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reason – will

We are perceivers. We are an awareness; we are not objects; we have no solidity. We are boundless. The world of objects and solidity is a way of making our passage on earth convenient. It is only a description that was created to help us. We, or rather our reason, forget that the description is only a description and thus we entrap the totality of ourselves in a vicious circle from which we rarely emerge in our lifetime … So, in essence, the world that your reason wants to sustain is the world created by a description and its dogmatic and inviolable rules, which the reason learns to accept and defend … from now on you should let yourself perceive whether the description is upheld by your reason or by your will.

Castaneda, Carlos. Tales of Power. New York, NY: Washington Square Press, 1974.
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  • place: Golden, Colorado

notes: ‘using’ vs ‘taking-care-of’

I got onto this track while observing how others live in relation to the stuff that they ‘have’. A few additional thoughts coalesced between the annual moving of house, the monthly payments for a storage unit 800 miles away, and the effects of having too much stuff myself.

The personal nature of this dialectic rests within the character of an individual’s relation to reality, to the world, and to the perceived structural manifestations of that world. A worldview of flow acknowledges that change drives all conditions, that ‘things’ are temporary configurations of energy flow. A worldview rooted in the hard structures of materialism sees ‘things’ as mutable in their immediate usefulness, based on their potential to persist, if that characteristic is acknowledged at all. Both views stand in deep relationship as to how life is lived, moment-to-moment. Both are forced to acknowledge the transitory nature of be-ing.

Using suggests a consumption of a limited resource, something that is recognized or at least assumed to have a finite material life. And, when ‘finished’ or ‘used up’ the object is discarded, after being rendered use-less. But isn’t it such that everything gets used up? Sure, but there seems to be an inherent level of violence correlated to the rate at which something is used up. Laboriously accumulated or meticulously assembled things may be destined or actually created to be destroyed in a single usage: the explosive weapon. Although time is often measured relative to human perception and human life-span; this metric applies an anthropocentric stance that seems reasonable, given that many of the things used up are human fabrications. However, the speed question suggests that a slow dissolution is a constant background condition. If you don’t use me up, I will be used up anyway.

Taking-care-of suggests a stewardship that is governed by a continuity of interaction and attention meant to project the usability, the use, perhaps into a long future, perhaps a passing from person-to-person, beyond the individual’s life-time. In a way transcending the limitless hubris of the anthropocentric: it will last longer that I. However, to maintain usability an object needs to maintain its ordered existence: this requires energy and attentive care. Life-time and life-energy are drawn upon. Living is compromised. And, in the end, nothing will stop the dissolution that entropy enforces. You may be taking care of me, but I will be used up eventually.

Turns out, a majority of the ‘things I own’ are use-less to begin with: The Archive. Well, perhaps not completely bereft of function, but certainly not when in a survival mode. The Archive is the carrying of a story, of stories, forward in time. The use-full-ness of the story is directly correlated to how it augments survival—how it carries us through. The propagation of information forward in time is the core value in this. Whatever the form, information represents an ordered configuration of energized matter. However, value is relative. Information, energetically carried forward in time, compromises the viability of the carrier in a direct way. Without the compensating augmentation, it is not a good idea to participate in such a process as an organism. Use-full-ness is relative and changeable depending on circumstances, what was once useless may later become a valuable source in another context.

Using suggests a recognition that the end game is ever-present. Nothing is forever. Order cannot be maintained indefinitely. Energy runs out. We leave only the dissipating measure of our transitory presence: ripples radiating from that short cosmological pulse: use it, or lose it.

Taking-care-of suggests a refusal to recognize our impotence. Resisting the inevitable. Gentle raging at the dying of the Light. A refusal of the commonly assumed nature of reality: that caring is somehow an eternal value.

In the end, perhaps neither style of engagement with stuff really … matters. pffff!

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  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Full dissertation text: The Regime of Amplification

Well, I guess it’s about time to put the PhD dissertation text out there in .pdf form, so, here it is (PDF download):

The Regime of Amplification

Have at it, be polite, no grabbing, pushing, or shoving. Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate. If you can prove that you’ve read it back to front, I’ll buy you a bottle of Herradura Añejo Tequila*, as long as we can split it!

*this is my hard liquor drink of choice since 1980 when it was hard to find even in the US southwest — cherished bottles imported into Iceland (bought in NYC at NY Liquors on Canal Street, the only place in NYC that carried it!) would last up to six months, like a fine Scottish whiskey, small glasses for sipping — none of that brutish slugging down shots or making margaritas with this fine distillate.

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  • place: The Bubble, Colorado

The Last Night in the Bubble: departure(s plural)

numerous departures ensue. greetings to commence thereafter on other continents, along other seas, rivers, on hills, and city streets, at airports and train stations: entlang anderer Meere, Flüsse, auf Hügeln und Straßen der Stadt, an Flughäfen und Bahnhöfen.. movement is assumed. car, train, plane, bus, taxi, tram, ferry, sailboat, and stints of upright bipedalism. The shift of be-ing that comes with the shift of place is a change of perspective. It is a change in point-of-view. It is a change in world view. It is change. As it goes.

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the social

So much of be-ing is a convergence (there was no divergence!) of the social and the natural — as if these two categories are indeed mutually exclusive and reciprocal reductions of the world. They aren’t, they can’t be. In a holistic worldview, it is clear that the social is a development of the human species which is a natural extension of life on the planet.

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you can’t be outside of it!

We are thus facing the following strange situation. While all building stones for the [modern scientific] world-picture are furnished by the senses qua organs of the mind, while the world-picture itself is and remains for everyone a construct of his mind and apart from it has no demonstrable existence, the mind itself remains a stranger in this picture, it has no place in it, it can nowhere be found in it.

Schrodinger, E., 1956. What is Life: & other Scientific Essays, Garden City, NJ: Doubleday Anchor Book. p.216. (pdf copy)

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  • place: Arvada, Colorado

revolution?

For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete, and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from fact to value. In other words, critical epistemological practice examines not only the content of knowledge, but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes, and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation. — (McLaren, P., 2001. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies.)

Aside from the monumental use of academic blah-blah-blah here, the idea behind the obscurity is valid. That is, a radical approach to the facilitation of transformative learning requires a deep awareness of more than just a subject. It demands an awareness of how an embodied knowledge of that subject is founded or generated or discovered. This “how” is in many cases far more important than the “what” of knowledge. I describe this “how” as the meta-structures under which the learning is undertaken. It can be a material issue — bricks-and-mortar, the architectural setting — but also, consequent to an energy-based worldview, it is also a critical question of the entire set of flows within which the encounter is taking place. This is far, far more than opening a classroom window for fresh air, or sitting under a tree with a group of students, although the change in the energy ‘content’ of the situation can be quite profoundly altered by small actions on or reactions to the locale. An energy perception drives much deeper into the meta-structures than that, although any awareness is a good starting point. Because the energy content of the situation is most profoundly affected by the presence of the Self and the Others, the entire energy dynamic among participants must also receive this attention and care. This dynamic is more fundamental than ‘merely’ the social — it is expressed in my concept of continuum-of-relation, defined as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. A holistic awareness of this continuum is necessary to optimize the facilitation.

No revolution is possible among people using language as per McLaren!

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  • place: Bundoora, Victoria, Australia

Models of Reality

Models of reality are generated by every social system and, in essence, are crucial elements of social relation and interaction. The models which people share may be more or less dominant, depending on many dynamic factors within the society. They may also be more or less coherent, and are typically fragmented (Aerts, et al, 2007). Within what are called creative practices there exist impulses which seek to challenge existing models or seek to construct alternate models. It is the latter pathway that I have undertaken to travel along with my creative practice. It is a practice that has enabled me to initiate significant encounters with the world and with numerous Others and to engage in sustained dialogues. These dialogues, as the site of the creative practice, have become, in turn, the field of exploration of this thesis.

These dialogues and especially the life-energy that they comprised of are carried through a “liberatory use” (Bey, 1991) of technological mediation .

Within the intertwined trajectory of dialogic engagement with Others, as explored in both the creative practice and the thesis, I have engaged in evolving a shared worldview from the macro level of a flexible cosmology through to the granular-level of everyday momentary practices. The creative dimension of the PhD accompanying the text is not an illustration of the principles of the worldview, rather it is a tracing of praxis, a site of evolving evidence of the pathway that this particular world-view obliges. It is a recursive demonstration of how that worldview evolves and enables that very practice. In short, the question posed by the thesis is “What is the relationship between individual creative practices and technologically-mediated human encounter in media arts?”

Aerts, D., et al (1994). World Views: From Fragmentation to Integration. Brussels: VUB Press.

Bey, Hakim (1991). The Temporary Autonomous Zone. Available at: https://www.hermetic.com/bey/taz_cont.html [Accessed November 16, 2009].

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  • 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.

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  • place: Preston, VIC, Australia

interview with Niina: art & technology

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

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

you could also check out:

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

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

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

more “interview with Niina: art & technology”

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  • 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

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

this and that

Yeno (Hui-neng, 638-713) writes:

The Bodhi* is not like the tree;
The mirror bright is nowhere shining:
As there is nothing from the first,
Where does the dust itself collect?

This was written in answer to a stanza composed by another Zen monk who claimed to have understood the faith in its purity. His lines run thus:

This body is the Bodhi-tree;
The soul is like the mirror bright;
Take heed to keep it always clean,
And let no dust collect upon it.

A nice example of the conflict between knowledge and knowing of a logical sort, and the wisdom of be-ing which Zen produces in a practitioner. The latter is business-as-usual, mega-churches, and MacDonalds; the former is living, spirit-in-motion, and sustenance.

* True Wisdom

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From The Regime of Amplification to The Road

[editor: this document was used for a mid-way doctoral assessment at the University of Technology Sydney and no longer reflects the final content of the PhD dissertation as of the April 2012 submission at La Trobe University in Melbourne. The presentation was accompanied by the video that is posted at the end.]

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. more “From The Regime of Amplification to The Road”

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On The Poetics of Protocol

How to transcend the rigidity of extant and defined protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is an emetic for it; or at least poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol. Or simply turning away to create a new protocol. But this threatens social viability. This is a critical issue as protocol underlies all techno-social deployments. All. And the affect of protocol, its genesis, its makers, its purview, all contribute to the formation of a (dominant) worldview that it imposes a(n arbitrary) frame of reference upon the participant in the particular techno-social system. On the other hand, life without protocols: an impossible situation for social animals (or any animal, for that matter — a protocol may be thought of as a way of going, whether self-directed or directed by innate sense and following the line of maximized entropy production).

This conundrum applies to all (socially) evolved protocols, no matter the genesis. It means that this pervades and saturates, all experiences of being (except perhaps for the pre-human, or over-human). On The Poetics of Protocol, a working title moving towards a core thematic. Using the metaphor of a sliding scale, at one end, chaotic ways of going, at the other, completely prescribed ways of going, life falls somewhere in between.

Having to jump between several points-of-view — the tremendous volume of applicable writing on the range of subjects; a strong, principled, and unifying overview tied to idiosyncratic personal experiences; and, finally, the mental focus required to tie all this jetsam together — the jump has to be transformed into a creatively complied micro-narrative. But looking around at the plethora of source materials is always discouraging — in form and content. The inability to structure my own content into a form consistent with the material that I consume is disturbing, though idiosyncratic expression is one of the goals for PhD research. (Inconsistency has potential to uncover innovative spaces and may be used as a strategic tool or approach.) So this can be viewed as a strategic advantage in the creative interpretation and packaging of the material. Content-wise, I am confident of the presence of something to say, as well as a subsequent pathway-of-action reflecting what is said. Daunting task none-the-less, from any vantage.

Seeing from more than one point-of-view requires motion or at least movement between points of stasis. Does the establishment of a point-of-view require a cessation of movement? (Motion of course is completely relative regarding point-of-view: life is never static so point-of-view never absolutely static.)

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stories from stricture

from Kevin Hamilton on the iDC list:

Thanks for sharing this tantalizing bit from your project Chris, I’m sure eager to see more of the outcomes. You rightfully remind us that framing the discussion in terms of ideologies or worldviews, even economically-influenced ones, leaves out the fact that there are bodies moving around (or not moving), generating these stories.

Much of the flow of human resources (beings) as a primary energy source, was facilitated (forced along) by the formative pathways of the Military-Industrial complex (Interstate highway system, for example, the car culture in general, etc, ad nauseum). It was the prescribed protocollary forces of that M-I system that facilitated (required!) mobility of the bodies as a dispensable resource. And that enforced mobility had a cost — the essential alienation of the displaced Self. This displaced Self would have been a major social problem in regards to social stability, but that problem was muted by universal consumerism (chain retailing) which imposed a sameness on most major (Cartesian) points under the domain of the M-I complex. The pathways remain the same, but the strictness of their applied impression on each individual gives rise to a plethora of different stories: variations on a theme.

These energy flows are not arbitrary, but are complex interactions between evolutionary expressions of life on the planet (humans as perhaps a non-unique expression of that life, in principle) and how techno-social systems re-form and impress pathways on those energies…

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Sydney Non-Objective Gallery exhibition

[ed: An excerpt of neoscenes::drift was recently included in the Sydney Non-Objective Catalogue and CD 2005-2010, SNO Gallery, Sydney, AU, 2010 (gallery catalog and audio CD) ISBN 978-0-9805877-3-9, Mar 2010]

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

lost in a maelstrom of sonic simulations and stimulations, re-collected, re-presented, via various creato-destructive algorithmic methodologies, drift moves through many post-cartesian spaces and through several parallel universes. depending on your frame of reference you may follow a similar path. or you may not. drift demands relativity and provides quantum realism.


(01:00:00, stereo audio, 115 mb)

blurb for SNO gallery exhibition web site, November 2009, NSW, Australia:

drift arises from an ordered archive of ambient phonographic fragments recorded over the past twenty years or so. From this archive improvisational works are assembled: indeterminate and reductive modulations that critically sample the flow of embodied be-ing. Known objects and discrete events populate our world only because we are social animals who have learned the dominant protocols of the techno-social system that we inhabit. This condition is especially onerous with the protocols circumscribing the failed (object-oriented) materialist worldview. drift consciously moves algorithmically with-in and with-out of recognizable protocols, acknowledging that without these memory-impressed protocols, all immediate experience becomes an incomprehensible flow. However, the cosmos we participate in, and indeed, are part of, is composed of these flows and comprehension is an illusion. What we know is only the temporal persistence of patterns in our embodied consciousness which resonate with an attenuated selection of those flows. drift simulates the full signal width of the flows, recognizable or not, and simply transits the field which is the present.

more “Sydney Non-Objective Gallery exhibition”

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  • place: Millers Point, NSW, Australia

resonance, matter, and poetry

I wake up this morning remembering spatial plans for grocery stores in Prescott, Arizona, and then, one in Kiel and another two in Berlin, Germany. As I started to think about it, after a few minutes, I came up with (mental) spatial maps for more than 50 different food stores in ten countries. Small segments of an enormous set of spatially-framed memories of tens of thousands of situations passed through. Repetition of exposure is more likely to create and lock those memories into recall-ready be-ing. It is what structure and structured situations impress onto the embodied life. The access to these memories arises as a sequence of resonant flows across consciousness. As mindfulness scans a region of mind, resonances appear as bright spots of particular order in a dim background. Resonance is a fundamental indication of higher or concentrated energy states. Fundamental quantization of resonance will cause distributed peaks and troughs in the strength of resonance. The subtlety of resonance guides our movement through the flows around us.

(Who cares?)

Does it matter that dominant views exist? Does it matter that humans are faced with a decision to submit to those views or not? To matter is probably the wrong question, because matter locks us into one view to begin with.

How to transcend the rigidity of extant protocol? Opposition is no cure. Poetry is perhaps one pathway, poetic stretching, morphing of the protocol.

Poetry. The Prose Edda, especially the Skáldskaparmál comes to mind, Snorri’s guide to the forms and language of the Saga, and the process of kenning or naming the objects of that world. Imagine making such a device for covering the territory of inquiry. It brings up the text sketched, though later scrapped, for the Hybrid Spaces workshop: The Hybrid: This and/or That. Could be a useful source for later on…

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Weltanschauung

The construction of a worldview is a process of feedback, memory, and resonance with that memory arising out of an awareness of difference.

We know remarkably little about the ground functions of practically the entire system we are embedded within.

Writing an idiosyncratic worldview oscillates between the interior and exterior of being. It moves through all culture and social systems, the natural world, and every code encoded, every text ever written. To this passage is mixed lived impression, the accumulate energized traces that life leaves on the body — traces that, ultimately, are memory. And through memory, life compares these two strands: difference arises.

Traces of word and traces of where and when word arrived into the body-system: spoken, written, the two means to no end. Each in arrangement, in relation with an Other, Others. The relation to the Other defined by inarticulate resonance framed and directed into word, and left as traces both embodied and those dis-embodied, change left behind as bodies pass by. more “Weltanschauung”

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Proxemics

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that is, the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements, rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, as they do govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language-as-protocol. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-processes of one’s self. This particular energy ‘form’ arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body that allows for that particular expression: the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth, and so on. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ from the Self to the Other, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time), a protocol on the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation: when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

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theme song

The armature of the final work is a combination of practice-based activities and a display of input-output (re)sources. Thematic threads (flux, energy, continuum, flow, movement, change, sound), and must needs vocal, aural, oral output/interface. The allowance to rest in writing, here, is a giving-up, a surrender, to the order. And critique cannot dominate the work. it must be proactively positive after shifting the basis of the argument from a traditional worldview to one based in energy, flow, and distributed presence. And transform the argument from argument to metaphor, to incantation, to invocation, to song, to a lived/living dialogue replete with rejoinder, complaint, excuse, bombast, and obscure platitudes.

Produced by writing, philosophical statements are no more authentic or truth-bearing than are literary expressions, and literary expression are no more pseudo than are philosophical dicta; they both fall victim to (or rather take advantage of) the figurality of language, its uncontrollable semantic slippage and syntactic leaps and bounds. In fact, the more one believes one can stay clear of or break free from the sign’s dictate, the deeper one is likely to sink into the ever widening semiotic quicksand. — Briankle Chang, (1996) Deconstructing Communication: Representation, Subject, and Economies of Exchange. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. (p. 202)

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fragmentation

… this false reification of the self is basic to the planetary ecological crisis in which we find ourselves. We have imagined that we are a unit off survival and we have to see to our own survival, and we imagine that the unit of survival is the separate individual or a separate species, whereas in reality through the history of evolution, it is the individual plus the environment, the species plus the environment, for they are essentially symbiotic. — Gregory Bateson

This is exactly what Bohm is talking about when he frames the absolute disaster that a fragmented and materialist worldview has delivered us to (and to us!). And how a holistic and symbiotic view is the only way out of the crisis.

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  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

Wholeness and the Implicate Order

Finally getting down to some David Bohm texts that I’ve been wanting to absorb for years but never had the time or access. I had a short correspondence with his widow some years back for the purpose of responding to the Dialogue essay and subsequently hosting it on the neoscenes third-party texts area. After Buber, Bohm was the first to show up as a source on my dialogue radar, an influential one at that, when a contemporary concept of dialogue-praxis is examined. Bohm has a powerful and holistic approach, literally, grounded in a worldview based on his interpretation of Quantum, the development of which he was an integral player. I am more than encouraged — inspired would be the correct word — by his approach, rigor, and mapping of a powerful foundational approach to human relation both with the cosmos and with each Other.

Also crucial to his view is the problematic nature of language as it exists (English, specifically), suggesting that the (tyranny) of subject-verb-object be replaced with a structure that emphasizes the verb — emphasizing action over thing (reflecting back to ancient Hebrew as did David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World where the written language included only the consonants, and vowels—which necessarily need expiration, a projection of the spirit to say—were introduced by the spoken reader, infusing the word with the life-spirit of breath.

The shifting of English that Bohm suggests illustrates how language informs/forms ones worldview as Benjamin Whorf promoted with his concept of linguistic relativity (which has always seemed obvious to me, an awareness perhaps brought about through the process of photographic abstraction of the world).

Wholeness and the Implicate Order, Bohm, David, Routledge, London, 2002

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world. — Wilhelm von Humboldt

Then the question of how to deal with all these books at once? Where to read them, how to take notes, how much to read in any one at a time, and such. Reading in the evening before sleeping isn’t very good, although restful. Mid-afternoon is optimal, but carving out several hours from the daily to-do grind makes that difficult. Having a space in the CMAI office is very helpful now, as there are more comfortable chairs. The collective grad offices are too noisy and busy. Dislocating to Bronte or a cafe elsewhere is possible, but not time-effective if only for reading. Ach!, the questions of methodology …

posted

Energy and Society

Excellent resource which will allow me to trace both forwards and backwards in time on this particular worldview which, although the definition of energy is strictly based on contemporary physics and thermodynamics (of that time), it provides a valid and detailed approach to the issue.

(Not to mention that the copy I got from Newcastle University was “donated by the Newcastle District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.” Would for the survival of humanity that engineers take in the consequences of thermodynamics at all scales!)

Cottrell maps out in some detail the inter-relationships of technological (energy-usage) and the consequent/subsequent social change/evolution that occurs.
more “Energy and Society”

posted
  • place: Ultimo, NSW, Australia

constancy of change

Responding to Michael Connor on the [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] list:

In the gallery it presents a kind of ontological mirror reflecting back and stabilizing our own sense of self in its apparent stability and autonomy… By contrast time-based art, interactive art, and all art involving some form of interaction over time tend to do the opposite. Perhaps this may be a partial explanation of the continued resistance to such work in mainstream institutions.

sotto voce:

I’d say this dialectic is a cultural construct relating to the West’s inability to philosophically cope with the constancy of change in the universe. So many arbitrary scalar frameworks (and labels, names, abstracted linguistic tags) are put onto (material) stuff to give us a(n artificial) sense of stability. Art in institutional white boxes (whose very institutional-ness is critical to the fostering of that sense of stability); stone sculptures in public spaces; art market metrics. The very object-ness with which we frame the discussion here is embedded in the language of Newtonian fixity and precision of tracking the trajectories of Things. Along with the categorization process which allows a ‘safe’ social shorthand for circumscribing those Things (which, in other world views are merely phenomenal events or flows of potential energy), a circumscribing of which has as primary intent the rendering as safe that phenomenal event to a nervous bystander who wants to believe in the monumental fixity of his/her social system. And the personal fixity of being alive and existing.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

Qi approaching the Equinox

go to bed reading of Qi in Ted J. Kaptchuk’s treatise on Chinese medicine and wake up early from a deep dream where I was working with a group of boisterous and engaged young people who are somehow brought together by the impulse of Barack Obama. my immediate thought upon waking is why does a political figure enter my dreams? social action is important, sure, along with an interest in community dynamics, but a politician (community organizer none-the-less)? somewhat disturbing, though that thought is outweighed by the energy of the scenario. I suppose I am missing teaching. there will be opportunities for that in Oz, although I will keep it highly restricted to workshops rather than term courses. nothing should get in the way of the appointed task.

the Qi discussion illustrates the absolute difficulty in framing a concept in the language — the specific social protocol — within which the concept did not arise. the fundamental problem of translation. and in this case, translation of a term that is so formative to any worldview built on it that if one adopts that specific term, it will map, literally, where one stands in the world. and the ensuing conclusion that the adoption of another social protocol, language, precipitates a shift in worldview. no surprise there.

one global ‘solution’ to this issue especially in regard to fundamentals like Qi or energy (noting that even here I am making no one-to-one correspondence between the two!), when ‘comparing’ fundamentals, is to consider that each human individually is observing the world, and, at the same time, the social collective that they are participating in exerts an impressive synergy on all these points-of-view, and generates a collectively determined world view. this is the dominant social protocol, their language. Both the individual and collective world view are reductive apprehensions of essentially the same phenomena — that of be-ing in the world — seen from the particular point of view of that individual or collective. Of course, there are the instances where the worldview of the collective is impressed on the individual when the individual is forced to sacrifice personal autonomy to the collective — often through violence or threat of violence. it becomes a deep issue of personal autonomy or idiosyncrasy versus the power of the collective and where to set the line.

… the unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter…. (Furthermore) the continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter, signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted by Cartesian dichotomy …. Qi, in short, seems inadequate to provide a philosophical background for the development of empirical science as understood in a positivistic sense. What it does provide, however, is a metaphorical mode of knowing, an epistemological attempt to address the multidimensional nature of reality by comparison, allusion, and suggestion. — Tu Wei-ming in Confucian Though

furthermore, the adoption of another linguistic naming system or protocol represents the potential of seeing the world anew. at the same time as it represents a separation from the dominant or previous system. this is an essential feature of the process of immigration, this identity shift that comes through a (linguistic) re-naming the world. but it is also inherent in the process of adoption of any protocol or technology that is produced and imposed on the individual.

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: Berlin, Germany

teaching parameters

begin this morning sketching out the chapter Dialogue and the Other :: Protocols of Intimacy (that’s a provisional title, I came up with the protocols of intimacy phrase a few days ago, and liked it). it has a chapter-title-resonance like the Regime of Amplification :: A Primer.

this is the chapter where the core teachings lie. or where many foundational assumptions that hold up the broader teachings will be framed. it is the easiest and most difficult chapter. simple and complex. powerful and simple.

and a question pops into mind — when thinking about how I need to provide as many examples of situations to students to re-inforce the efficacy of the worldview — how is it that the teaching of ones own worldview is so different than teaching the worldviews of others. how is it that so much education is simply the mass inculcation of a canon of Others by individuals who are somehow lesser than those represented by the canon and to a grouping of individuals who have no value to the social system until they are fully inculcated. was it such that only those in the canon were truly great Teachers, and all who come after them merely lesser disciples? Or does the social system have the tendency to self-reify at the price of eliminating successors of equal or greater inspiring power? isn’t it such that any individual has some lesson to teach any Other? where is this lesson taught? it should be enshrined in a bill of human obligations (versus human rights), that any human may learn something from any other human.

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

Art and Teaching Philosophy

ART

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged and immersive pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated and directed by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a humane seeking: to engage in a dialogue of energies with an Other. Finding a proper pathway for those energies—transmitting: simultaneously receiving the expressions of the Other—this is the moving act of creativity. Creativity is the charged flow of energies between and through the Self and the Other over relative spaces and times.

These two proto-definitions are the basis of my art and teaching praxis. more “Art and Teaching Philosophy”

posted
  • place: Bremen, Germany

Uni-see

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

posted
  • place: en route Brussels Midi, Belgium - Maastricht, Netherlands

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!

(00:04:52, stereo audio, 9.4 mb)

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!

posted
  • place: Kiel, Germany

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!

(00:05:05, stereo audio, 10.5 mb)

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.

posted
  • place: Santa Barbara, California

good art

Listening to: Muslimgauze & Phill Niblock

Good art allows a deepening of internal vision, a precision of being, as delineated by an Other’s perspective and worldview combined with their abilities to express that view in a way which catches the streaming of Self, gently re-directing it to an alternate placement.

Wes takes me on a uphill cycle ride around Santa Barbara that, after some hairy traffic encounters, ends back down on the ocean-front and a cafe for some refreshments. Mmmm, that Southern Cal feeling.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

language is what?

Sapir makes some heavy suggestions that, as I look around the social system, are little considered by folks as an idea or worldview. the ramifications are too complicated to consider, eh?

Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group . . . . We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. — Edward Sapir

posted
  • place: Lakewood, Colorado

jottings to iDC

sotto voce: A model is reductionist. A model will never be the thing itself. (A map is not the territory).

Consider an isolated individual — he/she looks at the world, receives energy into his/her body system. Recognizes patterns of flow, and behaves according to such patterns (over time)… (Learning). Building a model by which to interact ‘successfully’ with the flows around him/her.

OR, an individual is told the parameters of the model (non-experiential learning), accepting what an Other tells (because of the position of power-relation where the Other is more powerful in that social relation).

Science is a collective phenomena at the cusp between these two situations.

Which do we trust most? Our own analysis of the energy flows impinging on our body-system, or the system of the Other?

I believe that over-socialization — a global trend perhaps based on the simple facts of growing population and lessening room — is an inexorable force which demands the second condition to the exclusion of the first. The first is dangerous (to the social): unpredictable, unstable, and requires one to be living at the very front of experience, to learn in the moment, to exist in the momentary flow of being. The second allows leisure, taking the word of an Other about survival parameters, ‘good enough at this time.’

As a teacher I facilitate confidence in the first — trust in ones own sensory input — at the same time as acknowledging that we are products of the second system (more and more) which has interfered with the first process of immediate feedback from body system — embodied learning.

Technology is the means for a social system to codify and implement the (scientific) model such that it may be literally im-pressed on the sensory system of the individual (the collective hallucination). Thus, to counteract this process and to have embodied learning, the im-pressions of technology and of surrounding social system need to be removed (for at least a moment) to allow the individual to feel their socially un-encumbered body, and the flows of life that are impinging on it — without the intervention of non-experiential, second-hand socialized models.

Based on this description, technology is very problematic in that it socially codifies a point-of-view (worldview) which is then applied to the individual who is participating in that social system.

You can chose to trust the momentary sensory input to your system (and be marginalized by that same social system), or you can choose to assimilate into the social system and take on the collective worldview instead.

It’s a sliding scale of participation and reciprocal marginalization, but I believe we are sliding ever towards the second end of the scale. This slide precipitates the long-term denial of embodied and creative life in the stead of socially mandated ‘solutions for living’ like Songdo City.

Uff…

So, coming back to Situated Technologies — they seem to be the result of an (continuous) evolution of the social system — which is now intricate enough to apply/deliver these im-pression systems at an ever more individual/granular level to insure socially ‘proper’ worldviews…

yikes!

posted
  • place: San Jose, California

seeing hearing feeling

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

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

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

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

some overviews on the conference:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

node relations

Back to the iDC list — consistently marvel how the topics on the list draw me out, especially when I am so overwhelmed with the local in-ma-face reality. The following in response to Josh Levy’s comment (which one in a series of comments under the subject — undermining open source: iTunesU):

> i think Apple has been let off the hook for a long time especially by cultural
> activists. Bill Gates and Microsoft have been an easy bugbear, but Apple are
> monopolists too and have been since they first started making an OS that works
> only with their own hardware.

sotto voce: every social institution seeks to guide (a polite term) the relational expressions and impressions of participating nodes (humans) in discrete reductive pathways which may or may not suit each individual node: adopt or become a non-participating node in that social structure.

Acquiesce to that dominating worldview and participate.

Resist (or simply turn ones back on that whole system) and create new pathways: be prepared for those who are heavily invested in the dominating social institutions to ‘not get it.’ Only those who have the ‘bandwidth’ to leave personal input channels open for other than the dominant pathways will be able to receive alternate expressions and impressions.

Every social structure of any scale greater than two nodes will be reductive because of the need to correlate three or more distinct view-points (points-of-view) — that requires a system of observational/experiential interpolation (protocols) to identify fundamental likenesses between the points-of-view. This correlation process — the development of a mediative ”technology’ to carry (shared) impressions and expressions between nodes — is a fundamental (and necessary) process of social development. It leads to the exemplary structures as are mentioned above. The two examples differ only in scale, though the organizing principles and goals of each are similar (the same!). That is to induce the greatest number of nodes to acquiesce to their protocol-of-relation.

The greater the personal acquiescence, the greater the general feeling of alienation.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

response to Lev

sotto voce: Some comments (on the nettime post from Lev Manovich, Mon, 28 Nov 2005 21:22:03 -0800 – his text snips in yellow)…

We Have Never Been Modular…

but we have agreed-upon standards via political hegemony, pressure of dominant ideas, and participating in the easy consumption of ‘whatever works’. And since standards underlie the concept of modularity, I’m afraid that I disagree unless you are talking about another collective “we” that is represented by the demographic you are addressing and are member of.

Thanks to everybody who commented on my text “Remix and Remixability” (November 16, 2005). It was provoked by reading about web 2.0 and all the excitement and hype (as always) around it, so indeed I am “following the mainstream view” in certain ways. But I would like to make it clear that ultimately we are talking about something which does not just apply to RSS, social bookmarking, or Web Services. We are talking about the logic of modularity which extends beyond the Web and digital culture…

And it is worth mentioning that none of those ideas are remotely sourced in digital technologies — they are constructed on the entire precursor socio-technical infrastructure of engineering in general. digital technologies are a ‘final’ product of a long and continuous development process of standardization that started when Empire (or collective social life) was born.

Modularity has been the key principle of modern mass production. Mass production is possible because of the standarisation of parts and how they fit with each other – i.e. modularity. Although there are historical precedents for…

From an engineering point of view, modularity is a subsequent process result following the necessary precursor: the development of standards.

As a simple anecdote, I recall traveling across Europe in the early 80’s. When crossing a border, say, between Italy and Germany, or France and Germany, aside from the ritual rubber-stamping of the passport (and occasional body searches, but that’s another story), one was aware that suddenly, when before the streets were full of Renaults, Citroens, and Peugeots, they were now filled with VWs, Mercedes, and BMWs. To such a degree that if you saw a Citroen Deux Cheveaux puttering around in Bavaria — a car I occasionally had in those days — you would invariably honk and wave (at the ‘hippies’). The currency changed, the language changed (obviously), the places for money exchange shifted, the electric plugs morphed, the telephone rings, cables, and plugs changed. Distance didn’t unless one crossed the Channel where temperature, length, weight, currency divisions, and volume changed to absurdly baffling non-decimal fractions. The socio-political history of the EU (and globalization as well) is mapped over the development of international standards that (have) effectively wiped out those prior social differences.

The history underlying any and all movements towards a pervasive technology (regardless of the geographic extent) is the history of standards development. This precedes any (modular) engineering deployments. (A wonderful USD350 million glitch on a NASA Mars project — when an engineer (collaborating with ESA) forgot to convert between metric and US measurements). Of course, economic (military) hegemony is absolutely connected to this process of standards development. You join in a military alliance and if you are the minor partner, you have to re-bore your cannons to take his caliber of projectile, lest, in the heat of battle, you run out of usable ammunition.

I think a discussion of standardization supersedes the discussion of modularity as most (all!?) characteristics that arise in a description of modularity and its impacts are derived from the ‘textures’ of the socio-technical landscape that are determined by standardization. In a way, collective knowledge as a very broad and general social product is a result of standardization, especially if you are considering, for example, knowledge that spans disparate physical locations. Even with the existence of the basic technology of the Internet, no collective knowledge may be derived without a standardization that transcends the physical restraints on the digital system — a primary one being calibration of time scales, but there are many other calibrations that must take place as well. In the Paul Edwards article quoted below, he points out that there are heavy consequences for detecting global warming because the propagation of measurement standard differences between national and international organizations. An example of the fragility of knowledge building and the importance of standards in collective action.

Strip Latin from biological nomenclature, and international collaboration in the entire discipline is immediately snuffed.

It would seem that the larger the social span of an institution, the greater the built-in desire to establish and propagate standards among its constituents. Maybe remix is the ultimate surrender of the individual to the collective. Standardized idiosyncrasy. Lovely end result.

And at the other extreme, some of the more powerful expressions of artistic creativity take place in a landscape where there is some freedom to deliberately ignore standards (and modularity) and filter lived experience through the idiosyncratic filter of self — re-presenting that lived experience rather than an obsession with filtering someone else’s signal…

I think your mention of musicians sampling published music points to something perhaps more tiresome — related to the instance when rock stars sing about life as a rock star. A simulation of a simulation. TeeVee shows about teevee producers. Escher’s lizard consuming itself. Maybe remix culture will turn out to be so efficient that it will come to that — annihilation by self-consumption of its own mediated worldview…

Maintaining consistency in this huge, constantly changing network is the work of standards. Standards are socially constructed tools: They embody the outcomes of negotiations that are simultaneously technical, social, and political in character. Like algorithms, they serve to specify exactly how something will be done. Ideally, standardized processes and devices always work in the same way, no matter where, what, or who applies them. Consequently, some elements of standards can be embedded in machines or systems. When they work, standards lubricate the construction of technological systems and make possible widely shared knowledge. — Paul N. Edwards

Edwards, P.N., 2004. A Vast Machine: Standards as Social Technology. Science, 304(7 May 2004), pp.827-828.

Measurement is a comparison process in which the value of a quantity is expressed as the product of a value and a unit; that is, Quantity = {a numerical value} x {unit} where the unit is an agreed-upon value of a quantity of the same type. The concept of a quantity such as length is independent of the associated unit; the length is the same whether it is measured in feet or meters. A standard is a physical realization of the definition, with an agreed-upon value to be used as a reference. — Jeff Flowers

Flowers, J., 2004. The Route to Atomic and Quantum Standards. Science, 306(19 November 2004), pp.1324-1330.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

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.

posted
  • place: Prescott, Arizona

killing hidden waters

Groundwater is essentially nonrenewable in the arid west because the economies that exploit it cannot abide a low rate of use. By combusting nonrenewable coal and nonrenewable oil and nonrenewable natural gas, they have managed to lift nonrenewable water at incredible rates. By using water with abandon they can compete with more humid regions, where it is basically a free good. This extractive process, like the looting of ore deposits, soil, forests, and fuels, is the machinery behind the expressions “conquest of nature” and “the miracle of the deserts.” Rip away the veneer of western history and this consumption of resources links the centuries.

[and the final paragraph of the book:]

This writing has always been on the wall. It is not a revelation to learn that cheap energy makes societies boom, that groundwater in arid regions has negligible recharge, that humans tend to use as much of anything as they can lay hands on. We can ignore these facts and pump, mine, and combust with abandon, or we can recognize these facts and attempt to construct a sustainable society. There will be no painless answers, nor were there any in the past.

Bowden, Charles (2003) Killing the Hidden Waters: The Slow Destruction of Water Resources in the American Southwest. Austin: University of Texas Press.

I was not expecting what he presented, and was fascinated when he repeatedly makes the connection between levels of technological implementation and several attendant processes — the consequent overall social structure, the impact on the environment, and the absolute energy cost of the different implementation levels. Starting with indigenous tribal groups and continuing through the contemporary inhabitants in the desert Southwest, he examines the usage of a range of resources — water, fossil fuels, soil, and forests — and makes a good case for the cataclysmic risk of unsustainable use. Indeed, pointing out the obvious, he makes it clear that unsustainable use (always) ends in some kind of socio-economic collapse — perhaps deferred temporarily by substituting one resource for another — but eventually depletion precipitates a collapse. Noting a sequence of energy-coalescing advances (the horse for the Comanche Indians, fossil groundwater for the High Texas Plains (the Llano Escatado), the metal shovel for the Pima indians, etc), Bowden examines the consequences of resource exploitation via those technological advances and compares the social system both before and after access to the resource (as afforded by the technology change). Basing the view on the intrinsic energy value of the resource, he forms a powerful critique against contemporary social systems that blindly insist on technologically maximizing usage of a non-renewable resource base. It is probably necessary to be reminded that these cycles occur across any (and all) civilizations, down to rather small population groups.

Compared to my own energy-based worldview, Bowden confirmed some examples that I often use in class — where the history of civilizations may be directly correlated to the existence of one or more non-renewable resources which causes the ‘rise and fall’ of the society. The rise is facilitated when the resource-base becomes exploitable through technological advance or through simple physical access to the geographic locus of the resource followed by the subsequent fall when the access is denied or the extent of the resource is exhausted. One example I use are the British hardwood forests that, through technical advance became the basis for the construction of the British fleet which eventually defeated the Spanish fleet. When those forests were depleted, the British had no substitute for the first-growth elm and oak trees which were used for the unitary keels of ships-of-the-line. Not long after the depletion of British forests towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, coal, a potent form of concentrated solar energy is discovered, and drove the industrial revolution. British Imperial hegemony follows the decline in this readily available coal. And, aside from a tenacious clinging to Gulf oil resources following World War I and continuing as a secondary partner to US hegemony, the British Empire is in very late decline. This example is over-simplified, but it is not difficult to make the case that a single fundamental resource or energy source or a combination of a few underlies any concentration of social power. And, conversely, it is not difficult within any social system to identify those primary sources, given that much of the attention of the social system as a whole is dedicated to the secure utilization of those resources.

posted
  • place: Chino Valley, Arizona

Unocal memories

Reflecting on parallel universes, light musings surround the controversy that today ceased rumbling around CNOOC (Chinese National Offshore Oil Company) and Unocal (Union Oil of California). Back when I worked for Unocal in the early 1980’s, it is hard to imagine any other response than hearty guffaws to the suggestion that in 20 years the US oil concern would be up for auction with Chinese buyers out-bidding Chevron. No longer in contact with any of my colleagues from those days, I would be curious to hear their situations, if, indeed, they still are employed by the firm. Times change the conditions of the market. Unocal has been an acquisition target since the early 80’s when I was there — when the infamous Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens was in hot pursuit of the company, such that the board tried to sink the company into multi-billion debt to make it less attractive. It is a different time indeed when a Chinese company, 70%-owned by the Chinese government, makes an aggressive bid to acquire a legacy US corporation. And on top of that, a company dealing with the major strategic resource of the developed world of the 21st century. No wonder Washington hawks are screaming! After watching the entire Cspan-aired Senate hearings on this precise merger, I was astonished at the lack of intelligence in the expressions of the ‘experts’ called in by the Senate. So little understanding of the movement and evolution and change of power in a dynamic world. Fighting or resisting inevitable power shifts is for the naive who cling to temporal power under highly conventional paradigms. It is clear that China is rising, and the US perhaps falling — in the broad sense. the empty cup tends to fullness, the full cup tends to emptiness. Rather than deal with the realities of socio-political evolution, the Washington power-brokers cling to an out-dated and very static worldview. Few seems to get Sun Tzu.

But how is it, these men and women who populate a corporate landscape, how do they live? Remembering back to the instance of going on a executive retreat to an exclusive resort in Ojai, north of LA, for a 4-day review of Unocal’s status in the oil business. My task was to present at an informal seminar an overview of state-of-the-art technology and applications for gravity and magnetic in petroleum exploration. Golf was on the schedule for a majority of the older execs, their bonding exercise. Open bar helped with that. I got the feeling that everything simply went along a certain and safe pathway to the intended goal of regular paychecks which were fed into mortgages, car payments, and very short vacation splurges (only 10 days of holiday per year for the first 5 years). Like a corral to tame the wild engineering student broncos. At the end of my briefing on the Colombia Llanos project, I showed a series of slides including portraits of the local peasants, the landscape, and the on-the-ground operation. It was very quiet when I was showing images of the people.

I have always maintained that my departure from the Big Oil scene was in no way an altruistic choice. this despite an early radicalization which included studying “The Communist Manifesto” in 7th grade — a fact that classmate Russ Werner picked up. he was the funniest kid in the junior high school, and the best cartoonist as well. he left a note in my yearbook addressed to the Pinko Commie Rat. no, that predilection did not factor in, though I can point to Roger Steffens program on KCRW, where I was a volunteer-member, The Reggae Beat brought the vibes of the Rastafarian belief system into high relief with guests the likes of Bob Marley, Alton Ellis, and Peter Tosh. If music can radicalize, it did. Bob Marley speaks as powerfully as any German philosopher! Jah Rastafari Makonnen! not to mention programs like “Alma del Barrrio” on KXLU “schizo-radio on the Left.”

I also recall, when living off of Lincoln and Ocean, taking a long slow look at a Roland Jupiter 8 keyboard, running around $1200 at the time, now I really wonder what would have happened if I had bought that rather than a Nakamichi tape deck, a used 6’2″ twin-fin swallowtail surfboard, and a Fiat Spyder.

No, leaping from the Big Oil gravy train was merely the next step. on the eve of departure, the actual handing in a letter of resignation to Dennis Mett, the director of International Exploration, there was the huge Mombasa project that came up. For six months after I left, I would get occasional phone calls from Bill Sax, the VP of the International Division, asking if I wanted to continue working for Unocal and go to Africa for a couple months to oversee a mag survey from offshore up into the Great Rift Valley. By that time I was on another trajectory completely. Not nearly as lucrative, but somewhat more soul-satisfying.

Chief executives, who themselves own few shares of their companies, have no more feeling for the average stockholder than they do for baboons in Africa. — T. Boone Pickens
posted

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”

posted
  • place: Berlin, Germany

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.

posted
  • place: Suomenlinna, Finland

de Saussure

dinner last night with Sophea, Andrew and Jodi, impromptu gathering. on the island. finally got to the pool in the morning, doing 2500 meters in meditative solitude.

stay on the island today, another dinner here tomorrow.

As for the radio’s object, I don’t think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back coziness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. — Bertold Brecht, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication

reconnecting with dreams. perhaps that’s what this residency is about. after a drift this morning that starts in a graying Light of 0500. a drift through family images and the cares of Light future. the whining Light hum of Boreal summer has not arisen from the earth yet, but will soon. dreams, Light, and a contemplation of the past, present and future at the same time as being in the moment.

reading the introduction to Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics,” a few pages into the text helps me realize that the energized worldview I hold is a valuable point from which to view the world, and, more significant, it is worthy of re-creating for others in the form of a text. this is a realization of self-worth. nothing more, nothing less.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

Leary

In planning a session, the first question to be decided is “what is the goal?” Classic Hinduism suggest four possibilities:

  • 1. For increased personal power, intellectual understanding, sharpened insight into self and culture, improvement of life situation, accelerated learning, professional growth.

  • 2. For duty, help of others, providing care, rehabilitation, rebirth for fellow men.

  • 3. For fun, sensuous enjoyment, aesthetic pleasure, interpersonal closeness, pure experience.

  • 4. For transcendence, liberation from ego and space-time limits; attainment of mystical union.

…snip…

Instructions for Vision 4: The Wave-Vibration Structure of External Forms (Eyes open, rapt involvement with the external visual stimuli, intellectual aspects)

O nobly born, listen carefully:
At this point you can become aware of the wave structure of the world around you.
Everything you see dissolves into energy vibrations.
Look closely and you will tune in on the electric dance of energy.
There are no longer things and persons but only the direct flow of particles.
Consciousness will now leave your body and flow into the stream of wave rhythm.
There is no need for talk or action.
Let your brain become a receiving set for the radiance.
All interpretations are the products of your own mind.
Dispel them. Have no fear.
Exult in the natural power of your own brain,
The wisdom of your own electricity.
Abide in the state of quietude.
As the three-dimensional world fragments, you may feel panic;
You may beget a fondness for the heavy dull world of objects you are leaving.
At this time, fear not the transparent, radiant, dazzling wave energy.
Allow your intellect to rest.
Fear not the hook-rays of the light of life,
The basic structure of matter,
The basic form of wave communication.
Watch quietly and receive the message.
You will now experience directly the revelation of primal forms.

— Timothy Leary, Ph.D., Ralph Metzner, Ph.D., & Richard Alpert, Ph.D. The Psychedelic Experience

Ah well, stumbled on that, following a thread from Aldous Huxley. As for the effort to shift awareness from a dominantly materialist point-of-view to one that has a central locus on an energized movement: I just had the realization that I probably will not ever produce a text-based representation circumscribing the territory of my own worldview. [ed: well, fast-forward to 2013 and my dissertation!] And unless in a situation where there can be an unfolding of the thoughts, in concert with an Other, there will be no revelation, no representation. Only action, doing, facilitating, and teaching. The 2126 class moves fast and with gusto. A deep difference with the spring class, where students seemed tight, fearful, and distracted. Just war? or, hmmmm, does it confirm or refute my theory that much education is about saturating individual, forming humans in a certain fear of non-conforming, while in-validating divergent behaviors and thoughts. How come I resist letting my child be wild?

posted
  • place: Fort Myers, Florida

missing things

already leaving after a very short visit with Aunt Mary and Janet. a nice break. back to this temporary base in Boulder for the next 6 months. surely find that travel is more difficult with this long hiatus. a hiatus that is longer with fewer miles, fewer kilometers than almost ever previously in life. and nothing to say here about the no-see-ums, the retirement community of Shell Point, the sun, the clouds, storms, rain, vegetation, birds, stores. no travel documentation or review. no engagement?

Loki at least gets into it, though I affect his enjoyment with my reserve.

clear that a full-bodied text is necessary. one that posits and shares my worldview, a transcript of lectures made, fleshed out with further commentary, reflected, filtered, and packaging the energy that is danced around. it needs to be generated, but how to make that text when I don’t want it to be linked directly to the generations of previous texts. it needs to spring from direct experience. how?

and what to make the armature? academic discourse, performative speaking, hypertextual juggling? conversation? dialogue? the dialogue technique doesn’t seem to address the social volume necessary. and volume is what I need now to maintain social viability. speaking to many rather than one or two. though it is against the principle of the teaching. still don’t have a good feel for mapping this extended social space of praxis.

posted
  • place: en route Boulder, Colorado - Charlotte, North Carolina - Fort Myers, Florida

floridada

back on the skinned wings of alloy, fleeing with Loki, moving mach 0.6, east-south-east. to floridada. long time since being in these containers (but what is it to stay embedded in a language that is full of Cartesian frames, and mechanistic, materialistic frames of reference?) it may be that I have missed the precise point. but there was that moment, day-before-yesterday, sitting by the creek, several miles into the canyon, watching a stick that arched uplifted midway between my eye and the glittering, rushing clamor of water. keeping eye focused on the stick, exercising the physical mind’s eye not to travel or be disturbed by that energized background. and getting, as a direct infusion of this practice, the reminder that this is actually an embodied result of the theoretical point of view, the worldview that is emerging during the last months and years. that a way of looking does merge with a practice, the momentary be-ing, finally.

arriving. in the southern realms with a micro-burst welcoming us to the landing strip, rough thunderheadwind, and warm blustery flatness. Aunt Mary is there in the terminal waiting for us.

posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

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.
posted
  • place: Boulder, Colorado

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.

posted
  • place: Helsinki, Finland

Lev’s edifice

Lev was suggesting that the skyscraper was the ultimate (or crucial) symbolic and real social expression of the Industrial Age, and, in the course of his fascinating lecture, pondered what might be the crucial expression of the Information Age. immediately my thoughts went to the concept of LifeStyle as being that edifice — LifeStyle becomes the penultimate expression of the consumer society. this false edifice of success(-full) surrender to a socially mandated norm or behavior. the vapid Look of it all.

and what about creativity — too much attention paid to aspects or results of it — and no observations that is is a continuous, (NOT sporadic) and peak experience. and, at the same time, it is cyclic. and it involves both the creative and destructive principles. it is not a commodity. it is harmonic, balanced from all scalable viewpoints and sensual contacts.

some notes I wrote later:

In this era there are (pseudo)nomads who dance around the monuments of the global information age. These monuments — status, wealth, and power — together combine in a single ever-shape-shifting edifice with no seam, no crack, but with the seductive and bewildering attraction of Joseph’s Technicolor mantle aLight and burning with the fire in Plato’s cave. The edifice is Life-Style. Its ornamentation is Fashion.
more “Lev’s edifice”