all week submerged in digital things. recoding to mp3. adding to this massive archive. each year, resolutions and accuracies and the ability to fool the mind and the eye into believing that what we create digitally has some indelible relationship with the Truth. the possible negativity of this illusory de-evolution is further obscured by linguistic shifts happening with a frequency and amplitude spectrum of a jet-fuel A turbo formula nitro Pratt&Whitney revving in the starting line up. who cares? juggle-not! using old language and new language bits keep the self stuck, cut free and use only new things. instead of “cut free” (when was the last time you were tied with rope to a point?) the New Self says “I have now three SUV’s.” this translates to complete freedom to those who buy into that worldview. but maybe it is itself only an illusion that this is a prevailing worldview. public opinion is a synthesized meme, knowledge-bit. not arising from the real life of anecdotal information, the real life of birth, death and just about everything else that happens in between to each of us.
psychic nomadism
so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. finally getting around to exploring the TAZ (Temporary Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why real music is inevitably dangerous to readers). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar. more “psychic nomadism”
worldview
On the eve of the New Year by the Roman calendar, the time-marking sequences of the Christians. The turning time. As movements of planets and stars allow us some relief from stasis, life immobile. Talk, blather bunk!, as Randy would call it. Written words that have no aura. Rather manufacture fragments. Pure fragmentation. The worldview web site that I constructed with the content generated by students in my Critical Thinking on Art and Society class.
worldview
students in my Critical Thinking class (see below) have been collaborating with me to form the content of the worldview hyperspace project, it is entering phase two in the next week with cross bridges spawning multi-dimensional movement. [ED: wayback machine version]
aristocracy of technology
Absolutely no chances to update this log of certain being here. Barely a moment to consider even the possibility in mind, much less the quiet and concentration to put hands to keyboard to make this happen. I spend long hours with other people. Teaching, speaking, discussing, listening, planning, and the rest is for slaving away on practical Web things and whatever. I have finished with all the teaching I will do in Finland on this trip. Terhi and I ended two days of intensive lecturing and hands-on work with students at the Academy of Fine Arts yesterday. The course turned out very well, the students were quite enthusiastic and motivated despite the short time imposed on the teaching. It is a good opening into a place that is in great need of getting a more broad introduction to concepts relating to networking and to technology. Oliver, the Vice-Rector of the Academy, and the Head of the Time and Space Department, has done a good job bringing technology-based mediums into the teaching space, but there is the usual resistance. I find technophobia to be an interesting phenomenon. On one side, a distrust of machines is necessary, even demanded by the excesses of the situation we find ourselves (our Western Selves) in these days. But unless there is some kind of (anarchic?) engagement of technology by some people at least, we leave the driving to the Aristocracy of Technologists. They will rule in their new Hierarchical Form (Consumer/Slave vs Producer/Master) without opposition. Ahhrgh. I am not an ideologist, and dislike framing the issues in pseudo-academic lingo. For myself, I believe that the most revolutionary action I can engage in is an unmediated and genuine dialogue with another human being. Maybe too simplistic. I wash some clothes in the sink. It cleans my fingernails and exercises my hands at the same time. I listen to the radio, voices talking about the Market. There is no other World, it seems. To the voices of the New Media, the world is a phenomenon of the market. And the people are Workers and Consumers. I do not understand what the impact of this propaganda, this imposition of a monolithic worldview, is upon daily life. Does it dominate life? Is it true that we are merely pawns in the consume game played out by these cloaked NGOs (Non-Governmental Organizations)?