so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance??? when one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. how can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? the web of dependencies is both wide and deep. can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. there is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon. that baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

the dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. a dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. it consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

how can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? it is a relative issue. clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to that system. it is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. from covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. it is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the Self in relation to the system.

in the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct likely created by a subset of military technologies. but trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. this is where the Self engages the Other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of what’s out there. trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other critical in the measure of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway which trust must follow to be realized. what is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous Others. what does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…

I was a co-curator again this year for the annual netarts.org 2007 awards. it was a tough year for finding fresh takes under our call for works:

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0

For those of us who use the net, watch TV or SMS friends, we find that we tend to spend a lot of our time peering into one screen or another during our waking hours. Changing images float in front of our eyes as the disruptive sounds and jingles of our prosthetic devices keep us under the spell of the network. Texts flow into focus for as long as we need to retain them, and just as effortlessly gush out again through our fingertips into the ether.

Embodied Praxis – Real Life 2.0 draws on these telematic interactions and examines how art and artists take up these strands and weave them into daily life. However, the projects showcased will not dwell on the ways in which these digital traces are drawn from our lived lives rather they will manifest how our real lives are constructed around these embedded threads; and how their telematic substance is injected into the praxis of daily life.

The projects selected (will) track those nomadic flows as they are propelled across borders and through different languages; producing scenarios – political, commercial and cultural – that net those fluctuating moments in new and distinct cultural spaces. Although we recognize that these specific moments – such as sending/receiving an SMS or a real time interaction in Second Life are primarily transitory in their essence and serve more to de-localize us in non-spaces than locate us in embodied space – we also acknowledge the ways in which these concrete threads actively constitute the social self and, by association, serve to construct the complex fabric of Real Life.

and I wasn’t consistently online to be able to focus as well as I should have, but even still there were some nice projects to be seen, and the honorable-mention list is very interesting.

Grand Prize: Feral Trade by Kate Rich
http://www.feraltrade.org/

an honorable mention went to Isabelle Jenniches for The Call

Sue Thomas poses some interesting questions in her search for possible synergies between the cyber and the natural. it’s an open project — add you own answers on her site!

Please describe where you lived and your strongest memories of nature during the years of your growing up. I’m interested in both positive and negative recollections of anything from the smallest plot to the largest wilderness, including animals and plants.

Architectures of Participation is a compelling phrase that attempts literally to frame a deeper fundamental of human existence. This text is a preliminary meditation on that existence and aspects of its profound presence.

On the immediate surface, the phrase suggests the grandiose, the monumental, and the static and rigid hegemony of brick-and-mortar — a suggestion that appears to contravene the deeply dynamic nature of the broader continuum of human relation. This continuum, generated in part through participatory actions, is a far more fundamental space that circumscribes much of our passing presence in this world. We will have to dig deep to find the foundations.

Participation is one reductive descriptor that applies to the infinite range of personal energies expressed and shared during our lived be-ing. Participation is a condition that does not leave our lives until we leave our lives. Participation starts when life starts with the participatory synergy of reproduction. This prototypical participatory act is phenomenal in that the energies of two human beings combine to create the presence of a third human being. Participation is the root of life. Participation follows life in the synergies of parent with child, friend with friend, partner with partner, colleague with colleague, stranger with stranger. We participate in life, in living, every moment. (more …)

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.

another Furtherfield review:

As a test-review for furtherfield neoscenes reviews a random online project by Sandra Crisp:

make a blitz into downtown to meet Sirpa and check out her exhibition in the Mission. we met nearby at her friend Alice’s home and drove down to the gallery, the Mission 17 Gallery. parking is a hassle, with my boat-length pick-up. not used to driving it in compact urban settings. walk down Mission, thinking that this setting is almost identical to Brixton in London when I was there with Pete. urban complexity, noise, confusing information flows, mixed cultural impulses, chaotic surface intersections and orientations.

the gallery space is a beautiful second-floor room with first-growth straight-grain pine flooring, can’t find that anymore. looks like the material that Aalto used in Villa Mairea. on either side wall there are a dozen or so color photographic prints, large. English text fragments are posted on the third wall along with stereo speakers, the fourth wall are large windows overlooking Mission, itself another scenario. Sirpa explained that the sound system is not so satisfactory for the work, but there were no options, and it just arrived a few minutes before the opening the previous week. there is a one-hour ambient audio piece playing. the environmental portraits are intimate, varied. some of them easily strong image works unto themselves. Sirpa starts the audio and we listen and chat about the project. the premise is that she asked people that she met to take her to a place of personal importance, she asked them on tape, while in the place itself, to describe the place and its relation to their life, and then she made a 35mm color portrait. half the works were done in Moscow in December, the other half in San Francisco in summer. might be called polar-ly opposed locations. the audio was mixed in fragments, not completely cut up, but the segments were short enough to maintain a flow of interest in the sonic material and intercut in pairs. the acoustic of the room is somewhat problematic, where the sonic material got garbled by hot and reflective surfaces reverberating. I would have preferred headphones to fully catch the ambiance, but Sirpa felt it was important to have the free-association possibilities of spatial movement, which is understandable. in that case, a less sonically active space would have been more appropriate. not much to be done about that, though. as I was with the artist, she made connections between the sounds and the images, something I might have done, but perhaps not. it would be a challenge to match all media to it’s respective situation. and I wonder what the matching would accomplish? it is better that the effect is more random. to give all possibility to each example. cross-correlation in randomness.

the exhibition takes time, I gained by staying for the whole audio duration. it’s a bit hard to imagine, in the rush that is California, at the beginning of the decline of the Age of Oil in 2005, that an American audience would take the time to engage. unfortunately. another testament to the cultural width of the Atlantic, or, perhaps in this case, the divide of all Asia and the Pacific between Finland and California. perhaps feeding the work in a different form, say, on the web, or as a audio/video installation would be speed-appropriate. of course, it would lose the intimacy that less mediation leaves. maybe intimacy is the first energy level to be lost when mediation takes the place of presence. communicating intimacy and place. how to suggest this. how to give this. place. locative media. audio recording puts you in the place of the microphone. a photograph puts you in the location of the camera. the two devices, under the observation of the artist, eliminate the indeterminacy of the self-experienced and lock it into a definite outcome. making a reality materialize. the characteristics of the materialization are literally subject to the observer. the collaborator who uses the tool to make the observation. the energy of the images is surprisingly modulated — there is a reflected difference between the images made in Moscow and those in San Francisco. do they simply reflect a difference in the observers state-of-being? it’s not clear. and also, to eliminate the effects of the sampling tool, especially the camera, it would have been helpful to see printed images of the same genesis. the largest prints, Sirpa tells me, were made by a soon-to-retire printer in Helsinki — a print-maker clearly with quite some skill. it’s a pity he retired before the rest of the images could have been matched in size and quality. that would have removed an artefactual difference from the manifestation. allowing the viewer to see situational, posited differences more clearly.

the sounds bring voluminous information and ambiance to experience. it is closely modulated by the human connection and makes concrete the essence of place. images alone are too explicit. sound suggests. and the remembering of speech brings to a crux the personal placement. the three are a tri-partite unity, lacking nothing. having explicit, implicit, and soul-full presence.

looking deeply into the past, the query from Mambo Mail, Eskifjördur, Iceland surfaces with a vengeance. and with no apparent meaning.

What is Mail-Art?
Where is it from?
What is it for?
Where is it going?

The response:

Who is Mail Art?
Why is she from?
When is she for?
How is she going?

My Dearest Mambo:

Okay, great, a text book, for historians to study all about this elusive character, Mail Art and her characteristical characteristics.

How do I love thee, Mail Art, let me count the ways:

1. Always a challenge to get a long with / without.
2. I have a special room reserved for the neoscenes Mail Art archive, now I have to sleep in the closet.
3. Email is fast subverting my postal inclinations. it is cheaper, and that cheapness shows up in quality.
4. Post is my second largest expense behind rent (especially since the national Postur og Simi raised postal rates, some up to 250% in November 1992.
5. Postal Authorities the world over resist all forms of hierarchical organization and are an essential form of negative inertia to keep the world free from efficient government.
6. The US Postal Service is the largest employer in the world behind the US Military (and, I suppose, the Army of the PRC). Over 1,000,000 employees.
7. Mail Art is going away.
8. Mail Art will never go away because it is probably the most democratic form of global communication.
9. Hardcopy letters that are handwritten will become great rarities.
10. Love by Mail will cause world population to increase precipitously until The Apokalypse comes in the form of a massive Publishers ClearingHouse mailing to everyone on the planet declaring each and every human a winner.

– neoscenes, reykjavík, iceland, january 1992

The netart 2004 exhibition is opening tomorrow, well, today, as Tokyo is ahead of Arizona. Here’s the blurb posted as my curatorial commentary:

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.

A short note about the installation that I just opened yesterday as part of the Akureyri ListaSumar 1997 (Summer Arts Festival). It is an extension of the performance series solstice-to-solstice: a naming of the Light of Being [it takes a few minutes for the java slide-show to upload] and the intro on the wall looks something like this:

Probably a measure of bullshit, but the 40-meter long strip of images that span the space impressed the hell out of my back, leaving me crippled and craving more of the pain-killers that the Doc prescribed. One step forward, two steps back. A photographer from the national paper came in to do a portrait for upcoming coverage of the town’s summer art festival, and during the opening, the most retro and pin-headed critic (no, I can’t honestly call him a critic — should simply say guy-who-fills-columns-with-pointless-drivel) employed by the newspaper ran through the installation. The poor old fellow knows little about art, and nothing about photography. I recall the review he wrote for an exhibition I did some years back which was of as much critical value as an equal quantity of paper pulp destined to clean a baby’s arse. Some people don’t know when to quit. The only positive point is that a bad review from him pretty much confirms that an exhibition is at least interesting.

This article expresses a few personal ideas about changing the educational structure of the Icelandic Academy of Art to stimulate what is presently an introverted and socially isolated program. Although the suggestions are presented in relation to expanding the existing photography and electronic media program, they relate also to the general situation at the Academy as of late 1994. (ed: not as prescient a text, when retrospecting from 2011, given the development of the Internet, but there are some valid points. And, the Academy went through a transition fours years after this was written in which many of the recommendations noted herein were instituted. Pity I had already left Iceland by that time.)

The importance of a challenging media arts program in contemporary art institutions is well known. Almost all academies and departments of art in the developed world are making regular use of photography, computers, and associated digital mediums as enormously powerful and flexible art/design tools.
(more …)

To write an all-encompassing article about the ever-changing states of cybernetics in art and culture is virtually impossible. Although every digital machine is grounded in the balanced order of Eastern religions through its binary yin-yang core, the one fundamental concept that dominates digital arts today is chaos. Furthermore,chaos and change are themselves only elements of the vast collective rush of information experience that is carrying us on into the virtual spaces of post-industrial society.

I recently enjoyed the very chaotic experience of attending the Fifth International Symposium on Electronic Art in Helsinki, co-sponsored by the Inter-Society on Electronic Arts (ISEA) and the Media Lab of the University of Art and Design (UIAH). The five-day conference in late August was attended by around 400 people and covered a wide range of topics, while a parallel array of artistic side-shows provided absolute proof of the far-ranging activity happening in cyberspace arts.
(more …)

This essay was written for an exhibition that included photographs, installations, and performances which took place at Galerí Einn Einn, Reykjavík, Iceland, March 1991.