Rinus makes some nice notes on the Amurikan evening at das kleine field recording festival last week in Kreuzberg.
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technically this would be a simulation of the live visual-sonic mix I did late this evening for a decent crowd at the migrating realities conference…

long day in the city. starting in the United Nations Plaza which is, definitely a coagulation of spirits. first scenario visiting the eye on regaining ground-level from the Civic Center BART station is that of a seagull in the process of eviscerating a live pigeon. by the time I film, the pigeon is dead. the second scenario: to kill time, I drop in at the Asian Art Museum where the guards start to check everything in my backpack and begin to recite a mantra of all the things that cannot be brought in or used or done (or thought!) in the Museum. I stop them, and say that I am not interested in participating in their particular little corner of the social system, pack my bag and walk out. and head back along streets brimming with urine-reek, the displaced homeless, flophouse hotels, and so on. at a stop Light, a woman standing next to me asks the world in general how can I restart my career? I look at her and say I was going to ask you the same thing! it is clear that social empowerment is at an extreme low here in the center of San Francisco.

lunch with Casey, and on to a rendezvous with Sophea and Amanda. a double espresso puts an edge on the afternoon. on the way, evidence of a TAZ is spotted: a good omen! although the juxtaposition with other street scenes previously experienced in the day raises many questions about the way a TAZ might be expressed in this time, in this socio-political system.

on to Whole Foods for breakfast provisions, Casey goes home to study, we head back to Amanda’s place to prep for the trans-national breakfast with the Sydney

and Adelaide crews at 1630 local time. the breakfast — French Toast, fruit compote, pashed (!) potatoes, and champagne is streamed and rebroadcast on free103point9 in Brooklyn, NY as part of the live_feed: Breakfast Radio streaming project. the overall performance was initiated by Andrew Burrell and the Hybrid Radio Research Group as part of the Aural Degustation: Tasty Bites to Feed the Ears exhibition at the SCA Galleries at the SCA in Sydney, Australia. participants included: (in Adelaide): Mimi Kelly, Sasha Grbich, Jen Brazier, Heidi Angove, and Tamara Baille ; (in San Francisco): Amanda Hendricks, Sophea Lerner, and John Hopkins; (in San Diego – special telematic drop in): Amanda MacDonald-Crowley; (in Sydney): Lia Smith, Amber Moloney, Clara Chow, Bjel Bakker, Belle Brooks, Heidi Abraham, Sach Catts, Alli Barnard, and last-but-not-least, Andrew Burrell.

the Month of Sundays live performance mix is done. Neil recorded it here. Kudos to he and Roger for facilitating/developing the visitorstudio performance platform.

so, the conclusion: to Oslo for the weekend, thanks to PNEK, the organization I was set to become the director of a couple years ago, before I left Europe for the Colorado gig. and the schedule is such that I can do the streaming performance on Thursday evening with Milos in Prague and NYC — Beyond the Dream Syndicate which is part of the anyware project scenario. fly to Oslo on Friday morning and stay through until Sunday evening. excellent!

another dinner this evening, David and Maria will come out for this one, along with the local crew. it’s been slow getting the dinners thing happening, there are so many people that I would like to invite out, but the time seems to just race by. and the fact of not having a mobile phone, strange the impact of that contingency. and, the whole issue of making food. I realize now that what cooking skills I used to have since have slid by the wayside. still can whip out a brutal chili, proper Mexican when the right ingredients are available, decent spaghetti sauce, and of course the garlic pasta is a solid standby, but quite out of the loop on other improv standards, like anything Asian. still impressed with a conversation with nick many years ago where he described his quest to learn how to cook. not the surficial process of combining packages and cans of pseudo-food, but the real and necessarily deep praxis based on a dynamic understanding of the principles of combination of scratch sources along with a solid knowledge of raw materials.

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!”

It’s a bit strange, sitting on an office chair rescued from the dumpster parked on horrible-cheap 1980′s shag carpeting, pumping out an acoustic signal to a situated live urban-drinking audience halfway around the world. How to get the groove on? The inspiration of the moment has to be local and global at the same time. The senses of the body have to pick up every shred of remote input to judge the reaction, and with only those minuscule bits of evidence plow ahead with faith in connection. “I’m thinking about you!” Concentration, attention, focus are all keywords in the process of throwing embodied energies from here to there, across a network that is defined by thin wires snaking across thousands of kilometers. Connection is where the Self and the Other actually make energized contact, whether it is bridging 2 meters or 20,000 kilometers. neoscenes gets up early (GMT-7), studies the possibilities, brews some tea, maps out a course of action, and dives into the work-play.

First, gather stores of internal energy, then facilitate a material infrastructure, and then, with care-full intensity, send that energy out into the network.

The gathering process is critical. It starts with listening and looking while moving through life, an awareness of the surrounding fields of flow. Keeping the “be here now” above the need to re-produce history. Over time and space neoscenes accumulates a deep archive from this lived process of looking and listening, be-ing. These fragments are a very real energy bank of electromagnetic impulses waiting for the proper moment to be re-configured and revealed. It is from this archive that the remix arises. Serendipitous elements are facilitated in every performance — unstable real-time inputs that reflect the energy of the moment. With the proper concentration, these are combined with a flow from the archive, and whatever remote vibe is coming from the receivers at the other end. It is impossible to guess the result. Except in the deep space of psycho-spiritual anticipation.

Configuring the technological infrastructure is a time-intensive and energy consumptive process — and it’s important not to run out of energy doing that, else the actual performance suffers. Fighting the technology is an old story, not a very nice one, but it comes with this kind of work, it comes with any work involving technology (which raises the question, what exactly IS technology? Well, maybe it’s whatever means any human uses to reconfigure their internal energy in order to pass that energy along to an Other.) A balance between twiddling with tools and the ensuing energy loss must be precisely found. Simple = saving energy for the communicative act itself, not worshipping the binary coders. Creativity happens in unstable autonomous zones.

Finally, the performance. The flow, transmission. Point-to-point. Real time. Is the receiver open to the right frequency? Is the transmission to narrow? Where is the groove, especially when the sonic space is outside rhythm and rhyme. When it is full of Ghosts of the past. Speaking tongues gone by. From ether to ether to ether. And while passing through bodies again and again.

You had to be there. Revolution is a live praxis. But you can still be here now, in which case, you can pick up the vibe still ringing from radiostadt 1, through the trans-temporal ether.

yet another workshop over. surprising, it crept up on me. done for this school year. ending with not a bang but a whimper. okay, I can deal. well, not a whimper, no need to be negative about it. actually it went okay, in the sense that my energy level is not diminished. I seem to have found, for the moment, a means. a mechanism to sustain teaching indefinitely through a careful cultivation of collaborative energies in the classroom situation. and the balanced positioning of my own ego-system within the milieu that evolves within the group. activating students to creative expression has the goal of nurturing the collective energies. thoughts keep racing forward to Linz and the performance on Wednesday evening, and the subsequent thing in Budapest which is even more unplanned. spontaneity is so bloody dangerous that I can’t even begin to express the stress it sets up in my head, although at this point, I have learned to deal with the physical effects by activating my own physical movement when things get underway. I know how to grab energies in the air, push ideas, concepts and other parameters around, physically. this, I have noted in previous events, has a lot of power on the Others involved. connection in Frankfurt. a throng of Japanese tourists sweep by heading for a flight to Rome. my neck tenses up, and it threatens to head toward a migraine. brain is not functioning in true travel-style. and this will continue for the next year again. I have committed to the movement, and two other schools have responded to my ad for workshops. so far Eindhoven, Arhus, Trondheim, Kiel, Tornio, Lahti will be part of the tour, and I suppose Reykjavík and Akureyri if I have the time. maybe next year I will have to do the same thing in the USA just to see what will happen. plans to deal with next summer with Loki in Europe are next on the agenda. trying to figure things out. clearly, however, texts like this are not worth writing here. already the beginning of this work is waiting for re-writing. into something better retrospecting on the surface of things. shaking meaning from the continuous stream of events that impinge on my body. or not even that, just ensuring that the future becomes what it is planned to be. stupid plan — to try and ensure what cannot be controlled. why try? avoiding the spontaneous negative, the spontaneous positive is destroyed simultaneously. energy. how to bind energy in to the text. to be released in TIME. to the proper receiver. no idea for the performance tomorrow evening. F.E. Rakushan is the partner in the evening, along with Maggi and Christa. What will this bring? (I need to have a recording of this event forwarded (and real-audio-ed). oh, and the lecture at Kiel tape copied, and… now here. exhausting day of travel, thankfully, Christa meets me at the small Linz airport. it is HOT, at least as measured by my recent experience, and the whole long winter.

early this morning Adrianne ran the Sayonara Diorama performance in New York; with a few students here, I connect up via CUSeeMe and we participate for the duration, maintaining a conversation with Tapio, Steve, Susanna, Ariel, and others connecting up from other locations around Europe and the US. until 0530 here when the performance finishes in NYC in the early evening there.

Waiting for my performance this evening. I have flashes of memory, and begin to see the monstrous gaps that now exist in the structure. Names gone, places forgotten, transits wiped from the table of chronology that is the super-structure of memory, the armature begins to deconstruct. Time folds into itself, events melt into meta-memory. And the gaps are themselves telling of another story. Studying the written history of the moment, one can recall more details, but the sensibility is limited… The performance is a collapsed fiasco. The worst I have made. It falters on ego and confusion and lack of clarity. How is it that I can make myself clear? Transparent being? I suppose this series is at an end. That over the past year of this cycle, all has became frozen and static. Rigid again. As a result of what? Unknown. But I have the suspicion that I do know some of the source.

A slow day, although I had thought it would be faster. Steve and Genie arrived after small complications yesterday afternoon. We took a short tour of Suomenlinna in the afternoon. Finally, a truly glorious summer day. Probably in the 60′sF at least out of the wind, maybe 16C. Not bad for a day outside. I can see in all the faces of the locals that there is a sense of absolute joy at this arrival of the warm weather. This morning I meet Visa at my all-time favorite café in Europe (I think), Café Suces which is below and around the corner from Visa’s studio. When I used to sleep on a mattress on his studio floor, back in 1995, when I was here teaching at Media Lab, I would start out the day with a cup of tea and a danish roll, leisurely sitting and writing for a bit until I had to walk to the bus to the University. It was my only luxury. Since then, on subsequent trips, it is always a pleasure to meet Visa there. After tea this morning, we went up to his studio to see some of his new mono-type prints that he has been working on this winter and spring. He got a one-year artists’ stipend for 1997, and so has been able to work without too much stress about making a living. A somewhat typical situation in Scandinavia, although these stipends are not really easy to get — if one sticks it out as an artist, it is possible. His new work is Light, tonal, vigorous, and relaxed. I am happy to see this new work.

I sit and read a special Forbes supplement on the impact of technology on business and society. Most of the essays graze the mark, but none really dig into the root causes of the vague-and-growing discomfort that most people are feeling about the encroachment of technology into all aspects of contemporary being. Technology is merely another predestined manifestation of material life, or is it? There’s no proof of the pre-destination, the inevitability of development, nor the neutrality of it. The logical product of the development and ascension of the human intellect, ha. I talk to Adrianne today, and begin to make final arrangements about the Dinner series which begins on Sunday evening in and out of the Sandra Gering Gallery in Soho. I am relying on wit and presence to carry me through this series of performances … And trust that simply by doing this action will add a bit to the definition of what performance is (or, perhaps subtract from that same definition…). I rather dislike the word performance anyway. It seems to be more about theater than about real life, and I would seek to wrest those collective and hierarchical actions from the sphere of the spectacle and posit them back in the personal space.

Staying at Scott’s place for the last days here at Florida State University. He’s doing tech management for the Art Department, having just finished his MFA up at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Yesterday was heavily involved in discussions with students and faculty about my performance last Thursday. Passionate discussions to be sure. Because of a small glitch in communication between Paul and I, (and, the onerous ideological relationships that accompanied the performance space itself — the Art History lecture room) the dialogue which is the third component of the performance stopped after about ten minutes. The intensive hours of discussion that ensued in the days following amply illustrated to me a number of factors influencing the dialogue. The first was the power of the ideological structure enclosing the audience and space. (This would include the unfulfilled expectations, based in preconceptions and comfortable same-ness)… Anyway, the continuing discussion has been very stimulating and has opened up new areas of consideration for me. I have very mixed feelings about the performance, but the flux of energy that has enveloped it in the four times it has happened — once in Köln, once in Helsinki, once in Tampere, and now, in Tallahassee — has carried my thinking on a productive tour of my own pathway as well as providing deep insights into others’ attitudes, dreams, and beliefs.

Morning. I take it slow. After the performance I went out with a small group of students and Jim and Kaisu. The two of them left early, and I ended up with the students until 2330. I then went back to MUUMediaBase to try and get some work done. Got back to Tapio’s around 0130 — totally exhausted. The performance went well, although there were a number of problems — like, no data projector was available, and nothing was ready, so I was happy to have arrived two hours early. Oliver helped set things right, though. There were about 15 people there.

Spending the day preparing psychically for the first of two performances in the next week. Tonight will be at the Time and Space (tila aika) Department of the National Academy of Fine Art here in Helsinki. I am unsure of the content, and how that content will develop and manifest itself from my memory. Formally, the performance is rather similar to what I did in Köln last May, but there is the change of memory, and I am also adding images which may either corrupt the spoken word or be a positive contribution to the piece. My mental references are documented on the Blast website as part of the blast 5 drama project. The title of the performance is Solstice to Solstice: a naming. It exist as a cycle, a continuation, a movement in Time and Space, so it will be perfectly appropriate to the location. The moon is full tonight, I think. Life is too short to be apprehensive, so I enjoy the anticipation of it all. Moments ticking by. Approaching the moment when I walk out the door. That is the critical moment, the initial going, overcoming of the static inertia, the friction of immobility. And the going is an endless thing. It can be on a continuous journey that moves the body across the various incarnations of the physical world, for that is what any leaving of home is. Each and every movement from the home is a journey, and one becomes a traveler once outside the door. The door that guards the hearth from danger and the excessive wildness of the world. I have had many homes in the last months. Safe havens. With friends new and old. But none of them are mine. Does one need a home? Is not this existence a wandering in many forms? Can the sense of home take other forms than the floor-walls-ceiling-and-door?

At the door of the house, who will come knocking?
An open door, we enter
A closed door, a den
The pulse of the world beats beyond my door.
– Pierre Birot

And on the theme of networking, Tapio asked me to write a brief article for ValoKUVA, the Finnish Photography magazine. I titled it Manifestations of Networking — it explores some personal roots in my usage of the internet. It will appear in Finnish, so I wanted to post it here in the original.

Well, I leave London, thankfully taking a taxi with Joanna to the Underground station — she was heading out for a meeting her Open University students, and I am carrying the full compliment of my belongings because I go direct from Bath to Heathrow for the flight to Iceland tomorrow morning. I transferred at Paddington Station to a train to Bath, arriving after some delays around 1330. Taxi to the Bloomfield Hotel (the organizers of the digital chaos cyber conference are covering my expenses — other wise I could not have afforded to even come out to the conference — thanks!). Rail tickets here are expensive like in the US, and I am rapidly running out of money. I am afraid that each time I use my Visa card it will be rejected or so. I drop my bags and with the sun strong enough for me to break a sweat, I walk into the center of town to find the Hub Intercafe, the headquarters of the Conference, where I meet Stella who gives me a Mac to play on while waiting for Johanna Nicholls and Heath Bunting to show up from a meeting. Still had trouble logging into my home server in Reykjavík, but I finally succeeded after remote-logging into one in Colorado, dropping into the Unix shell there and connecting from there to Reykjavík. Don’t ask my how or why it worked when a direct connect didn’t … Not too much mail had built up, but it was good to check it anyways. Heath and Johanna showed up shortly, and I met a few other of the digitalchaos crew — Stanley Donwood, Stella (the hostess at the Café when I arrived) and so on … Heath was interviewed on the radio by telephone at the Hub, and after that I had a beer with Johanna then took a leisurely stroll around Bath as there were a couple hours to kill before the evenings activities.

We have flown through the air like birds and swum the sea like fishes — But have yet to learn the simple act of walking the earth as brothers. — Martin Luther King

For the dinner convocation that I called for the evening, I make a very short toast that began with a quotation from the German writer and activist Martin Buber and continuing along the lines:

Heath did put up a small gallery of some of the participants at the festival (I’m the last to the right on the first row…), but this poor shred of cyberspace has long since vanished.

Up at 0800. I wake even earlier, but stay in bed relishing the lack of movement and the quiet. Volker comes back for breakfast, and begins to make some calls to see what is to be recovered for the evening performance/lecture. It is possible that there may be some few people there, so I will do what I have to do. Which is, let’s see. We stop by at the beautiful restored farmhouse of Rolf Hinterecker (the Director of the Ultimate Akademie) for a chat and then head back home where I simply collected my concentration for the performance.

Performance/Lecture at the Ultimate Akademie Köln: This event was a challenge for me from the moment I scheduled it when passing through Köln back in early April 1996. Normally I would rather do a formal and structured lecture at the schools I visit. I knew this would not be the way to go at the Ultimate — with its close association with the Fluxus movement — I knew that it was an opportunity to try something that would possibly be scandalous at a ‘normal’ school … I knew, for myself, it was a challenge, it had to be a challenge. The primary problem internally was to completely remove myself from any pre-tension that might arise by attempting a performance that did not emanate direct from my internal energies. Pretension is a form of energy that, for me, has a significant negative resonance. I think it is one reason I have never enjoyed theater very much with the enormous pretension within the actors who have to Act. I would like to do three or four things this evening. 1) Cut and eat an apple 2) Name the Places I have been since leaving Iceland on the 22nd of June, 1996, the Summer Solstice, and name the people whom I have been with 3) As I am a traveler, I am a carrier of information and stories from place to place, I would like to find out about you, hear your stories that I might carry them on the the next destination. To name some of the attendees: Pietro, Hans-Jürg Tauchert, “couple of names of couples for a couple of talking travelers relaxing,” Detlef Brezel, Mimi Flick, Skulli, Rolf Hinterecker, Volker Hamann, Paul Virilio, in kind …

Volker and I laugh that in the middle of the performance, Rolf, in an increasingly agitated state suddenly asks “when are we?” as I am reciting three hours of people and places in order of the year’s movement. Without breaking my stride, I say “October,” and continue on for a couple more hours as the space darkens in the twiLight.