A quick response on Alda’s Icelandic Weather Report posting concerning the veto by the Icelandic President of the IceSave agreement.

And on the power of the (Icelandic) Presidency:

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…

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

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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 world-view. 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.

blurb for SNO gallery wall, December 2009, NSW, Australia:

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

drift is an approach to the task of comprehending the flow of life around and through the energized body. In particular, sonic energy flows may be used as an indication of the order of the localized universe. In some world-views, all points in a energy field are thought to contain the full (yet indeterminate) information set necessary to reconstruct the entire implicate order of the universe.

or

drift arises in habitually restless nomadic sampling of sonic energies.

drift depends on a somewhat fluid, though discontinuous, processing of those mediated samples.

drift retrospectively charts a pathway taken.

drift follows that pathway as defined by the energy constraints of that path.

drift reflects the trace of an indeterminate trajectory.

drift moves through numerically limited post-Cartesian dimensions and through several discrete parallel universes.

drift should be of infinite length to adequately circumscribe the unknowable Void.

drift demands an assumption of relativity and provides quantized realism.

drift is a simulation of energized be-ing.

drift is made available by the relentless domination of the machinic over the humane.

drift is a simulation of apprehending the storehouses of knowledge that culture tend to build: a consuming of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

drift is be-ing lost.

or

Energized expressions that are the essence of life arise when beings-of-energy frame and re-direct small samples of the impressing flows that they are immersed within. This sixty minute piece is a spontaneous low-resolution sonographic drift approximating the extent of the universe.

or

Depending on your frame of reference — concatenated with the dynamic range of your point-of-view — you may resonate as you follow this drift, or you may not. And, as you go, it is good to recall that the simulation is not the thing itself: the map is not the territory.

The following quick essay was for the last and final edition of the annual NetArts awards from the Machida Museum in Tokyo:

Grand Prize for this year, the online platform VisitorsStudio, is not a complete newcomer to the netart scene — it’s been running as a live visual-sonic collaboratory for a few years now. As a playground, it offers many degrees of freedom within what appears at first to be a restrictive environment. But, isn’t it true that all play-places have limits? Your mother would never let you go off just anywhere and play. She would certainly approve of VisitorsStudio. The limits of VisitorsStudio lie primarily in the intriguing area of file sizes (more on that shortly). The interface is intuitive and straight forward, and without a steep learning curve, anyone can create mesmerizing works in no time.

The most obvious elements of digital mash-up play are the text, the image (still and moving), and the sound. Participants in VisitorsStudio may gather these elements themselves and using a rich set of live controls make compelling live mixes. There is an existing database of files to work with, or, you can prepare your own media library to upload and play with. This is where each sound, image, or video file is limited to a 200kb maximum size — you will be surprised at what can be done — the result is absolute proof that great things come in small packages.

VisitorsStudio is available for special performances and makes an ideal platform for educators in all settings who wish to stimulate imaginations with real interactive digital art — its not simulated and its not eye-candy. As a collaborative tool, it does not aggressively take the foreground in the process, but rather works as a solid and supportive background element for seamless play.

Of course, the best way to enjoy a jam session is with a heavy-duty sound system and a 72-inch plasma screen or a video projector. You will be the resident visual-sonic artist. But intimate small-screen solo play is also very satisfying. The best feature is the possibility for live remote partners and audience. Invite your friends half-way around the world to join you in a jam session!

Technically, VisitorsStudio needs only an internet connection and a browser running the latest version of the Flash plugin. And, hey, if we ask, maybe they will port a Wii controller to VisitorsStudio! Wouldn’t that be fun? Let’s play.!

One of the Honorable Mentions for the 2009 netart award is SiTO’s gridcosm project which, if there ever was a primordial interactive play-place online, this is it. Gridcosm was initiated by Ed Stasny way back in 1997 as an outgrowth of SiTO’s live online image mash-up collaborations. That’s in the PreCambrian era of internet time! It even has its own Wikipedia entry! But gridcosm clearly tapped into something fundamental — with a fresh and accessible interface design; solid back-end code; and exuding a rare social sensibility of precisely what it means to collaborate online — there are hundreds of contributors. A dozen years later, the collaborative space is continuously full with a vibrant and evolving palette of personalities and plenty evidence of creative juice spilling out onto the screen. The acronym SiTO originally came from OTIS (Operational Term is Stimulate) which was the motto of the nascent online collective collaboratory back in 1994 or so. So, kudos to gridcosm for sheer staying power and what looks to be a lively future. How many layers does an artwork need to have for it to be classified as cosmologically significant? Visit gridcosm and discover the answer to this profound question! It’s an open project for anyone to jump into — as are all the SiTO collaborative projects — so, check it out!

Eduard Freudmann wrote on the nettime list: : The Bologna process aims at an extensive convergence of European Universities with the Anglo-American education system. The aim is to enter competition in the global education market in order to strengthen university’s economic position and increase their research-dependent revenues. The establishment of regulative norms and the harmonization of standards are the basis and at the same time the precondition of this process: without standardization there can be no measurability, without measurability no comparability, without comparability no competition. Economization and the logic of competition are imposed at every level of knowledge production.

sotto voce: Standardization is inexorable as long as the Techno-social system has the energy input to expend on maintaining and propagating ordered sub-systems.

That energy input is, at base, the attention paid to it by the individuals who populate its institutional sub-systems.

When the Techno-social system runs out of energy input, it will gradually gain in disorder and degrees of autonomous freedom.

Learning takes place everywhere all the time. It is a mistake that you expect a state institution, an integral part of the Techno-social system to be a free and open system. It’s best to pay it NO attention and instead take your education fully into your own hands. Take your attention and give it fully to your peers, and you will learn everything you need to know. And at the same time, you will see the Techno-social system weaken as it loses your energy/attention input…

Leaning on/into the State in opposition only strengthens the reified/reifying bulwarks of State.

Walk away on a new self-determinate path and the State falls flat, crumbled edifice of artifice.

Liquidity and Flow (rather than Solidarity) from Sydney, where the #2 source of GNP to Australia is Corporate/International Education — it’s right behind #1 which is the Extractives/Mining Industries.

Not much difference between the two, somehow…

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social infrastructure.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

Politic enlarges
a prosthetic order;
it affects
an ignorance
of madness and absurdity.

aAz

[09:]

A spring
an almost summer
and I am here among
these trees
luminous birds
ripe grasses
which gave such incomparable
unknowable
surprising form
to my first decagon of years—-
(surpassing
every schooling)…..

aa/z’

[OWFA:]

Out of this bough

Winds pick

>From pollen cones

A cloud

a)a)
z’

Nature?
That ridiculous,
undifferentiated
conglomerate;
it exists,
it clowns
as vain reflection;
—-it does not live.

Nature,
with its Latin reverberation,
as transportation,
as birth,
yet incises,
knots
a passage.

(juice and syllable)

(bone and ganglion)

An.

sexuality

rims
subtleties

gender
envies

and contemns it

aaa”
z(

with its zero:)

dryness

veils

surveils us

as water

kisses

water

z’(z’(z’
A

wow
bow-wow
and a swoon.

what an exhaustion,
what a prolongation,
what a
yeast-explosion
(souffle)
(implosion)
yesterday
was.

The Past is not dead;
it’s not even past.

Recently,
often enough,
my body has been a
contagious site

for arduous,
tenacious
spirits

for collisions,
elisions, litterings,
erosions,
floods
of certain humours,
certain histories.

Very much
in the Locus
of Mallarme and Naufrage,
Coup de des.

This “present” circumstance
(of intellectual inertia)
is untenable,
is impossible.

It Is Time—-
to cut the Strings
(of the Violin)—-
and to way with the giving Storm,
across the gravelled
waves.

The rigour,
the balance,
the elastic effervescence
of the Sycamore
surpass
every aspect
of the House.

No Need of Nature,
No Need of Art for This—-.

Franz
conceives of a “man”
who awakens in “his” bed
with the body of a scarab
(Old Egypt and its Love
of Puns);
a “man” who yet
(miraculously)
“retains” his human head.

What
might we say of a man,
who neither sleeps nor wakes;
who finds himself
inside
a Mural-Wall,
Wall-inside-a-Forest,
Land
travelling at Sea?

Wall: as Compass.
Forest: as its Clock…..

A….Reader? ….Reader-Hand?

Aestival,
estual,

Rain-Hand

Palus-Reeder?

(As with
*I Ching*—-
Biting-through-the-Sack….

What
kind of Sky?)

An.

– a. zega

iDC list gets annoying and rewarding at the same time. but what of life spent on the keyboard? the topic is teaching… and the transition of the teacher into the link jockey.

sotto voce: While the offerings of IP_based networks seem unlimited, and in rhetoric, the superlative of “unlimited” is often applied, I think it is important to keep firmly in mind that it is not a space of unlimited knowledge nor is it a space of neutral knowledge. And, also, in this time, it is not a space of embodied experience aside from eyes absorbing statically-framed EM radiation, ears hearing sounds disconnected from their source, and fingers twitching across a very limited place. Not to mention underlying ideologies which accompany each form of mediated connection (largely invisible but very much real) — among others, that of consumption (extractive resources, electricity, and thus, the globe-spanning world that we exert irresponsible dominion over).

In this regard, the (limited)vastness of that knowledge-space seems a bit tainted and out-of-touch perhaps. Expensive and consumptive. Exclusive, reductive, and reified.

A teacher is a catalyst, and is one who, simply by being an Other we encounter in life, presents us with the unknown. If we trust that Other, a world opens up that was previously unknown, and (if) we (trust enough to) apprehend and engage it, it changes us, we learn. This unknown world is sourced in the entire comprehensible universe, and is available through that Other. These encounters may take place anywhere, anytime, and can be had ‘for free.’ We need only ‘pay’ the Other with our attention, our life-time, and life-energy.

It seems that in our formal techno-social educational systems, these potential encounters with the Other are (being) replaced by more and more socially-standardized systems-of-relation (protocols, curricula, government mandates, abstracted monetary instruments) which seem ever more intrusive to and even suppressive of potential open encounters. This limits the creative potential of the outcome. The cumulative effect of this social hyper-formalization-of-encounter — because learning occurs precisely at the edge of knowing, not within the known — is that we look elsewhere for the dynamic of coming-to-be (learning) that keeps us alive and growing. To me this is the ultimate source of the loss of vitality that affects the Education World, a vitality that ultimately does not rest on technological mediation but on human encounter. Yes, human encounter is always mediated by the vast range of social protocols and tools, and learning encounters may happen within highly mediated (‘virtual’) spaces, but when we allow those encounters to slide continuously into more and more mediated spaces, the life-time available for less mediated human encounter shrinks. I think that this represents a wide loss to learning, education, community, and creative potential as it moves to extremes and forgets what it is predicated upon — the originary encounter between the Self and the Other.

I spaced-out posting the netarts 2008 selections last November. here’s my brief jury comments:

This year’s netart award was very difficult to close in on. The absolute volume and traffic of data on the network does not seem to be correlated to its ultimate creative vitality. Can it be that the net has reached the saturation point as a means to realize the creative potential of its creators: that the signal-to-noise ratio has reached an asymptotic limit? Or is it merely an approach to the saturation point of the haplessly consuming audience? Is the net only a flooded communications platform in service of global capitalism? There is perhaps no particular reason to be overly cynical, although for this tech-no-madic curator the life-changes that accompany each further implementation of technologically-mediated connection seem to lose their appeal more and more quickly. For a creative, though, the question remains — how to be evolutionary when taking on the next tool presented by the Venture Techno-capitalists. Where to find something that avoids the clichés of, for example, the ubiquitously pop Web 2.0? There are the occasionally surprising implementations of the 2.0 paradigm, but they are often revealed as the tired exercises in the viral marketing of venture capital dreams. What inspiring sources are out there in the net? Are there any? Perhaps, but only if we leave the material behind to search of the ghost in the machine.

Where is the immaterial, the trace or evidence of the metaphysical, where is it hidden in the technological network of things? Is it actually hidden at all? Or is it simply not there? Has technology, in the form of global networks, banished those inexplicable essences from itself? Technology does have its obvious formative materialized essence, as it is another thing that presents itself to us in our limited sensibilities. But in the dislocated network, far from our touch, what is the apprehended essence, that attractor that keeps us intently focused on the screen. An attractor so compelling and full of gravitas that we chose to limit any change in our point-of-view and remain instead in a motionless screen-bent gaze, in a stationary orbit?

What draws us with this gravity, what draws us into its field of action? We are fascinated by the Light, sure, but our attention is bound by the gravity. The attractor of the machine lies within itself, not within us. We orbit the gravitational center of our own creation, the dense hubris of code. Without code there is only the material gap into which falls our embodied being, levity left to airs and vapors, (hydro)carbon (a)(e)ffluence and other oxidation-reduction reactions.

The grand prize goes to a work that is elegantly inexplicable, conch by the Japanese designer Ｙoshiyuki Katayama. Four topical and simple interactive works explore code as a means to transform time and space into essential visual essences. We may easily orbit the code while watching its realization. And time passes. Such is life.

The runners-up all seem to find simple interactions between code and presentation, leaving some viewers to perhaps simply shrug and move on. Somehow I like to think that these projects represent a search for the network coding of the koan — the Buddhist meditative tool — where the code is an essential step on the path to enLightenment.

Cloud of Clouds by Miguel Leal and Luís Sarmento keeps the sky open for interpretation as it should be, while Ethan Ham’s work, Self Portrait, leaves the self open for interpretation. And, to disagree with the Internet, as does the Disagreeing Internet well, that leaves our orbit around the gravitas of code very much open for not only interpretation but for fundamental questioning and even outright rejection. No more passive agreement with those Venture Capitalists!

Perhaps, when the last flicker comes from the last flat screen, we will understand that code is a chant to exorcise the machine, leaving the ghost (and us!) free to move on to something else. We shall see.

John Hopkins, Prescott, Arizona, USA, 04.Nov.2008

Art, at its social core, is the trace of an engaged pathway. A pathway that conducts the circulation and exchange of creative human energies as they are attenuated by a vast range of mediative (materialized) carriers. The artist is that person who opens and offers the Self in a directed seeking: to engage in a dialogue of human 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.

From Jordan on nettime: Maybe we need to EXTEND the market as a network, rather than resist it, developing ways of speaking through it.

Ted wonders what it would be like to assume that the intellectual vanguard “is in fact a reactionary force trying to protect its political patrimony by imposing traditional interpretations and ideals.” We have to be brave enough to realize to what extent this may be the case.

sotto voce: The vanguard is (should be!) that which is not engaged in criticism alone. The vanguard alights where action and word intersect. I was thinking that one measure of the efficacy of a critical point of view would be to see if that point of view could be translated into a way of living to be taught to a child! As an educator, I am seeing the glaring gap between the academic mind-set and the reality outside that students have to deal with and indeed is their milieu. I am not surprised when the answer to the question “what did you learn in the last 12 years of education that you use in your life?” is an uncomfortable silence from a roomful of young adults. They KNOW what they need, in many instances, the skills for humane survival, but they also need something to live for. They don’t get it through the system that built criticism.

Jordan’s observations about the futility and hubris in the thought of re-constructing a new way from parts of the old are quite accurate. That argument seems to be a repeat of those which vainly (in retrospect) dealt with deconstructing the Master’s House with the Master’s Tools. Naming and confronting the enemy simply strengthens it (whatever it is). Best to turn and walk away on a new path.

I hope the critics live for more than the sound of their own and others’ words in their ears and eyes. The network is alive. The vanguard needs to walk the walk at the same time as talking the talk: the walk and the talk must fly in synchronous orbit around a life that is engaged with those around it both in cyber extension and in physical extension. There are people doing this, and have been doing this (quietly) for years as Brad rightly points out.

To quote Saarinen and Taylor (from imagologies: media philosophy):

1. in the praxis-dominated world of ultra-tech, the politics of critique must take a new form.

2. the strength of theory is relative to strategies for action. action must lead, theory must follow. in opposition to mainstream modern western philosophy, thoeretical and conceptual reason must serve only an instrumental role and thus give up its previously unchallenged position of supreme value in itself.

3. critique that is restricted to the realm of the literate and remains a literary project is no longer feasible as an effective strategy for action. Argument and objective analysis, pure content, abstract thinking, logic, and evidence, these forces of the word-centered world have lost their creative potential. Literate reason and the literary critic have become relics of the past.

When can we shake this reliance on the weakness of abstract reason and instead forge interactions of dynamic presence and being?