clouds and meaninglessness

Siri's butikk, Bergen, Norway, September ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
Siri’s butikk, Bergen, Norway, September ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
Siri's butikk, Bergen, Norway, September ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
Siri’s butikk, Bergen, Norway, September ©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
I set off with a sigh. Above me the entire sky had opened. What a few hours earlier had been plain, dense cloud cover now took on landscape-like formations, a chasm with long flat stretches, steep walls, and sudden pinnacles, in some places white and substantial like snow, in others gray and as hard as rock, while the huge surfaces illuminated by the sunset did not shine or gleam or have a reddish glow, as they could, rather they seemed as if they had been dipped in some liquid. They hung over the town, muted red, dark-pink, surrounded by every conceivable nuance of gray. The setting was wild and beautiful. Actually everyone should be in the streets, I thought, cars should be stopping, doors should be opened and drivers and passengers emerging with heads raised and eyes sparkling with curiosity and a craving for beauty, for what was it that was going on above our heads?

However, a few glances at most were cast upward, perhaps followed by isolated comments about how beautiful the evening was, for sights like this were not exceptional, on the contrary, hardly a day passed without the sky being filled with fantastic cloud formations, each and every one illuminated in unique, never-to-be-repeated ways, and since what you see every day is what you never see, we lived our lives under the constantly changing sky without sparing it a glance or a thought. And why should we? If the various formations had had some meaning, if, for example, there had been concealed signs and messages for us which it was important we decode correctly, unceasing attention to what was happening would have been inescapable and understandable. But this was not the case of course, the various cloud shapes and hues meant nothing, what they looked like at any given juncture was based on chance, so if there was anything the clouds suggested it was meaninglessness in its purest form.

Knausgård, Karl Ove. My Struggle. Translated by Don Bartlett. 1st Archipelago books edition. Vol. 1. 6 vols. Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2012.
word, Bergen, Norway, September©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.
word, Bergen, Norway, September©1993 hopkins/neoscenes.

The photos were made around the same time Karl Ove was living in Bergen: I was teaching at KHiB (now the Faculty of Fine Art, Music and Design, University of Bergen). Probably no need to explain the resonance of this particular passage to other entries on this blog.

Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2019

Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2019, online and Golden, Colorado, May 2019

neoscenes joins in yet another annual live streaming broadcast with the Reveil 24-hour live broadcast 2019 that is one dimension of Soundcamp:

We organise overnight soundcamps where people can sleep outside and investigate the sounds of unusual locations, especially at daybreak. We transmit REVEIL: a 24 hour radio broadcast that tracks sunrise around the globe, relaying live audio streams from collaborating artists, independent channels, and a variety of streaming media assembled for the event.

We are a platform for artistic and trans disciplinary work in the emerging field of live streaming audio.

We contribute to research and development of open source solutions for relaying live sounds, and establishing a permanent open microphone network as a resource for artists, researchers, activists and other listeners.

We assemble and produce materials online and in print as contexts for The Live Archive which Reveil taps into and extends.

Join soundcamps and streamers who will open microphones for the Reveil 24 hour radio broadcast, tracking the sunrise around the world for one earth day.

This Reveil stream is coming from a house set in a suburban mountain neighborhood at the fringe of wildlands on the east-facing side of Apex Park in Golden, Colorado. Overlooking the wide expanse of the High Plains, the house sits at 1890 m/6200 ft, the Mother Cabrini Shrine isn’t so far, at least as the red-tailed hawk (Buteo jamaicensis) flies, nor is Deadman Gulch. Apex Park is yet another expression of the Laramide Orogeny of the Rocky Mountains as they rise from the Great Plains of middle America. The view to the east is expansive and includes Lakewood, and off in the middle distance, the high-rise towers of Denver, Colorado, and the eastern horizon, looking towards the state of Kansas, is far enough away that you may easily see the curvature of the earth.

The live microphone feed will include far-away-though-still-violent vehicle susserations from Interstate 70 and 470; un-throttled air traffic ascending hard to cross the high mountains from the Denver Int’l Airport; local neighborhood car and dog traffic; interspersed with the conversational cries of the Black-billed Magpie (Pica hudsonia) and a variety of other birds. It’s not unusual to see large herds of elk (Cervus canadensis), very fat suburban coyotes (Canis latrans), lynx (Lynx rufus), and mountain lions (Puma concolor) among the houses here, but they are generally silent or absent at dawn.

Here’s a recording of the stream as it happened:

(02:04:20, stereo audio, 297.2 mb)

The neoscenes stream parameters:

Date: 05 May 0445-0630 MST UTC-6
Location: Golden, Colorado, USA
Streamer: John Hopkins
Link(s): https://streams.soundtent.org/2019/streams/utc-6_golden-colorado-39412544-e716-4ca1-8733-9ea05c371380
Coordinates: N 39.717319 / W 105.215913
Timezone: MDT UTC-6 — 7 hours behind London
Civil twilight (local time): 5:25:57 AM / 0526
Sunrise (local time): 5:55:31 AM / 0556

TUNE IN HERE: soundcamp listen and my continuous stream that is live (though very quiet) now: https://streams.soundtent.org/2019/streams/utc-6_golden-colorado-39412544-e716-4ca1-8733-9ea05c371380

The direct stream will be at https://locus.creacast.com:9001/neoscenes.m3u (open in iTunes or so…)

prescient: Amurikan Facism

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Rorty, Richard. Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999.

Given the gradual transition from The Federation to The Republic to The Imperium during the last years, facism in Amurika will be very subtle and hard to catch: this, especially in the exercise of power relations among those vying for influence. There will be obvious spectacles worthy of the label ‘facist’ but the real machinations will be largely beyond the reach of ‘the media’ given that ‘the media’ is merely a symptom (or harbinger of infection).

AudioBlast Festival #4: le cri des neurones

AudioBlast Festival #4, le cri des neurones, online and Nantes, France, 28 February 2016

Electrical transmission running through our neural networks produce all kinds of stimulations and impulses within us every day. The Internet network can be taken as a comparison of the nervous system that conveys information between neurons, are not exactly the same type of information circulating the same way or to pass this information – Electrical vs. Digital : is put in relation to its copy.

Since its origins, cybernetics seeks to re-create its own reality, whether or not this is wanted, by taking it into account the question arises : how can we transform this approach?

The Shout as a proposal for a sound practice combines its own dematerialization and reinstatement of disruptive wave vibrations in a powerful sound system – Taken as a starting point we propose “The Shout” as a constitutive element of musicality and poetry, all nuances that may transcend technological reality !! Is it possible? Let us know !!

A one-hour live improv stream of material drawn from a sizable analog/digital archive: the multi-tracked material will be selected based on a criteria of neural resonance — during a lead-up to the performance, and during the improv performance itself. There will be various electric field disturbances, recorded in a variety of ways, along with the neural traces of memory, re-constituted from ancient electromagnetic 4-track and cassette tapes.

The controlled behavior of a magnetic dipole is the primary model for all material used to store information via electromagnetics — both tape and hard-drive — to relinquish control of the dipole moment is to spin into chaos and noise.

The Festival starts on Friday night 26 February and runs through Sunday 28 February.

neoscenes was again invited to jump into the festival for a one-hour live improv stream.

Stay tuned here for up-to-date information on catching the live improv stream. Mark the time — (you can go to World Time Buddy to calculate other time zones).

Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Phoenix – 02:00 – 03:00 AM GMT-7 (MST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – New York – 4:00 – 05:00 AM GMT-5 (EST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – London – 09:00-10:00 AM (GMT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Nantes – 1000 – 1100 GMT+1 (CET)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Helsinki – 1100 – 1200 GMT+2 (EEST)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Sydney – 8:00 – 9:00 PM GMT+10 (AEDT)
Sunday, 28 February 2016 – Auckland – 10:00 – 11:00 PM GMT+12 (NZDT)
.

The Festival has their own output stream to tune in to. (or copy/paste https://apo33.org:8000/audioblast.ogg.m3u into VLC or other streaming player). Headphones recommended to capture the ethereal density of the stream!

If you can’t manage to stay awake, we will be archiving this stream for future listening.

Mumford…

… the city owed its existence, and even more its enlargement, to concentrated attempts at mastering other men and dominating, with collective force, the whole environment. Thus the city became a power-trapping utility, designed by royal agents gathering the dispersed energies of little communities into a mighty reservoir, collectively regulating their accumulation and flow, and directing them into new channels — now favoring the smaller units by beneficently re-molding the landscape, but eventually hurling its energies outward in destructive assaults against other cities. Release and enslavement, freedom and compulsion, have been present from the beginning in urban culture.

Out of this inner tension some of the creative expressions of urban life have come forth: yet only in scattered and occasional instances do we discover political power well distributed in small communities, as in seventeenth-century Holland or Switzerland, or the ideals of life constantly regulating the eccentric manifestations of power. Our present civilization is a gigantic motor car moving_ along a one-way road at an ever- accelerating speed. Unfortunately as now constructed the car lacks both steering wheel and brakes, and the only form of control the driver exercises consists in making the car go faster, though in his fascination with the machine itself and his commitment to achieving the highest speed possible, he has quite forgotten the purpose of the journey. This state of helpless submission to the economic and technological mechanisms modern man has created is curiously disguised as progress, freedom, and the mastery of man over nature. As a result, every permission has become a morbid compulsion. Modern man has mastered every creature above the level of the viruses and bacteria-except himself.

Mumford, L. (2009). The city in history: its origins, its transformations, and its prospects. San Diego, Calif, Harcourt.

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”

eine sondersendung von radio aporee und colaboradio

Udo cranks up yet another collaborative streaming project linked to https://radio.aporee.org. So neoscenes joins in for the first time in a while — setting up the Nicecast stream and using the H4n to stream ambient quiet neighborhood sounds from The Mountain Club neighborhood.

1900 GMT+2 / 10 AM GMT-7 until tomorrow 1100 GMT+2 / today 11 PM GMT-7

It’s also going out on https://senderberlin.org and FM 88.4MHz (Berlin) / FM 90.7MHz (Potsdam).

TUNE IN!

radio aporee spezial

eine sondersendung von radio aporee und colaboradio

radio aporee

radio aporee continuously plays recordings from its global soundmap project. however, it’s a responsive stream of sound, a radio that listens, that may (or may not…) recognize and react to events, e.g. new sound uploads, listeners tuning in, mobile app activity, live sessions, phone calls etc. it’s an ongoing experiment and exploration of affective geographies and new practices related to sound/art and radio.

radio aporee ::: maps has started 2006, based on former artistic research on mapping, spatial conditions and the navigation between the real and the virtual. The idea being to connect sound and space, and to create a cartography which focuses solely on sound, and open it to the public as a collaborative project. It contains 1000s of recordings from numerous urban, rural and natural environments, showing the sonic complexity of these environments, as well as the different perception and artistic perspectives related to sound, space and places.

radio aporee 52° 29′ 66″ N, 13° 25′ 26″ E ::: maps https://aporee.org/maps/ ::: stream https://radio.aporee.org ::: miniatures for mobiles https://aporee.org/mfm/

en route

Moving in a gprs-accessible Amtrak train, the Keystone, from Penn Station in New York across New Jersey to Lancaster, Pennsylvania. The gauntlet at Penn Station included a heavily armed NYPD Special Operations officer with full body armor and at least 5 30-shot clips in his equipment vest. He was pulling random people aside for searches: NYC/Amurika post-9/11.

The ‘back-east’ trip continues with intimate encounters — old friends, and a few new folks met along the way. The impending house purchase seems far away, but it does put an edge on things when I talk/think about it. So many things to be done on a negative cash flow. Trying to absorb the mentality of capitalism: “takes money to make money” and such banal platitudes. Dealing (effectively) with an abstracted social instrument (protocol) predicated on collective trust requires a certain distance and disconnect. The level of internal disturbance that it precipitates is more than it should. The constant appearance that it makes in mediating social intercourse. In truth money itself it not the mediating factor so much, but rather what the access to money brings. And hard on that situation is the question why it is that I cannot convert some force of my intelligence and creativity into that particular form of social capital. It is a question for which I have not found any clues to the answer, except that I do not place the conversion process in a priority position in daily praxis.

So it goes.

that day

Small memories of those ancient times. Vague memories fortified by family lore. I was at a neighbor’s house in South Acton, Massachusetts at a playmate’s afternoon birthday party as a five-year-old. The party was cut short when the news propagated across the nation. The gravity and horror of the event was evinced in the level of emotion apparent in the adults: upon returning home I came running into our split-level suburban house with the alarming report that “President Lincoln’s been shot! President Lincoln’s been shot!”

. . . when he shall die,
Take him and cut him out in little stars,
And he will make the face of heaven so fine
That all the world will be in love with night
And pay no worship to the garish sun.

(from Romeo and Juliet, a quote given to Robert F. Kennedy by Jackie and later recited at the 1964 Democratic Party Convention by Robert as the introduction to his speech about his brother’s vision.)

At Home in the West: The Lure of Public Land

Bison, Lamar Valley, Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, 1995. (© William Sutton)

William (Willy) S. Sutton‘s fine book of western landscapes—lands in the ‘public trust’—came out recently. I had the opportunity to spend an evening with him last spring at the marvelous home he built for his family in the mountains west of Boulder. We looked through many of the original (beautiful!) prints he was preparing for the book. The comparisons to Ansel Adams will doubtless be made, but there are significant differences—and indeed, these images share perhaps only three factors—one is the landscape itself, another is the technical format of the images, and the third is particularity of vision. Beyond these basics, as an individual image-maker with a singular individual vision, Sutton demonstrates with his images a profoundly subtle relationship with the situation. The fascination of ‘making landscape photographs’ for some lies in the embodied relationship that the image-maker feels for the place, the places, (and clearly being in the places). Mr. Sutton’s relationship with these places is precisely, amply, and ineffably mapped out in these images. The drama in making a landscape image lies at least in part in the subtlety of the Light that reflects from the land to the mind’s eye. But that eye may often be filtering: is often always filtering the Light energy that arrives in mind. The neural system is selective in what it sees. This is especially evident in photography which adds the selectivity of the framed image, and the limitations to tone in the case of black&white work, and the skills required to bring images to print — a command of which Mr. Sutton amply demonstrates. These images are understated but at the same time possess a serene and very smooth gravity: they are solid, intricate, and leave the eye’s mind with a calm yet electric regard. Not dissimilar to the effect of be-ing there, in these landscapes, immersed in the instantaneity and, as the photographer Richard Misrach once characterized the Western landscape, its “terrible beauty.” more “At Home in the West: The Lure of Public Land”

Day 1 – Hawk Moon Ridge

Heavy storm beginning in late afternoon, continuing with an especially heavy downpour. To clean out the 40-gallon garbage cans and to collect some water for augmenting the supply for the plants most proximal to the house, I move them under the down spouts. they fill in moments. 500 gallons could be collected in no time. water. Prior to the storm, everything feels dry. very dry. This storm certainly lowers the fire risk significantly for at least a short time. It’s ‘monsoon’ season now, so the storms may come every day. Between waves of rain, a flock of birds, some kind of jay, comes: it’s piñon pine nut time so they pass through, busily pecking at the downed pine cones. This morning before dawn when running the perimeter of the canyon with Luna, I disturb hundreds of them roosting along the ridge crest in the trees.

After two months of intense human contact in mostly urban regimes, finally arriving at Hawk Moon Ridge is a treat for the senses. Much work to be done — primarily digesting of all the intense encounters and their potential for future engagement. that, along with a number of texts to continue preparing, editing of several new audio works, correspondance, and retroactively adding to this blog which has gotten rather thin on content since early spring.

Disturbances and Distortions

Wolf Vostell, Sun in Your Head 1963, video, black- and- white, silent, 7:10

Kohei Ando, Oh! My Mother! 1969, video, color, sound, 14:00

Nam June Paik, Early Color TV Manipulations 1965- 68, video, color, silent, 5:18

Steina and Woody Vasulka Excerpts from Vasulka Video 1978, video, black- and- white and color, sound.

Stan Van Der Beek, Vanishing Point Left 1977, video, color, sound, 9:30

Joanne Kyger, Descartes 1968, video, black- and- white, sound, 11:25

Wolfgang Stoerchle, Sue Turning 1973, video, black- and- white, sound, 12:00

urban energy organization

Hypothesis I. The self-sufficiency of urban areas with respect to their source of emergy decreases with the urbanization process. During the urbanization process, the diversity of emergy sources driving urban systems increases at first, then decrease due to the heavy reliance on fossil fuel.

Hypothesis II. During the process of urban growth, urban productivity is greater than the energy consumed in emergy terms, and information flows of the product of urban structure and the input to support the urban life continue to increase. Due to the increase in the accumulation of urban structure, the efficiency of production decreases.

Hypothesis III. Cities have the highest empower density in the hierarchy of ecosystems. During the process of urban development, empower density and transformity of land uses increase. Owing to the reliance on imported goods and services, the emergy investment ratio of urban areas increases and emergy self-sufficiency decreases with increases in density.

Hypothesis IV. As urbanization increases, the circulation of money also increases, faster than the increase in emergy flows, decreasing the buying power of currency.

Hypothesis V. The organization of emergy flows in urban systems is arranged in a spatial hierarchy with the highest emergy use close to the urban center.

Hypothesis IV. The fragmentation of landscapes on the urban periphery that results from urbanization will affect the distribution of emergy flows.

Huang, S.-L. & Chen, C.-W., 2005. Theory of urban energetics and mechanisms of urban development. Ecological Modeling, 189, pp.49–71.

Veteran Fact Sheet

Veteran Statistics
— There are approximately 25 million veterans of the U.S. Armed Forces alive today (7.5 % are women).
— Some 7.2 million of those veterans are enrolled in the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) system; approximately 5.5 million receive health care and 3.4 million receive benefits.
— Since October 2001, approximately 1.6 million members of the Armed Forces have served in Iraq or Afghanistan. As of December 31, 2007, more than 800,000 veterans of these conflicts were eligible for VA health care.
— There are about 37 million dependents (spouses and dependent children) of living veterans and survivors of deceased veterans. Together they represent 20% of the U.S. population.
— Most veterans living today served during times of war. The Vietnam Era veteran, about 7.9 million, is the largest segment of the veteran population.
— There are approximately (as of October 2007) 2,911,900 WWII veterans alive, but they are passing away at a rate of 1,000 per day (approx. total today 2,583,400)
— In 2007, the median age of all living veterans was 60 years old, 61 for men and 47 for women.
— Median ages by period of service: Gulf War, 37 years old; Vietnam War, 60; Korean War, 76; and WW II 84.
— The percentage of the veteran population over 65 is 39.1%.
— Sixty percent (60%) of the nation’s veterans live in urban areas and six states account for about 36% of the total vet population. They are California, Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New York and Ohio, respectively.
— Veteran Population by Race: White 80.0%; Black 10.9%; Asian/Pacific Islander 1.4%; Hispanic 5.6%; American Indian/Alaska Natives 0.8%; Other 1.3%
— Approximately 150,000 of our nation’s veterans are homeless.

Suicide Rates
— Veterans are more than twice as likely as non-veterans to commit suicide and the “Katz Suicide Study,” dated February 21, 2008, found that suicide rates among veterans are approximately 3 times higher than in the general population.
— The VA’s own data indicate that an average of four to five veterans commit suicide each day.
— A document from the VA Inspector General’s Office, dated May 10, 2007, indicates that the suicide rate among individuals in the VA’s care may be as high as 7.5 times the national average.
— According to internal VA emails, there are approximately 1,000 suicide attempts per month among veterans seen in VA medical facilities.
— The VA has hired suicide prevention counselors at each of its 153 medical centers to help support the national suicide prevention hotline.

PTSD
— Approximately 300,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars – nearly 20% of the returning forces – are likely to suffer from either PTSD or major depression, and these numbers continue to climb.
— An additional 320,000 of the returning veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan may have experienced traumatic brain injuries during deployment.
— By fiscal year 2005, the VA’s own statistics indicated that PTSD was the fourth most common service-related disability for service members receiving benefits.
— While there is no cure for PTSD, early identification and treatment of PTSD symptoms may lessen the severity of the condition and improve the overall quality of life for veterans suffering from this condition.

Energy and Economic Growth

We conclude that economic liberalization and other policies that promote gross national product growth are not substitutes for environmental policy. On the contrary, it may well be desirable that they are accompanied by stricter policy reforms. Of particular importance is the need for reforms that would improve the signals that are received by resource users. Environmental damages, including loss of ecological resilience, often occur abruptly. They are frequently not reversible. But abrupt changes can seldom be anticipated from systems of signals that are typically received by decision-makers in the world today. Moreover, the signals that do exist are often not observed, or are wrongly interpreted, or are not part of the incentive structure of societies. This is due to ignorance about the dynamic effects of changes in ecosystem variables (for example, thresholds, buffering capacity, and loss of resilience) and to the presence of institutional impediments, such as lack of well-defined property rights. — Kenneth Arrow, et al. here

highly recommended!

Systems depend on power, which they use to develop structure and functions that self-organize according to laws of energy transformation and use. As suggested by Alfred Lotka in 1922, maximum power results from self-organization according to the natural selection of systems designs. This chapter explains energy laws, including the maximum power principle and its control of production, growth, competition, succession, energy storage, diversity, and the oscillatory pulsing of all systems. more “highly recommended!”

Friday, 07 July, 1961

JFN ret’d the draft of the Reaction Time paper with some corrections; he wants it printed as a 22G report.

Cool

Mashinney Plymouth Agency on 2A in Lexington re: a ’53-4 Plymouth Suburban; they had one just in with only 30,000 miles on it, so I went over to look at it. It has a standard transmission and is in excellent shape inside and out, they want $595 for it. It is over-priced but there are a lot of miles in it. Stopped to see Leo about his Jeep; he has 2 — wanted $50 for both of them.

downhill? uphill?

The overall direction of change in the universe is from less probable (more organized) states to more probable (less organized) states. Life does not “oppose” this but rather makes use of it. The “downhill” movement can be used to raise things “uphill” (just as water flowing downhill through a water wheel can be used to raise a weight). There is, however, always a net loss of organization in the process.

For life on earth, the dissipation of energy from the sun is the downhill movement. Photosynthesis creates “uphill” molecules which in turn can be used in cellular respiration to create additional “uphill” molecules from which, in turn, all of the “uphill” organization of life and culture derive.

All of biological and human organization represents a state of improbability very much less than that of the concentration of energy in the sun, and one which would quickly dissipate if the sun ceased shining (or there was some disturbance in the chain of water wheels which link the sun to biological and cultural organization). — Paul Grobstein

Systems thinking is a framework that is based on the belief that the component parts of a system can best be understood in the context of relationships with each other and with other systems, rather than in isolation. The only way to fully understand why a problem or element occurs and persists is to understand the part in relation to the whole. — Fritjof Capra

In conversations with Churchman on the historical sources of systems thinking, he often identified the Chinese I Ching as the oldest systems approach. As an effort to model dynamic processes of changing relationships between different kinds of elements, the I Ching might be seen as a systemic approach, in contrast with the more systematic approach of rationalist Western thought rooted in the work of Plato and Aristotle. The pre-Socratic philosophers were perhaps closer in spirit to the Eastern view than they were to the more orderly view of systems embodied in the later evolution of the Western tradition. This is particularly true of Heraclitus, whose inspiration is often cited in connection with the more progressive developments within the contemporary systems tradition. This contrast between systemic conceptions, which focus on interrelationships and dynamic processes, and the systematic conceptions, which are more concerned with classification and order, is critical in understanding the relationship between different views of systems in the twentieth century. — Debora Hammond, in The Science of Synthesis: Exploring the Social Implications of General Systems Theory

interview with Niina: art & technology

Niina has been researching art and technology for some years now. We met when I was teaching my old netculture class at the Media Lab in the University of Art and Design Helsinki back in 2000. I participated in her research for her PhD then, and … now

Ei Niina — this is all I could manage, it’s impromptu, but honest, with a bit of humor mixed in… a little complicated, as there’s no time to write an essay about what world-view lies behind the answers. You might want to reference https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/pixel.html an article I wrote for Pixelache in Helsinki in 2007 — the same year I did a workshop there too https://www.neoscenes.net/projects/pixel/index.php

you could also check out:

https://neoscenes.net/blog/ and search on
https://neoscenes.net/blog/?s=network
or so…
even
https://neoscenes.net/blog/date/2001/11

> 1.What changes have happened in your work and practices as an artist during the
> last ten years? Do you think your relationship with technology / or the way you
> use technology /has changed during this time?

My practice has widened intensively to take on a tough challenge of the entire techno-social system we are embedded within, are part of. Yes, this includes my relationship AND my understanding of the relationship between all flows that are the substance of technology. This also includes all aspects of life governed by techno-social protocol. When I use (a) technology I understand what I will both lose and gain when using that particular protocol. Using a technology is in fact, a changing of flows of energy that we are embedded in, part of. We are not separate in any way from everything else!

more “interview with Niina: art & technology”

change

view south from KCL Campground, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California, December 2010

The argument may be made that a fence, a window, an article of clothing, a wall are — one-and-the-same — deflectors of the extant natural flow of energies out there. They represent a set of energy deflectors imposed by humans on their environs.

The other issue, tied to this is the production of waste (unusable) heat energy which impinges on a locality after the use of high energy sources which are subsequently rendered into usable and unusable forms of energy with varying efficiency. The primary source of this unusable energy is in the actual production and maintenance of the energy deflector systems: making and installing a fence, fabricating a window (glass being an extremely energy-intensive manufacturing process), building a wall, a building, a dam. more “change”

schizophonia

Originally all sounds were originals. They occurred at one time and in one place only. Sounds were then indissolubly tied to the mechanisms which produced them. The human voice traveled only as far as one could shout. …

We have split the sound from the maker of the sound. Sounds have been torn from their natural sockets and given an amplified and independent existence. Vocal sound, for instance, is no longer tied to a hole in the head but is free to issue from anywhere in the landscape. In the same instant it may issue from millions of holes in millions of public and private places around the world.

Schafer, R. Murray. (2006). The Music of the Environment in “Audio Culture.” New York: Continuum International Publishers.

This Julian Treasure talk is a very short (seven minute) but provocative dance around some issues of sound and hearing (and listening).

By substituting the concept ‘energy’ for ‘sound’ the issue expands and finds some wider principles. Action, activity, creative and destructive both, releases energy. Many times this energy is in the form of sound. Techno-social systems generate massive amounts of waste energy in this form of sonic vibrations. Living organisms tend not to generate waste sounds as any wasted energy possibly compromises the life-form (life being a negentropic energy-optimizing process). On an evolutionary scale, waste energy (in the form of adaptive experimentation by the life-form) is incrementally minimal when considered in juxtaposition to the total energy expenditure of the life-form itself. However, en masse life clearly plays a role in accelerating the production of entropy of the Terran system when considered in comparison to a planetary system without life.

Humans, in their superficially intelligent pursuit of technological solutions, especially in the recent era, have created the means to generate tremendous amounts of waste energy. While engineering is about solving problems in the most efficient manner possible, the vast majority of devices created are clearly inefficient. This is especially apparent when the entire process necessary to bring a device to a completed configuration is considered, ensemble — that is, the extraction of earth materials, transport, processing, and manufacturing.

Whenever one has a technological process, it is likely that at one or more points in the process, sonic waste energy is being spewed out into the surroundings. This plethora of waste energy impinges on the body system with (un)certain results. (Remember the experiments of playing heavy metal or classical music at plants? It’s easier to understand the effects when you consider the energy content of the two different sonic manifestations.) In a typical urban environment, a tremendous amounts of (sonic) waste energy is, literally, reverberating everywhere. Any flux of (waste) energy will change that which it encounters. It will change the energy state of everything along its pathway to eventual almost-dissolution in the un-stellar void.

Using your ears to guide you, find a place where you can comfortably be for an hour. If eyes desire — sight falling between night sky stars tracing on the retina — could carry the ears to a same-such place, life would have different potential.

bricoleurs

abira_a, acracia, adrianobf, agger, agryfp, ale, alejo, alewei, anais.gabaut, andrea.mayr, andreslov4, ann.light, aoifejohanna, arlequim, armin, arrow.training, asbesto, atteqa, befree, ben.schouten, beppo, blauloretta, brian.degger, bronac, brunotarin, burbano, ca, calnoguiera, camilacorazza, catadores, cgfoster, christian, circletide, ciron, contact, cristiano, danilo_to, danlatorre.tint, davidg, desislaciones, dmartins, doma, doutorsocrateseidofutebol, drew, drica, edycop, eiriniskouta, ellen.sluis, erwann.thoraval, feijun, felipefonseca, fernandorabelo, filippo.gianetta, francesca.bria, fredbomba, freire, frontierlab, g.a.jones1, gif, gif, giles, gnu2007_dyne, habib, hdimantas, hellekin, henk, ho, honzasvasek, info, irlawence, ivanovic900, j.j.froehlich, jakeharries, james, jaromil, jean.habib, jerneja99, jhopkins, jnm, john.haltowanger, john, jonpaludan, josephgray, jp, juhuu, junk.bitte, k, khuramsdesk, ki.ber, kikomayorga, kovats, kranenbu, kurt, laubanech, laura, lurker, mail, maja, marc.garrett, matt.ratto,matt.trivett, mathew t. craig, mickfuzz, miles, myers.alex, nameeraa, nancy, nmagnan, nynke, olivierschulbaum, organismo,orlandosillva,osfa, phumphreys, patrice, paulo.hartmann, pauloandringa, paulolara, penelope.di.pixel, philippe.langlois, pvelezbr, rafael, ramsespetronia,rbrazileiro, rdom, ricardopalmieri, rm, root, rui, ruth.catlow, scur, shulea, siliamoan, soenke, sonjavank, sskoutas, tapio, tati.xx, thenetworked,theoparmakis, thomas, tiagobugarin, tnovaes, tomak, tvlibre, udrugauke, vanessa, venzha, vickysinclair, vilson, vjpixel, vladfiscutean, voodoo_rays, w, web33_matthieu, yannick.rumpala, yasir.media, yb, yto.lab

on the Ark

memorial, Arkansas River, Pueblo, Colorado, June 2010

long cycle ride with Bill first down the Ark which was partly over the bike path at one point. that made for a challenge going back up against the current in a foot or more of fast moving water — the river is definitely at spring flood stage! Then all the way back upstream to the Pueblo Dam which was open and blasting snow-melt downstream. pretty damn hot, but along the river in the shade of the huge cottonwood trees, all is chill. at the end of the ride, I was tuckered, but also impressed with the urban green-space development that Pueblo is undertaking.

retreat

Greenland Ranch, Colorado, May 2010

Retreat from the high country, back to urban centers. Drop by at Jim and Dona’s place on the way back to Boulder.

CLUI: Day Twenty-Eight — raven’s grief

Re-construction is continuing on the Enola Gay Hangar almost constantly. All the new windows are finally in, the wing areas seem to be in order with their new galvanized sheeting. A couple days ago, the last gaps in the sheeting on this end and the far roof have been put in place. So, what of the ravens and their constant efforts to build a nest (and hatch chicks perhaps?) somewhere inside? They are now gone. I felt a little ill when I saw that the construction crew was going at the remaining gaps in the sheeting, knowing it would cause a huge disturbance in the lives of the ravens. Okay, to be sure, they would likely not have been nesting here in the flats if the building had not been constructed here to begin with — humans had already caused a significant distortion in the flows of this place — life does that, always. I noticed for a couple days the ravens sitting on the roof, but no more of the flying back and forth by the window of the residency. This is a huge loss, and I wonder if anyone else has thought about this as an affect of the restoration process?

Clui: Day Five — tangential contact

Enola Gay Hangar, Wendover Airbase, Wendover, Utah, April 2010
In the sonic realm, this part of the western desert (the spatial extent defined by precipitation at least) seems, at first, quiet. Stepping out of the car after a bruising day of fighting the wheel, ah, only the susurration of blood pumping in the ears. But, despite this initial impression, human intrusion in the western desert is never silent. The ambient pre-human sonic domain is defined by a few animals making occasional signals “I am here.” Ravens and coyotes are perhaps the noisiest, with others following in a rapidly declining decibel range. Wind is mostly, literally, in the ear of the beholder as a register of turbulent flow around the aural orifice but occasionally one is in a place where the wind makes some secondary sound (in a riparian regime, in seasonal leaves, or whistling around a certain rock formation, but these are rare and difficult to record without exceptional and expensive equipment). Otherwise, then, there is only the human incursion. This incursion is typically related to the movement of those intrusive humans through the domain as few have the desire to stop and actually hear silence. The few who volunteer or are forced to stop for a longer time are not necessarily prone to sonic disturbances, though that group, as a whole, are dominated by willing or unwilling participants in the military-industrial machine. The balance, a small remainder, are likely seeking the silence. The members of the machine make plenty of noise via everything from weapon systems testing to mining to toxic waste incineration, but access to these secretive sonic sources are for the select, not the transitory rabble.

Those engaged in field recording are left with the experience of tangential contact. That is, functioning as a stationary point, recording the arrival and departure of a nearby transport vector — trains, planes, and cars. Given the proper conditions, especially the lack of wind, these can make interesting (and startling) recordings. Trucks may be heard many miles away and render an impossibly slow Doppler shifting that is also modulated by differential density and velocity metrics of the intervening air. Planes are often more difficult as the most dramatic contact is with the low-flying fighter aircraft which will show up practically without warning and are so loud that recording is impossible. The db peak of that tangential contact pegs the meter. Before the air-to-ground missiles are launched at you, the target, and field incursions become moot.

So, what to do? Muddle along. Hit the casinos. Though I’ve been tossed out of those in the distant past for making photographs, the H4 Zoom looks suspicious, so I think it also will attract attention from security for sure. Ach.

devoir: a re-naming

Further, deeper, wider, (more iconoclastic), what is research? Merely to search again? The broadening of a socially-sanctioned knowledge-base? A connecting-of-threads to historic tradition? A discovery of what’s been before? A following of a pre-existing trajectory (but with more fuel for a higher, further flight)? What about re-sensing instead of re-searching? Immersing senses in a situation again (related to German entgegen ‘opposite’). Sensually immersive: sensing difference again (from another situation), and reflecting on that. Or, better yet, riding the gradient of that difference, and using that potential, that power, that source, to express from.

Re-search — to circle again, more intensively — but to remain detached. Neither academic detachment nor technological objectivity are the way that is needed now. We need immersive, connected, aware, and sensual be-ing. In order to apprehend what the world needs of us. An empathetic engagement with all expressions of life-energy. more “devoir: a re-naming”

Angel Place

Angel Place, one of those darkish urban voids produced by vertical development and poor planning, is host to the Forgotten Songs installation as part of the Hidden Networks program. Sounds of extinct and near-extinct species that once filled this very ground before colonization. The bird (sounds) are in cages. What brilliant human-applied alterations of flow does (temporarily) to natural systems: when’s a mass equilibrating event gonna happen?

property

as an example of the problematic of owning, and of property in general, as it is defined in Western social codes:

The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign — for all these titles are synonymous — imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings — kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion? — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

and

Property, acting by exclusion and encroachment, while population was increasing, has been the life-principle and definitive cause of all revolutions. Religious wars, and wars of conquest, when they have stopped short of the extermination of races, have been only accidental disturbances, soon repaired by the mathematical progression of the life of nations. The downfall and death of societies are due to the power of accumulation possessed by property. — Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Case Study: stormwater

[ED: Although this report centers on a particular region in the Colorado Rockies, the principles apply everywhere—it informs how development affects our most important resource: water.]

Stormwater runoff is excess water associated with a rain or snow storm event that flows over the land surface and is measurable in a downstream river, stream, ditch, gutter, or pipe. From a regulatory perspective, stormwater is managed through some sort of engineered conveyance and is focused on specific pollutants. Hydrologically, stormwater also includes water that is infiltrated into the subsurface and contributes to increased stream discharge.

Check-dams along drainage ditch, Clear Creek County,
Check-dams along drainage ditch, Clear Creek County, Colorado. Photo credit: Colorado Geological Survey.

Urbanization and development causes changes to the natural hydrologic system in a watershed. Alterations in land use and land cover for agriculture, buildings, roads, and other urban infrastructure result in loss of vegetation and topsoil. These changes and the construction of a drainage network alter the hydrology of the impacted area producing radically different flow regimes than the pre-development hydrology. The developed landscape results in a reduction of infiltration and evapotranspiration functions of the soil and vegetation, such that stormwater flows rapidly across the land surface discharging into streams in short, concentrated bursts of high flows. When combined with pollutant sources, increased stormwater runoff leads to water quality and habitat degradation. Stormwater has been identified as a leading source of pollution for all types of waterbodies in the United States.

Traditional stormwater practices were developed with flood control in mind and promote collection and conveyance of precipitation from all storms away from the site to prevent property flooding. This has the unintended consequences of conveying water from small storms out of the watershed, concentrating pollutants, causing stream channel impacts, and depleting groundwater recharge. Local governments with their dual responsibility of land use planning and stormwater management have direct control over stormwater runoff impacts. Research has identified and documented stormwater management technologies and practices that may be implemented locally. These can protect and conserve water resources through the mitigation of detrimental impacts caused by land disturbances and modifications associated with land development.

Get the full (free!) report: OF-09-11 Managing Stormwater to Protect Water Resources in Mountainous Regions of Colorado

Citation

Topper, Ralf E. “OF-09-11 Managing Stormwater to Protect Water Resources in Mountainous Regions of Colorado.” Hydrogeology. Open File Reports. Denver, CO: Colorado Geological Survey, Department of Natural Resources, July 2009. https://coloradogeologicalsurvey.org/publications/managing-stormwater-mountainous-regions/.

Sycamore Spring

long day with a 12-mile round-trip trek into Sycamore Spring. could not have made the drive in with anything less than a Mercedes Unimog, a Hummer would have been too wide. SUVs don’t have tires with enough bite. so, two-foot-drive it is. better that way. though tiring even when the air temperature is modest. sun was not.

there are cattle being grazed on the BLM land that surrounds the wilderness, and technically they are not supposed to be near the spring or in the wilderness area at all, though I find one gate completely down, and cow shit in some stages of decomposition all to frequently. cattle cause tremendous shifts in the landscape. although it would be hard to tell exactly how or what aside from the obvious disturbances of the soil from the cloven hooves, and the dessicated pies. they re-distribute large quantities of grass and other seeds through the grazing and shitting process.

a frequent thought exercise while making these long walks is to imagine the landscape manifesting as a time-lapse film rewinding back to pre-settlement, and pre-human times. this also purges the frequent song loops that arise while walking — some inane Abba riff will get stuck in head, god knows how (or maybe god places this curse of cultural meme-play on solitary human stragglers). the loop will keep time with the walking pace.

the moment I step off the jeep track and enter the wilderness area beyond the slender fiberglass demarcation signs, up a wash, the energy of the place shifts. walking along another much older jeep trail that has been unused for years one sees the damage as well as the natural regeneration process overtaking the road, destroying it eventually. once the surface is defaced by a vehicle it rapidly erodes with the sparse but often violent rains. sections of the trail now are reduced to a single track or narrow gullies making it easier to bush-whack.

a mile or so down the track is Sycamore Spring, near the head of Peoples Canyon. it is bursting in its place, in this time. at the mouth of a narrowing deep canyon: upstream the dry wash has a trickle of life for at least 200 yards up from the actual spring, a trickle moving across a white bed of welded tuff. shallow pools of tepid and greasy water buzzing with flies, hornets, bees. the spring itself is surrounded by huge sycamores about to leaf out, some substantial cottonwoods, jumbles of downed wood, deep dried leaves, juniper, myrtle, mountain mahogany, segueing within 50 feet on either side back to hard-core desert like all the surrounding space for at least 20 miles to the east and 300 miles to the west, 500 to the south and north at least. saguaro, cholla, teddy bear, barrel, beavertail, mesquite, ocotillo interspersed with short grasses and flowers. the transition is stark and stunning. I am greeted by a pair of Peregrine Falcons who, for a few moments make my presence welcome, but only as an interloper. one sits high in a sycamore screeching occasionally, the other circling on the thermals, they eventually glide down stream to the deeper canyon. there are several deep pools under the trees covered with a yellow skim of pollen, numerous frogs and tadpoles are in the water. this is a wild place.

thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
more “thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts”

Tuned City. Between Sound and Space Speculation Reader

The reader from last July’s Tuned City event for sound and architecture is available for order.

Edited by Anne Kockelkorn, Doris Kleilein, Gesine Pagels und Carsten Stabenow. 200 Pages, German/English texts, with Illustrations by Andreas Toepfer. EUR(D) 25,00 / EUR(A) 25,70. ISBN 978-3-937445-36-6. KOOK BOOKS 2008.

Sounds belong to the City. They determine spaces and identities. For years, artists have been using city noises as a material to stage or to question urban space–new territory, however, for most architects and planners within the routines of functional planning procedures. “Tuned City – Between Sound and Space Speculation” searches for a new evaluation of architectural spaces from the perspective of acoustics. This volume presents various positions of architects, artists and theorists to expand the architectural discourse with the dimension of listening.

Risk and storms

listening to the sounds around the house, summer storms range through the suburban spaces as do Risk games on the north porch.

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The Regime of Amplification: A Primer

[ED: This text is essentially an extremely preliminary draft—written in Berlin, Germany in 2007-08—of my dissertation The Regime of Amplification.]

I decided to release this text in advance of any hard-copy publication, with another chapter nearing its final stages, and several intermediate chapters forming more concretely. The following is the original ‘final’ text, although there will be a significantly improved one in the years to come.

This speculative essay addresses the process of amplification which expresses itself at a wide range of scales and affects and which models a fundamental aspect of all human presence. It opens with a brief description of a prototypical amplifier, then frames life as the coherent self-organizing expression of energy embedded in a universal field of energy flows. It examines simple biological models of amplification and suggests possible reasons for amplification processes to exist. Narrowing its focus, it looks first at the human species, then the body, and then the collective social system as an operative field of amplification. It subsequently explores the Regime of Amplification as a general manifestation of the prototypical TSS (techno-social system) — a system whose goal is to maintain the viability of localized sub-sets of the species in the face of competition as well as continuous and universal change. Two specific examples — the radio and the military — are presented to simply illustrate the principles suggested. The conclusion reiterates the affects of techno-social amplification on individual be-ing as well as on the entire continuum of relation that the individual is a part of. It suggests some fundamental pathways of action which have an immediate detrimental affect on the hierarchic flows of the Regime.

This essay is built on the subject of one chapter in a book-in-progress titled “Energy of Being :: Dialogue of Creativity” which explores in greater depth many of the issues that are danced only Lightly around here.

KEY TERMS

TSS (techno-social system), Regime of Amplification, energy, amplification, attenuation, flow, continuum of relation, life-energy, life-time, evolutionary development, natural selection, self-organizing, radio, military systems, resonance, social energy bank, life-time=energy=life; attention=life-energy=life-time, feed-forward system, biochemical amplification, concentration, rarefaction, command-and-control … (to be continued)
more “The Regime of Amplification: A Primer”

ascending

holiday in Netherlands, Ascension Day. internet goes out. just after figuring things out with the next day’s schedule. meeting tomorrow with Carmin, Rob, Geert and Linda, uff.

several times, friends in Europe have expressed the sentiment that they should be allowed to vote for the next US president. I don’t blame them.

in a cafe. pretending that I am a normal tourist. visiting this place on a week’s break from the job. shaky premise. Chinese tourists, comfortable in their own skins, progressing to world dominance. while Amurika founders in scarce 225 years. street musicians sing “if you’re going to San Francisco, make sure you have some flowers in your hair…” or so. he’s Amurikan, maybe 40 years old. maybe more, maybe less. who knows. age becomes less knowable or even contemplated. as day after day there is yet another blank page let lie, while pretty girls smile and rub their lover’s backs. tattooed arms intertwined. and what of life trajectory, how it goes? year overtaking year. while an older guy sits down at the next table with a baby-fist-sized spherical knob on the top left side of his head. bulbous. the tattooed gal shows the dimple in her lower back to her lover. they kiss. each second of eye contact they have, I age a year. slowly sinking into anonymous senility. nothing to do but stare down the far horizon, if it could be seen at all here in the City, to spot any sign of Death approaching. but there are too many brick buildings framing the space of Rembrandtsplein. more “ascending”

current Capra

Lesson #1
A living social system is a self-generating network of communications. The aliveness of an organization resides in its informal networks, or communities of practice. Bringing life into human organizations means empowering their communities of practice.

Lesson #2
You can never direct a social system; you can only disturb it. A living network chooses which disturbances to notice and how to respond. A message will get through to people in a community of practice when it is meaningful to them.

Lesson #3
The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.

Lesson #4
In addition to holding a clear vision, leadership involves facilitating the emergence of novelty by building and nurturing networks of communications; creating a learning culture in which questioning is encouraged and innovation is rewarded; creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes. — Fritjof Capra

re-asia

head to the HKW for another opening, this time an Asian exhibition, Re-Imagining Asia. happen to run into Stephen, and will get together with him later in the month to catch up on things. aside from the numerous online events I’ve jumped into when he was at V2, I haven’t seen him f2f since Tornio in 1999 or so when he and Nina came through with a collection of Canadian experimental films that they screened to an unsuspecting audience at the Polytech. they were on their way further north researching their Aurora project. will have to ask him about what happened to that.

the most intriguing work there not simply how it dominated the entire space, but for the work it was, especially reflecting the previous evening at Alnatura. the work, Wu jin qi young, translated as Waste Not, by artist Song Dong, is a collaboration with his mother:

On 28 February 2008, the Chinese artist Song Dong, from the People’s Republic of China, started erecting his room-filling installation ‘Waste Not’ in the Foyer of the House of World Cultures. It is his parents’ house, which fell victim to urban planning in China and is now being reconstructed together with its entire inventory in the Foyer.

Wu jin qi young describes the philosophy of life of an entire generation of ordinary people in China who have grown up with the experience of war, expulsion, starvation and constant shortages of goods. Song Dong’s mother belongs to this generation. And one can imagine all the things that have accumulated in her house over the decades. When his father died in 2002 and his mother was filled by despair as a result, Song Dong tells us: “Art was my last hope. And by helping me with my art, my mother was gradually able to shake off her sorrows.” The two of them worked together on the concept for “Waste Not.” This not only helped his mother to work through her problems, but also to emancipate herself from a household that was growing out of control. The result is both impressive and depressing, with the seemingly countless toys, items of clothing, buttons, ballpoint pens, cupboards, remnants of materials, bags, pots, tubs, toothpaste tubes, etc. are lined up alongside one another like stock. In the Song Dong’s hands, the entire construction becomes an artifact; he creates multilayer archives full of obsolete Chinese products and manifestations of past living conditions.

we are suspended in a sea of stuff. certainly the Confucian pathway would show some relief, eh? imagine a similar house in the US, that generation is almost gone in the US, the ones who grew up in the Great Depression. but perhaps another will come down the long road of history along which we spend a little time.

ultraintelligence?

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make. — Irving Good

aside from inventing a pretty damn smart off switch.

urban renewal is happening in Berlin. on another circuit walk, this time further to the East, I can stand in one spot and see a dozen construction cranes. they are all working on domestic housing units — mostly low, three story maximum, like row houses, condos. filling up vacant lots which were once filled with warehouses. most of the red brick warehouses are gone, and the lots are scraped clear, down to the golden beige sand that underlies the whole city. the top few feet are always full of detritus — porcelain, shattered bricks, glass, and mortar. somewhere I read that in the process of doing random construction in Germany, they also frequently discover WWII munitions accompanied by an occasional detonation and casualties. yikes! I am amazed by the intensity with which the city is still transforming itself.

swimming

out to the pool. well, one of the 50-meter pools is for competitive swimmers (remember the East German women’s swim team in the 1970’s?). the pool open for those sub-human non-competitive swimmers is pretty crowded at 20:30, but I manage to do 700 meters. have to wait for slow folks, there is no lane speed criteria. and I forget my earplugs. everybody wears bath sandals — does this mean there are virulent foot fungi around? no pull-buoys or any other items for borrowing, they are all in locked baskets. however. decent water temps, it gets a bit less crowded after 2100, and I can get from the house to the water in about 10 minutes. on the way home I do another detour further east into a new-looking neighborhood which could be in suburban Helsinki, or maybe somewhere in California. big gas station with 16 pumps and high-octane fuel running at EUR 1.60 per liter — that’s about USD 9.00 per gallon. uff. shiny new mid-rise apartment blocks, chain grocery stores and hotels. not very Berlin-like as visioned in the imagination of Berlin being an exotic destination. it evens begins to construct in mind the idea how similar Germany and the US are in the throes of evolved consumer globalism. true, one can probably find more Made in Germany items in a typical German home than one would find Made in the USA items in an American’s home, but certain cues point more to similarity than difference. over-consumers — fat people being a fundamental evidence; mega-shopping centers; global-chain brands; fashion-as-lifestyle, or is it lifestyle-as-fashion? (either way having approximately the same affect on sustainable living!); status, status, status :: consume, consume, consume…

The cheapest, cleanest energy is the energy you don’t use. — Jenny Powers of the Natural Resources Defense Council

 
Thank you Jenny. Now how about SHOUTING THAT direct into every cochlea, maybe somebody will get it!

tendencies

(00:09:14, stereo audio, 17.8 mb)

Tending to my own symbolic annihilation. Making agreements with distant others to be there then. When being here now remains contested and thin in execution, and, still, a warm hand-shake and I feel like crying; gracias, gracias por todos, gracias, gracias to the guitar-playing Latino guy (is he my age?), a tenor singing in the L station. His spirit-voice shakes the rusted iron foundations of the city. It quickens autonomous space and heart in the urban subterranean and pushes everyone to the electric forefront of be-ing. The sustained highs transform the state of all things until suddenly I am here now. The I-beams shudder as the train pulls in. My head hangs as I enter the car and slump onto the fiberglass bench. Peak experience, and the inevitable deflation.

urban recall

overnight at Eric and Sylvia’s (aka Asteria) place

in Brooklyn after that nice share.dj evening at reboot in the City.

meet Trebor for lunch and coffee in Park Slope. hanging in a coffee house, cyber cafe. where hardly anyone is talking. this is the social venue of the time. wouldn’t have been this way five years, ten, twenty years ago. with Bob Marley playing non-stop on the sound system. and photographic portraits of old gypsy women on the walls. the guy across from me, in the cluster of couches full of typers gets up and leaves, leaving an ipod or iphone behind. a gal next to him in an overstuffed smoking chair gets up and runs after him. no one else looks up at the ripple fluttering of off energy. I smile at her when she returns to her seat and her computer. no more contact.

and the urban vibrato in the space from ankle to nose. along with hard pavement. I walked two miles from Eric’s down to Trebor’s. it always surprises me, the condition of the general infrastructure of the city. would it be better if there wasn’t a war going on?

The Wild Surmise

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father, a senior Pentagon analyst, sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitoes, and dark star-brilliant skies. more “The Wild Surmise”

Oog

finally getting around to a good look at Oog, a curatorial project by Dutch artist Nanette Hoogslags curates at Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily newspaper. I happened to meet her for the first time when I was in Amsterdam last March when I had dinner with she and her husband, network activist David Garcia, an acquaintance of mine. Nanette comments on the current state of the project:

Oog is a commentary and opinion platform for the online edition of De Volkskrant, a major Dutch daily national newspaper. It began in September 2004 as a platform where every week a different artist working in sound and image is asked to respond to news and current affairs. The selection of artists participating has grown into a varied group of national and international artists working with very different forms of expertise and approaches. In this way, artists are using their skills to become commentators on events in a news environment. After each week, the work is placed in the archives, making the Oog collection accessible as a whole.
more “Oog”

art

Kly Yee, the guy in the COFA tuck shop — does wonders with cream on the top of the coffees that he serves. tried to Bluetooth some snaps he had made on his phone of different designs he had made, but wasn’t successful, my SIM was full. will try again later.

what about impressions of urban Sydney? lots of small shops — clothing, jewelry, food, cafes, small restaurants, and on every corner, upstairs the Hotel, downstairs the bar, pub, snookers hall, whatever, mostly quite upscale. clean, none of the sawdust-and-vomit-on-the-floor scene of ages past. though the design with tiling three-quarters up the walls for convenient hosing down remains. then there are the backpacker hotels, clubs, and adult entertainment joints. the occasional acupuncture and massage salons open to the sidewalk, feet protruding from behind curtained stalls and sweating Chinese hosts doing their thing. globalization is expressed in Kinkos, 7-11’s, MacDonalds, Western Union, and such, though these are a definite minority, with (apparently) non-franchise places dominant. there could very well be some mafia-type of franchising going on, but not to the casual observer. cosmopolitan. even critical locals said the Olympics were a good thing. blah blah blah…

with a climate similar to areas of Southern California, comparisons would be obvious, but in terms of general quality-of-life, Sydney would out-rank SoCal easily — especially as the population seems to enjoy the relaxed and low-key street-level cafe-scene, rather than the more obnoxious automobile-driven and anti-social SoCal mentality.

but, enough of banal and surficial observations. it does appear that there are significant levels of stress in the educational system. doing a brief presentation at a doctoral seminar yesterday initiated a number of conversations with some of the attendees. each detailed the particular struggle to get a quality education while dealing with personal economic issues. many students work, some full-time. the government has several funding schemes, but not all people can take advantage of then, given their individual situations. funding is time-limited, as has become the norm in Europe, and similarly, tuitions are rising.

but there seems to be a robust demographic pursuing doctoral degrees either part-time or full-time. good for them!

despair? or what?

interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.

Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair style=

global transit

A couple days in Livermore. Lumpy sleeping on piles of dis-used or dis-placed bio-rhythms. But two days in the pool for abbreviated workouts. That’s a relief. Though the real results of all the hard rehabilitation work of the previous 15 months has dribbled away in the hectic urban travel of the last two months. The only redeeming physical process has been walking around, taking the stairs rather than the elevator.

This day starts two days ago with an afternoon drop-off at the Bart Station in Dublin, exposed to the intensity of 10 lanes of rush-hour traffic on each side of the station. uff!

(00:04:01, stereo audio, 8.2 mb)

About to land, the plane delayed its take-off in order not to arrive before 0600, the aviation curfew time where landing would initiate a fine of USD 250k! Don’t wanna wake up those sleeping Aussies. The Pacific slipped by, unnoticed under a waning moon. Have wondered at those who chose to sail it in times past. To be on it, at the center of a reduced world, as though on a ship in space, with stars filling the vaulting dome to the rim.