posted
  • place: en route Aachen, Germany - Brussels, Belgium

migrations

a long day yesterday riding the rails from Kiel to Aachen, back into familiar spaces again there. a really nice but far too short visit with Günter, Christina, and Manon — who is now as tall as her mother! last time I saw her she was just a little child, maybe eight years ago?! lovely child. so, hanging out talking about books, art, life, music, so nice to re-connect after all this time.

re-creating the passage of time. young children grow up.

a leisurely breakfast with Christina, and she then drove me to the Hauptbahnhof for my train through Liege and on to Brussels Midi, a short walk to the hotel, where Dirk has faxed a three-day plan of meetings with a variety of artists, artist’s collectives, and educators working in that fuzzy space of new media. my room is not ready, so I stash my bag and start wandering towards the first agenda item: a round-table (albeit around a rectangular table) with two of the principles of LA[bau] — a laboratory for architecture and urbanism — Manuel Abendroth and Els Vermang.

a nice lunch (those dang baguette-sandwiches are always so crunchy that they cut the skin in my mouth at first, I forget to remember this and take care, flipping the sandwich over so that the smoother side of the baguette is up). but mmmm. on the way to lunch, however, a strange event. walking towards a building under reconstruction, a scaffolding is being set up, maybe four stories high at the moment. I catch the eye of a guy who is stacking parts to be hauled up on a cable winch, nothing unusual there. I am looking at the structure which looks somehow unstable. I decide to walk off the sidewalk instead of under the structure. I am looking up at the structure, calculating it’s condition. a pass it by, return to the sidewalk and hear a clang, then a meter in front of me a wrench, a heavy one, smashes to the ground. there is a group of 4 guys walking towards me about the same distance from the landing point as I am. faugh! how weird is that. I had the prior intuition something was wrong with the situation, and I can’t really say that the slight detour I made brought me closer or further away from my head intersecting with this tool which must have fallen from around 15 meters up. far enough up that is could easily have killed me or those other people.

so the rest of the day, I am watching things more carefully, but what difference does it make? if you look one way, you miss what is coming the other.

at any rate, they outlined their program and a couple of the main projects they have undertaking recently. tough to cross over my lack of background in architecture — it has always been a distant field of interest, but seldom the opportunity to crack the conceptual world that it is embedded in. the one time jumping in on a final critique with some of EJ’s students at Boulder was interesting — along with a surficial awareness of functionality in housing design — but does not provide any preparation for the contemporary conceptual spaces of inquiry. it does seem that innovative, and especially decorative design elements in architecture are about something. but the connection between the about-ness and what I would understand as the reason for the existence of architecture is not clear to me. but this is perhaps my own weakness combined with a deep frustration at the frequent appearance of non-functional design in built structures and in objects, for that matter.

at any rate, their work shows the presence of superior economic capital, and the consequent high production values which is nice. professional. sleek, designer, urban.

been in the desert too long, or, not long enough.

Crabbit (cra-bit) dialect, chiefly Scot. – adj. 1. ill-tempered, grumpy, curt, disagreeable; in a bad mood [esp. in the morning]. (often used in ‘ken this, yer a crabbit get, so ye are’). n. by their nature or temperament conveys an aura of irritability. — drink coaster at Christina & Günter’s place

posted
  • place: Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

psychogeographic confluence

Psychogeography, yet another buzz-word in contemporary media art Worlds. Usually applied in the context of the controlled environment of urban human-scapes. A gravel and sand bar at the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers makes an ideal counterpoint. Despite scaring off the wild geese and beaver. Where to go? The water’s too cold to ford the river, and the canyon walls too steep to climb. Around-about, then. Leaving Debord, the dérive, and the rest of the Situationists well behind with Parisian dog-shit on their shoes and Gauloises Caporal ash sticking to their tongues.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

dinner, elk, and teeth

raucous evening with the college room-mates and partners and kids. retrospecting, eating, discussing, and laughing. meeting some new folks as well: stimulating, into a very late night. bed is sleep-worthy, but sleep doesn’t come so easy in the lateness. the new job possibility seems to find a space in self and mind. a retreat to the mountains after twenty years of urban intellectual activities. time to mull, digest, and re-create the documents of all those times. at the same time, working with children, revealing the wonders of the natural energy systems of the Sangre de Christos.

watch/hear elk rut and bugle in the back yard. a big stag riding herd on a sizable harem of cows. not seen this kind of wild-life action in Golden before. a cow charges big friendly 120-pound Milo, Don’s Rottweiler. Milo retreats fast from the backyard fence — if possessing a tail, it would be between legs.

later in the evening, to top the day off, Natalie loses a tooth while playing with Sonya and Alex in the basement.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

performances

friend Varsha sends this image: in performance at the Tate Turbine Hall in London:

Swathed in a shell of white embroidered fabric, two bodies appear in the urban landscape, adapting to the architecture of the site. The straight-jacket-cum-exoskeleton that links two artists — Tejal Shah and Varsha Nair — is joined at the arms, forming a connected ‘bridge’ that nevertheless speaks of distances between people.

In generating this project, Shah (Mumbai) and Nair (Bangkok) exchanged ideas by email about their respective interests in the edge of everyday normality and in the loneliness evident within the teeming cities in which they live.

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

seeing hearing feeling

spend the morning with Sally Jane, checking out some of the exhibitions including a personal walk-through of the Animalia project with producers Angela Main and Caroline McCaw (more kiwis!). then on to the ART MUSEUM to see THE SHOW curated by Steve Deitz. some amazing works, leading off with the elegant live-chat-based piece.

lunch with Ken at La Victoria Taqueria, better burritos than Macho Taco which was inexplicably closed at lunch-time.

also happen upon the npr (neighborhood public radio) broadcast studio at the downtown cineplex in an unused ticket booth. was wondering where they were broadcasting from — last night I happened to tune them in at 88.9 on the car radio on the commute back to the ‘burbs. so, met Jon Brumit and

hard to begin and end the day with a rattling vibrating swervy commute that lasts about an hour, door-to-door.

some overviews on the conference:

yadda-yadda-yadda; blah-blah-blah.

so many words, so many moving images, so much sound, talking heads, and spectacle. along with nice personal encounters. the monumental, the hierarchic voices along with the personal, networked, and confidential/private.

San Jose is interesting clash of urban-renewal towers of glass and corrosion-resistant metals: ringed some hard-core barrio Victorian bungalow scene, interlaced with the chronic homeless scattered between the shining spaces and conventioneers.

organized networks are interested in new institutional forms. tactical media has come to a stage of confronting itself. question of scalar transformation, (vs) networked organizations. democracy and networks are antithetical. bunk.

prototypes: sarai, iDC, srishdi school of art and media, indy media, etc

end up going to see a Mike Figgis remix of his film Time Code. a pseudo-press guy is giving away a couple tickets, so I snag one. he explains that he’s not really press, but a writer, and is trying to write a history of media art starting with the worldview of Gertrude Stein. I didn’t quite understand what he was trying to tell me. I suppose he very well might be a better writer that explainer. the film is a disappointment — the subject of the narrative is hermetically sealed in Hollywood and lacks any compelling visual or story elements. Mike is there, verily, and does a live “remix” which consists of rewinding the tape(!) and fading in/out the 4 different screen audio tracks. in form — the four frames which simultaneously inhabit the main screen that were recorded in four single simultaneous takes starting at the same time — there is an extremely interesting potential, especially as the overall resolution of video systems for shooting, recording, editing, and playback are gradually increasing. but the possibilities of the form seem completely wasted by the insipid narrative and visual void. is it a joke maybe?

head back to Livermore on the 87-280-680-84 pilgrimage route. not really liking that violent traverse of the land. though one segment moves across the Calaveras Valley which is still unpopulated and sports the rolling amber hills with huge live oaks scattered at stellar intervals.

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

isea day 1.5

Kate Armstrong and I try out urbantells.net as their first guinea pigs. tech problems start everything off. and seem nearly as ubiquitous as the number of devices deployed at the exhibition.

the polar/solar brunch ends up with Ed, Ken, and I talking over lunch for several hours — nice, catching up — mapping the network, teaching, working, net-working. we then wander over to the CRUMB project run by Sarah Cook and Beryl Graham to have some tea and cakes and some interesting conversation on strategies for survival in the culture sphere.

yeah, isea ’06. stories begin to accumulate as to failures of the local infrastructure in support of the program of incoming artists and their projects.

later, doing the gallery crawl with Ken, run into Mathias. catch some interesting work and good food.

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

re-colonization

things have not really started for ISEA’06, but I head down to San Jose on a shake-down run and to see who is around already. the drive and parking logistics are a bit complicated, so it is good to construct an operational head-map without the pressure of schedule. public transportation in central San Jose is revived along with the recent urban renewal that appears to be taking place. a re-colonization by huge shiny-skinned office buildings, no real community thriving are the foot of these gleaming beasts. just restaurants to cater to the convention crowds. food shopping? no chance for that in this infotainment core. immediately outside there are the remains of a pre-existing indigenous community.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Partial Description of the World

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. more “Partial Description of the World”

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

deflated

no energy. good days are fewer than bad days. bad days come when sleep is not found. a particular kind of diffuse pain or sensation keeps body from sinking into deepening slumber. no fast-racing head thoughts, just sensate disturbance. strings the days out in a fog of lack and pointlessness.

posted
  • place: Phoenix, Arizona

limbo :: pergatory :: hell?

post-op. twelve bleary and medicated hours later. I am splayed open for 6 hours of spinal surgery — anterior L3 corpectomy combined with a L2-L4 fusion in titanium — from noon to 6 pm with a team of doctors lead by Dr. Papadopoulos. he tells Janet that the surgery went perfectly. I have no coherent memories of the ensuing 3 days when on heavy morphine IV. with the self-delivering clicker that Janet says I am clicking on all the time.

waking moments bring the perception of the room, nurses coming and going checking on my body’s status, the IV machine sounding like a few children shuffling down a long corridor and back, forever, shoes scraping on an institutional tile floor. why don’t they stop them going back and forth so I can sleep?

when eyes close, like a junkies eyes grafted onto my own, as lids drop, another reality rolls into place. immediate, present, and dynamic. sometimes I find myself reaching out to touch the objectification of vision. knowing it’s not there, except a sliver of doubt, maybe it is. scenes as real as any reality, urban, details everywhere, even where the eye is not focused, textures impossible to render except in real time. changing, evolving, and the self, wraith-like moving through it all, soaking in the experience.

posted
  • place: The Mission, San Francisco, California

places, sounds, words

portrait, Sirpa, Mission 17 Gallery, San Francisco, California, June 2005

make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice’s home and drive down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.
more “places, sounds, words”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Caesar

What is it about the insularity of the US population that makes it so hard to see relations and connections between actions and results? Take for example, the issue of Chinese economic advancement. Almost every object that one can buy in the cheap distribution points like WalMart, CostCo, K-Mart, and pretty much all other consumer institutions in the suburban consumer US is manufactured in China. The Amurikan consumer is able to consume at such a rate primarily by the subsidization of the Chinese worker by the Chinese government. Not through some kind of controllable mechanism related to the government in power: the relative hegemonic position guarantees a certain stability of markets, but it does not control the procession of wealth and movement of global capital.

Beware the leader who bangs the drums of war in order to whip the citizenry into a patriotic fervor, for patriotism is indeed a double-edged sword. It both emboldens the blood, just as it narrows the mind … And when the drums of war have reached a fever pitch and the blood boils with hate and the mind has closed, the leader will have no need in seizing the rights of the citizenry. Rather, the citizenry, infused with fear and blinded with patriotism, will offer up all of their rights unto the leader, and gladly so. How do I know? For this is what I have done. And I am Caesar. — William Shakespeare

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

slackers?

workshop starts. dinner with Trine. apparently the student situation at KiT is the same as before. students too ‘busy’ to attend a workshop. given that this is the only place where this has happened — twice in 4 years — I just don’t understand it. two students showed up for the first day. one of them a Spanish exchange student. and two other people from the ‘outside.’ thank goodness. else the trip ends up not really being worth it. though it’s been great meeting some new and old acquaintances in the meantime. while hardly earning my keep. such an extreme difference in the students between here and Bremen, for example, the ones here simply absent. don’t get why they are in school except for the social infrastructural value purely. which has nothing to do with art, only commerce. if they only knew. of course, there could be over-arching infrastructural issues affecting their presence. the effect that the faculty has on the long-term base emotional confidence of the students can be immense, though very hard to quantify. but absent teachers make absent students. Trondheim suffers from the drain that all the Nordic countries experience — that of having a single dominant city that is the seat of fiscal, political, and cultural power. all other cities are second-rate. so, the milieu outside urban Oslo (Stockholm, Helsinki, and Reykjavík, Copenhagen, among other small countries) is always stretched and even under threat of not remaining viable in extreme instances.

posted
  • place: Glen Ridge,New Jersey

arrival

a day of urbanity , Manhattan, Brooklyn, Long Island, Jersey City. street Life, pizza, chili relleno, art, airports, cars, traffic. Loki arrives early.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Venus küsst die Sonne

gravity vortices spinning out from solar-venusian intersection draws me along, trailing, but engaged at high altitude. als kleiner dunkler Punkt vor der Sonne vorbei. a tracer.

after a nice afternoon re-connecting with Simon, listening to a whole slew of new sonic impressions since the last time we crossed paths long around about a decade ago across on the other side of Germany. decades that include the age of The Wall, a mark largely erased from the Berlin landscape. only a quick glimpse down the Unter den Linden to the Brandenburger Tor. can’t see anything, the linden trees obscuring most except the spinning Daimler-Chrysler ikon.

thinking that this place would be a nice landing zone. with energy that is picking up, focusing. but it would also be necessary for it to be a humanely warm place. no solo mio.

Day and night sounds on Goslarer Platz outside Wolfgang’s flat are urban and rural at the same time.

posted
  • place: en route Bremen - Kiel, Germany

spins

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!” more “spins”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

tech-no-mad rising

finally positive and official confirmation on the artist-residency award in Helsinki. March through May or so, artist-in-residence at the Sibelius Academy’s Center for Music and Technology. with a nice flat on Suomenlinna, a stipend, and no real teaching contingencies. the first time in a decade I have had time to work without the pressure of teaching and/or movement hanging over my head. some teaching before and after in Germany and probably trips to other places here and there in between — Riga, Tallinn, Venice, Amsterdam, Köln. open-ended. Europe as destination, home? but with the welcoming spirit shown, it is something of a homecoming. that old dilemma of a spiritual home in certain landscapes of the West, and an intellectual/social creative home in the urban energies of pan-Europe. after the last two years of geopolitical developments across the Atlantic, I understand that things will be different now. and the time of returning to the US may be further off than I can imagine.

facing the tech-no-mad inside. the usual stresses surface. destination instabilities, fiscal indeterminacy, psychosocial unknowns. people to see, two years on, at least, the amount of time I have been in the US without leaving at all. but the forward look that travel requires begins to liven my mind again. stories to share about the lapsed time of distant absence.

posted
  • place: enroute Gallup, New Mexico - Prescott, Arizona

migraine

Waking up in an expensive cheap motel in Gallup. A hole of a town. Along “Historic Route 66,” a place in a long slide since Interstate 40 sliced across New Mexico, Arizona, and California and made that quaint legend a fact: a dead remnant of another level of pop culture and consumer opulence. Gallup is dying slowly.

The drive the day before becomes a gritty and wearing task—made so by one of those damn migraines that I seem to get as often as I travel. What is this about? No answers there, been trying to decode the messages of body on that, but to no rising clarity. Stress? Improper hydration? Too much sugar in the system? Full-body tension? Lack of solid sleep the night before? A friggin’ mystery still. Passing through the landscape of my country. Seeing places that would be soul-stirring, soul-food. Loki not into the isolation. An age thing. Feeling that the time for withdrawing from the things of the world. Where Loki desires friends to play with, and an urban context in which to live. Though he enjoys camping and the outdoors.

Impossible to measure anything. As again I am NOT writing about most of the events in life. Family, relationships, work, blah blah blah, internal feelings, and struggles. Blogging nine years on into the ether.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

net2art

(ED: Review of the net-to-art exhibition written for (the now defunct) Norwegian web-culture site http://kunst.no/ at the millennial change)

What our age needs is communicative intellect. For intellect to be communicative, it must be active, practical, engaged. In a culture of the simulacrum, the site of communicative engagement is electronic media. In the mediatrix, praxis precedes theory, which always arrives too late. The communicative intellect forgets the theory of communicative praxis in order to create a practice of communication. — Taylor and Saarinen, from “Imagologies: Media Philosophy”

Imagine.

Enter a plain white room with an Other. Take a facing seat one meter apart in not-too-comfortable chairs and follow these instructions: “You have three hours, create a dialogue with each Other.” There is no piped-in music, no magazines on coffee tables, no televisions, no mobile phones, no windows. No implements, tools, ethernet connections, or whining hard-drives. And, as this is not an experiment, there is no one watching from behind mirrored glass or by video surveillance.

Start the dialogue.

Imagine, what are the possibilities?

Now, increase the separation to ten meters between you and the Other. Repeat the instructions. What now? Add the mediation of a heavy glass window between; add a microphone and speakers on each side. What happens? Abstractly paint over the glass with opaque pigments. Take away the microphones and speakers, each of you has a pencil and paper to write messages which will then be carried by robotic assistants from one half of the room to the other via a long hallway.

Imagine designing the rooms.

Add the fact that neither of you speaks a common mother tongue, but instead, you must use a third or even fourth language, sometimes relying on a book to supply the proper words.

Imagine building the rooms.

Split the room in half, place the two halves at least 1000 kilometers apart, replace the hallway with a slender wire of glass, you are given the means to throw words, encoded with several layers of machine translation, through the glass wire. Provide keyboards for each to touch, exchange the glass window with a monitor that displays the color, form, sign and symbol of your decoded dialogue.

Imagine several hundred million rooms, a person in each.
more “net2art”

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

psychic nomadism

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. finally getting around to exploring the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why real music is inevitably dangerous to readers). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar. more “psychic nomadism”

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

microwaves

A borderline migraine; a long walk up to the microwave tower/restaurant. wandering up hill. and musing on the nature of far-seeing. if matter in the world is related to our perceptions/observations of it, what is the change of conditions that appears around us? progress. (mere imaginings?) illusions. Illusory seductions?

And the appearance of Others! Perturbations in the local energy field. The Other is in the image of god. God is Presence. I only wish I could write about this (or do something about this). It seems so unclear. and. uncertain. along with the vicissitudes of living that over/under-lie the teaching.

A heavier and more consequent praxis would raise my profile. And particular anti-social meanings. Leave not so much in their wake. Sitting here in the Bakeri/Café in Møllenburg. Mill Rock (where grain was prepared. on the Thresh-Kjeld. And so that goes. Hoping that caffeine will drive a migraine away. and hoping that I can find some answers by wandering. But I don’t think that it will be so. slacking won’t keep mind on a force-full track.

(I distract myself with news. (radio-freak, I have called myself).)

Audio is disturbances in the local flux of energies. dynamic. movement. fluxus.

And the I Ching. Book of Changes.

What am I doing that will change? Building up a certain Karma. and then it will fall away to the opposite? or can I dynamically balance things. Thinking now so much of the future. And how it might come down. To another way of going. and being. Knowing that Sanna is much more that just a shelter in a storm. And seeing this one-or-other way coming. Losing/giving up on her to regain Loki. (neither will do). because I won’t be there for either. and then what?

posted
  • place: en route Helsinki, Finland - Eindhoven, Netherlands

snow-free

arrived in a snow-free urban zone from a historical fortress sheathed in ice, snow, and rime. Best Western Hotel. just like all others. cars rev their engines and burn rubber at each stop Light. what is this about? can’t do that in Helsinki. that would be useless as a display of aggression or macho. Journey to the Center of the Earth plays on cable, here I am in another box with teevee fed in, and I turn it on.

posted
  • place: Trondheim, Norway

terrible tragedy

morning, cool night (inside) cold (outside). my sister Janet, the family historian, transcribes and sends this story written by my grandfather, George Blodgett Hopkins, of an incident from his childhood in Linn, Missouri in the late 19th century.

Sometime between 1875 and 1877, when I was ten or eleven, a terrible tragedy occurred. My father, sister and older brother had been in California for some time. Mother, brother Walter and myself were still living in the old home. The new Linn courthouse that I had mentioned previously, was completed and part of it was occupied. The basement, composed of numerous rooms, 16 or 18 feet square, was not occupied. The rooms were located on either side of a long hall that extended east and west, the full length of the building. As I recall, the ceilings were about 10 feet height, the walls were plastered, painted and nicely finished. more “terrible tragedy”

posted
  • place: en route Lahti - Töölö, Finland

multiple dreams

dreaming of something, but the memory is gone. 20:20 and listening to a Monty Python CD. waiting for Sanna to come home from YLE. ride in from Lahti on the bus with a group of students to Kiasma. Kirsti tells me about her mother who died this spring. we’re on an art field trip. art at 10:15 in the morning. Bruce Naumann, and the rest. coffee and a weineri in the Kiasma cafe and I have lost the foreign students that I was to take around the museum, so I head to a shop to buy a bunch of flowers and then on the number 10 tram to see Sanna — we end up hanging about talking for several hours before she has to go to work for the evening.
more “multiple dreams”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

shorn

Loki is counting down to his birthday on the 18th. all day he is telling anyone he meets how many days to his birthday. his mother has made birthdays a big occasion, as is the custom in her family. with my 40th closing in only a week later than Loki’s, I have nothing to say. my 21st, probably the last milestone, was an early dinner with a couple friends, not even a shot of whiskey! never have been one for birthdays — with the excuse and sentiment that to be the focus of attention at a family-oriented event was sure to bring ridicule or derision or something maybe a bit less destructive, but still an accumulation of energy that dogs the self and slows the trusted outering of the soul. reflecting that I have never really edited my writing here — in the gross sense of writing a passage and then just deleting it. never have written like that — editing is a process that I do not like to apply to my writing unless it is a formal process in which case I take the word-work very seriously — too seriously in the view of some. Loki and I go to the Urban Coyote salon to get our hair cut. both short. my long tail is cropped and bagged to join the collection of three or four others that have been chopped at various times in the last few years. should have done this early in the summer, as it leaves both of us with white skin unbaked by the sun. Alberto from Mexico is the cutter, and I don’t take the opportunity to practice my Spanish. a lady sitting under a huge hairdryer gushes about how wonderful a thing, getting my hair cut off — it is something that does titillate women, a man being shorn … short hair once again, after 2.5 years. so quick does time move, that I don’t feel that it makes a difference, nerves receiving the impulse of SHORT are overloaded. merely allows for less thought to tying it up and all. and I will be less shocking to many folks. I like the long hair intimidation factor — unfurling my “freak flag” always was enjoyable.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

walls of academia

hike with Mark and Loki. first we drive from Boulder up through Gold Hill and on to Wild Basin. I suddenly realize that since Wild Basin is actually within the boundary of Rocky Mountain National Park, there will be a ten dollar use fee which is just too much to deal with, so we turn around and head for Brainard Lake which ends up having a five dollar use fee. both these developments are new — at least within the last five years. things change. we do a leisurely circuit of Long Lake before having to race back for dinner with

EJ, Bridget, and Eliott. ice cream and a stroll on the pedestrian mall. Colorado has this possibility of massively splendid scenery within a short drive from urbanity. the big weakness is the absolute cultural vacuum. and too many Californians moving into the state. ah hmmm. and the University suffers from the following malaise:

Institutions of higher education have not taken advantage of the resources and energies circulating beyond the walls of the academy. As a result, cultural analysis is separated from the very condition of its own possibility. To overcome the isolation of the intellectual critic, it is necessary to enter the mainstream of culture by leaving the confines of print. — Taylor and Saarinen

is startling to me because the telematic event described in their book Imagologies takes place in 1992-3. it makes what I am attempting as educator/activist/artist seem dated and lacking an experimental edge (a feature of much of my creative work — it appears retro and staid somehow). of course, I stand by my thesis that the being of dialogue is a condition that is regenerated or reborn in each successive moment, a condition that gives the edge of immediacy and presence to all communicative attempts, but what about the actual results of what I am doing? With the knowing that success in telepresence is predicated on attention, concentration, and focus, events that I facilitate directly address these factors and push the envelope.

posted
  • place: en route Lahti - Suomenlinna, Finland

Loki’s dreams

Leaving the flat in Lahti, after a relatively long stay of four weeks, I immediately experience the stress of movement-insecurity. And again, it plunges me into a state of ineffectiveness. Crisis point. Questions of how to proceed with this style of living. The vacillations I experience emphasize the fragility of building a presence of being on the ego. That is the source of the oscillations. These become the most uncomfortable and stressful times of life. Other times are filled with the in-your-face of teaching, where time flies by as I make the pronouncements of a teacher — or at least speak with the students. At the same moment, it seems that speaking introduces its own complex web of deception. That having to speak to the Other is a way of escape from the Self, as a rattling noise that supplants any need to look into the frightening swirl of internal energies. A diversion from the essential. Really looking for the way of Zen detachment from this. A stiff back is not the right way to be going. keep on keepin’ on is one way that the truculent San Franciscan flower child would put it, moving targets are safer. but stillness and silence are so difficult to bear. Although at times the floating body simply desires to come to a rest. Disturbances in mental functionality seems to no are different than of other ways can to forget filters of movements into the base of binary openings. Enough said? Who cares? Not me! Plow, Plow through Oxen! Little things. Undisclosed. Partial, fragmentary, immediate, extraordinary. transition. movement. for the moment, lost again. far from a home that is not mine, surrounded by homes and houses. cut loose. partners around, in various stages of being. Sun breaks through the high arched window over the tall buildings across the street. breaks through a multitude of meditations to give me Light. (Jah Rastafari!) but what tools are there in life and in the mind? move through this Light, no, remain stationary, Immobile. for a grasping thousand seconds. body locked in a known curl, legs crossed, and only the pen-hand in motion, mind following. But following at a distance, in low visibility where musings break few borders, and run aground often on size and placement. and time. following myself. sun heats up. and I am left feeling warm. sleepless. under lids that never close. with the storm of the ego, (it will pass) and I will go on. without remembering the real sensation of it all. only repetition will bring recall. lost in a storm. swimming pool, immersion, submersion, a small ache where cold water penetrates to the eardrum. decide not to flip-turn, but to stop for a moment. he is standing in the water. his nose is crooked and flattened. a fighter. long stringy hair. he turns to me and says something. (this dialogue to be finished)… I find a scrap of paper where I have scribbled, sometime last fall in Colorado when Loki was with me, a fragment of one of his dreams. In a previous life, before being born, he was a wolf with two names, one was Strong Jumper or Sterk Hoppur, the other Hungry Jumper or Svangur Hoppur. I make it through the day, not really very confident of anything, especially what I am doing. Incredulous that I can be so fragile. Wondering at what others do in this life. Each Other is focused on the way of going through the material jungle, looking for survival.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

David Byrne

Christmas over. I made a big breakfast for everybody on Christmas morning and then we opened presents. Janet gave me a copy of David Byrne’s book, Strange Rituals, which caught me somehow … I have always enjoyed the Talking Heads (one of my first concert and album reviews in the Oredigger was the Heads’ Fear of Music disk which, although I didn’t quite understand the scope of the minimalist urban perspective at the time, in retrospect was a great album. And of course, in-concert, the Heads were explosive: led by Byrne. I also caught a solo concert by Byrne, in, of all places, the national symphony concert hall in Reykjavík a couple years ago. I remember sitting, no, standing on my seat, dancing, while this older lady sat next to me and didn’t move a muscle—she was probably only at the concert because it was (literally) cool to be there. Byrne really has been all over the map creatively, and not in a spotty and dilettante-ish way, but in a struggling (and successful) movement testing, trying the responses of various media to see if they will be the proper vessel for his energies. Anyway, this book, Strange Rituals, is pretty interesting. It is a photography book primarily, with some text. I found it inspiring (not to mention that Janet posed the question in the accompanying card—When’s your book coming out?). I have been toying with the idea for some time, doing a book, and have made a few attempts at a beginning, although I haven’t had the time to make a more serious start. The images are there, and I guess the daunting task is the editing, layout, and treatment of text. I have gone through several working titles, the latest being Rituals of Movement, Rituals of Place. I guess it resonated, this Byrne book, the images had a vein of the raw and concentrated aimlessness with a thematic non-thema that concentrates energy on the flow and energy behind the images … A bit hard to settle upon, but striking. I have been put off of my own work by the over-riding need not to make a “best-of” type project, that is, searching for the images that are most accessible from the traditional photographic standpoint. Editing my own work has always been such a challenge for me. Some where, I have the wish that another person would come along and help me do the editing, be the Editor in the critical construction of this structure—a book—as I am unable, so far, to do it myself.

I am free to behave, to create, and to act in ways that have never appeared before on the Earth. Maybe. I am free to invent myself and my culture from scratch. I have, like Stephen Daedalus wished, cut myself off, released myself from the dead weight of history. The pressure of constantly having to build my own support system, my own philosophy, my own religion, my own unique way of life makes me slightly neurotic. It is more than one person, or even a living community or nation, should have to bear. America, for many immigrants, is the insane wilderness it always was. It is still the land of limitless dreams, boundless desires, and insatiable lusts. And of greed, psychotic outbursts, and subtle oppressions.

David Byrne, Strange Ritual: Pictures and Words (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 1995).

On to work at LANkaster.com. Plenty to be done. And money to be made. I move onward into the day. Lawren left early this morning, driving to eLAy, to get back to work. Doug came up with Jason and Angelique after flying in to Phoenix from NYC via Las Vegas.

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  • place: Newton, New Jersey

Bertha

Bastille Day. I was going to meet with Randy and Amy, Stefan and Ellen, and Kevin up at Storm King, the great outdoor sculpture park on the Hudson in Westchester County north of The City, but I have not finished the photographic work that I had wanted to. Among other disturbances to my week of printing, my eyes have been hurting quite a bit. Photographic printing is not an easy task, and I am out of shape, if that is possible. Nothing like standing up ten to twelve hours at a stretch, handling large sheets of wet paper. I love the process! Thanks Willy for letting me use your lab! Hurricane Bertha passed through the area yesterday bringing about eight hours of heavy rain and some winds. Other than that, the weather has been very mild, almost chilly for this time of year. I am stressed about the future. Plans circulate, opportunities flash in front of me, indecision makes me shudder, printing seems to slog along, concentration wavers, and eyes give out. Telephone calls to different people, friends. Still the mediated communication. I have not called Loki yet.

… The air touches you with a hand of lead. All your promises stand behind you surrounded by your vows. … — Markus Lupartz

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  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Autobiographical sketch for the University of Redlands Alumni Association

Cleveland Hopkins (Class of 1932), June 1996

My Redlands experience started in the fall of 1928 after my graduation from the Ukiah Union High School in northwestern California. I was drawn to Redlands by the attendance there of my older brother Howard who graduated in 1931, and by the approval of our parents in view of the connection then between Redlands and the Baptist denomination. The overnight journey to Los Angeles was made on the coastal steamer Yale with the trip out to Redlands on the Big Red cars, mostly through what were then orange groves! I enjoyed a most pleasant three years at Redlands, followed by an unwanted vacation for a year for lack of funds in the early part of the Great Depression. This lead to my graduation from the Stanford Engineering School in June 1933, where I found that my excellent training in Redlands in mathematics, physics, chemistry, and economics enabled me to spend only a year at Stanford to obtain an undergraduate degree. My good fortune then was to find industrial engineering work for the next nine years in the San Francisco Bay area. Challenging work during World War II took me to a large governmental effort during WWII at the MIT Radiation Laboratory at Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I helped develop radar. Also, and by the hand of the Creator, found my wife, Lillian MacKenzie, at the famous Park Street Church in Boston. She was graduated from Gordon College with the class of 1945 and we were married on 11 August 1945.

We have four children, Douglas, Janet, Nancy, and John Charles. Our grandchildren are Jason, Casey, Loki, and Dana, and one great grandchild, Lexie. Jason is an able soccer player and was on the Arizona state-wide team for high schoolers.

From my 43 years of active work, four contributions are noteworthy: 1) assistance in the development and application of ground-based radar; 2) contributions to the design and development of certain essential data collection devices for the 1948 atomic bomb tests at Eniwetok; 3) input to the JCS Alaskan Command in fixing on the position of Alaska in the 1958-59 strategic posture of the United States; and 4) devised a project to transmit aircraft altitude in response to ground radar identification queries. This 1960 project enabled air traffic controllers for the first time to fix on safe airborne aircraft separation distances. All of this occurred in a period of intense technological change and innovation, some inspired by the Cold War. My early background at home and Redlands helped me in all of this as well as aid in countering the warlike attitudes of some of my associates, particularly in discussions of what later was known as MAD or Mutually Assured Destruction, a product of the Cold War based on active use of ICBMs with multiple warheads.

My professional memberships include fellowship in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, senior membership in the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, charter member (1953) of the Operations Research Society of America (now the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science), and member of the American Scientific Affiliation (ASA). The ASA is made up of scientists and engineers who are also Christians, a connection that was easily made as a result of early training at home and later at Redlands. As author, editor, co-author, or co-editor, I have had a hand in 57 publications of varying importance.

While at Redlands my sports activities included student managership of the basketball team and participation on the tennis squad, and as I am an Eagle Scout, I was employed by the Redlands Boy Scouts as a field executive for one school year.

My educational activities included several specialized shorter courses at various governmental and non-governmental educational institutions. My associations with many physicists and others with advanced degrees caused me to acquire 22 units in graduate physics and mathematics at the University of Maryland during the period 1945 to 1952.

While we were living in suburban Maryland, we were associated with the Derwood Alliance Church, part of the Christian and Missionary Alliance: in particular, both my wife and I were members of the Governing Board for sixteen years. In addition, I taught a Sunday School class on Proverbs for three sessions. While a member of the First Baptist Church here in Prescott, I was vice-chairman of the Board for a short time.

One of the reasons that we retired to Arizona in 1983 is traceable to my life-long interest in astronomy, as I believe that “… the heavens declare the glory of God.” About eighty percent of the nights here are suitable for astronomical observation, and I hope that my computer-driven 10” Newtonian telescope will soon — summer 1996 — be ready for variable star research.

As a suitable end to this narrative, it is my pleasure to pay tribute to my wife Lillian for her faithfulness and support in following and encouraging me during my ups and downs over these 51 years. She has also carried out much of the raising of our children in my absence on so many trips away from home. In addition to being active now in Christian womens’ work here in Prescott, she is School Board Chair for the Prescott Christian Academy. She was recently invited to participate in the joint campaign of the Campus Crusade organization and the Association of Christian Schools, Inc. (ASCI), to help take evangelical Christianity to what was the USSR; on 17 March 1992, she returned from three weeks in Kiev and Minsk where she instructed other teachers.

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  • place: Stockholm, Sweden

crowns

This morning I went into town to the Konstfack (aka, the University of Art and Design), where I had lunch with Hans Hedberg and Olof Glemme, the two full-time faculty at the School of Photography. They showed me slides of student work and the facility which is modest, but includes a bit of digital equipment. They have only 14 students and the program is only for a Masters Degree, not undergraduate work. The school just recently got on-line, with a server and a LAN-line to most the terminals. I never got a hold of Art Node people today, either the phone was busy or no one was around, so I ended up sitting in yet another café, writing myself into a depressive frenzy of self-negation. Not the best way to spend an afternoon, and I topped off the rage with some french fries from McDonalds of all places. I don’t know what has gotten into me … Maybe just too much travel and too little work being done. I think living (the last six years) in Iceland has damaged me, broken my power in a way. For all the intensity it precipitated, it left me without the ability to concentrate and work hard on producing Art. Maybe I never had those characteristic to begin with. Okay, I won’t dwell on things like that here. There are more important things to talk about. For example, tomorrow it is King Karl XVI Gustaf’s 50th birthday, and there have already been quite some celebrations going on in the media leading up to whatever happens tomorrow. The last day of April is also a celebration of the coming of spring (or the ending of winter, whatever), something like the May Pole parties of Germany.

Our nature lies in movement, complete calm is death. — Pascal, Pensées

Stockholm is an interesting and rather complex city. It seems on the verge of becoming too urban compared to other Scandinavian capitals, and the architecture has a certain heaviness that Vienna, for example, doesn’t have. It could be merely the building materials which are predominantly the dense, dark, ancient granites from the glacially scoured Nordic shield. And the fact that today was cold and overcast. Spring will be held off for some days, it appears, even though the trees are desperately trying to bloom. I do imagine in full-tilt summer Stockholm is beautiful and very pleasant like Helsinki. At any rate, I am enjoying every minute I spend here.

posted
  • place: en route Rösrath - Köln, Germany - Vienna, Austria

First District tour

I arrived from Köln to Vienna, following the long train ride through the German heartlands. Passing by Nuremberg, I thought of hopping a train to nearby Bamberg, the home of the work The Bamberg Apocalypse an altar-piece I have wanted to see for some time, but, no time for that now. It was snowing heavily from the Austrian border on to Vienna. I made it to Mathias and Sylvia’s place with minimum problems and was happy to stop moving after the ten hours on the train. It will be interesting here, I can see that. Vienna is a special place that is/has been balanced on many borders and frontiers. I won’t have much time to work on the digital audio piece, especially between visiting people and getting over to Hungary to visit ArtPool and Kesckemet, but will at least get a start on it, and hopefully continue the work later in Helsinki. I look forward to the next days — and discussions on audio art, radio, and networking.

The gray smoke drifted the gray that stops shift cut tangle they breathe medium the word cut shift patterns words cut the insect tangle cut shift that coats word cut breath silence shift abdominal cut tangle stop word holes. — William Burroughs

I begin to understand what must be done. Pure incantation, pure consciousness, pure un-self-consciousness, pure impulse, pure way of going. In the interstitial moments between things, thoughts, and seeing, another way of being must be cultivated. Awareness full into each second. There is no time for replaying, no second chances. this is IT!

It’s quite cold, and at times there is a bit of snow falling, we make a long walk through the marketplace and flea-market, on to the First District, a stop in the café in the basement of the Weiner Secessionist Museum, and the long walk back to the flat on Sebastianplatz. We spent an hour online, I showed them my web site, although the connection wasn’t particularly fast, and they ended up casting an I Ching with the question poised What will happen to us in Japan? They are leaving in August for a four-month sabbatical at a house in rural Japan with a view on Mt. Fujiyama. Tough life! Progress was the return, but the I Ching cautioned about a return crossing on the Great Water (good thing they fly via Siberia and not the Pacific Ocean!). This evening we caught the film Chungking Express with Fatih and Roberta, friends of Mathias and Sylvia who will be sharing their new studio space. Visually the film had interesting camera work and post-production technical manipulation. The story was the familiar one of young loves and losses and lives. After the film we had a drink at the bar Trapant, a ultra-cool hangout featuring 60’s sci-fi video, funky music, and a stripped-down urban nihilistic 50’s architecture. Hmmmm. Taxi home, the black driver groovin’ on techno-reggae. After all the walking earlier in the day, I didn’t complain when Sylvia decided to cab it. Now it is two ayem, and I crash, leave these click-clacking keys for the morrow.

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For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson

This essay, by London-based artist Ian Rawlinson, mentions a project I was involved with Clive Sall and Emma Davis called Outpost which appeared at the Venice Biennale (1995) and the Edinburgh Festival (1994).

In this paper I want to concentrate on a form of public art practice which takes as its point of departure the social interactions involved in its processes and production. I would like to approach this principal concern by way of some initial and very brief observations of the situation here in Barcelona, as compared to that in Britain.

In June 1994 I was awarded an arts in the community travel fellowship which I used to visit Barcelona to study and report on the impact of public and/or community arts in the regeneration of urban areas. At that time in Manchester we were seeking to find ways in which art might be integrated into a program of urban renewal that would involve the collaboration of artists, architects and community members, with the City Council and housing associations in control of the redevelopment.

Whilst Barcelona can boast a great wealth of public art I could find no evidence of any practice which in Britain would be understood as community art, characterized as it is by the participation of community groups in particular projects. In searching out these kinds of interactions I found no individual projects which might serve as a model but rather an entire campaign. more “For an Interactive Art – Ian Rawlinson”

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

Fax You announcement

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

Concept and Theme

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

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

Time. Place. Context.

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

Participating Artist

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

The Medium and Necessary Equipment

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

Bulletin

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

Curators

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

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

Sponsors and Organizing Parties

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

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

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

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Performance Bicycle Shop

June 10, 1992
Reykjavík, Iceland

Performance Bicycle Shop
Customer Service
P.O. Box 2741
Chapel Hill, N.C. 27514

Dear Folks;

Unfortunately, this letter is not praising Performance products, although I have gotten good service from most of the variety of cycling equipment (and two bikes) that I purchased at your store (in Boulder) between 1988 and 1991 (to the tune of $1600). A Big Problem, though, with the 16″ Aspen that I purchased for my wife in the spring of 1989. Refering to the enclosed photographs, you will see that the frame has developed a transverse fracture below the lower water-bottle braze-on. My materials engineering education tells me that a fracture like this, in this location, develops from a material defect, as you will note the paint is not even cracked on one side of the fracture, and there is no accidental structural damage. Now, I would probably not even write to you if my wife was a thrash-out competitive rider doing intensive and extensive off-road riding and touring — I have seen frames fail (never like this or in this place, however…) under some extreme riding circumstances. On the contrary, I got her the bike in January of 1989, and since then the bike was used for two months that year, and in the following two years, it got about six months of thrice-weekly commuter use, and about a total of ten days of dirt-road day-tours. She is petite and a conservative rider (used to bike commuting in urban Germany). There is absolutely no riding that she has done to cause a material failure such as the one with this frame. The bike has not been in any accidents of any kind, nor has it been ridden by anyone but her (she weighs 105# if you want to know), nor has it been ridden with payloads over 15 pounds, nor has it had any modifications to the original design, it was transported by ship up here two years ago in its original packing with the rest of our household stuff. This fracture has only recently developed — since March as the bike was in winter storage in our garage and I did a complete inspection and tune-up then.

Another reason I am writing, just for your information is to say that I was going to have a friend who is visiting us from Boulder next month bring up a new bike for me — to replace my Nashbar Alpha MTB (which has given five problem-free years of almost daily heavy urban or off-road service). Needless to say, with this new development, that plan is canned for now.

I am an American living up here as an exchange teacher — if I was back in the States/Boulder, it would be an easy matter to get the bike to you. It is pretty frustrating, though, as it would cost a fortune for me to ship the bike all the way to North Carolina for repairs, not to mention import/export complications at this end. What can I do? I feel that despite the warranty running out that this is a pretty serious quality control failure. There are no repair shops with people experienced with this kind of problem. I am pretty disappointed about the whole thing — I was nervous about Taiwanese tubing, but the salesperson at the Boulder store insisted that the quality was as good as Japanese, at a lower cost — I see the results of that reasoning! We finally had the free time to go on a two-week road tour later this summer, thank goodness this did not wait for that, but now we have to totally change our plans. We are lucky that this was not a catastrophic failure during riding.

I would appreciate your timely response to this problem; thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,

John Hopkins.
Hólmgardi 24
108 Reykjavík
Iceland
Tel.354.1.34591

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  • place: Jersey City, New Jersey

AZImUTH

A few notes on the Azimuth: Degrees of Perception project initiated with Bill Abranowicz long on thirty years ago. Bill and I had just met at Parsons School of Design where Ben Fernandez set me up to work the photo cage & lab, and also to TA for Dennis Simonetti, George Tice, and Bill. Azimuth took off, and — to describe it in brief — was sourced in the geophysical concept of infinite half-space — where the world may be mathematically modeled by bisecting it with an infinite plane (usually this representing the surface of the earth), thus splitting it into two half-spaces. Azimuth was predicated on the idea that Bill and I go out photographing, when one saw something that they wanted to photograph, the other would have the opposite half-space, as indicated by the film plane, within which to compose an image. We worked in 4×5-inch large format which made the process deliberative, and concentrated. Working often at night in urban and rural areas across NYC, New Jersey, and Cape Cod, some exposures pushed an hour! The project did have one exhibition in Washington, DC, in the format of 4×5 contact prints on Kodak Azo paper mounted side-by-side. It wasn’t the optimal solution, but our desire to print the work at 20×24-inches on Oriental Seagull paper was interrupted by the robbery-at-gunpoint of the lab on 23rd Street one night when we were just beginning to print things. I left for France shortly thereafter, done with NYC.

It had the sound, the cadence, of something that Hesse would have Zarathustra speak about. I think the concept began in that time of my existence; when I was first able to read, though perhaps not to understand Steppenwulf. And, contemplating, with friends — in thought and being — the essence of the Shadow of a Hand falling on the Back of the Skull. Imagine that feeling, that presence of vitality: if you can, you will see God. We seek to live in the discovery of what is behind us. Behind and within us. That we come from nothing and all is open, empty before us. more “AZImUTH”

posted
  • place: Castle Rock, Colorado

Case Study: Rockfall – St. Francis of Assisi, Castle Rock

The state geological survey was brought in to examine the site of St. Francis of Assisi Church in Castle Rock, Colorado after a block of sandstone detached from a cliff face on their property in January 1981. The block presented a risk to homes at the base of the slope south of the church property, and was subsequently broken up using passive demolition methods. Other detached blocks continued to present a rockfall hazard to six homes located at the base of the bluff. No consideration was made to address rockfall hazards at the base of the slope when the homes were originally built. Common sense suggests that if there are existing boulders at a construction site, they had to come from somewhere, at some point in time: you can’t fight gravity! There are hundreds of such locations around the state with structures at varying levels of risk.

View from housing development looking up towards the fractured and unstable cliff of Castle Rock Conglomerate, Castle Rock, Colorado, January 1981. Photo credit: Colorado Geological Survey.
View from housing development looking up towards the fractured and unstable cliff of Castle Rock Conglomerate, January 1981. Photo credit: Colorado Geological Survey.
Fresh fracture line, note in the center exposed vegetation roots that were previously wedged between the fallen block and the rest of the Castle Rock Conglomerate cliff, Castle Rock, Colorado, January 1981. Photo credit: Colorado Geological Survey.
Fresh fracture line, note in the center exposed vegetation roots that were previously wedged between the fallen block and the rest of the Castle Rock Conglomerate cliff, January 1981. Photo credit: Colorado Geological Survey.
more “Case Study: Rockfall – St. Francis of Assisi, Castle Rock”