African Feedback
Through a process of listening and speaking, African Feedback documents an exchange between artist Alessandro Bosetti and residents of villages throughout West Africa. Playing music by various experimental and avant-garde composers to people met in villages, Bosetti records their responses, asking them what they are hearing, and how they relate to the music and sounds. Composing their responses, with field recordings made throughout his travels, African Feedback is a musical portrait of cultural translations, misunderstandings, different voices and languages. Including an audio CD and the transcriptions of the listening sessions, along with an introduction by the artist, African Feedback is a beautiful and beguiling work cutting across the ongoing questions of cultural difference.
Alessandro Bosetti was born in Milan, Italy in 1973. He is a composer and sound artist working on the musicality of spoken words and unusual aspects of spoken communication, producing text-sound compositions featured in live performances, radio broadcasts and published recordings. In his work he moves across the line between sound anthropology and composition, often including translation and misunderstanding in the creative process. Field research and interviews build the basis for abstract compositions, along with electro-acoustic and acoustic collages, relational strategies, trained and untrained instrumental practices, vocal explorations and digital manipulations.
and the Dworak’s are off to Brussels for the weekend for Milena’s daughter Karla’s baptism.
dogs
okay, how does this guy in Bremen manage to sell these things so cheap? Martin says that the wursts are made locally, too. as we make a short tour of downtown on share-bremen night. Jürgen is sick. but we see some interesting art work.
The truth is that there is not enough of the right kind of freedom, the fundamental freedom to choose to be free or not to be free, according to one’s preference …. Thus I demand, for each and every member of human society, freedom of association according to inclination and of activity according to aptitude. In other words, the absolute right to choose the political surroundings in which to live, and to ask for nothing else. — Paul Emile de Puydt
The Wild Surmise
Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!
Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.
sotto voce: I am a native of Alaska, born there as a Cold War military child. My father, a senior Pentagon analyst, sport-hunted grizzly and polar bears among other magnificent animals. We moved to Boston, then Southern California, then Washington DC, living in suburban or rural fringes of cities. A primal memory was of viewing a total solar eclipse from a beach in Acadia National Park in the northeast state of Maine, USA, at five years old. Watching the sun be consumed, until there was only a shimmering ring of fire surrounding a black hole in the sky. My father was an amateur astronomer, and I accompanied him on a further four total eclipse expeditions. Along with these specific memories, there are general memories of sleeping in the woods, of eating around a fire, of washing in streams, mosquitoes, and dark star-brilliant skies. more “The Wild Surmise”
OHV
Ready to vacate the camp ground: the omens and portents are not good.
Bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.
Nothing like the amplified throb of hydrocarbon explosion to go to sleep by and to wake up by. Camping in a BLM (Bureau of Land Management) OHV (Off-Highway Vehicle) area. The premise is simple, the social system has generated devices, machines, both two-wheeled and four that allow a single driver to mount somewhat like a horse, and to ride at speed on rugged and steep terrain. For entertainment. (Note: three-wheeled machines were banned from production 25 years ago because of the vast toll of injuries and deaths which ensued as a fault of the basic design). The word entertainment is key. It is absolutely true, straddling one of these machines, with hydro-carbon explosions vibrating the body, landscape rushing by a high speed. The body transforms itself into the body of a god (or goddess). Speed and flight, and the power to conquer the land makes one a lesser though very carnal deity. It’s great fun. The wider world is narrowed down to a small slice of the road ahead and some limited peripheral vision that is otherwise masked with the (state-mandated) helmet. The system narrows to the challenge of moving forward along a pathway (state-defined, in this case, with designations for beginner, intermediate, and expert, like a ski area), maintaining forward motion and lateral balance while negotiating the shifts in speed and orientation. Essentially an immersive video-game experience. Back to the virtual. Hearing is both muted in the helmet, but also assaulted by the viciously loud hydrocarbon explosions happening with minimal attenuation between the legs, touch is overwhelmed by the vibrations of hands, holding onto the handlebars (feeling reduced by gloves) and actions reduced to wrist rotations for accelerating, and gripping for braking. Sight, limited by the helmet. Smell coming through a nose filter, and otherwise, smell and taste dominated by the grit of dust that chokes everything. This is circumscribed by my definition of virtual as that which entails an attenuation of sensual input to the body-system.
It’s a holiday weekend, one for remembering the dead, fallen heroes, and the reasons that nation-states exist. The right to bear arms under any circumstances.
A radio blasts into the night as soon as the working folks arrive late on the Friday evening for the three-day weekend. Motors are tuned, beer is drunk, laughter and shouting echoes around the local space. The local space is a mis-en-scene, a tableau. The trees are decorations to be cut for fire, nails inserted into and chopped with hatchets because they are there, extruding from what is taken simply for painted or projected backdrops.
The camp ground is, as darkness falls, a backdrop for yet another kind of entertainment to take place. The BLM has posted a regulations sign-board, but it is the victim of target shooting with large-gauge shot-guns. Most of the regulations are unreadable, peppered with holes leaving letters, words, whole sentences unreadable. No shooting so far this weekend yet, but it’s sure to happen. Our campsite has a mound of big red 12-gauge shotguns shells, spent, under one tree, and several hands full of high-power rifle shells of a variety of calibers scattered around. And every once in a while one sees side-arm shells. Spent ammunition. Broken glass, beer bottle tops. Past remembrance-of-the-dead weekends. Celebrated by shooting into the air, shooting the trees, shooting anything that looks non-human. Most of the time.
The ambient audio mix also contains material from the City of Ten Thousand Buddhas compound.
There is nothing that does not flow forth from the Dharma Realm, and nothing that does not return to the Dharma Realm.
bbbbbrrrrrrrraaaaaaapapapapapapapapa, brapppapapapapapaaaaaaa.
perambulations
clearly lost at words. in words, without words, for words, back words. energy ebbed under the circumstances. the demise of the workshop still a real bother. will be into the future. and not very auspicious first visit to Australia. perhaps the last visit.
missed Sophea today, she lagging from jets, coming the other way ’round the globe, via Delhi. worked on slow machines. after the walk to the College. jetfuel coffee and a nice muffin in one of the many cafs along the way, reading the newspaper, catching the local drift. the word ANZAC (Australia – New Zealand Army Corp) in the context of recent political scandals, historical honor and glory, contemporary resistance to the Iraq/Afghanistan crisis. nationalism? you bet!
walking back and forth trying different pathways, the row bungalows with the iron-railed porches and verandas, steel gratings on the doors, the more modern apartment blocks, slick, shiny, bright. life-style. many of the row houses are under remodeling, for sale and resale. there is a significant market, though nothing like the California frenzy. apparently people have also flocked to the huge tower blocks that fill the center of town, built in the last five or so years. where there used to be porn shops and big business districts.
fried day
Superstitious or what? Dawning like other days. Up at the crack of (early to sleep after perusing some Plato (The Symposium)). Birds cranking away. No particular breeding time, apparently when it rains it means raucous amorousness. No rain, but just the arrival of daytime. Something to crow about.
Jumping around today. Met one faculty member at COFA, then on downtown to meet Ian Gwilt over at the University of Technology. Catching up and mapping out the states/conditions/problematics of university educational institutions among other issues. There’s a nice exhibition of large-scale portrait prints at the UTS:Gallery (digital prints, I wonder — very sensuous paper surfaces) from Jon Lewis of images he made in Bougainville. And later, meeting Anna, finally, to have the beginning of a more long-term conversation. There was one point that we skimmed across — the idea of setting up a consulting framework for corporate advising — because the problems in any social structure may be the same. Academic, corporate, creative, politic. And so on. Beginning to expand the scope of foot-travel, changing routes, checking things out slowly. Still have not internalized any form of orientation. The harbor lies east-west, and there are a variety of towering office and apartment blocks, and the downtown skyline. But the topography is contorted and wrinkled like the Coast Range immediately south of San Francisco proper, and so, no easy sights to maintain. With only a one-page Google printout of the immediate neighborhood, the mapping-dependent side of orienteering is limited. Get lost. That and get to the beach. Tomorrow. Bondi. Or bust.
Now and then — but this is rare — one hears such words as piper for paper, lydy for lady, and tyble for table fall from the lips whence one would not expect such pronunciations to come. There is a superstition prevalent in Sydney that this pronunciation is an Australianism, but people who have been Home — as the native reverently and lovingly calls England — know better. It is ‘costermonger.’ All over Australasia this pronunciation is nearly as common among servants as it is in London among the uneducated and the partially educated of all sorts and conditions of people. That mislaid y is rather striking when a person gets enough of it into a short sentence to enable it to show up. — Mark Twain in The Birth of Sydney
despair? or what?
interview passes smoothly, no need for the pre-tension of notes. great pressure to articulate in brief the complex topics of life-practices. the results will be known in a week already. fast and efficient compared to the debacle of the other recent US university interaction. it will be a tough choice if there is an affirmative. there is a deeply-felt distance from everything I know in the world, being here. settling into yet another life here. finding a place. Sydney is urban, though with a slick easiness of calm inner relaxation. huh? words can’t circumscribe it yet. at all. haven’t made any photographs yet either. a few audio samples, but nothing definitive. walking home after sunset, the skyline of downtown is silhouetted against a singularly sharp sky.
Life is impossible at high temperatures. That’s why I have reached the conclusion that anguished people, whose inner dynamism is so intense that it reaches paroxysm, and who cannot accept normal temperatures, are doomed to fall. The destruction of those who live unusual lives is an aspect of life’s demonism, but it is also an aspect of its insufficiency, which explains why life is the privilege of mediocre people. Only mediocrities live at life’s normal temperature; the others are consumed at temperatures at which life cannot endure, at which they can barely breathe, already one foot beyond life. — E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair
swamped
Whoa, way behind. But the email inbox gets more and more full, a tidal wave, or at least a tidal surge, about to cover nose with a sludge of glimmering words. Back in Helsinki. Having to take the extra time to type the word Helsinki slowly, otherwise it gets typed wrong: Helsniki, Heslinki, etc.
Workshop migrates into the second day. Dialogues generate, pathways open up, words, energies are exchanged.
Meet Tapio at mbar (aka meteori) in the Lasipalatsi, where my old cafe9.net office was. The center of town, different now since the huge Kamppi underground bus terminal complex is finished. That complex is behind the Lasipalatsi, and looms like a mini-Tian’anmen (Gate of Accepting Heavenly Mandate), though the Finnish translation must be something like Gate of Accepting Earthly Commerce (Portille hyväksyä maallisen kaupankäyntiä)??
more meetings
Bad night’s sleep again, not sure where that is coming from. Feng shui of hotel rooms. Don’t like hotels. Open window too noisy to sleep; closed, nose imitates room and stuffs. Maybe caffeine. Some small cups of coffee during meetings, not just to be polite, but it smells so good. So, wake up before alarm, force the obligatory liter of water down, gradually clear head. body drags along behind. pack, and hobble down to breakfast and wifi access to at least consume croissants and Eudora. And some Firefox. Though belly is fat and getting fatter. Can’t wait for a swim, cycle, something aerobic. But Dirk has made a tight schedule of luxurious 2-3 hour meetings with such an interesting variety of people. And so, this morning, he comes to breakfast a bit after Thomas Laureyssens comes tentatively to my table.
Excellent generation of ideas, intuitive connections, and pathways, dynamically evolving possibility. Thomas is working on a social networking project which aims to create a functional gateway for Belgian new media initiatives.
Brussels as the background. some good food, some short visions, hardly any time to catch the tourist scene, and no photographs made. Nothing missed on that account. Previous visits, the most recent was in 2000 for the closing cafe9.net meeting which ended up in the scandalous shouting match among participants at a Chinese restaurant. So much for European solidarity.
Dirk and Thomas head off after Angelo Vermeulen arrives for a short meeting before I have to catch the train to Maastricht.
Angelo illustrates my dialogue-based worldview with several direct anecdotes which counterpoint his prodigious and stimulating formal creative output. And reminds me a bit painfully the lack of a PhD is a deterrent to social viability. That or a book. So that story haunts again in the background. Text trumps lived praxis, title trumps actual presence. sheesh.
We have lunch at the Brasserie Falstaff with a nice interior where “you can admire the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” and the staff looking like they should be in a Paris bistro. And the pay toilets governed by a wrinkled old lady. Just the way it used to be. Mais oui! Typically touristic, with a complete backwards look to the future. Tourists would never distinguish that this is not real. Maybe tourists are so conditioned by looking at the world via tele-vision, that when confronted by the real thing, they cannot tell when it is a simulation of something else authentic. Like Disneyland. Seems like a great place to actualize physical presence in the ‘world’ when compared to prime-time teevee. uff!
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Over to Maastricht, train to bus to Rod and Lizbet’s place. Nine years since last time. Catching up on years of remote art, music, books, Iceland gossip. Talk about getting more of Rod’s work online aside from the wiki page that a friend has done—he’s a networker, and a singular one of that breed, a networker’s networker. No time to worry about publicity, the market, promotion. The work and the network are all that counts, matters, all that provides life reason. His output into that network is prodigious, profound, and humane. His archive is priceless, marvelous!
hooligans
A long stroll to the Hauptbahnhof for tomorrow’s tickets. End up using the electronic ticket machine which leaves me with exactly no change because it doesn’t take EUR 100 bills. Fortunately I have exactly the cost, EUR 87.50 from Kiel to Aachen. Should have gotten a rail card 4-days/one-month it would have saved me a bit, too late now.
Muttering German phrases, words, repeating to self the texts on signs. Down to the harbor, ever so often, becoming mindful, not enough, but bringing the breathing and the hyper pace down a few levels, and deepening the breathing and shifting the worldview. On the way down there are several conglomerations of police in full riot gear. Apparently a football match between Lübeck and Kiel is taking place today. The police presence is overwhelming, and at the Hauptbahnhof there are at least 100 officers deployed, forming a press to search fans as they get off the train from Lübeck. Some are outfitted in dark green cloth-covered body armor, some are in black. No clear difference between the two uniforms. They mostly are large and imposing figures, a few women among the men. The football fans repeatedly break out in hoarse and echoing chants. The police escort the city buses to the stadium with riot vans, along with officers filming everything on dv-cams.
The sonic ambience is interesting. Getting good use out of the Zoom H4 (Ed: redundant link, now to the H4n-Pro which is way better than the discontinued H4). It seems to get pretty decent sound with the built-in microphones. I have yet to try the external phantom miking possibilities. Now it’s a question of getting the content online, though, I’m way behind on that, when each day is full of in-ma-face email pressures and logistics issues. So it goes!
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Then Björn sends very dramatic footage from the riots in Copenhagen, right from his flat overlooking Sankt Hans Torv. He caught some of the molotov cocktails going off and some rude crowd action until the tear gas forced him to close his window.
Stonehenge energies
Stonehenge, in a stiff wind. fenced, parking lot closed. the Place looms, well, not looms, but appears between oncoming lorries and a small wood. small and along on a gentle slope that opens up on closer approach. we can’t park, so Jo does a u-turn (aaaaaaa, on the wrong friggin’ side of the road, IMHO!!) and parks on an available pull-out. a full 180-degree rainbow appears over a flock of sheep across the way, almost along the sight line of the standing line stone. there is a hooded figure appearing and disappearing around the base of the main circle, beyond the chain-link fence. I have a sacrifice stone to image there. and some panoramas, but the wind and light rain makes any absorption of the Place not so easy. sunset Light appears, horizontal brilliance cutting from the southwest. clearing the air. there it is. there we be.
I run back to the car, kicking and wiping the beige chalk mud off my boots. getting in , the wrong side always. and fighting the urge to grab the stick-shift even though I don’t have the wheel in front of me. a few missed turns so a larger circled homing-in on Huntsham Court. dark, running the hedgerows. machine-trimmed close and tight. especially with the van that we are driving. high on each side three or four meters. a chill, cold dark. small pullouts for tractors to turn into fields, or leading to stone houses. finally the manor appears. massive stone building with many many windows, stairs, halls, and rooms. three floors, 20-foot ceilings.
we’re not the first to arrive, Jo’s parents and a couple family friends are there trying to stay warm around the enormous fireplace in the Great Hall.
elk and impala heads, jaguars, leopards, bronze owls with glass eyes. swords. closed doors open to reveal more and more incredible rooms. a snookers room, library, sitting room, dining hall set for seventy-five, and on three floors above, the bedrooms and bath, each unique, furnished with a scatter-shot mix of period furniture from stuffed animals to magnificent Tudor oak woodwork and 18th century porcelain bath accoutrement. not to mention the two lions at the front door. wow!
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.
scale of impact
The scale of impact may be described using a material framework in a Cartesian coordinate system. For example, bringing by car a plastic container full of toxic chemicals — better yet, a bottle of water. Leaving this container behind, we have effectively inserted a certain amount of energy into the local system (as defined by a scalar coordinate system) in the form of an abundance of liquid water and the hydrocarbon container itself — a very concentrated form of hydrocarbon energy with a certain threshold value for the liberation of that energy. The threshold value changes over time as the container is slowly decomposed (to compose and decompose) through the availability of UV energy which, at peak dayLight hours, is high enough to just barely exceed the threshold. Whether or not the bottle appears to alter the local environment depends on the speed of liberation of the energy. Or perhaps it doesn’t depend of the speed of liberation. The change in the environment takes place upon the introduction of the object (material energy system) into that particular location. The liberation of energy from the introduced material energy system begins immediately. Plastics release free radical organics all the time in their inevitable breakdown process (smell nalgene vs pvc vs polyethylene, for example). Temporal rates of release do not always scale to the eye of the casual observer. The intent observer, aside from changing the energy state of the system through the act of observation, notices smaller and smaller changes. (Question: in Quantum, (how) does the observer affect the total energy state of the observer/observed system? — another words, does the observer actually introduce an extra energy (source) into the system, or what?) Global warming will evidence itself in an accumulation of relatively small scale observations which will need to be correlated to indicate a larger scale shift in the global system to the casual observer. With observation itself as a rapidly diminishing individual function, (being replaced largely by collective and heavily mediated observation), it will be difficult to make the connection between small and large. Although technically there are large numbers of detail-observers (in the form of specialist scientists), the structure of the social system effectively keeps these observers and their consequent observations separated (by the rigidity of specialty vs trans-disciplinarity). It will take a trans-disciplinary visionary to draw many isolated threads together to make clear the changes necessary in the global system for the mediated-reality pseudo-observer.
Wha’? Who cares? You’re speaking obsequious drivel!
Nawp, just fishing for basic principles of human presence in the world. Impact.
So far only one other vehicle seen on the national forest road today. A 4×4 that went in and came back out from the trailhead in about an hour. Otherwise, watching ravens catch thermals and play around the welded-tuff-over-breccia hoodoos across the Soap Creek valley. And collecting spent brass cartridge cases that litter the ground.
John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006
Learn sorrowfully from the network (from Karen (T.)) of another passing. John Wester was a great friend from junior and senior high days. we maintained contact after the college diaspora and when we were both living in Los Angeles after college (he doing his law degree, me finishing my tenure with corporate oil) and later through email, thinking that at one point we would cross paths. an obituary is a terse framework that little shows the life, only the social situation. I’ll add some words and, if I can find some, photos soon. Karen calls — the first time we have spoken in, what, maybe 30 years? nah, a few less than that. it is strange and nice to hear a voice that slowly stirs older memories — of those humid summer days down at the North Shore dock of what was a not very large lake in one of the first planned communities of the 1970’s, Montgomery Village. I would cycle down Brink Road from home to the Village on occasional summer days before a drivers license made more of the world available. At the dock, John, Richard, Taryn, Karen, Mark, Gary, Bruce, Sharon, and others would hang out — some of them working (boat rentals), some like myself, just hunting for summer friendship. more “John Francis Wester 1958 – 2006”
security please
full days and nights. at the airport, feeling quite good, back not a problem. with a week off exercise. when the architecture of social relations break down. flight 473 waits for a part coming from Washington. some passengers become irate even though the flight isn’t technically late yet. one shouts really loud when the gate attendant is making a public announcement describing the situation. he does it again during the next announcement, with a stentorian voice that drowns out the announcement, so she storms over to him and they exchange words, he demanding to see a supervisor. she goes back to her desk and calls security. making connections. I should be in line to change my Denver – Phoenix flight, but what’s the point? the line is at least 30 minutes long at this point. later, security finally comes. they take him away. he broke the accepted relational barriers that exist in a public place — or the accepted protocols of relation, projecting his stored (pent-up) bio-energy into the space and at the agent. she, a spokes-person for the social institution of the airlines. an individual speaking for a mass.
10th anniversary
into the second decade of this travelog. following through the long and winding road of countless kilometers of body movement and mind floating above the surface, suspended in the dark matter between two infinite half-spaces. leaving reduced fragments of primary technology — words — behind, scattered in frozen wake-full-ness. no thought that it would persist so long, accretion volume and visuals and sonic samples. until it becomes a primary manifestation of present being. no more no less.
incursions
shoving into the month. already moving again. house emptied more-or-less. now out in the Mojave. near Kelso. on the usual overnight stop between Prescott and San Francisco — in the Granite Mountains southeast of Kelso Dunes — perfect temperature, negligible humidity. so, star gazing bare-chested. Sirius, Arcturus, Vega, Antares near the waxing moon. Jupiter ahead. took the back way to I-40 at Seligman — essentially continuing out Williamson Valley Road for 65 miles. deep through isolated ranching territory on the fringe of the Prescott National Forest and something of a soft terrain of limestone, basalt, some red-rock, and green vegetation cover from the recent two weeks of monsoon. even caught a small storm that cleaned the windshield. making virtuality more transparent.
the Mojave as it always is. despite encroaching red-yellow air at sunset from eLAy and other less tangible impacts from humans, bats are winging about, some animals and birds out there — jack rabbits, nothing else seen, but likely there — and the plants, rocks, contributing to the raw being of place. and the ever-consequent silence laying heavy behind any sound. even starting up the computer for a bit of writing is a noisy industrial incursion. and with battery running down very fast. so that words either have to form now or simply dissipate into the real ether! setting the alarm early to have a slow breakfast, tea, before the sun breaks the boulder ridge immediately to the east. want to get on the road in this black car so that at least all the hours of the heavy mid-day sun are not spent inside it. coffin.
back to look at stars as battery dies.
silence is betrayal
John forwards this extract from Martin Luther King’s opinion on the war in Vietnam:
A time comes when silence is betrayal. That time has come for us in relation to Vietnam.
The greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.
To save the soul of America.
This is the message of the great Buddhist leaders of Vietnam. Recently one of them wrote these words, and I quote:
Each day the war goes on the hatred increases in the hearts of the Vietnamese and in the hearts of those of humanitarian instinct. The Americans are forcing even their friends into becoming their enemies. It is curious that the Americans, who calculate so carefully on the possibilities of military victory, do not realize that in the process they are incurring deep psychological and political defeat. The image of America will never again be the image of revolution, freedom, and democracy, but the image of violence and militarism.
Unquote.
A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
Nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation?
it is the annihilation that is easy. it is slow, imperceptible, and complex to unravel — the feelings of powerlessness in the face of the invisible macro-scaled inevitable. shopping marks the first instance of micro-annihilation.
become republican
JC sends this to da40 — become republican
I respond,
sotto voce:
only too true, though personally I’m not so rabidly anti-Jesus. it’s the zealots who, as the cartoon points out, hide behind His words and are fundamentally hate-full and intolerant. not what I would expect from the pursuit of a Christ-like behavior emulation…
seems there are glimmers of hope that the society has woken up from a bad dream that was imposed by the 2000 pseudo-election. I frankly don’t have much hope though, that the systemic corruption in the political system is going to go away at all, demos or repubs are the same animal from that perspective.
in the Republic system of Rome, there were various contingencies (balances of power) to cover during different times of need (war being the primary one, though it was misused as a power-manipulation tool — nothing new about that! It is interesting that the concept (and specific form of civil rule) dictatorship was held for a temporary crisis.
more “become republican”
V2
tuning in to Lev Manovich‘s lecture/discussion at V2. last time I saw Lev was at my flat in Helsinki in 2000, I made dinner for him, Tapio, and Susanna. His topic is “scale effects.” Stephen Kovats, a curator at V2, sent an email invitation to myself and a handful of other folks who frequently participate in such live/online events. it is a non-standard way to participate, for sure, watching and hearing the event via an audio/video stream, and reacting to that via an IRC channel that is projected into the lecture space. there is much more that one could do to push this format for live interaction, but it usually ends up being rather mundane and polite.
sotto voce: after self data-mining. computers scaling social forms. (dialectic between increasing quantity, size, creates new effects. examples Wikipedia. scaling in visual culture. one million hours of programming online. (BBC?) company in San Diego makes 6 giga-pixel images. (factors — image size, data volume, podcasting, moblogs) Bruce Sterling, the future. ubiquitous computing. media ecology. listing newest, hippest pop technologies. What about the societies in which this technological consumerism takes place in? medical imaging – PET, MRI, CT. graphical browsers took off. 30-40 years of media history. What about the impact of scaling up of existing media? What is tradition of quantitative effect scaling. very much based on a Cartesian system. Mcluhan’s suggestion that increasing of speed changes the social system. With scale being a parameter for comparison of media implementations. Speed: processing speed relating to visual presentation. algorithm already developed in Durer’s time. so, scaling causes the development of a “whole new media”… new visualizations important to contemporary science. resolution yardstick. but the available visual cortex (field of vision) can cover a small fragment of the image at any one time. redefining new media. normal media flattens the world, then surveillance. 4k digital Cinema. adam says it’s all smoke and mirrors. I think it seems to be using conventional metrics — based in Cartesian worldviews? temporal, spatial, compression. the collective. “as much data as we want.”
the parallel irc discussion (see below) leaves much space for wondering at Lev’s success. there seems a close linkage between text production and influence, something I have mentioned many times in other places. he made careful note that he is working on two new books and is proceeding at a rate of 2500 words a day. seems linear, quantitative, and retro. hmmmm. but it works within the attention economy.
structural holes
Hunting more background on the ‘structural holes’ issue that Burt raises in relation to the geometry of links in a social network. Goyal, in laying out the question of whether or not connectivity is a sustainable strategy, formulates the ground conditions:
We develop a simple model of network formation to address this question. We consider a setting where interaction between every pair of individuals generates a surplus. If two individuals are directly linked then they split this surplus equally, while if they are indirectly connected — there are other players in the ‘path” between them — then the division of surplus depends on the competition between these intermediaries. In this setting, there are three types of incentives for individuals to form links with others. The first incentive is the desire to create surpluses: individuals would like to join the network so as to create exchange possibilities which in turn create surpluses. The second incentive is related to the rewards from intermediation: players would like to place themselves between others in order to extract rents from intermediation. The third incentive arises out of the desire to avoid sharing surpluses with intermediaries; in other words, individuals will try to circumvent intermediate players to retain more of the surplus for themselves. — Sanjeev Goyal
The allusion to a surplus in the connection between two individuals is one of the first uses found in network theory that is in the direction of my research — where a core outcome of the series of bi-directional connections that occur in an open network is a surplus of energy. Back to the 1+1=3 theory. The extraction of ‘rent’ however brings up an entirely different mechanism. The mechanism is the applied attenuation of social strictures (as applied through the full range of ‘technological’ mediation) that extracts energy from the pair of engaged individuals — in this case, the third party happens to be in control of the ‘spending’ of energy from that immediate social energy bank. So, two separate and very different dynamics happening, not degrees of the same process.
sotto voce
so, from here on forward (and backward), recognizing that there is plenty of material to be culled from the email archive and the daily outgoing rush of words to generate relevant content here. as I run into the issue of editing — why not put material here that is more immediate, more intense, more reflexive of the trajectory of life in this incarnation? one old memory popped up — that of a small scandal that I precipitated when I was in my last year of teaching at the Icelandic Academy in 1995. with a group of students, I was running a collaborative email- and fax-based project with a couple other schools and as I had also built the first, very primitive, web site for the school, I decided to put some form of documentation of the collaboration up as well. I stupidly put transcripts of emails that I and the students exchanged with the other schools. at the time there was a part-time video teacher at the academy who was using the computer lab repeatedly without asking me, for his own projects. I objected that unless he clear things with me, I would rather that he not use the machines during the day for his own things. somewhere in an email I mentioned this to one of the other schools, complaining about this guy. and somehow he ended up reading it (doh, I did put it on the nascent web) and complaining to the Rector. I was leaving the school anyway, but it upset some of the other teachers who were already ticked about the amount of money that I lobbied for — to build up the photo/video/computer lab. anyway, sotto voce will become entries culled from email. they will only be scandalous for me.
sotto voce: I’m pretty slow on the reply — just now coming out from under what seemed to be a large rock. I can walk (slowly), sit, drive now without the brace I wore until last week. it feels weird to be without it — like a shell-less turtle. & still months before I hope to get back to full strength. it’s been strange though. everything from the hi–tech repair job, the interruption to ‘real life,’ and dealing with a very material body…
gravity
a classic Arizona evening. air cooling rapidly, sky running a burnished spectrum from burnt orange to blue-white silver, clouds reversing the shades so that at zenith cloud and sky become one, for a moment. full moon rising over Mingus Mountain. dogs barking in the neighborhood, a rabbit comes running on the cool western downwind to sit right in front of me in the twiLight. Venus is the first planetary orb to show, followed by Jupiter, 13 degrees behind on the ecliptic. and while the precise placement of these masses constructs a field of influence on every body external, leaving the internal point of self unaffected, it is not revealed easily to the eye, used to watching fast-containing media flows. astrophysics talks about gravity. and so it is, a pseudo-science of invisible attractions. drawing bodies nearer or into slingshot close approaches which accelerate one in an altered trajectory onwards and leave the other spinning more slowly. while the sun provides life energy to press upwards with body presence, for a time, resisting that sagging force. there is no contradiction between science and spirit — the contradiction arises only in the naming of things. science believing that its system of naming, so clean and internally consistent, is superior to others, but each system of naming believes this. science is no different. faith in one, truth in the other, reality in a third. just down to words. (and the surprise that Babylon brought to humans — how could language be corruptible?)
places, sounds, words
make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice’s home and drive down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.
more “places, sounds, words”
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).
The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks
A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor’s note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 that set life on another trajectory.]
1.0 Statement of Problem
1.1 Introductory note
Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. more “The Energy Dynamics of Technologically-Mediated Human Relation within Digital Telecommunications Networks”
chaos & dynamical systems theory
Illustration of a Julia Set by Scott Hotton. Dynamical Systems Theory (a branch of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex systems by employing differential and difference equations) is another limited framework for modeling complex systems. More accurate than linear and non-linear models, but none-the-less reductionist. (Well, talk about restating the obvious when it comes to anything mathematical, as the concept itself is a reduced language for expressing natural phenomena — I don’t subscribe to the early Greek concept where mathematics does not represent but is a universal and perfect thing unto itself). While human-generated system solutions (say, engineering problems such as placing satellites into orbit) are solved through classic computational modeling with linear systems, natural systems like the brain need something more.
Chaotic systems are especially sensitive to initial conditions. initial conditions are necessary for any reductive system analysis because in the abstraction process of reduction, the system is extracted and disconnected from the continuum of life. Good for mathematical (computational) modeling. But when defining a real-world problem, how feasible is it to define initial conditions at all? Is there a way to not define initial conditions?
A chaotic system is defined as one that shows sensitivity to initial conditions. That is, any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the future behavior. In other words, the system is chaotic. Its behavior can be predicted only if the initial conditions are known to an infinite degree of accuracy, which is impossible. — Gollub and Solomon
alarming equinox
On balanced spin, equinox framed, about to board a flight. maybe the first, maybe the last, I can’t remember. Who is who. Asian lady pressing cucumber slices on her eyes. Halves the slices and rubs the edges around her temples, forehead, and face. A traveler. With some shamanistic knowledge about cucumbers. They keep away all sin and corruption. Now a small group of children. With two women. The children are in varying stages of difference. Bodies shaking and shivering, or crooked bent, but through that mere material be-ing, there are brightness shinings. Words sound from shaking throats. Life takes all form. Any form, any way. Two hours to the flight. And eleven hours on the plane. Hours to arrive and depart.
London always is a memory. And what a racket at Heathrow. Fire alarm goes off as I am perambulating around Terminal 4, almost making me miss my flight. Automated grill gates roll down in front of all the duty-free shops. No shopping in an emergency! A crowd of anxious people, many of them obvious foreigners, wondering what the hell was going on.
Good grief, steel gates clanging shut to the wing of the terminal where my flight was taking off from. Just made it.
Now on the plane, over Fargo, thought about Ken when just puttering over Winnipeg. Encased in ice. Might as well be north of Hudsons Bay.
fearlessness
the speed of religious innovation. words to wake up with from a sleep of a thousand dreams and groping around for the pathway. these two thoughts come to me: the despair I face is of my own making; and fearlessness is paramount. it is always this internal relation to the world, where change is framed as something accomplished by introspection, not in relation with the surrounding presence of spirit. although there should be no distinction between the internal spirit and the external spirit. they are One. but connection to that dynamic flow remains elusive and transitory in the confusing rush of noise that the social brings. (how this sounds an anti-social position, but this is not the case, merely to recognize the effect of social structures (as they enhance material survivability) on the individual.)
interstitial awareness, and Brakhage’s rise to the surface of my consciousness through meeting certain Others. the sheer animated viscerality of his expressions that so activated my fascination. the further individual creative expressions/projections can be stripped of the restrictions of abstracted and impressed social channeling, the closer the impulse comes to pure energy.
The light of power is waning. The eyes of individual subjectivity cannot adapt to mere holes in a mask, which are the eyes of those fog-bound in shared illusion. The individual’s point of view must prevail over false collective participation. In total self-possession, reach society with the tentacles of subjectivity and remake everything, starting with yourself. The reversal of perspective is what is positive in negativity, the fruit which will burst out of the old world’s bud. — Raoul Vaneigem
back in the West
Marcus gives me a paper about Bernard Noël.
What is it to be face to face?
From the depths of the window comes
the self that is not other
Through the eyes he casts
a cry of smoke
Then the knowing is
the torn off fingernail
Head and knife are cold
in the thought
and this excerpt from the powerful essay “The Delicate Oppression”:
Therefore, behind the appearance of a free and universal culture, is the attempt to seize entirely the cultural field and the mental space of cultural subjects, transforming them into simple consumers. The mechanism of this transformation is so simple in principle and practiced so regularly, that it becomes imperceptible as soon as it goes into action. It can be summarized in the following way: every cultural action always involves a certain effort of comprehension, learning and of listening, its movement leads to an exchange of pleasure. Cultural consumption, on the contrary, only requires a bit of passivity. A show serves as mental activity, an activity which is only agitation and ends by discouraging reflection, to the advantage of the voracious appetite of ones own nonsense. It is sufficient to sit in front of a television and watch, in a totally natural way, and what you are watching will drag you into its movement and become your thought.
this would apply to any form of re-produced, re-presented cultural manifestation, and in-authentic constellations of be-ing. so, again, a reaffirmation of the power of authentic be-ing in the world. not a retreat or return to some ‘primitive’ state of living, no Luddite protestation by refusal or opposition, but simply an awareness of the extreme psychic danger inherent in the collectivization of human expression.
noting the yet significant differences between Czech Republic and Germany. like the cost of rail travel. it will cost me more to get from Dortmund to Rösrath today than to fly from Prague. and if I was doing the same trip in the East, it would cost about a tenth of what it costs here in the West. no wonder people are making counter-migrations to the East. though there seemed to be fewer Amurikans evident in Prague these days, there were plenty from other places. not much to say. en route on an ICE train right now. deciding the connections to make. surely a ‘nicer’ system here, but not to a degree to justify the cost. the long-distance rail runs must be getting killed by the short-hop discount airlines. what does competition do to a previously nationalized system? it forces privatization. Frieder was mentioning that there are now private regional rail lines (actually they share the same rails), that was a surprise. it would be a pity if they move in the direction of the British Rail system which is a real mess. ach. whatever. doddering words here. full of nothing. noticing that International equity market funds are pegging a good upward stride this last month.
netart 2004 – Ping Melody
The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:
where is netart?
When invited to join this year’s netart curatorial crew, I was somewhat skeptical that such an exhibition—with the attendant baggage of dusty artifact carried by the traditional Art World—would be a satisfying way to spend life-limited time when there are always other things to be done. That and the continuous nomadic movement that underlies my participation like a slippery mat, allowing only sporadic concentration of my remote presence hunting for and looking at network-based art and actually thinking about it.
However, collective curation with people who I knew were sensitive to the contingencies of remote collaboration and very aware of the limited understanding that the Art World has regarding net art makes the project interesting. So what then? Do I trawl the now-vast network for something brightly shining or sounding attractive? Eye candies? A hopeless task. The only thing to do was to sift the daily flow of content, during interstitial times when local presence was not demanded—the information flow personally customized by the networker to form a vital link with the remote macro-network—while keeping the overall blast of data at a comprehensible level. Not always possible: it’s getting ever more difficult with each spam-filled day. Especially given that the networker is not fond of reductionist activities which concentrate attention on particular nodes.
more “netart 2004 – Ping Melody”
dahl again
Kevin is here, Ellen and Stefan away in the City for work, the kids at school. so we catch up in a wide ranging flow of words. jump over to Whole Foods to get all the makings for dahl which I prepare for dinner. red lentils, ginger, curry, coconut milk, bullion, cumin, coriander, masala, carrots, potato, olive oil. different every time. I’ve never been very confident of my cooking, as when making food for myself, I don’t dig into the process as deeply as I could. and with all the nomadic scene, I don’t often get to host people for food in a place where I can confidently gather the ingredients for something that I know how to cook to begin with…
sheesh
too depressing for words.
one year from passing
a year since Dad died. doesn’t feel like that at all. a year. one of an endless cycle of circles around a Light. how else would we know, without abstract methodologies of measurement, except to see that things are the same, and different each time around. time may be a continuous phenomena, but it is variable for different beings, and states of being. why not? the willows, aspen, poplar, and birch are all transforming. rapidly. along with the snow marching down the mountainsides. by the time I get back from Norway in three weeks, this place will be stark, winter. time passes. flooding all corners of the sensual world, and affecting change in all things. when in the pool, at each deep inhalation there are smells of the sticky-sweet poplar here, almost a taste. it’s slightly different from the Cottonwood of the desert Southwest, but the smell brings a strong memory to surface. I’ve talked about this before in other places of this travelog. the smell of trees.
At times I feel as if I had lived all this before and that I have already written these very words, but I know it was not I: it was another woman, who kept her notebooks so that one day I could use them. I write, she wrote, that memory is fragile and the space of a single life is brief, passing so quickly that we never get a chance to see the relationship between events; we cannot gauge the consequences of our acts, and we believe in the fiction of past, present, and future, but it may also be true that everything happens simultaneously — as the three Mora sisters said, who could see the spirits of all eras mingled in space. — Isabelle Allende, House of Spirits
mushrooms
sonorous night of outside vodka partiers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now comfortable meaning is heard in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.
a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.
mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.
I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.
this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.
workshop
after a shaky start on Friday (combination of not enough sleep, early rising, not enough food, water). today flows. rainy outside, sun now.
This seminar/workshop explores some particular pathways and practices of creative activities with a close look at the impact of contemporary technological developments. It proposes and critically examines implementations and strategies for sustainable and relevant social engagement as mediated by technological networks.
Especially important is the establishment of an in-class situation for open dialogues on personal worldviews and experiences. This distributed human situation will be the core source for the seminar and will allow us to explore topics that are directly relevant to the practices of the individual participants. Another words, the actual form of the workshop will, by necessity, reflect the content to be discussed.
Participants are asked to share their experience-base and engage in attentive and focused discussion about the ideas that arise in the moment, and to target specific issues that inspire, challenge, or block their creative engagement of technology. These programs tend to be highly flexible and dynamic, with uncertain outcomes. But it is exactly in those un-defined spaces that novel and life-changing events occur.
The seminar facilitator, John Hopkins, is an experienced international artist, teacher, and technologist who is most currently working with live/online collaborative performance actions — occupying the social spaces represented by global telecom networks and facilitating creative action in those spaces. He maintains an extensive web space at https://neoscenes.net. Particularly relevant as an introduction to the seminar is a brief article that he wrote about his praxis for the AcousticSpace 2002 entitled “1+1=3”. That article may be found at https://www.neoscenes.net/hyper-text/text/xchange3.html. Documentation of recent activities may be found via his CV at https://neoscenes.net/info/cv/index.php.
ram5 – day 3
quick series of presentations covering software, performative situations, and … in the morning. non-keywords: collective and playful, revealing, (bob him say, “they materialize their every wish. everywhere is war.”), (the possibility for personal data/info re-vealing confused with an open-ness for change as stimulated by the Other). two trees linked via data feeds, one in the north of Sweden, in (natural) situ, and another in Stockholm and elsewhere with a life-support system that mimics the limited quantitative data parameters.
locative?
smartmoblogsociallocativefictiongpsteredmedia creatures feeding one on the other, in a frenzy of “what’s next that’s cool” and built for speed. (which ultimately will move ‘it’ on to the next “Next Big Thing.”) seems like another wave of meme-hype reverberating around the extraordinarily limited space of global telecom networks (in collaboration with military satellites). is the price to be paid so removed and hard to comprehend? seems so. I have run across exactly zero critical words about this phenom. instead a flood of vacuous phrases and spin terms that are kept afloat in a social sea by the flatulent buoyancy of affluence, global capital, and ex-military industry. STILL. “radical decentralization” for autonomous consumption of text, image, audio and video — the re-presented and ultimately consumable world. autonomy for re-presentation and re-production of reality — one that fills the belly with gas and the head with language peddled by those same tired techno-utopian spin-doctors. technology always looks its ubiquitous best in the eyes of the über-class. as I click through the verbiage at locative.net (no longer extant) it feels like RedHerring from 1999 or so — so much interlocking terminology leading in a head-rich circle of hype-logic. headmap drops phrases like “everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached,” “every place has emotional attachments you can open and save,” and “life flows into inanimate objects.” and behind these words (more and more of them) there is no awareness of or anticipation that there was/is an essence that is a substrate for knowledge and abstracted/systematized human apprehension. that something comes before knowing. and the vitality-draining construction of a Babylonish Tower is an ongoing exercise that society never quite purged from its mind. the path that re-creation bumbles along is not the same one as creation. not even in the same forest.
When people consider the dangers of the chaos of a free intensely networked spatially augmented world, they should also consider that like all technological advances it offers tools to both sides of any argument. ‘ends appropriate means’ may seem ominous but the ends can just as well be social advancement. Even in a critical situation, disaster response and recovery in a world of spontaneous peer to peer mesh networks, running evolved social software, seems like a sane option for coordination of local efforts to recover and help from outside. The homeland security initiative raised the point that a citizen owned spatially aware communications network could be invaluable in a crisis. — headmap.org [ed: dead link] ideolog
what kind of crisis? when shopping is compromised? what can be meant by the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘homeland security’ being used in the same context? and, invaluable to whom? a threat to the status quo? or is there a radical suggestion that the masters tools be used to displace the master? funny, though, the effect of wielding a tool is perhaps the same, regardless of the wielder. that is, on the wielder, not on the hapless victim!
and what if, just what if these technological deployments are subsequently used for command-and-control, will everyone be surprised and taken aback? gee, we never imagined…
and the other core issue — whether you believe that all things are connected by a relatively un-knowable (or un-circumscribable) substratum or whether you consider that phenomenal existence is populated by discrete and completely independent objects, actions, and beings. that driving an SUV in Chicago rush hour has absolutely no connection to the presence of an M1 Abrams tank parked on a bridge outside of Falluja. that typing these words on this keyboard into this device has no connection with degradation of ground water in the Kwale region of Kenya from titanium mining.
microphysics & son(net) subterfuge
Manu sends an image from TRyPTiCHON, with Amanda and I standing after the performance. a blue-Light special.
Foucault falls into my hands, though I am not particularly fond of the French School of philosophy, or, maybe to say it more concisely — I dislike the widespread invocation of his name. but, a book from the library is here, so I pick it up. immediately the term microphysics pops out from the intro. along with the observation by the editor that Foucault’s work never was successful in addressing the dynamic of social change and the autonomous nature of social action. ahah. my model does this explicitly! another spray of Lighter fluid on the fire kindling under my thesis. doubts remain, many, but as I bang words around, there seems some hope that this task gets done.
dinner last night with some of the other residents.
and then, the thesis issue keeps popping up.
Certainly, fantastic theories must not be arbitrarily invented contrary to the regularity of experience; nor must there be any departure from the harmony of Nature, since she tends to be simple and always consistent with herself. — Isaac Newton
cranking with Josephine in Amsterdam on the dress rehearsal for Son(net) Subterfuge which takes place tomorrow evening. a distributed dance/network happening, I’ll be supplying one of two incoming audio/video mixes that Jos will re-mix to be projected into the dance performance piece in Waag’s Theatrum Anatomicum. everything was stable last night. knuckles rasping to a bloody pulp on wood — to ensure the same tonight…
spins
leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.
Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:
Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!” more “spins”
transformative reactions
arrive the night before Valentine’s Day in Kiel following the first European workshop of the Second Nomadic Phase. if things proceed like this all the time, there is no going back to the core of Empire, in retro vision, it is too corrupt. is this too simplistic a diagnosis? maybe, but the energy flow patterns in that set of structures is … oh hell, can’t describe it, it’s just a bunch of abstracted words.
anyway, Christian brings Steffi flowers last night. Valentine’s Day. I bring some Lübecker marzipan.
yeah, reflecting back on the two weeks, I had forgotten how powerful dialogues can be when there are engaged individuals at both ends. the system in Boulder exerts such a high degree of psychic pressure on the students (and faculty) that the conditions for humane dialogue are almost impossible to achieve. they need some breathing space of chaos — or some a root ground that feeds any contingency of flow. if the degree of insistent social flow-framework is too rigid, then there is no possibility of inspiring breath. and there is suffocation. embedded in the situation at ISNM is, for now, a degree of chaos that is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is at least available.
The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. — Karl Jung, hanging in Frieder and Susi’s kitchen
ice follows fire
the month ending. all hallows eve. only seven more weeks around Colorado. yesterday hot and dry, huge flames lick at the final hogback between the Rockies and Boulder. today ice coats everything. clouds cling so close that there is no town, no mountains. fire chills.
parting. so concentrating on seeing people, because I feel like this departure from Colorado will be more long-term than I can imagine. maybe, maybe not. strange to even be typing that, but it might be in the words. hmmmmm. with my in-box now brimming at around a constant 130 emails, after the application of 70 filters and spam removed and all the answers and questions each day going out. scandals at Media Lab, territory grabs, and in the US government. nothing new.
the place
back in this place again, camping up against the wall that looms over the campground. maybe sleeping out tonight. remembered yesterday that I had sent one of the tent poles to North Face to be replaced before we went to Florida. it had not returned yet, and they didn’t have a record of its arrival. tent is useless without it. a short walk along the wall, seeing the marks of complexity, flows, reconfigurations, conformations, transformations. rock to sand to rock to sand to rock. illustrated, no, manifest. fundamental richness of source to press inwards on eyeballs until seen. I have no words for this place, or for life anymore. so, commentary, that gradual or catastrophic removal from presence, is in contradiction to lived experience. the experience of birds singing no longer calls up the multi-fold apprehension of that momentary, transitory now-ness that can no more be duplicated in the flux of life.
overt war begins
and then WAR starts, so much hype. madness. and the situation here. seeing hospitals again. and mortality. why do people want to kill? to add to the misery of living that already smothers so much life on this planet.
whole seasons peel away, onion skin, how many left. Black Elk speaks, through his transcribed words. loudly, clearly, and with no fear for his own idiosyncrasy. and full of knowing relevance and wisdom.
The Spell of the Sensuous
No thing has changed. All conditions change. Tired of language. Stopping to consume from the archive. The database that, if I did not have, in its massively material form, would free me to live in the moment. Digitizing is no answer because that process does not remove the weight of that past. Only complete transformation (by fire) would accomplish that. Burnt offering to the present, to living presence. If a practice was subsequently developed.
Approaching the limb of the eighth year of this journal/travelog. Meanwhile reading, or rather adsorbing, David Abram’s book “The Spell of the Sensuous”—recommended by a mutual friend, Eric Fisher, a friend of the author—which confirms obliquely several crucial practices that I had not yet been able to firmly frame in my worldview. Pleasing and stimulating. But reasons for characterizing drift into stretches where only poetics are meaningless for navigation of the now. Discrete, concrete, miscreant. Mechanical words, stripped of any life leave traces that mar what is left behind the wave of hand, brush of hair, shadow of hand on the back of the head. What is the be-ing-ness of Light?
Abram, David. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books, 2017.
Chuang Tzu
With these words that come forth day after day, I harmonize all things in the Heavenly Equality, leave them to their endless changes, and so live out my years. As long as I do not say anything about them, they are a unity. But the unity and what I say about it have ceased to be a unity; what I say and the unity have ceased to be a unity. Therefore I say, we must have no-words! With words that are no-words, you may speak all your life long and you will never have said anything. Or you may go through your whole life without speaking them, in which case you will never have stopped speaking.– Chuang Tzu
and so use this good evening to the end of all selfishness. rupturing no membranes, though an osmosis of a kind happens, is happening. but the salty is on the wrong side of the permeable skin, and does not want out. fresh outside, concentrated impurities left to move against edges, borders, and selfless expression. moving from one to the other state.
event horizons
peristalsis. purge that machine could never achieve. only Light is left. full moon, pull neck back and gaze up. perihelion. azimuth. traverse no azimuth. an old phrase that crept into mind during the winter nights of Iceland. only words here, no blog. no trend-spotting, no riding choking waves of socialized enigma. only transience.
the governor of Colorado says that 300 million in state debt will come from higher education. (because the higher-education sector opposes his policies.) so, I begin to pack bags and chart routes to familiar and unfamiliar ports starting in July. Leubeck will be one stop. there will be many, as it was before. nomadism becomes a partner with networking. and the antithesis of successful integration into the system that I was programmed to perform in. outsider art.
letting notes get more and more cryptic and indeterminate. as a result of the floods of noise that arise when static social embeddedness increases. walk with the flux. feed on the flow, drown in the flood, speed up to “c,” and watch it all reduce to null. flatten and spread into a now of forever. and a place of only here. singularity. trip on event horizon, bruise the shin even as the Lights go out.
dream-forge. and the realization that only great loss, those shivering moments caught replaying between dream and dream, will transform, or, no, they will not. they will only amplify the emptiness. there is little left to do.
indra’s web
I awoke I answered we keep on living I began to think of endless transformation
and in gesture like a secret afterward I began to think of these phrases
they really were flying closer and they turned into words
dawn was the summit and night was speaking
for reasons that were flying closer
suddenly the sounds poured endlessly into my life because I didn’t use words
taken from the world both created and enforced
I began to think of whiteness
this shining road back to the surface of the final sound
— John Cayley
mapping transitions
almost a month later. in the middle of a conference. mapping transitions. academic discourse. so. stream notes. what do pictues want? god is an artist. reductions (models, models, models, built on each other, intertwined. biocybernetics. science/technology making bio-sciences possible. cloning and computers. extended sense. political economy that runs the world. world of computer station, tangled wires. cybernetics: the steersman. kybernaut. writing as control system. not law, but the actual technologic/semiotic (phonetic) tools. (code writers). conflict of visual orgy and at the time of triumph of the digital (logos). analogical arguments. (dominant). terminator of liquid metal. ultimate simulator. academicians desperately searching for a label. an interpretive system to decode what the hell is going on. building a new model with old embedded pieces which have no inherent difference in structural predicate. sa-mo, sa-mo. formative paradigms are old. 1) copy original 2) artist and work (subject:object) 3) temporality (remember Virilio, huh?) 4) time of gain. uniqueness. copy has more aura than original.
enhancements of amplification (reproduction): are they qualitative improvements? reproductive cloning — an improvement?
actual and mediated. (electronic media is given a certain status of unprecedented power.) “new media.” participates in “massaged” production. mechanistic view. the aesthetics of digital media? (what about defining what the hell “digital media” is? (instead of defining it’s “fit” into the hegemonic/dominant worldview). hybrid aesthetics? why not just toss it out…? simulation. materialistic presence. current, seeking closure in the circuit. remix, unlocking input and output authenticity. (digital images and digital culture and rituals of new media). new vs traditional: imitations. virtuality. ontological status. proper character. procedural, conceptual (don’t fit…). anti-materialist. (medium is not the point). thesis-antithesis. we’re not allowed to make progress? hierarchies of form. perfection of expression. useful ways to talk about objects. (and subject experience). taste. rational cultivation. descriptive systems assume static forms of … aesthetics of change. mechanistic production. potential literature. procedural methods. with certain sensibilities. floods of wards. static bodies in space. reading texts. monolithic and reified forms of presentation. (any tweaking of of meta shakes the whole tree, gimme a chain saw). key forms of reference — generative: Pannini, Turing, Babbage, procedural, Stockhausen, and so on. iterative. new objects. rethink premises of knowledge production. aesthetics is about awareness. (iterative), step beyond — in flux. two feet in the mechanistic…
swarming
taking quantum to its conclusion — points to a movement from product to process to practice — (Saskia Sassen — the “meaning” of the activities in the digital sphere is the total accumulation of all practices that take place in that space … MAKE THE LEAP…
anthropological centrism. mapping transitions. (remembering the new world order is a limited access, top of a hierarchical high). indigenous technology. Inuit Broadcast Corporation. media-maintenance. next5minutes comes up, tactical media. good topic.
reproduction (gathering and redistribution of original energized event creates a pseudo-powerful illusion, but this is purely illusion based on the hegemonic (and static) position of the “reproducer” within an implied “global” order … the photograph in the world order (re-radiated Light from the self.) … some forms of hypertext with image are nice, but. just ’cause it’s horizontal?
Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eyes are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light, which is true of the mind’s eye, quite as much as of the bodily eye; and he who remembers this when he sees anyone whose vision is perplexed and weak, will not be too ready to laugh; he will first ask whether that soul of man has come out of the brighter life, and is unable to see because unaccustomed to the dark, or having turned from darkness to the day is dazzled by excess of light. And he will count the one happy in his condition and state of being, and he will pity the other; or, if he have a mind to laugh at the soul which comes from below into the light, there will be more reason in this than in the laugh which greets him who returns from above out of the light into the den. — Plato’s Cave
caves, CAVES, and caves. technocracy. aristocracy of technology. networks of expensive, institution-oriented situations, (isolated from the Light, Light re-amplified, reflected, refracted, energized). “gotta have content.” flippant sycophant, mouthpiece of the complex. access. high-end polarity. slick-packaged technological. famous last words. manipulation and collaborative interaction. glib passing over any moral embeddedness of the power structure. fair use. attitudes of use.