This video supersedes some of the smaller clips that I made previously. It begins in Vilnius on a quiet day after the end of RAM 6. Jodi and I wandered around town, and eventually end up at a performance with Derek Holzer and Sara Kolster and some others; fireworks in Vilnius keeps the car alarms going; then it was on to Nida with Alvydas to the residency place nestled in the forested dunes a few minutes walk from the Baltic and just about 5 km from the border with Kaliningrad! It’s nice to explore the area for a time, and then going out mushroom hunting with folks for a big meal later in the evening.
Case Study: Rockfall – Glenwood Springs
The town of Glenwood Springs in west-central Colorado lies at the confluence of the Roaring Fork and Colorado rivers. The town is tightly constrained by the steep river valleys so land-development pressure is causing residential growth to push into rockfall hazard areas. In West Glenwood, on the west side of the Roaring Fork River, the valley is rimmed with dipping sandstone outcrops of reddish Maroon Formation (Figure 1).
The sandstone layers are being undercut by the erosion of underlying softer siltstone and shale so that large sandstone blocks are being actively undermined and destabilized. In this area, there have been several large rockfall events from the valley rim; some that have severely damaged homes on the valley floor, 1,100 vertical feet below (Figure 2).
Fortunately, there have been no injuries or fatalities. While there has been rockfall mitigation in some locations (Figure 3), the threat remains in other areas.
For more on rockfall issues around the state, see the original RockTalk: Rockfall in Colorado.
one of those nights
This is a deep retrospection on a Pixelache opening night dinner/party on Suomenlinna. Sophea, Jodi, Pete, Tuomo, and others joined in for a skip-rope and dance session in the hostel laundry room … earlier, Juha asked me to bring a bottle (of Koskenkorva, what else?) to contribute to the wet bar and then Thor showed up with a bottle of brennivín. uh-oh. So many photos, so little time … and I’m not the only intentional archivist—Sophea is of the ilk that this, yes, is indeed, performance in its essence!
nazca concert at uiah
Nazca is : buy their albums! (Karstein – vox 12 strings; Makke – 4 strings; Ninni – keys, hammers, b.vox; Tuukka – six strings; Pete – sticks, b.vox) This was a fine show at the UIAH auditorium. I tagged along with Mari and Mika who were doing the veejaying. Can I say ‘my’ former students? Sure, ’cause they taught me a lot! ;-)
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.
webartery
To: webartery@yahoogroups.com
From: “llacook”
Date: Wed, 13 Feb 2002 16:28:09 -0000
Subject: [webartery] my rules for net.art
01.) Don’t listen to me
02.) No narrative
03.) Not merely “pretty”
04.) Not merely weird
05.) Not merely animation
06.) Code. Use the computer. It’s not a television.
07.) Steal any and every image you can.
08.) Thou shalt not make text links.
09.) Do not imitate cinema.
10.) Do not imitate television.
11.) Do not pay any attention to “rules.”
Jim Johnson’s Iconophoria
[ED: This essay by Peter Frank was written on the occasion of the exhibition, “Open Workyards,” Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, 2001.]
The fruits of Jim Johnson’s labors and logic are on the walls (and vitrines and tables). The key to Johnson’s thought, however, is on disk and online. His interactive CD-ROM and his Website carefully set out Johnson’s modus operandi—not so much through explanation as demonstration—inviting the visitor into the game-playing and icon-building with which the artist constructs the seemingly errant appearances, arrangements, and relationships of symbols that comprise the crux of his oeuvre. The formal and technical range of that oeuvre, from paint to print to postcard to pixel, is impressive, though secondary to the consistent—even unified—but staggeringly varied nature of its content. Picture, image cipher, sign: these are not simply the manifold building blocks of Jim Johnson’s art, they are its raison d’etre, the provocations as well as the equipment for the elaborate structures that comprise his work, work that well predates and in many ways prefigures, the desktop cybernetics of our time. The structures may be elaborate, but the artworks themselves seem simple; information-laden, perhaps, but relatively easy to see and to ‘read’ or at least acknowledge as legible. If a viewer is foreign to any apparent code, the fact that there is a process of encoding is quite evident as are the visual components of that code. Indeed, the visual components may be as familiar as the code itself is opaque. That familiarity serves to assure the viewer that the code is not as foreign as it may seem. Such assurance is not always genuine; the ever-present element of play sometimes prompts the artist to tweak our expectations—but Johnson’s encryptions, word plays, concrete poems, and typographic rhapsodies are normally little harder to decipher than a good crossword puzzle. What might throw one off, at the same time that it leads one on, is the self-contained, self-sustaining, and in-and-of itself satisfying visual presence of the image.
Johnson would have image and language conflate. He returns our attention to the iconic quality—indeed, the hieroglyphic origin—of writing. Likewise, he reminds us that the image itself is a loaded icon: nuanced, certainly, by its context(s), but possessing a fundamental power, one that derives from the fact that we read and see such an integer of meaning at the same time. This is the small revelation afforded us by the art of typography, and that revelation is writ large by Concrete poetry.
more “Jim Johnson’s Iconophoria”
call-and-response
end of the week almost, more meetings, reverberations to the lecture on Tuesday gives feedback and response, (call-and-response). reaction, and, actions. Jörg Meyer from the Kieler Nachtrichten writes this story:
Der “Intenet-Nomade” John Hopkins in Kiel
Zurück zum Dialog
Wer erwartete, daß sich auf dem Computerbildschirm des Intemet-Künstlers John Hopkins allerlei bewegte und tönende Multimedia tummeln würde, sah sich bei dessen Vortrag über Networking & Creativity am Dienstag in der Muthesius Hochschule getäuscht. Mit dem von Intemet-Puristen treffend als “viel bunt, viel Klick” verballhomten Multimedium, das immer mehr Anbieter in deutsche Wohnzimmer bringen wollen, hat auch Hopkins nichts am Hut. Auf seiner Homepage sieht man nur Fenster mit farbig markierten Texten, die wenige Fotos sparsam illustrieren. “Mit einem modernen Computer kann man auf hohem Niveau Bilder und Töne machen, 3D-Animationen, Filme und all das Zeug”, greint Hopkins. Das sei aber absolut nichts Neues, demi derlei “Artwork” war auch schon vor dem Einzug der Digitaltechnik in das Atelier möglich. Das einzige, was den Computer wirklich interessant mache, sei seine Fähigkeit zu vernetzter Kommunikation.
Der “Netz-Nomade”, wie Hopkins sich selbst bezeichnet, hat gerade ein dreiwöchiges Seminar an der Muthesius Hochschule hinter sich. Darin ging es ihm um “so etwas Simples” wie die Vermittlung von Dialogtechniken. Daß Computer und Netz dabei helfen, ist für ihn einfach nur selbstverständlich. “Wenn ich einen Stift benutze, um einen Brief zu schreiben, oder ein Telefon ans Ohr halte, staunt ja auch keiner über diese tollen Werkzeuge.” Hopkins will das neue Médium entzaubern. DaB dièses als etwas Kompliziertes für hippe Technik-Yuppies dargestellt werde, beruhe lediglich auf der Tatsache, daß Kundige damit Geld verdienen und Herrschaft ausüben wollen: “Nichts fürchten Regierungen so sehr wie den freien und offenen Dialog im Netz.” Deren Verwertungswahn könne man nur entgehen, indem man das Netz als “persönlichen Raum” erobere. So gelange man zurück zur Wurzel aller Kommunikation, dem “genuinen Dialog” zweier Personen, die via Sprache “Energie austauschen”. Hightech wie Video-konferenzen im Netz, aber auch Lowtech wie das einfache Hin-und-her von Email-Texten würden dadurch überhaupt erst (wieder) lebendig. Vom im Internet leider verbreiteten “Broadcast”, dem bloßen Senden ohne Feedback, komme man zurück zu dem, was alle Kunst eigentlich will: Kommunikation und Kontakt zwischen “wirklich fleischlichen” Menschen.
Diesen “Fleischfaktor” will Hopkins in seinem neuesten Projekt “neo-scenes occupation 2” mit den Drähten des Netzes verbinden. Im finnischen Tomio nahe dem Polarkreis werden sich Mitte Juni Internet- und Neue-Medien-Aktivisten ganz leiblich wie auch “telepräsent” versammeln, um Urmenschlichem zu frönen, dem freien Dialog zwischen “persönlichen Räumen”. Im ersten Teil des Projekts, das im letzten Jahr auf der Ars Electronica lief, erfolgte dies über einen mehrtägigen OnIine-Chat. Mitschnitte finden sich noch auf Hopkins’ Laptop: “Aber das lebte nur damals live, jetzt ist das toter Kram.”
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”
Toward a Definition of Radio Art
It’s a challenge when sizeable chunks of one’s creative praxis occur well outside any traditional arts canon, so when elegant and incisive commentary comes along that helps to explain said praxis, I am grateful. Old friends Robert Adrian X (RIP) and Heidi Grundmann, founders of kunstradio at ORF generated this thoughtful manifesto on Radio Art some years back, definitely worth repeating:
Radio art is the use of radio as a medium for art
Radio happens in the place it is heard and not in the production studio.
Sound quality is secondary to conceptual originality.
Radio is almost always heard combined with other sounds – domestic, traffic, tv, phone calls, playing children, etc.
Radio art is not sound art – nor is it music. Radio art is radio.
Sound art and music are not radio art just because they are broadcast on the radio.
Radio space is all the places where radio is heard.
Radio art is composed of sound objects experienced in radio space.
The radio of every listener determines the sound quality of a radio work.
Each listener hears their own final version of a work for radio combined with the ambient sound of their own space.
The radio artist knows that there is no way to control the experience of a radio work.
Radio art is not a combination of radio and art. Radio art is radio by artists.
sayonara diorama
early this morning Adrianne ran the Sayonara Diorama performance in New York; with a few students here, I connect up via CUSeeMe and we participate for the duration, maintaining a conversation with Tapio, Steve, Susanna, Ariel, and others connecting up from other locations around Europe and the US. until 0530 here when the performance finishes in NYC in the early evening there.
technosphere: id 246
Many thanks for taking part in TechnoSphere.
We have been using your creatures to calibrate the system.
We are adjusting things to make the populations more stable,
at the moment the carnivores are too hungry!
Over the next few days we will get a more responsive
version running, please persevere and send lots
more creatures in.
Your diversity helps to keep TechnoSphere alive.
With deepest digital sympathy we regret to inform you
that your cyber beast (id 246) was devoured by a predator.
Your creature has fed a family of hungry carnivores
Fax You catalog
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.
For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson
This essay, by London-based artist Ian Rawlinson, mentions a project I was involved with Clive Sall and Emma Davis called Outpost which appeared at the Venice Biennale (1995) and the Edinburgh Festival (1994).
In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.
In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.
Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign. more “For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson”
Fax You essay
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.
Fax You performance
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
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.
total solar eclipse
![total solar eclipse, 11 July 1991, Mexico [CH]](https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/1991/07/1000/19910711-01.jpg "total solar eclipse, 11 July 1991, Mexico [CH]")
from Anthony
San Cristobal, MX
14 April 1988
14 April 1988
So J.H. –>
I find myself in an amazing place; Last night we had a fire because it got a bit cool; today we eat lunch outside in the sun… but first, the weather … the dedication in Borges’ book, A Universal History of Infamy reads:
“I inscribe this book to S.D.: English, innumerable, and an Angel. Also: I offer her that kernel of myself that I have saved, somehow—the central heart that deals not in words, traffics not with dreams and is untouched by time, by joy, by adversities.”
To those of us concerned with inscriptions (on rock, on paper) this comes as a blessing.
People here (as elsewhere) struggle to live, and no one can give name to that. Previously, Indians found in town after dark were jailed. The at-one-time Governor (Gobernador) of this state (Chiapas) was indicted for his Indian-killing policies. Rare to see an indictment because the Mexicans approve of this practice. This boy’s methods had become ‘unsound’ (Kurtz-style, Heart of Darkness). At some point the rule-makers changed their game, and now Indians walk the streets of this town at night. The man for whom the town was named Fra Bartolome de las Casas, First Bishop of Chiapas, was the first in his time to suggest that Indians were human beings and that enslaving them was wrong, early 1500s. Now the poor people in this area are deforesting the countryside, and Indians sell their land to lumber companies for a pick-up truck, lack of awareness in humanity at this time. Terrible corruption blotted up with human faces.
Strange scene –> a few days ago we went to the nearby Indian town, Chamula. There the Chamulans make offerings of Pepsi (poured in small glasses) to the Saints (who have combined with/replaced the Earth Gods) in the ancient Cathedral. The floor covered in pine needles, candles lit in homage set out in groups on the floor. Then we go to the ruin of another cathedral, graveyard packed: goats, lamps, burros grazing among crosses, and on certain graves bottle tops from Pepsi sprinkled, simply left, from offerings made by those still above. “An adaptable people,” my cousin says of the Chamulans and their Pepsi.
And we are accosted by a Chamulan woman and her child in that grave yard. She begging us to buy a belt from her and her daughter with a smile and full of play. Here it all was: the graves, the woman pleading, the bright child offering a bright doll in her hands. I imagined those below murmuring in darkness and soil; and we were above, the brown earth, the soft green of the grass, the bright blue of the woman’s shawl, her face: vivid. She not aware that she was pleading amongst graves. Other things that cannot be communicated. The faces of so many people I see now are beautiful, but they do not know. They are full of wonderful things but do not know. The loss of dignity, the loss of what is sacred. Well, I will say it: so many doomed. But this cannot take away my happiness nor theirs.
AZ
The Positions of the Particle at a Given Time
![The Positions of the Particle at a Given Time, April 1937 [AKM]](https://neoscenes.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/1937/04/1000/19370401-akm-math-paper-18.jpg "The Positions of the Particle at a Given Time, April 1937 [AKM]")