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dialogue with Terhi Penttila.

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dialogue with Willa Cline.

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dialogue with Lily Diaz.

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dialogue with George Saunders.

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dialogue with Joy McManus.

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The third Dialogue for PORT MIT, this one with Leslee, was supposed to have taken place today. Technical difficulties precluded it from happening in the form that I had planned.

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dialogue with Josephine Bosma.

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dialogue with Alexandra Thurman.

Juggling mental images, virtual being-ness, weather impressions, family, others, water, body, rain. I saw a coyote loping along the road this morning on the way over to Jim and Janet’s for breakfast. Angelique made biscuits and gravy. Jim was out waiting for a javelina to show up at a friends house — I guess you could call it vermit huntin’ — inside the town limits, and a big javelina it was rumored to be.

The Stupid Bowel, as I named it, was today. I was pleased that during that spectacle of spectacles, the internet was FAST! Like, Blazing! Wish it was always that way … Alexandra and I finally touched base with an IRC test this evening for something over an hour. I am having difficulty putting some kind of deconstructive take on this whole eight dialogues project. It is carrying energy, of that I am certain. The energy is real time, but the effect of the text mediation, the time lapse, the technical interface, and the perception/manifestation of physical presence. I have been having trouble typing all day, too, inverting letter order. Don’t understand that. I wouldn’t mind a better keyboard and working situation here at the house. I work standing up for my back and then my feet and legs just go crazy. I have never been so conscious of my body and its limits as I have these past weeks here in Arizona.

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The intro IRC test session was interesting. Willa showed up on her lunch break, Robbin, one of the PORT curators dropped in, and Terhi, from Helsinki appeared. There were some minor technical hiccups, but generally thing worked out. Josephine had some trouble, but it ended up that she was on the wrong network, and so couldn’t find us. I stay indoors all day. Why is it that I don’t want to go out. I should. But IceLand has made completely abhor being cold. Now, if it was 75F or hotter, I would be out. Shirt off, hat on. Sun screen on my poor over-exposed nose. But it is chilly out, and I can’t make myself go out. Whatever. I had dreams again last night, but they are lost in the brilliance of the sun rising up over Mingus Mountain across the valley. It is especially bright because of all the snow. Flagstaff, to the north got up to 40 inches of snow and is still held in that slow embrace. Now I watch the Simpsons. What am I doing this for? My back is trashed sitting in the lab, I don’t have a good chair in there, and I think that is the main problem with my back. And so it goes. Fragments from public television:

His body is strong, and he loves it
The man looks across the gray floor and sees the end of his life
He calls her and says Mom I love you very much
He thinks about the moment he stops breathing
I feel so Light I feel so fortunate
Introducing the survivors I see all these things
My work is that Dialogue
I have I don’t think I want to leave, I’m only 42-years-old
Where will I lay down? Who cares?
Thank you for saying that to me I’ll remember that when I am wracked with pain An interesting, vital dance that will say everything I have learned from the survivors
Diagnosis does that
Fear is the place that I can stand where I can say I am here I love the blues, I love to dance I fear pain I want to cross over I want to cross over But I’m too small — Bill T. Jones

Adrianne posts me this excerpt of a review she has written about Blast for January’s Intelligent Agent — it includes:

_John Hopkins_, photographer and writer, proves an active theorist/theory activist as an artist. By arranging one-to-one conversations between himself and others, he performs “talking” events all over the world. John sees one-to-one conversation as the only form of revolution left in the world. John provided a series of dinners; one with each blast5drama Editor. No agenda or conversational menu was presented – creating an empty space between one participant and the other which, in turn promotes a certain discomfort, accompanied by a strong urge to flail about demanding criteria. But one realizes in time that the experience exists in a state of being without identification tagging, allowing something both natural and definitive to happen between people via talking. Because he can bear the consequences of not imposing any structure or rationale on an event, John’s work, in a way, evokes the genre of outsider art.

I am grateful that she takes the time and energy to not only support my work, but to actively frame it in within the context of her prodigious and ongoing experience in the arts.

Well. I did make a foray into the high desert near Sycamore Canyon a couple days ago. Not far, however. Too much virtuality has left me stunned. Too much driving especially, that oh-so-virtual reality where, like with digital media, we are insulated by the silicon dioxide / amorphous silica, except of windows rather than IC chips … I figured once, some years ago, that I have spent about 500 24-hour days in a car, traveling about 50 mph, since I arrived in this in-car-nation, so to speak (ohhh, now THERE’s a pun for you…). But as it is ingrained in my existence, I must say that I do enjoy cruising across/through the western landscape in a vehicle. The unrolling vistas, the feelings of Power, the big road. … Enough of that. I stopped and walked some ways into the VR world, and coming upon a manzanita bush that had been uprooted by a heavy tractor, I cut a branch. Manzanita has always intrigued me, mystified me, to be more precise. For bark, it has only a thin silky-smooth surface of a dark reddish-brown hue. Dead parts of the bush lose their color quickly, or, well, the color becomes dead to the eye and harder to the touch. The surface invites touch. The leaves are small and roundish, silvery on the bottom. Dead branches stick out from live branches and are a gray-silver. I am back swimming, much to the deLight of my travel-battered body. Spent today stripping ten years of acrylic floor polish off my mother’s kitchen floor. Forty years of TeeVee demands that kitchen floors gleam like the nose-cone of the Enola Gay, reflecting atomic glory and modernity and TeeVee dinner trays. Working with acrylics is always the same. Dry too fast, sticky, hard to get rid of. It takes two or three applications of the stripper to remove the layers. Looks like I will be swamped with this chore tomorrow, although in the afternoon I am supposed to visit with Hope down at Computerlink to see about some web work. I’m getting a bit desperate. Supposed to be cold tonight, in the north of Arizona, -20F with wind chill. That’s cold…

My proposal to the PORT MIT project was accepted by the curators, Remo Campopiano and Robbin Murphy. Now I have to get into gear and do something about it. The project begins at the end of January and runs in to the end of March … Email overwhelms me, especially at the moment when the OTiS/SiTO listserv is going blazes with new things, and with the PORT listserv, I can’t keep up even reading the texts. But a few weeks ago, out of the blue, following a visit to my Web site, Alexandra began writing to me…

As far as writing to you goes–it seemed important to respond to your site for the reasons I mentioned in my first letter. I certainly *wasn’t* flattering you. But you had put something out towards “me,” and it moved me … And to stop just with that — your offering, my receiving of it — seemed somehow incomplete. As a writer who frequently reads in public, I’m often struck by just how abashed my audiences are, how seldom they move past their reticence into response. They seem struck dumb by the common belief that, as Audience, their only job is to receive, passively. But both for their sakes, and — quite selfishly — for mine, I want/need them to respond. Hate it? Love it? Grok with it? I want to know. Like you, I’m interested in real conversation, in an exchange of energy that transcends the patterns of ordinary communication. As Buber wrote, dialogue requires mutual attention and intention. It involves the willingness to be available to the Other; to recognize the common humanity between you. And then, dialogue is a living thing itself, isn’t it. My best friend Jane describes it as an imaginative dance, one in which the mind is free from its need to maintain persona, free of anything but the moment’s opportunity to speak, and to receive. I’m not saying that my silent audiences are locked off. Sometimes silence itself is a form of — one half of — a dialogue. I can feel the difference in a silence like that; it’s permeable, spacious; it speaks back in a language of feeling rather than words. Or, “Come, let us not be animals”… Just to finish what I’d been meaning to say about dialogue: the silence of my audiences, when it’s a dead rather than a living silence, has often made me feel weary and discouraged. Even when the silence is a living one, though, I long for just those few words that might let me know, directly, that I’ve made a moment’s difference in (any one of) their lives. Which response might lead to a little more from me. And then more again from them. Dialogue. And then it might be like that story you offered, the memory of which was touched off, it seems, by the very simple thing I did, which was to offer you thanks, and a bit of my own story. (And again, I did this because of my own experience of non-response, and because while I may, just may, pick up from an audience sitting right in front of me, this online sort of offering seems not only to allow for, but to require some actual feedback. I mean, until I wrote, you couldn’t exactly feel us as members of *your* audience out here silently communing, could you?).