posted
  • place: KCL Campground, Carrizo Plains National Monument, California

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”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

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.

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

48-Stunden Neukoellen 2010 : flickering wastelands IV

radio aporee presents flickering wastelands IV: another round of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival at Udo’s place, so I prep this 30-minute video piece of flickering wastelands from the Wendover residency, et al. Ambient sounds included.

posted
  • place: Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado

western terminus Yampa Bench

west terminus of Yampa Bench at the Chew Ranch, Dinosaur National Monument, Colorado, May 2010

Sleep difficult, not sure why, whether simple discomfort, though the back of the truck seems very comfortable in the immediate impression, warm, soft enough, but body cannot find a comfortable position, side to side, somehow, problems. Could be that yoga hasn’t been happening in the last days. Hiking is a challenge for the body as well.

Drive up to the head of Sand Canyon, intent on doing a hike, but what looks like bad weather coming in, a heavy front across the whole west, sends me back after a short recon along the Bench Road. It seems doable as an alternative escape route, if this end is the worst, though, in wet conditions, forget it. And it totals thirty miles to Elk Springs, not just the three miles I did on recon. Almost all of it is in the red and yellow (bentonite) clay-sandstone alluvium, and this is precisely this same stuff which sits at the top of the Echo Park Road — from the 2000-foot displacement on the Mitten Park Fault, so, no real solution in heavy and widespread rain. However, this doesn’t seem the case — the rain is sporadic, fast-moving, and interspersed with bright sunshine and the roads are basically still dry after two days of ‘winter storm,’ so fretting about it is a waste of energy. Either I get out on Friday or I don’t and have to wait a few days. Plenty of water, fuel, and food, so that is no problem. The only locked-in point is the flight next Wednesday evening to Portland. But I’d still hate to miss the yurt-raising in Glade Park at Collin and Marisa’s this weekend! more “western terminus Yampa Bench”

posted

CLUI: Day Twenty-Four — touring

self-portrait, Blue Lake Wildlife Area, Utah, April 2010

Back down to Blue Lake for another definitive workout doing the full length of the lake twice. The far end is shallow and covered with a fine mud with nodules of organic material, almost like crypto-biotic soil, and extending the hand into the mud, it’s warm, though I can’t tell whether that is an affect of the heat-flow driving the upwelling action that has generated the spring, or merely sun-warmed sediment. The water temperature is perfect, right around 82F, with the air temp at 50F, a great combination for working out.

There is a shallow play of fear when getting into the water — snakes? big fish? underwater dangers? Loch Ness monsters? It’s deep and not absolutely clear as it normally is because of the heavy wind and dust. The depth is indicated, though, through the deepness of the blue. In the middle it feels deep: gravitational fluctuations operating on the body. While overhead, the F/A-18’s fight gravity and each other.

Then a short photo trip to do a portrait of Wendover Will and some images of the casino landscaping. Plenty of material there! But somehow I am tired of simply illustrating western society in wasteful and dis-connected abandon. I’ve seen too much of it, and there simply is too much out there!

posted

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.

posted
  • place: Columbia, Missouri

life, living

Humans approach the ‘criticality’ of the global situation from a very species-centric view. (of course). If one looks at the flow of the continuance of life throughout its entire trajectory (back to we-know-not-where and we-know-not-when (and we-know-not-how)) — it is quickly noted that all species are transitory to one degree or another. Is there anything special about humans in this regard? So far nothing that humans have succeeded in doing has transcended the flow of life. There is the material/scalar aptitude with which we have accelerated the production of entropy within the limited planetary system. But this, in itself, is insignificant on any transcendent cosmological scale. If this is the only difference, then it might be said that we are only a more efficient life-form in that we cause this entropic acceleration. But even this aspect is relative. Each life-form will fully engage its energy sources and utilize them. To the degree there are readily available sources, life will expand its scale to take advantage of that abundance of energy, rapidly transforming it to waste. A pride of lions will not arrest its hunting of abundant prey unless satiated (and engaged in optimized procreation). Again, nothing new. It seems that the only disturbing characteristic that we sense somewhere in our perspective is the question of scale with our waste-production. Through windows of tele-media we have an (apparently) expanded perspective on the global picture. We see images of ourselves everywhere, engaged in the process of living. But this itself is suspect. A global perspective is a virtual artifice. Our awareness of our problem arises from an artifice of our own creation. What does this say about the problem? The perceived planetary scale is perhaps a distorted and very much reductive artifact embedded in our vision of life. But would the (limited) set of localized sensory perceptions lead to any different conclusions or ways-of-going?

No wonder people crave hyper-Terran (Celestial) visitation — what a perspective shift that would be. That we are not unique in a wider cosmos. That we are merely life. Only then might we be able to get on with it reasonably!

posted

musings before a roadtrip

Leaving aside the refined mapping of experience-once-removed. And instead, gathering experience first hand, in the moment, where circumspection is wistful, wasteful, or even dangerous.

Music on the road. Traveling minstrels, buskers, harmonica-playing hobos. playing for people on the road, or playing whilst on the road. Meeting at the roadhouse. Beyond the city limits. What goes down when humans engage beyond the control of the proper social order. What goes on outside the ordered flows of town. Interstitial in the sense that between towns lie the open roads. bandits, women and men of loose moral fortitude, and wild animals. The space of chaotic flow.

We suspect that even though travel in the modern world seems to have been taken over by the Commodity — even though the networks of convivial reciprocity seem to have vanished from the map — even though tourism seems to have triumphed — even so — we continue to suspect that other pathways still persist, other tracks, unofficial, not noted on the map, perhaps even “secret” — pathways still linked to the possibility of an economy of the Gift, smugglers’ routes for free spirits, known only to the geomantic guerrillas of the art of travel.

As a matter of fact, we don’t just “suspect” it. We know it. We know there exists an art of travel. — Hakim Bey, Overcoming Tourism

What is the nature of what is feared outside the purview of human controlled flows? Is it merely nature? It is the presence of (or the risk of) death — that singular element that lies completely beyond human control, for ever? It cannot be erased from the wild kernel of being. Some seek the thrill of facing it, some hide in states of paranoid control to keep it as far away as possible, backing away only to fall over a precipice unseen behind. Religion is the construct that irrationally rationalizes the presence of the unknown, of death, and of corrupt social order.

… back to the road …

The body of speed. (hunt and/or be hunted). Movement is the first escape from death. Running to safety, to the nearest tree. Running to fetch the weapon that you left at home. Running for the crowd so that the odds of getting eaten are marginally lowered. Running fast. Running to change places. Running to make a moving target. Running for help! Running to the Library!

The Book as fuel for keeping warm and The Book as weapon: dictionaries and encyclopedias work best for both purposes. Book as pillow. Book as door-stop. Book as object sensed orbiting centers of cultural gravity. Textual asteroids and debris. Escape that field.

The Book as tool for enhancing procreative potential and staving off death. Rather, Books on how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading about how to enhance procreative potential and how to stave off death. Reading-while-driving. Speed. And then it comes. uuuuuhhh.

20100206-2007-0862

nah. gotcha, I’m outta here, step on it, hit the gas, burn some rubber, spray some gravel in ‘is face…

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Food, Energy, and Society

For most of the time that humans have inhabited the earth, their prime source of power has been their own muscle power. …

Early additional sources of power included human slaves and domesticated animals. The hunting/gathering societies were helped when an extra food gatherer or hunter could join in the task of securing food. Likewise, the labor intensiveness of primitive agriculture increased both the need for and the usefulness of slave and animal labor. …

A slave or extra hunter, of course, would have to be fed. However, two hunters could kill more than twice as much game as a single hunter could kill alone. In this way, additional labor provided a greater return in energy than the energy input required for its maintenance. (p. 68)

Food, Energy, and Society, Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., Third Edition, Taylor And Francis Group, Boca Raton, Florida, 2008. Food, Energy and Society, [Pimentel, D., Pimentel, M., (revised edition), University Press of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, 1996]

I haven’t gotten access to the most current (2008) edition of this major collation of numbers, but the 1996 version is recent enough for the extrapolation process to be framed and the principles to be clearly demonstrated. Unfortunately that extrapolation reveals a worsening situation than they originally laid out (or imagined!) in 1979. With a detailed quantitative analysis of the (energy) costs of all eras and types of food production, as well as an examination of pesticide use, water, biodiversity, and soil resource issues, the separate chapters are full of numbers and comparisons which are remarkable in extent and sobering in their basic message. It would be possible to verify the extensive research in detail by tracking down the fifty-pages of references, but the message is simple: the human species is exerting an ever-increasing energy drain on the global environment merely to subsist, and there are definitely better and worse ways to marginally affect the situation. Humans tend to be wasteful — but any life-form causes this process of entropic waste (energy) production merely by living — it is not an avoidable condition. It appears now that the problems are of such a wide-scale, and the solutions are presently so haphazard (as applied by nation-states rather than through some trans-national instrument), that the inevitable upward geometric curves (population, resource consumption, environmental degradation, etc) will reach their limit. Those curves as they exist in the mathematical domain have no real upward limit and may approach infinity asymptotically. This would represent the system with infinite energy reserves. The earth, taken as a sub-system of the cosmos, is finite, and so are the energy resources it makes available for human use. more “Food, Energy, and Society”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

many impressions, no time

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy’s Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. old Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up and show pantied crotches at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it’s the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can’t bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose. more “many impressions, no time”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

refraction

For the first time in the history of this blog, anywhere, knuckles rapped for putting performance content online, (pppffft…) bullocks, certainly won’t waste time covering any more student work here at UTS on this blog.


(01:18:12, stereo audio, 150.2 mb)

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona - Berlin-Neukölln, Germany

48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III

A special live/streamed event, radio aporee presents flickering wastelands III in its long-standing open-house tradition. good foods, good sounds, good people. part of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival. neoscenes, fresh back from many weeks on the road in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado and in the Sonoran Desert of Arizona will take you, with hydrocarbons flaring, on a drifting trajectory through spaces that dwell restlessly between ears and leave traces of soot, soil, and water (listen below!). more “48-Stunden Neukoellen 2009 : flickering wastelands III”

posted
  • place: Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

bush-walking

Today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. When standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. Standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is — like the hissing of blood in the ear.

On the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable unnamed mesa. The only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. A good objective for a bushwhack. After the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. Of course, any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. Miscalculated movement will be punished by some extremely sharp and pointed object intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. Then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.

This bushwhack takes me to the Cottonwood. It looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. Apparently some near-surface water is available. Paradise in the shade under the tree. Except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow 20 meters away in the scrub. The shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. It is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.

Minuscule F/A-18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. In the day and night. Moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. For our nation’s security. So it goes.

Otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect diminishes the Light of the desert — and with that, its nature; along with distorting the energy flux among the organisms living here. They did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. This is a problem. Just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system — this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.

The rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. Run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. Someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone un-turned. The West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small two-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. That mineral bonanza, that natural ‘surplus’ regime drove and still drives the development of the West. Straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. Without which, well, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker suggested — Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark — the developed world could not exist.

posted
  • place: Sycamore Spring, Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, Arizona

the spring again

head out to Sycamore Spring earlier this morning to allow for a longer period to explore. four liters of water rather than two. forgot to take the pruning saw to take out some of the tamarisk trees growing in the wash. will do next time out. how the cattle wear ways through the bush: I followed many of those ways, but they are, in fact, infinite in number and go nowhere but elsewhere. leaving spaces where anything edible is gone. and the microbial soil is crushed and eroding. only splattered shit left behind in various stages of dessication. just as all other forms of life process energy and leave waste behind. eating on the move, because there isn’t enough nutrition in one place to really graze and shit one of those classic UFO-shaped pies, those are the product of pastoral abundance. the desert is not abundant in any way except in lack thereof. it takes at least 100-200 acres of this land per cow per year, possibly double, triple that. why even raise cattle here is the loud question I would ask the ranchers. how long does a cowpie last? here they are hard and indeed could be made good use of in a cow-pie-throwing contest. at the immediate moment of exit from the humid gut, the pies fester with flies, the hairy and loud kind with the technicolor backs and eyes. in a frenzied dance likely for the water content alone. fast dessication hardens a crust which keeps a core amply moist for some days. this attracts some kinds of burrowing creatures who build tunnel complexes that riddle the whole-ness. the pie eventually loses it’s bilious green color and grades into a bleached beige of a rag used to wash a car a few times. they seem to persist in this form — dried and digested grasses, cellulose — for a long time, years to be sure, possibly decades? probably a decent fuel source. how many acres used to gain one pound of meat on these beasts? more “the spring again”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

hipbone

Cross paths with a fellow BS‘er, Charles, who is based in nearby Cottonwood. Nice to have some high-quality f-2-f time at the Raven for the afternoon. Many interesting stories and thoughts emerge in the convocation.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
— William Butler Yeats

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

fixed memories

Memories. how to surface, how to frame, how to recreate. images, in the process of uncovering three decades of work primarily unseen. thousands of images of friends, places, strangers, objects, situations, events. a very small percentage are so far away in mind that what, who they are, is now unknown. so, looking through the external sources, the calendar, the email archive, other images, the travelog. to set a location. but some cannot be deduced. where was I? who are those people? what’s going on?

And then the questions, are the images interesting, compelling, usable?

and to the Wordsworth reference:

The world is too much with us; late and soon, Getting and spending we lay waste our powers: Little we see in nature that is ours; We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon! The sea that bares her bosom to the moon; The winds that will be howling at all hours, And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers; For this, for everything, we are out of tune; It moves us not. Great God! I’d rather be a pagan suckled in a creed outworn; So might I, standing on this pleasant lea, Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn; Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea; Or hear old Triton blow his wreathe’d horn. — William Wordsworth

posted

thesis proposal :: Background

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. more “thesis proposal :: Background”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

remembering

the tmp-deluxe performance is over. not interesting or successful at all. off track, I should not have wasted my energy of pre-tension on it.

Auto-Destructive Art Machine Art Auto Creative Art

Each visible fact absolutely expresses its reality.

Certain machine produced forms are the most perfect forms of our period.

In the evenings some of the finest works of art produced now are dumped on the streets of Soho.

Auto creative art is art of change, growth movement.

Auto-destructive art and auto creative art aim at the integration of art with the advances of science and technology. The immediate objective is the creation, with the aid of computers, of works of art whose movements are programmed and include “self-regulation”. The spectator, by means of electronic devices can have a direct bearing on the action of these works.

Auto-destructive art is an attack on capitalist values and the drive to nuclear annihilation. — Gustave Metzger, 1961

posted
  • place: en route Maastricht, Netherlands - Hasselt, Belgium

back in Belgium


(03:32, stereo audio, 6.8 mb)

Take the bus from Maastricht, Rod sees me off at the bus stop just 100 meters east of the border. Arrival in Hasselt, waiting for the free bus to the Grote Markt seems a waste of time, and indeed it is only a 5-minute walk to the hotel. (After living in Berlin, when consulting a map, the scalar sizes of cities becomes suspect). Another bed, another random coagulation of humans – a workshop, seminar, conference, happening. begin to meet folks. Chili dinner with early arrivers. Negotiating some flexibility in the pre-formed structures. More notes on this later.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

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.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

berlinerpool

Sencer Vardarman — presents Berlinerpool at the tmp.deluxe project that is curated by Mathieu Dagorn and Nina Korolewski :: a curatorial platform, and so on.

Sencer has done a great job with this berlinerpool — a process of collective action — 100 artists, a web site, an excellent clearing-house mailing list of cultural events and calls for participation, an archive, events, shows, etc. he’s a former student of mine from ifkik. we talk about feedback, fund-raising, MONEY, and funding for a room.

end of the goddamn month. wouldn’t mind it if there were no distinguishing variations in the days of the week, months of the year, days in the month. or maybe just a daily number, sequential, starting from the beginning of the millineum. or so. to day is a waste, stream didn’t work to August; testing before that didn’t work to Pit; and a trip to HKW doesn’t solve anything at all, scheisser!

and 75 years ago, Hitler came to power. doch…

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

The Planet

two rather friendly, though dark granite bears flank the entrance to the building I’m staying in. granite everywhere. that’s always the first thing I notice in Finland. the density of building materials. granite. the window in the bedroom looks out over the entrance from the second floor. another bedroom in Helsinki. realized in conversation last night that I’ve been coming to Finland for 13 years already. wow.

Finnish flags are unfurled on every building. not sure what that’s about.

head down to the Andorra Theater to meet Andrew and Sophea to see the movie The Planet. part of the Lens Politica Film Festival. I see Steve Kurtz walk out of the previous film early. I don’t know him, and didn’t really feel like interacting. he walks away through the mostly empty lobby. the movie is darker than Al Gore’s tour-de-force on the same subject of global warming. and it covers a bit different territory including e-waste, and developing-world attitudes about the problem. experts paint dark pictures, and pictures paint darker pictures. dark. realizing I likely won’t last to 2050 seems auspicious, though there is a curiosity at the idea of catastrophic change, planet-wide. what terrible lessons that would hold for those who are alive. how they will revile the fools of this present age. but the planet has the potential to re-generate another species if (once!) we eradicate ourselves. give it another 250,000,000 years. why not? or is our presence here a unique expression of order not to be replicated ever. what is it about these imaginations of disaster projected by science that seem to fascinate so much? and in the end, it is still us in the developed world, sitting in theaters in our cities, receiving the images of film producers, telling us what is in the world, rather than us out in the world, be-ing there. fully.

posted
  • place: Livermore, California

back to work

hanging out with the family. Dana is the initial portrait for the New Year’s project — a return to the work that I dropped in the interim between stopping with black&white 35mm film-based and getting the new Nikon D200 SLR which makes that work once again possible. in between, a hiatus of six years, while having access to a variety of digital cameras, the serious lack of one critical feature made my work impossible. that feature is the near-instantaneous synchronization of the shutter — when the shutter-release button is pressed the shutter goes without hesitation. the D200 is the first digital cam that I’ve had where there is no delay. that millisecond delay in cheaper cams makes the difference between the picture and a wasted shot. it’s all about synchronicity between my eyes, the collaborative subject, and the mediatory machine.

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: Chino Valley, Arizona

Bulgakov

The poet had wasted his night while others had feasted, and now he knew that it could never be recovered. He needed only to raise his face from the lamp to the sky to realize that the night was lost beyond redemption. The waiters hurriedly pulled the tableclothes off the tables. The tom cats slinking around the veranda had a morning air about them. The day was irresistibly bearing down upon the poet. — Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita

posted
  • place: near Kelso, California

Sacred Datura

Back to the desert. Around 95°F from Kingman onwards past Needles, then the turn north off the Interstate into the Mojave. Things are still green. The Buckhorn Cholla (Opuntia acanthocarpa) is blooming, along with Sacred Datura (Datura meteloides) and other plants. There is already one generation of spring grass that is now bone dry and gone to seed, dead. A reason for some alarm in human quarters: fire hazard, from simply driving through the stuff with a hot exhaust pipe. Southern Arizona is already seeing higher than average burn acreage this year even though it is early in the fire season. Sliver of crescent moon, shadow bathed in blue-green earth-Light. Venus slightly below, eclipsed by granite boulders. Jupiter with an extended string of pearls high and wide. Close by to the place I camped in December on the way up here. Not as cold as then, but the temperature swing from day to night will be at least 30°F tonight. But the dry air has a ethereal soothing quality. Limited material content, terrestrial-bound equivalent of Mars. Day and night. Hot and cold. Long drive tomorrow, the rest of the way for Dana’s birthday dinner. Five hundred miles away still. Mostly interesting drive, as a virtual show of landscape variation. But tedious when there are deadlines. Would rather take several days to cross the Great Valley. So many strange scenes there.

Smithsonian magazine echoes my words again. How the visibility of the West has contracted from 145 miles to between 35 and 80 miles. More dramatic than I mention to folks, but I got my statistic some years back. It is decreasing. From the right vantage, overlooking Tejon Pass and the gap to the south of the San Bernadino Mountains, thick jets of raw burnt-red eL-Ay air burst into the desert, making a dusty haze that spreads east to Arizona and further. Ever got caught downwind of a campfire? What’s the difference to that and being downwind of 13 million Los Angelenos swarming in single-passenger SUV-droves, simultaneously towards and away from their every desire. Not much. Weepy, stinging eyes, raspy nose, and asthmatic breath.

Imagining if I came into a sizable chunk of money I would buy a 3-CCD video camera. I shoot so much nice footage in cool places that it is a bit of a waste having a crappy consumer cam. Would never settle for such lousy optical quality doing still camera or traditional film work. The cheapest one could get would be $3K, and the prospect of a used pro cam is unsettling. Hmmm.

Well, once the doctoral direction is settled (or dropped).

posted

machines

For all of us, the arrangements, devices and machinery of technology are to a greater or lesser extent indispensable. It would be foolish to attack technology blindly. It would be shortsighted to condemn it as the work of the devil. We depend on technical devices; they even challenge us to ever greater advances. But suddenly and unaware we find ourselves so firmly shackled to these technical devices that we fall into bondage to them.

Still we can act otherwise. We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves so free of them, that we may let go of them at any time. We can use technical devices as they ought to be used, and also let them alone as something which does not affect our inner and real core. We can affirm the unavoidable use of technical devices, and also deny them the right to dominate us, and so to warp, confuse, and lay waste our nature.

But will not saying both yes and no this way to technical devices make our relation to technology ambivalent and insecure? On the contrary! Our relation to technology will become wonderfully simple and relaxed. We let technical devices enter our daily life, and at the same time leave them outside, that is, let them alone, as things which are nothing absolute but remain dependent on something higher.

Martin Heidegger, Discourse on Thinking, trans. John M. Anderson (New York, NY: Harper & Row, 1966).

Sheesh, there is a silky fabric covering the white underbelly of National Socialism replete in these texts.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

exploring assumptions

how does the assumption of constant 110 volt ac (220 volts in Europe) electricity supply to a connected device bear on the efficiency of the engineering design process? this is an issue driven not by absolute power/energy consumption, but by the economics of the same. a subtle difference, but something to look at in more detail. the drive for engineering optimization has also been strapped into the Market. although there are hints that this process is built into engineering as a social construct. inseparable from economics.

The effectiveness of the leakage reduction depends on how precisely the behavior of cache line can be tracked. While turning off a cache line later than the last use can waste energy consumption, prematurely turning off a cache line can incur energy/performance penalties when it needs to be accessed. Thus, deciding when to turn off a cache line is very important. In this work, we utilize the knowledge about the state of an object in its life span to direct the turning off cache lines. In particular, we identify different states in the lifetime of an object, when it is created, last-used, becomes garbage, and is collected by the garbage collector. It must be observed that the cache lines containing only objects beyond their last use waste leakage energy. Our analysis in this paper reveals that this wasted leakage energy contributes to a significant portion of data cache energy consumption. (G. Chen, et al, 2003)

note, these terms used in systems engineering — asset, communication, coordination, disaster, economics, engineering, feedback, management, methods, organization, planning, policy, project, protection, recovery, responsibility, schedule, technique — are adequately defined by Webster. the rest of the terms in the Certified Software Development Professional Examination specs glossary, have discipline-specific meanings: the exclusivity of language in the priesthoods…

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

the Dalai Lama

aside from the Flatirons encroaching across Baseline in Chautauqua Park. the events around teaching are less determined than ever. shifting back into the US system seems hopeless. I steel for the return to Europe. to survive professionally. maybe even to thrive. I see that life is slipping in this lack of praxis. clearly the axis of language and action, one that I have been oscillating along has brought me nowhere. and the suspicion about that abyss between language and action is only a scar tissue embedded in brain left from anomalous childhood. there are people who do as they say. whose truth is their word. what a surprise.

disengaged. and. lacking the words to put a reasoned spin, retching. grinding. poking at coals. filtering. charging, toasting, flaming, playing, reloading, installing, listening, not looking, answering, washing, riding, shifting, coasting, swimming, breathing, biting, chewing. nothing else. calling, sending, calling, sending, receiving, tired.

and now I decide to finish this travelog once again (hogwash). here at the end of the 6th year of entries. in just a couple weeks. because there is so little to be said. formations of letters. pulled from the fingertips. no sweat, the weather is too chill. merde! quit. ’cause it’s not going anywhere. anymore. the nomad doesn’t see the stars. doesn’t scrape hand across the sharpness of the macro-granular sandstone, cheek to ground. life going on.

a precious human life

everyday, think as you wake up,
today i am fortunate to have woken up
i am alive, i have a precious human life
i am not going to waste it
i am going to use all of my energies to develop myself
to expand my heart out to others,
to achieve enlightenment for the benefit of all beings.
i am going to have kind thoughts towards others
i am not going to get angry or think badly about others.
i am going to benefit others as much as i can.
–XIV Dalai Lama

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Chimney Rock

at Chris and Scharmin’s place, house-sitting. long roads across Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and other lands. full summer moon at Chimney Rock. rising moons, count ’em, Richard says, how many of them do you have left?

so many longings and self-sufferings from the ego. life flickers through them all and the self is lost eventually, as it should be.

small things: a y-shaped log from the previous campers, there in the fire pit. Loki helps me re-dig and repair the pit, placing the stones in a ring with a slight opening up-slope so the down-slope breeze in the evening will feed oxygen to the fire. that log is special. special for the full moon night. it is juniper, but a perfect shape, curved branches, or a u-shape on a stick, to be more accurate. it is somehow a burl or from a diseased tree. it burns the entire evening, more than 15 hours in the end, with a rich resinous, fragrant, smoke. to be danced around. into the morning when it is still brown wood at the core and sticky with bubbling resin.

maintaining a house and land. having a house and land.

having good friends. what is this in the long run of living? maintaining. the energy of this maintaining is depleting me. (because I maintain with a deep streak of ego, not pure love, as it should be). to what can be done. what if I had all that energy back? to work with on my own psychic condition? I would have wasted it. being with the Other is a salve. but it is not salvation. god refuses to change the rules. elemental beings play until the dawn finishes.

heat of the Front Range day begins to vibrate. water pipes in the walls aspirate with flow to the laundry machine in the next room. raydeeoh is on. Loki plays in the other room. looking over telephone numbers of people to call and see.

watching clouds all day. watching life. day-pulse. dawn. daybreak. moonrise, sunset. fires, smoke, horizons, trees, animals.

posted
  • place: en route Berlin-Charlottenburg - Kiel, Germany

rearriving

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

note from Anthony:

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

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

posted
  • place: Copenhagen, Denmark

complications

here at Björn’s, he is out, Easter Morning, singing in a choir at church. I stay in, it seems cold out, despite a warm looking sunrise. yesterday I manage to find a copy of the Kieler Nachtrichten newspaper with the article in it. rather long, scanning it, it seems to cover critical issues, but my German is not good enough to allow a full apprehension of it. save it for later to read with a German speaker. Schubert on, Björn has a huge opera and classic vocal collection. last night we are listening to the Texaco Metropolitan Opera Broadcast live from New York, and so I relate the story how my relationship with opera was most heavily influenced by the fact that my father used to listen to this very same broadcast which started rather early on Saturday mornings. the recollection of being woken up as a sleep-committed teenager was, by far, the most unpleasant aspect, but being woken up by Marie Callas singing Donde lieta usci… from Puccini’s La Bohème put the concept over any reasonable edge. storming out to turn the volume down, discover that he is not even in the room, but out working on the lawn mower, getting it ready for me to mow the lawn when I get up. operatic conspiracy. grrrrrr. okay, now I can enjoy almost all music; my criteria being as long as it is good seems to hold out into realms of all sorts except into the banality of badness. the line of sound and music has blurred to a point where listening and hearing are continuous. sometimes it is music that focuses ones attention onto itself, sometimes sound has the same effect, sharpening the sensual intensity of an event. we are hunters, in this incarnation, hunters, gatherers, (clockwork orange), violence-breeders to take care of continuing species. Ludwig van. gorgeousness and gorgeosity. shagging for the genetic promulgation of being. but who cares about genes? a single generation has no use for genetics — it is one of those questions that the Buddha suggested was a waste of energy to consider. what is important, then? the whole day is gone, Björn cooks a nice Thai meal (having recently returned from a visit to Bangkok) and I screen some videos. complications with Tornio, they don’t know when I am arriving. stress, but I don’t care about it, I just go. I can’t be bothered with complications when they are no fault of my own.

posted
  • place: Lahti, Finland

tedium of time

Spending all the day languishing with a bit of a cold. Feeling a bit caged here, but otherwise the situation is quite good. I find that my teaching work goes very well this spring, as was the case overall last fall. Actually my energy level is much higher even, as I don’t have the burden of the back pain that dogged me all of last year. It appears that the approach of unmediated space of dialectic to pedagogy, something along the lines of Paolo Friere (though I do need to re-read his works), provides a dynamic and plentiful energy source for both the student and myself. The computer and network is the ultimate desiring device. Any system, including the Market, falls because of the unlimited and ignorant confidence it is held in by the masses of people who blindly believe in its efficacy. There are too many null points in human nature that drive a theoretical system to destruction. For example, the market depends on perfect information to be held by all. When has this EVER been the case? And when is the FULL price of production ever acknowledged by a manufacturer? That is, the price of future toxic-waste Superfund clean-ups, for example … Blind allegiance to a system is the primary means for that system to run amok and bring disaster to both those in power controlling the system and those under its power … Blah blah blah. A clear critical distance to a system, regardless of its apparent glories and blah blah blah… A bad Tony Curtis movie that ends with his house in Malibu sliding down a muddy hillside to the beach. Afterward, the news comes on with the same images from Northern California. captured between the walls, the weather, and a bad sinus cold, somewhere south of Karelia, a long two days walk to Russia, and only the far-off Equinox to break the tedium of time.

posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

word-lines

House-sitting. for Rick and Sally. They are in Costa Rica for awhile with the kids. Loki is with me now. Sleeping upstairs as I try to stay awake in pain, but needing to write and feel some progress with things that I need to work on. Snow comes down tonight. Hot-tub pump whines away. Hard-drive spins. Meet with Gene for lunch a couple days ago. MB is come and gone, on to my family’s place in Arizona, sorta. Life has taken such a hectic dimension that I catch myself anticipating free time on the road that is looming up ahead in January. Needing to work with Mark, Rebecca, Jim, and others, things to be done, people to be visited. Well, at least, when I am not teaching. But that is minimal worry. The worry is about the solidity of the spine (spine-less, broken back, lame) to endure the intensity of things. Construction of word-lines that sustain. I find life-line mixed into threads. the thoughts that I am completely wasting my life, compared to much of what I have been taught (conflict), so-called knowledge, the thoughts that I am blessed with friends, a beautiful boy, job offers, the thoughts that the world might very well continue on the way it has to the moment, or it might end at any moment, the thoughts that there is not a day to be wasted, it must always be full, full of life, and that life must grow, thoughts of divine internals that might operate outside the skin wall and bring energy to others, thoughts of transcen-dances, thoughts of quietness and being, thoughts of nothing.

posted
  • place: Reykjavik, Iceland

Letter to Dan (RIP)

Well. Dan

“Lethargy is simply frozen violence”

What else? I sit in the middle of the Arctic Night (The middle always remains the same, no matter how long the night is). Waiting for sleep to fill my head, looking at a CRT screen. Eyes are getting crippled by the stress of focusing. Goodnight.

The next day late morning. All is gray. When I develop film here I notice the lack of contrast, especially after Colorado. The Light is different. I have taken to capitalizing the first letter of Light, and I have also quit using the Lord’s name in vain you know? Two changes from my previous life. You can look forward to wonderful things like this happening when you finish graduate school.

The work you sent arrived a bit worse for wear, and surely to the perplexity of the customs/postal people. They keep a close monitor on my post here, almost all packages are checked… A bit disturbing, but also amusing…
more “Letter to Dan (RIP)”