posted
  • place: Anna, Illinois

totality 14:01:35

totality, outer corona (inner is overexposed), 14:01, Anna, Illinois, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
totality, outer corona (inner is overexposed), 14:01, Anna, Illinois, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
the deets, Anna, Illinois, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
the deets, Anna, Illinois, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.

Short narrative: Driving (thanks, Steve!) from Franklin, Tenneessee starting at 07:45 on I-24 met with plenty of traffic at various choke-points until getting off at Vienna, Illinois, heading west. Made it to approximate centerline outside of Anna, Illinois just 25 minutes before totality, so wasn’t able to set up photo gear in a decent way.

Perfect weather, ~70F, 95% clear skies, some thin cirrus clouds that did not affect viewing at all. Some shadow bands, small and less distinct than in 2017, the final onset was very rapid. Spectacular diamond ring, then four minutes of totality with a massive hook-shaped prominence and others distributed around the disk, corona brilliant, easily observed out to maybe five lunar diameters, circum-horizon twiLight was gorgeous. And then it was over.

Many hours drive back in extensive traffic that intersected with a huge storm system threatening golf-ball-sized hail. Arrived back in Franklin at 23:00.

encroaching storm, near Hopkinsville (!), Kentucky, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
encroaching storm, near Hopkinsville (!), Kentucky, 08 April ©2024 hopkins/neoscenes.
posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

Winter Solstice 2017 Greetings

First chore is to choose an image made this past year and dress it up so that it is a fitting reflection of the past year. Hah. Impossible task. I was only out in the back-country once for a long weekend back in May. A blitz four-day trip to Prescott in September to do a bunch of tasks on the house, prepping it for rental. Otherwise 2017 was a dull repetition of work-a-day life. I have to admit, I’ve not adjusted well to it, after 30 years of a free-ranging arts/education practice.

I did help out with the Mines TinyHouse initiative until summer when my energy ran out and I got the cumulative impression that engineers don’t really think that anyone else knows what they are doing, especially in fields that the engineers have little-to-no experience. In this case I was advising on a communications strategy leading up to the Mines effort to deploy an entry to the Solar Decathlon that NREL runs every two years. They didn’t want to hear it, so I finally backed out of the role. The Saturday build days were fun, but when I came to understand the rest of the situation, the motivation I had managed to draw on—to burn up my limited free time—clocked zero.

Life got extremely complicated for a time, then simplified. The complication was a source and a sink: inspiring intelligence, extreme talent, beguiling presence, and convoluted signaling.

The highLight of the year was, as expected, totality. Two-minutes-twenty-three seconds of it from Hyannis, Nebraska. After some finagling and persuasion, I talked my old friend Dona, along with her daughter Julietta and son Niko, to join me for the cosmic phenomena. Dona’s words after third contact captured the essence: “I want more of that!” It was a pleasure to introduce the two youngsters to the event, they both were duly impressed.

My totality count is now somewhere in the neighborhood of +/- 19 minutes — just haven’t gotten around to making a precise calculation of the previous eclipses that I saw with my dad.

Life gets more and more fragile, though, when we were confronted with Julietta’s having a grand mal seizure and being diagnosed with a brain tumor, all in one day in October.

posted
  • place: nowhere

one year down, ?? to go

A year has passed of life, of work. This year defined mostly by the constrictions imposed by the j-o-b. There are still days where I would rather drive my truck to the airport and board a flight to Berlin to resume a more creative life. A fear-of-future precludes that, and the knowledge of that fear itself eats away at what little creative mojo is still existing in belly.

There were some jarring interjections to this diminished life: several inspiring, electric, disturbing human encounters, and as a sparkling counterpoint, ripping through to the root of the lizard brain, the eclipse. Nothing like a jolt of totality to bring presence into being. Otherwise, creative production contracts to flaccid efforts that lack mindfulness. Something must be done.

posted
  • place: Hyannis, Nebraska

entering the fourth full Saros cycle

self-portrait, waiting for totality, Hyannis, Nebraska, August 2017

This is how I enter my fourth full Saros Total Solar Eclipse Cycle of 18 years (#145)

04 January 1639 …
20 July 1963 — 31 July 1981 — 11 August 1999 — 21 August 2017 — 02 September 2035
… 17 April 3009

Likely, I will not make the 5th cycle.

posted
  • author: Udo Noll

Surfing the Gray Line

A sonopoetic exploration of space, sound and radio by Udo Noll

The fiery aether, which has no weight, formed the vault of heaven, flashing upwards to take its place in the highest sphere. The air, next to it in lightness, occupied the neighboring regions. Earth, heavier than these, attracted to itself the grosser elements, and sank down under its own weight… [1]

This aether, the upper atmosphere, begins some eighty to a hundred kilometers above the surface of the earth, where the homosphere ends. Here, above the protective ozone layer, the air separates into its individual components; the physical and chemical conditions are dramatically altered by radiation and the reduction in gravitational force. In the cosmogonies of antiquity order springs from chaos, the weightless is separated from the weighty, upper from lower, light from dark. The separation and differentiation of matter gives rise to the spheres: direction and space. The aether is breathed by the gods; to humans are apportioned the denser layers of air underneath. In the resonance chamber between the earth and the spheres of the fixed stars, the movement of the celestial spheres produces a harmonious sound, symphōnía, whose echo through the ages is still discernible in the string and quantum loop theories of today. more “Surfing the Gray Line”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

… if you notice anything suspicious …

The maxim of the Surveillance State is emitted by what is not, unfortunately, a Braindead Megaphone. The Megaphone has a brain that consists of the neural networks of all who pay attention to it, along with the processing power of the Information Society that those folks are tapped into. However, expansive State intelligence is tempered by complexity. A system that is self-monitoring creates a more-or-less dense feedback system. Any feedback sub-system affects the energy flows necessary to support the wider system it services. Within human social systems there seems to be certain degree of inherent paranoia (fear-of-death) that eventually provokes an evolution of these feedback systems, some of them more comprehensive than others (the Stasi and PRK come to mind as extreme examples, but then again, so do Google and Facebook).

Through their energy consumption extreme feedback systems overtake all but the most primitive functions of reproduction optimization (think: the weapon of rape as an expression of power and control and of the re-creation of ‘ones own’; or, state-sanctioned eugenics). The wholesale re-direction of State attention to surveillance signals the eventual end of a sustainable social system.

The maxim of the Surveillance State is an overt expression of the brutality (brutishness) of the norm, it hints at the precise locus of control (that is, within the Self … or not!).

Any expression falling outside this collectively sanctioned norm becomes an excuse, a rationale, a reason for the State to control the source of the expression.

And, by the way, the State is no single government — this is far too naive an image, one promulgated by those ignorantly focused on fearing a ‘takeover’ by the gub’ment — the State is the cumulative structure (path of flows) formed in the process of social evolution, the totality of wide-scale networks that act as binders of the social system as a whole — it is the full fabric of the social system that swaddles us and that we acquiesce to. It includes all the tools that are available to any, to all, for some to use.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona, Prescott, Arizona

kickstart :: bio

A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Dr. Jay (as he is known to some) watches the sky whenever he has the chance. This despite having survived a BSc, an MFA, and a PhD. As an international teacher (or better yet, a learning facilitator) on collaboration, creativity, art, and technology, John has a long history in photography. He is a master printer despite being away from a wet darkroom for awhile: he used to promise his printing students that their eyes would bleed with see-ing by the end of the semester. He made them read “Zen and the Art of Archery.” He made one substantial detour into an education and career in Big Oil and geothermal energy as a geophysical engineer, but cameras were always at hand. John was artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finland; at the Center for Land Use Interpretation in Wendover, Utah; and at the Gilfélagið in Akureyri, Iceland.

Finland? Utah? Iceland? For the last 25 years he’s led a peripatetic life that’s oscillated seasonally between Northern Europe and the Western half of the US (with another detour ‘down under’ for his PhD) although he’s also been spotted at many points in between, and sometimes he gets the seasons backwards.

While watching the sky, he witnessed twelve minutes of totality and twenty-six of partiality chasing solar eclipses around the world with his dad, an avid amateur astronomer and photographer who studied with Ansel Adams.

John has worked and played with (and made portraits of) thousands of really cool and creative people f-2-f in 30 countries. He’s been an online facilitator for Transmediale in Berlin, a workshop presenter at Pixelache in Helsinki and at the ADA in Whanganui, NZ; a member of the Icelandic Artists Union and the Society of Exploration Geophysicists; a volunteer at the Broadway Food Coop in Sydney; a net-art curator at the Machida City Museum of Graphic Arts, Tokyo; and has tracked mountain lions in several places in Colorado.

He watches the sky whenever possible. He photographs what he sees. Since 1983 his work falls under the moniker “neoscenes.”

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

conversation

a long conversation with Anthony this evening. always stimulating coverage of the non-typical meta-structures of social and individual existence.

the thought comes up, in teaching — most recently the “Multi-platform Story-telling” course that I was involved with this past semester at La Trobe — how seldom the holistic social meta-structure of the grouping of students (and teachers!) is considered in the facilitation of a learning trajectory. this includes the cumulative totality of all relations (power and otherwise!) that occur within the grouping. I call this space the continuum-of-relation and define it as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. Based on the assumption that we are in a holistic and continuous universe, it is possible to extend the definition to include the set of energy relations that humans have with the detailed and greater cosmos around them, and indeed, this is an important aspect to consider, but it is easier to limit the scope to a specific subset comprising relations between all humans. There are infinite sub-sets of relation that may be delineated, one set being those which arise in the process of learning facilitation. much attention is paid to syllabi, curricula, classroom technologies, and wide-scaled social ‘relevance’ of education systems while very little is paid to the immediate and long-term embodied needs for a recognition of presence of all the humans involved in the actual learning process. and especially the needs for deep human encounter and connection. is it such that this university, as with most others, is merely reflecting a wider scale of civil social decay when those crucial relations and their attendant qualities are simply ignored in the stead of assessment protocols, schedules, cash-for-services, and the general corporatization of education. more “conversation”

posted

From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

posted

dipping into Ellul

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.
more “dipping into Ellul”

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

workshop: Networks, Dialogue, Tactical Media, and Creativity

Initial description for workshop at agis – arbeitsgruppe grafische datenverarbeitung und interaktive systeme at uni-bremen – 14-24 February 2004

*Brief Description*:

The keywords of the title form the dynamic core to a wide-ranging workshop/seminar that explores the fundamentals of creativity from a socially aware and personally-centered perspective. It provides an open platform for a critical exploration of a wide variety of practical and theoretical technological implementations especially focusing on the possibilities of networks. Moving beyond a simple examination of product and process, it sets a precedent for an engaged creative praxis that is energized by principled and holistic understanding.

*Participant Profile*:

Because of an engaged human approach, it is ideal for students working in any discipline; it is designed to draw in a wide range of students, from those working with more ‘traditional’ art materials all the way to programmers and engineers. It is also extremely useful to producers, curators, managers and others who are dealing with contemporary landscapes of technological implementation and cultural production. Specific technical knowledge is NOT necessary, as many of the topics touched upon are prerequisites to empowered and critical use of any technology. However, strong technical knowledge-bases are welcome! A willingness to engage with others in open discussion and sharing of skill-sets is desirable. An ability to focus attention and concentration is also necessary.

*Points to consider*:

— highly adaptable to local infrastructures, individual knowledge- and skill-bases, and local creative needs

— facilitates deep dialogue on local social/cultural/technical issues along with other issues relevant to participants

— establishes a broad-ranging, inspiring, and critical context for understanding the dynamic intersection of technology and art and for engaging a wide variety of technologies

— provides a powerful context for self-development and development of collaborative activities by presenting and subsequently exercising fundamental skills and awareness

— provides a comfortable discursive space to explore a wide range of historical and contemporary developments of art and science

— maps out connections between creative processes and

— develops a deeper praxis-based starting-point for participants, helping them identify their own creative sources and tendencies

— self-generating project implementations

— involves practice-based exercises to develop personal creative focus

— examines a wide range of technical issues beginning from a fundamental definition of technology through to absolutely contemporary technological developments that affect socio-political and cultural scenarios

— provides a supportive atmosphere for rapid collective knowledge-building and collaborative sharing

— presents a highly-developed model for comprehending the complexities of human presence and creative action in the contemporary world

*Local Infrastructural Requirements*:

While a basic internet connection is assumed, other additional items would include several networked computers (Mac, PC or Linux), a humane and comfortable space for discussion with a white board or equivalent – preferably a space away from the computers, a data projector, good chairs!

Other than these basic requirements, additional items that could be used include a sound system, mixers, microphones, video/web cams, multiple high-speed connections, streaming/file/web/php servers, wifi networks, blue-tooth-enabled devices, software supporting audio, video, text, image production, cooking facilities,

*Bio*:

As an active network-builder with wide-ranging international experience in engineering, hard science, and the arts, Hopkins practices a nomadic form of teaching that spans many countries and situations. Formal teaching engagements — more than 100 workshop, lectures, and seminars in the last ten years — have taken place in Germany, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, England, Iceland, Finland, Norway, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Austria, Sweden, Russia, and the USA. Through an extensive personal network of dialectic human connections and sheer spontaneous presence, he is never far away from some kind of dialogue. Informal collaborative teaching/learning takes place anywhere and anytime. During the past year, he streamed live network-based media performances to Berlin, Dresden, Potsdam, and Kiel, Germany; Winnipeg, Canada; Amsterdam, Netherlands; Strasbourg, France; New York City, and Riga, Latvia among other places. Current activities focus more on facilitation of distributed network congregations rather that the production of cultural spectacle and artifact. With a web-presence that dates back to a few months after the appearance of the W3 and a dynamic network practice going back almost two decades, the neoscenes web space re-presents many previous creative activities like so much dead meat. Take a tour of the slaughterhouse. _https://neoscenes.net_.

A native of Anchorage, Alaska, Hopkins has experienced over 14 minutes of Totality under the darkened skies of Solar Eclipse. Presently as artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology in Helsinki, Finland, he is developing a comprehensive model under the title: “The Importance of Human Connection, Energy Exchange, and Interaction in Networks: A Model of Energized Presence.”

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Paul Klee

visit the Kunsthalle for a Paul Klee exhibition. find this on the wall, along with all the Klee objects, many of them from his teaching time at the Bauhaus. I had forgotten that he was there along with all those other intensities of life.

black gate because the marketable commodity art object is disintegrating under the energy of Light black gate because museums and galleries are sterile advertising factories black gate because we are the primitives of the space age black gate because space is a fluid concept black gate toward Light as a social totality the concept of art has disappeared the energy of Light is giving birth the octopus spreads in many directions under one core to Light as the new embryo giving birth to black

— aldo tambellini, black gate?

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

eclipse

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

posted
  • place: Akureyri, Iceland

decoding

this morning a step was taken, leading somewhere. away, towards. not clear, as mind is not clear, but the need to move toward clarity is not in stoking time so full of actions and opportunities to meet and greet with a long-term result of spreading consciousness over spaces so vast and convoluted that the totality of psychic and biologic energy is stretched thinner than the skin that holds meat and frame together. skins, surfaces, interfaces. creative action wells up, and the machine presses it into forms that do not release or flow. these times have been corrupted. following lines that are not straight, wending through secret geometries that are reflections of reflections of reflections of Silicon Dioxide mediations. this space here, text-mediated, papered, peppered with repeated and repeated structures. grinds itself to a standstill. constantly, and revives with each successive letter, comma, and line. the death of the text is in the interstices between words, between the minimal elements of its meaning. between the granularity of its sense. the death of digital is in the total vacuum of the interstices. the null set, the Dirac-delta function. zero-to-infinity in NO time. discontinuity. a mirror of life-cycles without the relief that they repeat. no illustrations to add smooth relief to this linguistic torrent. separated from cafe9.net as content coordinator. but the double scheduling of things just makes it impossible for me to do the job and it just didn’t work, like I have never walked away from anything. ever. but when the energy isn’t good, I do it. and indeed there has been a pearl of liberation buried deep in the act of walking away, gritting sand, grinding into flesh, and flesh responding with defense mechanisms of great beauty. the pearl is buried, though, so deep in the act, that for it to expunge itself, to surface in view, into ocular reception, life has to be lived with a slowness that is not a slowness of time, but a slowness of being. time is irrelevant. it is transcendence that must be surfaced without regard to social favor or safety or security or even presence. curvilinear. rectilinear. geometries. mechanics. quanta, critical media theory, the newest shows on teevee, software, code, code, DeCode. Loki arrives tomorrow, to visit me and his old haunts. well, me and Aaron, his best friend. he wants to hang out with both of us at the same time, wants me to get to know Aaron better. such a jewel a child can be. I busily try to re-map the spring to ensure regular times here in Iceland, strange to think of that. but it is clear for me that Loki needs his Pabby around at least some of the time. it can’t be all the time, and that makes my heart ache.

posted
  • place: MS Massalia, offshore, Mauritania

30 June 1973, Total Solar Eclipse

Total Solar eclipse 1973-06-30 10:38 UTC, frame scan, 16mm Kodachrome shot with a 150mm lens on the Bolex model SBM. ©1973 hopkins/neoscenes.
Total Solar eclipse 1973-06-30 10:38 UTC, frame scan, 16mm Kodachrome shot with a 150mm lens on the Bolex model SBM. ©1973 hopkins/neoscenes.

We experienced the eclipse from onboard the MS Massalia, approximately 100 km NNW of Nouakchott, Mauritania, [LAT – 19˚54’34” North (19.909444) / LONG 17˚15’42” West (17.261667), duration of totality was 05m46s]. The passengers on the ship were from a number of countries, mostly scientists, and the voyage was specifically an eclipse expedition (from Marseille, with stops in Palma de Mallorca, Málaga and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canarias, Spain; Funchal, Medeiras, Portugal; [the eclipse centerline off Mauritania], and finally to Casablanca, Morocco. The ship lost a gyro-stabilizer the day before the eclipse which caused problems with longer photographic exposures. I was shooting the eclipse with a manual Bolex 16mm film camera on a tripod. Although the sea was amazingly calm, the ship rolled slowly while stationary during the three hours of the event. Right when totality started, in the relative darkness, I ‘lost’ the sun in the Bolex’s viewfinder and couldn’t re-align it. I was actually swearing out loud as I panicked with the pent-up and deeply irrational excitement of totality until my father finally said, “Don’t worry about filming, just LOOK!” I did manage to film about a minute of footage up to the closing ‘Diamond Ring’ and Third Contact at the end of totality.

The lost gyro did end up causing big issues the next few days when a major Atlantic storm hit us broadside, from the west, as we were steaming north to Casablanca. The huge waves were breaking over the bow of the ship, absolutely terrifying, and almost no one showed up for the final ‘Captain’s Dinner’ for all the rocking-and-rolling of the ship: seasick, ugh. Glad to get off the boat, though the descent into Casablanca was intense: stand-out memory, sitting in a café having a warm Coke from a tiny bottle and looking around in cultural confusion.