of a network. The stimulation of positive conditions for personal and collective growth should be a primary concern for network participants. Modernist education models are not at all adequate or even desirable when mapped into the flat social structure of a network. It is, in fact, the rise of global networks that offer us the opportunity to transform the entire contemporary nature of education and its relationship with learning. more “learning and networks”

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: en route Berlin-Charlottenburg - Kiel, Germany

rearriving

back to Kiel briefly. eating a bag of M&M’s in the train. crossing through Wittenberge in the former East, there is still a complete awareness of the divided society here. derelict buildings everywhere in the East, wild undergrowth, a bit of chaos. my English is suffering — so many spelling mistakes as I write, I can hardly deal with it. retyping things constantly, back-spacing, returning to a crime-scene and fixing the evidence, this text exists in many forms that are changed sometimes months, sometimes years later. in flux. Theresa and Wolfgang will leave tomorrow for Trondheim for the opening of an exhibition at the Museum of Art that Theresa has curated.

note from Anthony:

REMARKABLE
trANSPOSITION
FROM SANTA BARBARA
THROUGH SUPERLATIVE ANGELES FOREST
REARRIVING AT MOHAVE KELSO DUNES
here this northern sky
sinks a sliding drop
surprise
a gliding sustain
stretches in suspension
firedrip gamos meteor gift

Zorak graciously fetches me from the train, direct to the Forum, and then I go out shopping when Jennifer calls me about the Content Coordination situation with cafe9.net. it seems to be degenerating as a result of both Heikki and I stepping away. I am really thinking I need to write a parody of European cultural cooperation. it is such a joke. but the idea of writing a narrative account of it seems a waste of time. rather try to continue digging further into the network. later in the evening, I make a garlic-pasta (ail del’olio?), a favorite recipe of mine. easy to prepare, and unless folks don’t like garlic at all, it goes over well, with some Romano cheese, a good salad dressing, some vino tinto. late evening. some strange drinks, and so on …

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

Dísa’s story

dinner with Margrét, Lars, Micho, Steffi, Zorak, Frank, and Thórdís (Dísa), where she writes the following story:

Das Gedicht: Ich und du. Du und ich. Wir sind beide gut!
Eine Geschichte: Es war einmal ein Stern. Der war bunt. Die anderen waren gelb. Die gelben, die gaben an.
Aber einmal kam der Mond und sagte: Schluss damit. Dann wurden sie alle Freunde.
— Dísa

at Santa Fe in Kiel.

posted
  • place: Amsterdam, The Netherlands

next five minutes 3 review

© Steve Cisler 1999. Non-profit servers and archives may distribute this document, as long as it is not on the same page as annoying banner ads or animated gif files. Others may contact the author. [Ed: sadly, networker and friend Steve passed away in 2008, as this text doesn’t seem to be floating around anywhere else, I decided to extract and revive it from my archive!]

“Tactical media” refers to the use of old and new media to achieve non commercial goals and to emphasize “a plethora of potentially subversive political issues.”

In spite of all the electronic connectivity, there is still a hunger to meet in one place. The more we communicate online, the greater the number of real world conferences and meetings. People realize they still need to get together, no matter how smoothly a video conference or email exchange may be. In March 1999, I took part in a multi-ring circus of activities called Next Five Minutes 3 (N5M3) in Amsterdam. It followed several years of my online participation.

Background

In April of 1996, Bruce Sterling started a discussion topic in the Wired magazine conference on The WELL, an online site where I had been hanging out since it started. The topic was entitled “Goofy leftists sniping at Wired [magazine]” and included a lot of posts from the nettime mailing list that Sterling found amusing or outrageous. I joined nettime (www.nettime.org) the source of most of the pieces and found it was quite a bit more varied and interesting than the wired conference had been. It’s hard to typify the kind of messages you see on nettime, but it includes criticism of the current trends in Internet growth, reports from hot spots in Eastern Europe, innovative art exhibits and experiments, meeting reports, and controversies ranging from the provocative use of new media to the role of George Soros and his Open Society Institute. There are also text experiments and word plays plus weekly calendars and announcements for obscure journals, literary web sites, and new media experiments. The strength of it, the lure of it for me is that many worlds intersect, and through the distributed moderation by people in North America and Europe, just about the right mix of messages reaches the readers who number less than 1000. Originally, many were from Holland, Germany, and eastern Europe. Now, people from Asia, North America, Africa, and Australia take part. more “next five minutes 3 review”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Eikon

Back here at this travelog. I think I will stop it as of the end of this month, making it an even two years since I began this particular set of rotless jotting. I’ll start off with another passage, this time in German, without translation, from an article by my friend Mathias Fuchs in Vienna. The article appeared in volume 18-20 of the Austrian photography journal EIKON.

John Hopkins, ein in Alaska geborener Photograph und Medienkünstler, der nach Stationen in Arizona und Kalifornien mehrere Jahre an der Kunsthochschule in Reykjavík unterrichtete, beschreibt in seinen “neoscenes” genannten Webpages Reiseerfahrungen und Eindrücke von intensiven Orten, Häusern und Menschen. Die Qualität Hopkinscher Beobachtung liegt in der subtilen Transformation einer ikonographischen Konstante, die sich gleichmässig durch seine Reisestationen zieht, um sich permanent zu wandeln: John Hopkins selbst. Es ist nicht nur die Kleidung, die vom Norweger-pullover zum T-shirt wechselt, oder die Haar- und Bartlänge, sondern auch der Gesichtsausdruck, die Gestik und die Körperhaltung. Auf diese Weise Gleiches stets anders zeigend, weist Hopkins mit den Mitteln serieller Porträtphotographie auf die Möglichkeit, Zeitlichkeit in gefrorener Zeit aufheben zu können. Der Mechanismus, der die Aufmerksamkeit in den Hopkinschen Webseiten auf die leisen Differenzen von Gesichtszügen, Gesten un Klimata lenkt, heisst Artifizialität: Der Bildaufbau der Images gemahnt an Gemälde, nicht an Schnappsschüsse. Bildkonstruktion, Hintergrund, Pose und Licht erscheinen wie gemalt, zumindest sorgsam gewält, nie aber unmittelbar. In diesem Punkt unterscheiden sich die “neoscenes” von den Homepages der Collegeboys und -girls, die sich unmittelbar, unbegriffen und in spontaner Selbstbezüglichkeit aufs Netz und in Netz werfen.

Unfortunately, at the end of the article, my defunct website address in Iceland appeared, but other than that, an interesting passage from a longer article about Web photography collections in an issue dealing with photographic collections in general. So it goes. Mathias sent me a copy, but I can’t read the German title.

My back is still giving me some reason to despair. It has not healed at all, so I face further medical consultations if I am to recover ever. I certainly cannot travel at all, so, until this has healed, I cannot move from this place… argh!