posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

augury: I can’t remember

Damn if it didn’t start with

yarrow—stalks harvested under the towering Sangre de Christo mountains, cut for use casting the I Ching;

then it proceeded to

culvert—piping rainwater under the road upstream from the Prescott house, it’s clogged with debris and when a flood comes it washes down the road and through my yard. It’s definitely not a conduit although it does guide flows; then there are

tamales—they snuck in there somewhere between the known, tortillas, and the next mental blank:

box elder—the trees that shade campsite #12 in Echo Park, Dinosaur National Monument, and that host those weird black-and-red (western) boxelder bugs.

Let’s try this again, commit to Latinized memory:

Achillea millefolium

tandem tabernus

Ferculum Mesoamericanum ex masa, farinam ex segete nixtamalizato, quod vaporetur in folliculo grani vel fixa folium.

Acer negundo quod exercituum Boisea rubrolineata

recalling, naming what routinely … cannot be brought to mind.

posted
  • place: Cedaredge, Colorado

Six Memos – Calvino

Indeed my writing has always found itself facing two divergent roads that correspond to two kinds of knowledge: one that moves through mental spaces of disembodied rationality, in which lines can be drawn that connect points, projections, abstract shapes, vectors of force; another that moves in a space crowded with objects and seeks to create a verbal equivalent of that space by filling pages with words, in a meticulous effort to match the written to the not-written, to the sum of the sayable and the not-sayable. These are two distinct drives toward exactitude that will never reach absolute fulfillment: the first because natural languages always say something more than formalized languages – they always carry a certain amount of noise that alters the essence of the information; and the second because in trying to account for the density and continuity of the world around us, language is exposed as lacunose, fragmentary: it always says something less than the sum of what can be experienced.

Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985–86. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988.
posted
  • place: Golden, Colorado

confusion:

To fundamentally misunderstand the nature of be-ing.

How is it that the veil — the same veil that obscured and was suddenly removed to clear St. John the Divine’s apocalyptic vision — so deforms life in the moment? Shaping a path, gambled upon, while in mind a removed reading of the world: to gather fulfillment, touch transcendence, to be joyful, and arrive at a plateau of satisfaction within the life well lived…

The efficient utilization of energy by humans — those energy sources that are more or less available — has determined the wide and confused distribution of the species. This is the wider perspective. Yet confusion salts the various wounds of the embodied self as well. Cells feel this, osmotic desiccation. Words utterly fail, falling, drops of lead in the thin mountain air. Nothing to say.

posted
  • place: Mint Wash, Prescott, Arizona

naming

Hyla arenicolor, Mint Wash, Williamson Valley, Arizona, April 2005

“What is it?” we ask, meaning what is its name? This odd quirk of the human mind: Unless we can name things, they remain for us only half-real. Or less than half-real: nonexistent. A person without a name is nobody. A human’s name can become more important than his person. A plant, an animal, a thing without a name is no thing — nothing. No wonder we humans like to think that in the beginning was — the Word. What word? Any word. Any word at all, anything rather than the silence and terror of the nameless.” —

Abbey, Edward. Abbey’s Road. New York, NY: Plume, 1991.

Plowing (ploughing) through Abbey this time, years since reading “The Monkey Wrench Gang,” his writing seems dated, depressing, even dark. So much of the landscape that he passed through is (de)evolved, so much of what he prognosticated about the Southwest, at the hands of corrupt politicians and developers has materialized like a cancer across the land. The forever-expansion, development-is-good, it-creates-jobs mantra that is chanted by deeply unholy men (and women). Bringing 4000+ square-foot pseudo-adobe MacMansions to dot the landscape along with scaled-up vehicular afterbirth: Hummers in every five-car garage. Although there are places one might go and on a middle-scale—meaning the easily visible—local scale, to the uninitiated eye, the natural system seems untouched. But with any consideration of scientific data—atmospheric systems, plant and animal ecosystems, and hydrological systems are being irretrievably altered. What of the domination of a species that will destroy most of the other macro-species only to live on briefly in an impoverished environment: soon to succumb to a viral celebration in the host of hosts. Definitely, catch it while you can. Take the last road trips around before gas costs what it should and the only way to get out of Dodge will be on foot. And the only way to survive the plague is through a slow and costly counter-evolution.

At any rate, this is a frog (possibly a Canyon Tree frog – Hyla arenicolor). But note the incredible coloration. The green exactly matches a particular lichen that grows on the granite in that area. The pinkish blush of the oxidized feldspar in the granite. There were four of them literally stuck to the side of a large smooth boulder on Mint Wash. I was sitting opposite from them, having lunch with Marianne, about 6 feet (2 meters) away, and at first I thought they were phenocrysts in the granite, but then saw they were frogs. This particular one was the only one I could get close enough to make an image of, it was crouched on a relatively reasonable ridge. The other three were glued to vertical (overhanging!) smooth surfaces, but there was a 2-meter deep hole in the creek bed, full of water immediately below them. So, this one had to do. The beautiful beast is about 1.5 inches (3 cm) long.

posted
  • place: Cornwall, Pennsylvania

long dialogues: alexithymia: interhemispheric transfer deficit

Conversations range through histories, futures, thoughts, and dreams. Nothing like spending time with old friends: with my oldest friend this week. Junior High, seventh grade, we shared all seven class periods each day, 40+ years ago. How histories recede: resonant memories tend to be supplanted; revivifying them in active recollection makes them last a bit longer, fills them out from another perspective, another memory system. Until our outward form sinks into the background (dis)order of the cosmos. There, the memories persist as slowly devolving trajectories of activated, materialized energy.

Gary’s evolution and sustained presence inspires so many of the people who are around him including myself. What to think about this? Do we ever really evolve, or do the changes we experience along the way in life impose merely small surficial modifications of our root character? And of this root character, what may be said? Is it the outcome of a chain of incarnations, is it an alignment of planets, the arrangement of molecular spirals? Inspiration from Day One? Predetermined be-ing? Can we change ourselves?

This particular trip takes the form of yet another pilgrimage, a soft confrontation of what the word ’empathy’ is in lived praxis among the network of friends. Finding empathy’s place, there is no pre-existing internal road-map. Its locus is within sight, reach, and touch, but it cannot be accessed directly except through thoroughly unpretentious and purely expressed action (not merely words). Embodied, in motion, moving towards. Up to this point, there are only fleeting instances where empathy as a defined characteristic is questioned. Having it, not having it seem to be questions that do not touch its real nature.

Then come the questions: Is it possible to attain an empathetic state where none existed before? If not, what becomes? Is life for some a desert of hollow resonance, disconnected from any Other? I don’t know, I don’t know, (pushing through gray curtains of neural absence). Into the Light, or, at least, looking for the Light.

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

Of the Imperfection of Systems

On the tail of a disruptive hardware failure that takes several weeks to recover from. It’s still in progress, and external communications, words, are in short supply — or perhaps the means to express them is temporarily lost, along with an accumulation of visual and sonic material, new and from the archive, to be cleared, sheesh. The digital archive increases in size with the localized ability to mine the analog one.

The need to be initially organized in order to undertake a project is something of a hurdle, but doesn’t seem to negatively affect the outcomes. Once work starts to flow and a work process begins to form, things get pretty messy at the same time as being productive. This is the armature provided by a familiar praxis.

The settled two months on Hawk Moon Ridge blazed by far too fast, as per other residencies and such, they become stops on a longer pilgrimage of nomadic working. Anyway. Whatever. Where ever. How ever. Why?

posted

Productivity and Existence

“A remarkable and charming man, your friend,” said the professor; “but what does he really do? I mean … in the intellectual sphere?”

“In the intellectual sphere…” I answered, “H’mm … in the intellectual sphere … he is simply there.”

“How do you mean?”

“Well, his occupation is not, in fact, of a very intellectual nature, and one cannot really assert that he makes anything out of his leisure time.”

“But his thoughts?”
more “Productivity and Existence”

posted
  • place: Glade Park, Colorado

Of the Imperfection of Words

Chapter IX

1. Words are used for recording and communicating our thoughts. From what has been said in the foregoing chapters, it is easy to perceive what imperfection there is in language, and how the very nature of words makes it almost unavoidable for many of them to be doubtful and uncertain in their significations. To examine the perfection or imperfection of words, it is necessary first to consider their use and end: for as they are more or less fitted to attain that, so they are more or less perfect. We have, in the former part of this discourse often, upon occasion, mentioned a double use of words. First, One for the recording of our own thoughts. Secondly, The other for the communicating of our thoughts to others.
more “Of the Imperfection of Words”

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

mucker, amok

John Brunner immediately comes to my mind as events continue to develop in our over-crowded and hyperventilating, hyper-mediated world:

True, you’re not a slave. You’re worse off than that by a long, long way. You’re a predatory beast shut up in a cage of which the bars aren’t fixed, solid objects you can gnaw at or in despair batter against with your head until you get punch-drunk and stop worrying. No, those bars are the competing members of your own species, at least as cunning as you on average, forever shifting around so you can’t pin them down, liable to get in your way without the least warning, disorienting your personal environment until you want to grab a gun or an axe and turn mucker.

Brunner, J., 1999. Stand on Zanzibar, London: Millennium.

‘Mucker’ is a word coined by the science fiction writer John Brunner in his great novel Stand on Zanzibar. The word derives from ‘amok,’ which will require a bit of history. It is a Malay word, and a person who goes violently insane, rushing through the village and murderously attacking everyone in his path, is said to have ‘run amok.’ In what was an egregiously idiotic statement, even for him, the eminent French critic Georges Bataille called running amok the purest manifestation of revolt, “the movement by which man rises up against his own condition and the whole of creation.” (Bataille never ran through the streets of Montparnasse madly slashing with a kris, so he either lacked the courage of his convictions or was a hypocrite with a small — a very small — modicum of brains.) The Malays, inevitably, were and are more sensible: they kill those who run amok.

A ‘mucker,’ then, is someone who runs amok; the times havin’ a-changed, now they use guns. As always, they are people driven to murderous madness by intolerable frustration, repression and conformity, whether in an isolated kampong or the Postal Service. So far muckers seem to have been mostly Americans, but just the other day the radio carried news of one in Germany.

It does Mr. Brunner’s prescience great credit to have foreseen the need for this word, back in 1964; and it does the rest of us no credit at all, for letting such a word be needed. — Cosma Shalizi

And then there is Firmin DeBrabander article in the NYT: The Freedom of an Armed Society. I have been known to say, lecturing, “There are three freedoms on the US: the freedom to shop, the freedom to get gunned down in the street, and the freedom to be lonely.” Of course, an extreme position, and containing a cynicism that gained depth over the years by virtue of subjective observation of the system in the US, and many other systems elsewhere. But imho, a small dramatic exaggeration not far off from the reality.

DeBrabander’s argument is profound, and despite the mis-statement about ‘high-calibre’ (an M-4 is distinctly not high-calibre, but rather high-energy & high-velocity, a difference that those in the know will quibble about), he explores the effects of the mere presence of a weapon. Ever see the looks of unarmed civilians around the world in the presence of armed intruders or militias? No free speech under those conditions. Ever had the situation of being around someone who is openly armed and there is a verbal conflict going on? Ever been armed in such a situation, when the Other is un-armed? The dialogue takes on a certain form. And that form is not open.

posted

resources

Middle French, French ressource, ressourse help, aid (c1175 in Old French as resorse, subsequently from 15th cent.), possibility of aid or assistance, action or strategy which may be resorted to in a difficulty or emergency (1422), re-establishment, restoration (late 15th cent.), stock or reserve of money (1558; chiefly in plural), physical ability to make a new effort after failures (1588), personal attribute and capability regarded as able to help or sustain a person in adverse circumstances (1687; chiefly in plural) < Old French sors, *surs, *sours (masculine), and surse, sourse, source feminine, substantival uses of the past participle of sourdre: to rise or spring < Latin surgĕre: to rise. (OED)

posted
  • place: Bundoora, VIC, Australia

The Cosmic Spirit

To every form of being is assigned
An active principle:—howe’er removed
From sense and observation, it subsists
In all things, in all natures: in the stars
Of azure Heaven, the unenduring clouds,
In flower and tree, in every pebbly stone
That paves the brooks, the stationary rocks,
The moving waters and the invisible air.
Whate’er exists hath properties that spread
Beyond itself, communicating good,
A simple blessing, or with evil mixed:
Spirit that knows no insulated spot,
No chasm, no solitude; from link to link
It circulates, the soul of all the worlds.
— Wordsworth. Excursion. Book VI, 1-15.

readying for a perambulation around the cosmos at any moment. readying for the moment of full-on change. readying for now.

posted
  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

back to B&B

Martin Buber and David Bohm — German-speaking Hasidim Jew phil-theo-logist/sopher and Anglo, McCarthy-black-listed quantum physicist. Unlikely combination, but in my practice, my pathway, they elicit a resonance unlike any others, although there are Legion sources of energized engagement that have made my trajectory a rich experience. All those Others who share the way(s). But I will work with these two as they both resonate. Simple, complex. One provoking an imaged-cosmos where there are no things, but only activated orders of manifestation, and this condition of being directly informing the way of interaction and relation between the Self and the Other. And the other thinker, sketching a cosmos which itself comes-to-be in the reality of relationship: within the encounter lies the source of all things.

Both these worldviews are highly idiosyncratic visions of the cosmos and also, consequentially, of human relation, but neither of them are mutually exclusive of the other. I find my own worldview shares at least this characteristic with both of them. But there are other ways in which our models overlap, and it is these pathways of flow which will stimulate the thesis.

The image of humans and their view of the cosmos that I always describe in a classroom setting is: (this after getting to know the students at least a bit) — “it’s as though we are dancing around the Void, each of us, in groups, pairs, alone, catching glances out of the corners of our eyes of it, calling out what is looks like in throat-tones frantic with fear, joy, and wonder. Sometimes a whole group will shout out in unison, the agreed-upon vision. Others stay to speaking the wind. Occasionally we turn to face it on, or are rudely pulled by the shoulder by another who is straying close to the edge. It has no name, yet we all insist on calling It something. Even when we turn our backs directly to it, we can feel it, perhaps even more than when facing it.”

So, idiosyncrasy is a way of movement (as point-of-view needs change), which leads to a clear, albeit self-relative, experience (impression) and the consequent expressions while regarding, receiving, that. Springing from these two pathways (im- and ex-pression) is a third which dictates, in part, the motion of the point-of-view. It is a feedback mechanism which generates, gradually or quickly, a worldview that touches on the Void if only by discrimination against what cannot be directly named.

Okay, working (or “working”) in the office much of the week and weekend, not too effective, but I think I did finally begin to imagine a framework to hang all these words on. And it feels like one that will work. Norie gave me a couple other theses of former students of hers — very interesting works. My intuition about her seems well-placed. And it’s a funny expression of the morphing social network that I’ve participated in the last 20 years. Connected.

And swimming. Hope to hit 100 km/3 months by the time I move on. That’s attainable, easily if I take care of things.

posted

The Value of Nothing

Consider this example: My cell phone company gives me a free handset, bristling with features, so I become a regular contract subscriber or buyer of pay-as-you-go minutes. I am pleased, not least because I can now navigate through the city without having to remember where I am, and I have the pleasure of palming the latest little gadget. In order for those features to work, I’ll have to pay a little bit more, to buy either an app or bandwidth. Clearly, many people think it’s worth it. Indeed, there’s a cell phone arms race, in which increasingly swanky phones become socially necessary. These new phones come with new applications and uses that, again, become socially indispensable for the user, and the permanent sources of revenue for the provider. In the United States in 2007, cell phone expenditure per customer reached six hundred dollars per year (surpassing that of a landline for the first time). That’s a lot of cash, which gets divided out fairly unevenly. more “The Value of Nothing”

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

more on control and autonomy

A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy that are antithetical to its ordered existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe un-controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. more “more on control and autonomy”

posted

Fred Arthur Nettelbeck 1950 – 2011

F.A. produced numerous chapbooks and alternative press publications. Not on many radars, but definitely expelling severe electro-magnetic radiation for the time he was around.

Demonic seconds of my history must not stop now. I am sober and writing this alone. No voice touch or folded skin of beings. I cannot remember. My father is a vapor inside a black box buried hundreds of yards behind my house. I have drunk the last of his beer. I have heard the last of his hollow laughter many long nights ago as coyotes joined in erasing tears, excuses, lies. I am left with what I have created of years. My structured words contained in slim volumes as proof that my face will not last. That here are many ways to spell a life. I cannot blame my vocabulary. I cannot blame the alcoholic seizures. I cannot blame the wet and sticky hours I have spent inside a woman. I cannot blame the relentless black night or the sun again. Again. As I still don’t give thanks for the days nor care to court the clock. Because I am owed millions of dollars. Because they don’t make enough damn booze to drink. Because you’re too stupid to understand. I am living here. As the stars punctuate all the past and future lives. I am living here. Possessed. — F. A. Nettelbeck

posted
  • place: Whanganui, New Zealand

Energy, Creative Action, and Sustainable Systems Workshop – Day 8 – eNZed

The official blurb for the workshop:

This workshop will draw on Hopkins’ international experience in facilitating creative encounters in the context of the Temporary Autonomous Zone. With an open structure for engaged and focused dialogue, the workshop will explore a powerful energy-based worldview that can open up new awareness of social, cultural, and natural systems. The dynamics of collaborative human relations confined within an attentive space is guaranteed** to generate provocative and inspiring outcomes. Creativity is, by definition, about the formative flow of energy between living organisms. We will move through a variety of environments (including on the river by waka) as we share life-time in the workshop. The workshop will augment the processes of any creative practitioner with a profound, situated, and practice-oriented conceptual toolbox that address the following areas and more:

(Keywords in no particular order): energy, creativity, thermodynamics, technology and techno-social systems, art, attention, entropy, learning, media, networks, participation, process, virtuality, creative action, human presence, Light, human encounter, mediation, concentration, optimization, pathways, meals, sustainability, simplicity, synchronicity, auspiciousness, and serendipity.

**on the condition that you bring along your entire Self, not merely your body, mind, and spirit

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

playing with the words

An engineer who has given us the entire…

Un-named engineers …

Engineer as a causative agent…

From Middle English engin < Old French engin (“skill”, “cleverness”, “war machine’”) < Latin ingenium (“innate or natural quality, nature, genius, a genius, an invention, in LL. a war-engine, battering-ram”) < ingenitum, past participle of ingignere (“to instil by birth, implant, produce in”); see ingenious. Engine originally meant ‘ingenuity, cunning’ which eventually developed into meaning ‘the product of ingenuity, a plot or snare’ and ‘tool, weapon’.

posted

Wanderlust

I kept coming back to this route for respite from my work, and for my work too, because thinking is generally thought of as doing nothing in a production-oriented culture, and doing nothing is hard to do. It’s best done by disguising it as doing something, and the something closest to doing nothing is walking. Walking itself is the intentional act closest to the unwilled rhythms of the body, to breathing and the beating of the heart. It strikes a delicate balance between working and idling, being and doing. It is a bodily labor that produces nothing but thoughts, experiences, arrivals. — Rebecca Solnit

Solnit, Rebecca (2000). Wanderlust: A History of Walking. New York: Penguin Books.

It’s hard to brightly imagine that when we decide to retreat to the desert or to the mountains to walk, it is a process deeply colored and, literally, in/de-formed by relatively recent cultural contingency.

The retreat is steeped in a socially constructed reality that began to emerge around William Wordsworth and J. J. Rousseau’s time and was sparked, in part, by their actual perambulations and especially the writings that welled-up whilst they were on the road (The Excursion, by Wordsworth, for example, and Rousseau’s Reveries of the Solitary Walker).

But in a completely different sense, walking (and be-ing while walking) is ahistoric. Because the present moment is never to be repeated, nor is a life-time to happen twice, the momentary events of that particular movement are unique, and uniquely inspiring. Embodied movement is a passage through the flux of difference, regardless of the pathway. And although I cannot anymore go to the delicious extremes of span and height and endurance that so many others have done and will do, it is not extremity that brings the timeless essence of movement. When all is change, the senses are taught to discern the minute difference of the everyday, ever more. In this, the near becomes just as exotic and inspiring as the far and less reachable places.

posted
  • place: enroute - Dinosaur National Monument - Grand Junction - Glade Park, Colorado

leaving and heading south

leaving Echo Park, Colorado, May 2010

Leaving when done with breakfast and cleaning and packing. A couple rituals yet — gathering some sage and some yellow Weber sandstone powder. A beautiful sojourn. The place is so rich, so un-circumscribable, no matter how many dances of words one would make around it. Best is the ability to press into the body the power of be-ing and the power of life. And Light. And the gravity of the earth. Fundamentals to the heart. The drift of cloud and shift of wider weather patterns, leaving Light on upturned face, changing all the time.

Maybe put out a call next spring to have others join. Then again, maybe not…
more “leaving and heading south”

posted
  • place: Wendover, Utah

CLUI residency — Energy of Situation

Some final words on the residency period:

Energy of Situation

Rather than producing new material configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system, I chose to concentrate on a fundamental closer to the bone, as it were: the production of new configurations of the energized world as a tool for individual continuance and relevance to the wider social system. What we do changes the cosmos, always, everywhere, (because everywhere’s are not separated nor distinct).

Traditional art production is (merely) the (re)configuration of certain flows in the near (and far) surround of the producer. My approach generally falls under this model but approaches the reconfiguration process from an entirely different path. Entering a ‘residency’ is (merely) moving from one (life)-situation into another: we are constantly doing this in life, transitioning from one semi-stable configuration to another, with periods of more-or-less instability in between. If one leaves traditional temporal and spatial metrics behind, this process may be seen simply as the modulation of a constancy of flowing condition. The particular conditions and configurations of a situation dictate the potential range of reconfigurations possible, given the energy input of the individual and the embodied life-energy/life-time that is available. The configuration is merely a cumulative apprehended set of flows occurring with a reductive purview (and is always relative to the observer!) There is the ‘locally external’ factor of the accessibility of external energy sources for reconfiguring, but if one approaches the situation as a more autonomous and self-contained instance, the range of possibility is limited just as life-time and life-energy is limited. It is along this approach that I undertook this residency. (I will here omit a wider discussion of the framework of my personal model of the cosmos as there isn’t the room here to undertake it even in brief).
more “CLUI residency — Energy of Situation”

posted

routed, rooted

If everything now becomes about the Road: it all falls along that infinitely converging line, that pavement rising to the foot, hard, on occasion scraping the nose, the knees, or the palms; it is both that which is down-trodden, and the means to get there. A path for social flows, climbing, gathering, consuming, dispersing. Freedom, indeterminacy, hydrocarbon wastage, imperial protocols, signage, regulation, safety, danger, possibility, newness. On the road, carrying the old with oneSelf, in a worn knapsack, that which is old, known, important, very important.

So, three or four threads: 1) the Self on the road; 2) the encounter with the Other on the road; 3) the road as an expression of the techno-social context for human relation; 4) what to do on the road that cannot be done elsewhere or under other conditions — what the road proffers to life, how one gets there, that and imagining the end of the road (Oz! to meet the Wizard (or Sorceress) hehe, from the Yellowbrick Road to Oz, now ain’t that whacked!).

In that moment I was able, so to speak, to place myself in a future which may one day be realized. I saw not only what I might one day be able to do, but also I saw this — that the anticipation of the event was an augur of the deed itself. Suddenly I realized how it had been with the struggle to express myself in writing. I saw back to the period when I had the most intense, exalted visions of words written and spoken, but in fact could only mutter brokenly. Today I see that my steadfast desire was alone responsible for whatever progress or mastery I have made. The reality is always there, and it is preceded by vision. And if one keeps looking steadily the vision crystallizes into fact or deed. There is no escaping it. It doesn’t matter what route one travels — every route brings you eventually to the goal. “All roads lead to Heaven,” is the Chinese proverb. If one accepted that fully, one would get there so much more quickly. One should not be worrying about the degree of “success” obtained by each and every effort, but only concentrate on maintaining the vision, keeping it pure and steady. The rest is sleight-of-hand work in the dark, a genuine automatic process, no less somnambulistic because accompanied by pains and aches. — Henry Miller, “To Paint is to Love Again”

Writing on the road. The translation of movement and sensual input to text. Learning what filters to apply, what social protocols to apply, what protocols to transcend, what to hold, what to release. Discipline.

posted

watcher/watched

Selling individual vision to an Other: convincing, forming mental models that will allow compelling suasion; pressing opinions, argument, elegant frameworks; all constructed with language, words, characters, academic form, journalistic style, flaccid prose, basic text, with footnotes or hyperlinks; bibliographic references to other words, other texts: but where is a praxis? Praxis weakens to a barely-lived presence fighting to become in a dominant social structure of insipid spectacle that maintains the attentions of a vast majority of the population. Those being watched increase in number to challenge that of the passive watchers. In many cases the passive watchers are the watched, and vice-versa. The consumption of the passive watchers is expansive, limitless, a whorish gaping maw willing to not just taste, but to gorge on anything that is mediocre, maudlin, bland, and self-serving; safe, pre-digested, pureed, and acceptable. Worked over. ‘urrrrp’

Indigestible fodder, poison, anathema, bloating farce, and gaseous prophesy.

The world is drowning in verbiage.

All protocols lead to artifice.

posted
  • place: Primal Locus, Where Ever, Terra

temporary suspension

(this was the final posting to the travelog on the hybrid php/html platform p-machine pro before the tech-no-mad blog was initiated)

apologies for the lack. you have no-doubt noticed the dearth of entries here. no travel, no entries, no kangaroos. all energy goes into the tech-no-mad blog at this point in support of the doctoral research. you may tune in there for tidbits and fragments sampled from the wide range of inputs sliced through. here will remain dormant for a time, methinks. besides that, reflecting back on prior situations also dominated by remoteness. how there is no solution in distance. face-to-face has to ensue. sooner than later. (b)logging miles to return home where ever that place (of heart) might be. or not. e.e.cummings comes to mind, or so, while the Western Slope recedes from same. but without stretching abilities, formative pathways, expressive outputs, little will come. the ecology of words is not sustainable. whilst closing in on 2 million hits to this project (since 2004), gawd knows the total since inception in 1994!

posted

technology fails

20100116 The latch handles on both the driver- and passenger-side door are broken. There is a certain geometry on the plastic lever-arm which, over time of repeated lifting motions, fails. So I have to replace them. The truck is relatively old, compared to the average age of vehicles on the road. I call the Toyota dealer nearby, and they want almost USD100 for each replacement handle. This is called an OEM part — Original Equipment Manufactured — a part which carries some of the branded weight of the maker and its record of quality along with a premium price (including a substantial markup to underwrite the existence of the dealer distribution system). Too much! I knew this would be the case before I called, but I wanted to set a ceiling price before looking elsewhere, online. This particular vehicle model was globally a widely-distributed frame, body, and engine combination and so there turns out to be a substantial non-OEM parts market. The only question is one of quality. Non-OEM parts online appear to be both Mainland Chinese- and Taiwanese-made with what seems to be a substantial US distribution presence in the form of highly discounted warehouses designed for online mail-order sales (with Ebay, Amazon, and their own web sales presence). I find the parts, in several styles (chromed plastic and black) for a small fraction of the OEM cost, USD 20 with free shipping. more “technology fails”

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

on participation, part one

I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
more “on participation, part one”

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

a multi-modal life

If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

posted

pox

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability. Therefore the deep impression that classical thermodynamics made upon me. It is the only physical theory of universal content which I am convinced will never be overthrown, within the framework of applicability of its basic concepts will never be overthrown. — Albert Einstein

and this work will (already) require an a-cyclic slippage into and out of mechanistic language which makes so much of the territory un-mappable (before a new language can be framed). a skimmering skittering across hot metal plates causing dissipation and evaporation. (where transformed language is a compressed gas, waiting for temperature and pressure changes to expand to fill a dialectic space — wherein the words and word-constructs are tested for vacuity or fullness). Conscious use will govern whether or not there is a sense of movement or an underlying stasis in the text. Thankfully it is a DCA and not a PhD so there is plenty of room for experimentation.

[and a pox on all you slackers who underline in pen or pencil or highLight texts in library books. I don’t give a damn what you think is important, so keep yer grubby hands away from public domain books!]

posted

The Military

(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)

The second example — though it is a much more complex combination of pathways in its geo-political and material deployments and in its interaction with the overall continuum of relation — is foundational to the TSS (techno-social system) and is also a prototypical expression of amplification. It is even more a prototype than radio. Radio is merely one sub-system of what is ultimately a military organization.

A military system incorporates all the requisite patterns of an amplification system: input signal (the human population and other concentrated energy sources available to the TSS); amplification process (provisioning and equipping of the select grouping of people through the collective life-energies of the greater population of the TSS); the feedback system (communications, command, and control systems); and the output signal (the expression of amplified (and directed) energy flow as a campaign to secure the viability of the TSS either by offense or defense).
more “The Military”

posted

what is language?

(a title: On The False Invariance of Text)

Writing is oscillation, it is frequency, it is tone and overtone. It is directed at a hundred thousand invisible targets some not yet alive, most dying, some dead. It is all-encompassed by the infinite flux of be-ing at the same time as being uncircumscribable. Resonance drives the text. Without resonance, the text is more than dead, it is simply not. Null, less-than-zero. Silent. While speaking in tongues, interfacing with one another, we tack meanings to the words, sounds, making them become for a moment, a surfacing out of a wider flow of dis-connection. Or merely happenstance accretion, coagulation, a resulting (sepsis-in-mind) of something (quelque chose), making: turbid agglomeration becomes acculturation.

The whole engagement with the idea of doing the doctorate arises from a combination of pragmatics and desire. The pragmatic considerations are real to the degree that the author understands the social value of ideas that are formally exposed, independent of format, and that the Other takes up, paying life-time and attention to. This is a basic premise. Desire enters the process where there is the need to be recognized, this, not on a social scale, but on a simple and uncorrupted personal scale. There is the deep risk that both these motivations are hollow and base-less. To defeat that potential, the process will be open and open-ended, unending. It will not begin and end with bound covers and stitched bindings. It will mimic life that came from who-knows-where and is going elsewhen.

One point of this blog is to de-stabilize the general process of writing to the degree of opening up expressive possibility. It is not here to be a blog, with endless sifting through and cross-referencing of network sludge. It is an armature on which to hang the infinity of idiosyncratic individual inputs and some limited external inputs into the process flow.

posted

notes prior to Memory Seminar with Andrew Hoskins

The concept of memory is related to my own work and practice — as an artist, part of my work does relate to the creation and preservation of my personal archive. Also, memory is a feature of collective Techno-Social Systems as a mapping of embodied participation in that system over time. It is also a concept to consider in the wider perspective of my work which examines human presence, encounter with the Other, collective social systems and their impact on the individual and finally, creative action.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the words of physicist David Bohm, that

… there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the individual (creator, participant).) The levels of loss of autonomy exist on a sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a collective or individual archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?

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

private juggling

reading older texts, reviewing the prior accumulation of texts and text files to get more organized, getting rid of dross. learning Zotero and beginning/continuing to structure keyword nets and document organizing strategies (before launching onto an abortive path with that). playing with this blog platform to see how I might best use it for this kind of documentation.

another words, building structures for words (and images, sounds, etc), places to hang words both for private juggling and public consumption. step one.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

bloke, mate, bludger, tosser

more words.

today, the 433 bus driver is a Yank. from Philly, his number to go to Vietnam was coming up, 167, when they were conscripting 163, so he enlisted, and the war collapsed two weeks later. somehow ended up in Australia visiting relatives 33 years ago, and never left. born in Italy, half the family went to Philly, half to Australia in the late 1950’s, early 1960’s. the best thing, he says, about living here, I can wear shorts to work year round.

all the late night bus rides have been interesting, by the time the bus gets through the hard-core downtown, the Quay, and The Rocks, it’s empty, so few people actually live in Millers Point. in the shadow of The Bridge.

posted
  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

to be mindful of modalities

exploring modalities of communication. of connection, of be-ing. Kittler shows up on the radar immediately (hmmm, recalling that extremely uncomfortable evening with him in that bar in Linz before the Intertwinedness happening. he needed the table to circulate around him. and it did because of the language (protocol) gap. I was not fluent in German enough to access the discussion that inevitably circulated, hovered, around him. strange situation. instead I talked with his assistant (and translator whose name I have now forgotten), a young American who came to worship Kittler in Berlin for a time. I left early as I had to catch a train to Copenhagen early the next morning.)

how to bind energy in to the text [as the particular creative output]. to be released in TIME. to the proper receiver.

that from an earlier travelogue entry. it clearly has been on mind for a long time. actually the transition from print-making to performance/happening was a mapping of that need. finding that the silver print was just too rigid a platform when compared to presence. although the print is, as with anything, in retrospect, a resonance of presence and be-ing as is any trace left in the wake of life.
more “to be mindful of modalities”

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: 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: Columbia, Missouri

tools to thrive

spend the afternoon at a meeting with a group of about 15 enthusiastic Mizzou students who are interested in fundamental issues around sustainability and social activism. the meeting (Open Sustainability Network Mid-Missouri, under the title Tools to Thrive. hosted by Richard Schulte, one of the founders of the Mid-Missouri group (which is connected to the umbrella Open Sustainability Network). OSN-MM is also the initiator of the Columbia Missouri Exchange Circle. Lonny Grafman, the featured presenter, is a lecturer at Humboldt State University and is the founder of Appropedia Foundation, the self-proclaimed sustainability wiki which provides a public platform for information on sustainable community practices along with pertinent knowledge-sets for implementation. Lonny is also the Executive Editor of International Journal for Service Learning in Engineering (IJSLE). He introduced some of his work in the form of a presentation Democracy Unlimited Humboldt County Rainwater: A Case Study in Open Source Community Action for Sustainability which explored community activism in deployment of sustainable (in this case, domestic rainwater gathering) systems. words: creation of human networks … the search for a deliverable … starts with a sonic ambient exploration a rainstorm … examples of rainwater sequestering … Bechtel in Bolivia … anthropocentric impurities … a lesson in rainwater catchments: free … local infrastructures generate independence / autonomy. Too many details at first. without the principles of appropriate technology use — public perception, policy situation, know-how, resources, initiative, currency in Humboldt … hemp paper, soy inks … Temporary Autonomous Zone break-out groups: creation and organization of more and better public art; bike-powered something; CSPAN (Columbia Sustainability Policy Action Network); local economy (in general); moving from thought to action; facilitating dialogue; sustainable creative activism; expanding the sustainability community; empathy and interconnectedness; rooftop gardens where possible on campus; community networking club celebrations, gardening; organizing / participating in one implementation workshop for a physically appropriate technology setup; less plastic use, healthy local food, teaching sustainability to children … sorry no more detailed notes, I had to leave right after the break-out sessions to meet Nick and Deb to look at houses. I cycle across downtown from campus to the Walgreens where I lock the bike and go in to buy a snack. when I come out I wander across the parking lot looking for Deb’s car. a chubby white woman gets out of a sedan and asks me if I need a ride. she says she normally doesn’t do that, but I looked like I wasn’t a killer and that she’d be happy to help me out. I say no, no thanks, I’m just waiting for friends to pick me up. mid-western courtesy? I’m wearing a black leather biker’s jacket, black jeans, black half-gloves and a baseball cap from Germany, and dark brown sunglasses. who’s she kidding? she must have been one of those mild-mannered mid-western serial killers. just then Deb pulls up. saved! Nick stayed with the kids, so we drive into the countryside to some small towns looking at houses. the area is really depressed, many empty storefronts on Main Street. and this area is relatively affluent compared to much of the rest of the state. it would be very interesting to travel through these areas and document what is happening. sustainability? indeed. things are not sustained here. help is needed.

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
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

https://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980’s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

https://neoscenes.net/blog/cv-resume

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT more “Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)”

posted
  • place: en route Boulder - Colorado Springs, Colorado

heading south

depart from Boulder, gas up in Golden, arrive in good time at Karen and Ron’s place in Colorado Springs. chocolate cookies fresh out of the oven, and cold milk. now that’s a welcome! but what spaces and times to cover. and in between the words, a better understanding of those far-off times. a nice dinner, hanging out, early evening though — they have to get up at 0430 for weekend work at a correctional facility east of Pueblo. but a nice start to re-connecting with an old friend. Karen and I both headed to Colorado in 1976, she to CSU, me to CSM. and only once meeting in Fort Collins at a party in early 1977, then at the 20th reunion in 1976, and today. Light steps across Light years.

posted

thesis proposal :: Basics

Title

Sonic Presence Within The Networked Regime of Amplification

This research explores the relationship of (sonic)energy to social be-ing, technology, and the consequent possibilities for creative action.

Subject

Sound is energy, sound carries energy. Sonic energy is a product and a by-product of life. It forms one expression of organismic presence. It is one particular energized expression of our band-limited life that developed its particular characteristics through evolutionary processes. These processes are essentially structured around variations in the (spatial and temporal) concentrations and availabilities of energy. As one such expression, sound is employed as one means through which humans enhance their survivability. Amplification represents a particular model for what is essentially a life-process that operates on various energy flows, modulating their basic characteristics. How human collectives generate and interact with sonic energy governs a wide swath of their consequent techno-social interactions. This research is a distributed exploration of sound as a carrier of energy between the Self and the Other — as it is mediated through the globe-spanning network of techno-social amplification systems. Specifically, it will be a critical exploration of our contemporary techno-social terrain through the application of this model in a variety of creatively energized situations.

Outcomes

Formally, outcomes will include the dissertation, live/online performances, workshops, a blog, festival participation, and conference presentations. Through developing an energy-based model that amplification provides an armature for, it is my hope that this research will generate a powerful tool for analyzing and understanding the dynamic affects of technological systems on creative human engagement at all scales. This knowledge will be applied to facilitate actual situations for this engagement to be explored.

Keywords

amplification, sound, (sonic) energy, power, technology, techno-social systems, networks, continuum of relation, dialogue, collaboration, presence, sustainable creativity, social action, entropy, thermodynamics

posted

thesis proposal :: Methodologies, Background, Timeline, Contexts

Concerning Particular Methodologies

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

configured for flow

what about it. is it recall, pure recall? or is it synthesis. or a combination of the two, or something completely elsewise, like a state of head that comes during a seizure, magnetic vortices swirling around picking spun and un-blocked beta adrenergic receptors in heart-felt relaxation and then the words all spill out. perfect recall? imperfect recall? replicating dialogue, reconstructing conversation, impression, apprehension, perception. stretch, scratch. back to the less descriptive and to the more surficial of textual generation. better yet, the visual. easier to cope with. but without any possibility of breaking out into a pluralistic space where threads of the Other are artfully woven into the text(ile) of word here. so that goes. the accession to expression in the midst of compression of social division to sparking violence. only the sounds that are in the head are worth reflecting. where the head gets filled in the movement of day-to-day through the systemic participation, this followed by a core dump of the consequent alteration of neural system in reaction? or is this reactionary writing? a real-time tap into the momentary flow of thought cannot, in fact, happen. unless fingers can transcribe this floating, channeling of sensation in-to-out. it happens. rarely if ever for most, sustained for a select few who are configured for this state of flow. hmmm.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

uff!

no fond member/consumer of any blogospheres, I have to link to this Huffington Post Stefan Sirucek article on the election…

Now, in a highly touted “change” election, one party is running a former D student who himself admits to being hot-headed and impulsive, whose low-road campaigning has tarnished both the electoral process and his own reputation and whose political ideas become less credible with every emerging reality. As his running mate this man has, either recklessly or cynically, chosen a woman who believes instead of thinking, who knows little of the world and whose every tortured sentence is an affront to the logic of language itself.

Forget the White House. The only public building these people should be heading for is the library.

yes, it’s true, few Amurikans have even a modest command of the language of the land — but I want, after eight years of a distinct lack of intelligent and thoughtful speaking (not to mention actions!), a political leader who can speak at least a handful of coherent words in a row, better yet, a number of sentences, or even several paragraphs. without teleprompters, handlers, and the assorted spin-meisters that ride herd on these … puppets … like so many … sheep. not to mention a media who only serves the interests of, you guessed it, THE MEDIA. sheesh, enough of this!

robocalling anyone?

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

ex-press

Cam sends a link to a nice interview with George. whilst the author of Phaedrus still echoes around.

There is an old Egyptian tale of Theuth, the inventor of writing, showing his invention to the god Thamus, who told him that he would only spoil men’s memories and take away their understandings. From this tale, of which young Athens will probably make fun, may be gathered the lesson that writing is inferior to speech. For it is like a picture, which can give no answer to a question, and has only a deceitful likeness of a living creature. It has no power of adaptation, but uses the same words for all. It is not a legitimate son of knowledge, but a bastard, and when an attack is made upon this bastard neither parent nor anyone else is there to defend it. The husbandman will not seriously incline to sow his seed in such a hot-bed or garden of Adonis; he will rather sow in the natural soil of the human soul which has depth of earth; and he will anticipate the inner growth of the mind, by writing only, if at all, as a remedy against old age. The natural process will be far nobler, and will bring forth fruit in the minds of others as well as in his own. — Socrates

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Bo Diddley 1928 – 2008

Bo Diddley went on to heaven yesterday it is said:

Garry Mitchell, a grandson of Diddley and one of more than 35 family members at the musician’s home when he died at about 1:45 a.m. EDT, said his death was not unexpected.

“There was a gospel song that was sang and he said ‘wow’ with a thumbs up,” Mitchell told Reuters, when asked to describe the scene at Diddley’s deathbed.

“The song was ‘Walk Around Heaven’ and in his last words he stated that he was going to heaven.”

I took this photo at a concert that Bo did in the Green Center at the Colorado School of Mines as the kick-off concert of the annual E-Day party weekend, April 1979. As Special Editor for the student newspaper, hung around back-stage with Bo and his band, made some shots there, but unfortunately don’t have those scanned yet in my digital archive at the moment. The acoustics of the auditorium were lousy, and the concert wasn’t particularly memorable, but the guy can definitely rock!

Bo Diddley, Golden, Colorado, April ©1979 hopkins/neoscenes
Bo Diddley, Golden, Colorado, April ©1979 hopkins/neoscenes
posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Weizenbaum

Just back from the Jüdisches Gemeindezentrum and the memorial service for Joseph Weizenbaum. Frieder was one of the speakers and had told me a couple days ago about the service and he would try to see if I could attend. Then I read in a Dallas newspaper that is was open to the public. So, an hour before it was scheduled to start I decided it would be something not to miss. Made it in good time — not by bicycle, though. What to say. More than half of the service was in German; his American ex-wife (of 46 years), and his youngest daughter Naomi spoke in English, and there were a couple letters read by his son-in-law from colleagues in the US — Joel Moses of MIT mentioned the presenting of the Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility Norbert Wiener Award for Professional and Social Responsibility with a tribute by Terry Winograd. I’ll get an audio remix up at some point. In the interim, I have Frieder’s homily for Joseph (in German):

(11:48, stereo audio, 28.3 mb)

Q: Do you think that the computer is creating a technical elite, reinforcing old power structures, or remaking American society?

A: I think the computer has from the beginning been a fundamentally conservative force. It has made possible the saving of institutions pretty much as they were, which otherwise might have had to be changed. For example, banking. Superficially, it looks as if banking has been revolutionized by the computer. But only very superficially. Consider that, say 20, 25 years ago, the banks were faced with the fact that the population was growing at a very rapid rate, many more checks would be written than before, and so on. Their response was to bring in the computer. By the way, I helped design the first computer banking system in the United States, for the Bank of America 25 years ago.

Now if it had not been for the computer, if the computer had not been invented, what would the banks have had to do? They might have had to decentralize, or they might have had to regionalize in some way. In other words, it might have been necessary to introduce a social invention, as opposed to the technical invention.

What the coming of the computer did, “just in time,” was to make it unnecessary to create social inventions, to change the system in any way. So in that sense, the computer has acted as fundamentally a conservative force, a force which kept power or even solidified power where is already existed. — Joseph Weizenbaum

and this, echoing Martin Buber:

We now have the power to alter the state of the world fundamentally and in a way conducive to life.

It is a prosaic truth that none of the weapon systems which today threaten murder on a genocidal scale, and whose design, manufacture and sale condemns countless people, especially children, to poverty and starvation, that none of these devices could be developed without the earnest, even enthusiastic cooperation of computer professionals. It cannot go on without us! Without us the arms race, especially the qualitative arms race, could not advance another step.

Does this plain, simple and obvious fact say anything to us as computer professionals? I think so.

…Those among us who, perhaps without being aware of it, exercise our talents in the service of death rather than that of life have little right to curse politicians, statesmen and women for not bringing us peace. Without our devoted help they could no longer endanger the peoples of our earth. All of us must therefore consider whether our daily work contributes to the insanity of further armament or to genuine possibilities for peace. — Joseph Weizenbaum

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

after the full moon

This was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

And, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

sotto voce (to brainstorms): A quick thought popped up as I struggle with some texts, sitting here in my sublet flat in east Berlin. As a person, I like to have the last word. What a lousy habit! In the learning situation, I consciously ask for someone, at the end of a class, to have the last word. I am thinking I will incorporate this more formally — to the degree that I pose the question (either to a volunteer or not) “S_, How about if you make a short (one minute) statement that you consider to be the last words for our session?”

When I’ve been doing this very informally, the reactions are quite interesting, with people vying for a last word a bit (people being anxious to leave and such), and then suddenly a consensus forms and the class ends. I think I’ll have to play with that idea/dynamic. I have the feeling it could be a powerful tool to impress (literally) the learning session into the self.

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

posted
  • place: Glen Ridge, New Jersey

GPS

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

Wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance? When one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. Though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. How can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? The web of dependencies is both wide and deep. Can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? Can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? Or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. There is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon, hardly. That baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. Beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. Even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

The dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this (GPS-based) selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. A dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. It consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

How can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? It is a relative issue. Clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to the protocols of that system. It is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. Social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. From covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. It is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the self in relation to the system.

Iceland pops into mind again, as I was implementing a ‘new media’ and photo program at the National Art Academy in R’vík in the early-mid-90s, where, with a user-base of under 30K people, Iceland demanded a translated OS from Apple *and* Microsoft. Terms were collectively translated or ‘determined’ by public discussion — I had instances like that happen in my classes, where, teaching in English, and mentioning a technical photographic term, the class would erupt in an animated conversation in Icelandic as to the correct translation of the term. Their cultural autonomy lay (lies) in a collective collaborative resistance to the imposition of ‘out-land-ish’ protocols.

In the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct (likely) created by a subset of the military-industrial complex. But trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. This is where the self engages the other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of ‘what’s out there’. Trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other is critical in setting a metric of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. Sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway that trust must follow to be realized. What is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous others. What does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…