radio aporee presents flickering wastelands IV: another round of the 48-Stunden-(Berlin-)Neukölln Kunst und Kulturfestival at Udo’s place, so I prep this 30-minute video piece of flickering wastelands from the Wendover residency, et al. Ambient sounds included.

Today, upon waking, there are two buses parked to the west of the hangar, a bit later, numerous SUV’s begin to pull up along with several official SWAT command vehicles and their teams from Winnemucca, Elko, and Wendover. It’s SWAT play. How to deal with a bus-load of terrorists/hostages or so. Several squads are lectured and engage in practice drills for the morning. I had originally been told by the airport management folks that there were going to be live-fire exercises at South Base, so we were surprised when this began to unfold in the back yard.

There is the fascination of playing Army, recalled from early days in the Maryland woods beyond the pond, beyond the corn fields, into unknown territories of abandoned farmhouses and hunting camps. Learning to make the sound of a gun and of explosions. And here, older boys, men, with very fancy toys, playing for their lives and the lives of their charges. Learning to stay alive, to save life. Learning to kill, or be killed. Learning to protect the innocent and kill the profane.

Before this chunk of the later afternoon I went down to Blue Lake Wildlife Area to check out the swimming possibilities. The water is around 80F year-round and the lake itself formed through the effects of a geothermal percolation spring. It’s frequently used by open-water scuba divers for certification, and the area shows the signs of heavy human abuse (the BLM doesn’t really ‘manage’ it much).

A forced migration to the Holy City of Moroni. Tire issues — the damaged rear cycle rim from the red clay mishap in southern Utah and the front-end alignment of the truck. Locate appropriate places to effect the repairs before coming over. A monstrous wind from the south dogs the transit across the flats of the Great Salt Lake Desert on I-80 and whips up a blinding dust storm in the middle and at the eastern fringe at the Kennecott Copper mine’s massive tailings dump.

Salt Lake City is quiet, wide empty streets, pedestrians are frequently toting suitcases-on-wheels. There are bicycle lanes and mid-block pedestrian crosswalks with baskets at either terminus with fluorescent flags for folks to carry when crossing.

Retreat when the work is done and after lousy lunch Reuben at The Bakery. Retreat looks like this:

a quick note on the 50th anniversary of the vote by the US Congress and signing by the then-president, Ike Eisenhower, that made Alaska, the 49th state of the current union of Amurikan states. this is some footage my father shot six weeks before I was born, 30 June 1958, and right after the territorial government passed a bill in the legislature approving the statehood process. the day before my arrival, the people of the Alaska territory confirmed their desire by referendum to become the 49th state on 26 August 1958. the US Congress subsequently passed a statehood bill on 03 January 1959.

migrating realities, day two. people going WAY over time, people reading papers. understandable a bit when they are second language speakers, but I thought at one point, why not have a native speaker reading it for them? (it would be more understandable and wouldn’t require their presence). my hand goes up, I’ll do it! annoying aspect of, again, the meta-structures of the encounter. as do dominate all social encounters. but tend to restrict and form the formal.

situation in Lithuania. empty spots, people leaving. an empty landscape (compared to Central Europe), poor standard of living, life expectancy, wages, employment. not good. but the emptiness is a nice thing. the politics of emigration.

Johannes Deutsch: WDR cultural spectacle, Mahler’s Second Symphony, gala concert … (Ars Electronica, Linz, big-ass spectacle). with live manipulation.

(and with that, I quit taking notes) <>

the last evening was nice. the conference panel in Savannah, which I managed to do from Hubertus’ flat, across the street from GdK, was not so good. my intervention was in poor comparison with the power-point presentations some of the other’s did. but I just couldn’t bring myself to engage with that hyper-limited platform. it is so ubiquitous in the pathway it prescribes on a presentation. clearly, though, Adobe Connect, the collaborative platform, is also so limited and restricted to particular forms of hyper-socialized human encounter. although limits can stimulate creativity if there is a resonance between the two people who are connecting via that pathway. it doesn’t resonate with my be-ing. I don’t use it again. f-2-f resonates. minimizing encounters mediated by cultural spectacle. focus as close to f-2-f as possible.

the performance, as with most performances is fringe, a good concentrated group, but small, the young folks wander off when the Vilnius student crew leaves. some people had come after reading on the site of my connection to Stan Brakhage. interesting conversations afterward. and a nice denouement, wandering back down to Potsdamerplatz and so on home. running on adrenaline.

today ends with a longish wander from Gdk to Pariser Platz in the reception center for the Akademie der Künste, thanks to Hubertus. wow!

with the mass of storage space available on the godaddy account, anything’s possible. so, an upload of a work finished a couple years back — a prototype for the kind of works that I would really like to make for all the friends that have been included in the archive over the years. ideally, making individual video-based works which include the diverse re-presentations of people, encounters, and events that have transpired over the years. it’s a tremendous amount of work, and requires a dedicated working place with two or three machines crunching away on the material. along with the four or five terabytes of raw digitized material easily available. not possible at this time. will it ever be? hmmm. we’ll see.

this work starts with the visit Stefan made to Finland back in 2000. we rented a car and spent a weekend with Kaisu and Risto in Noormarkku. Kaisu took us on a tour over to the Bay of Bothnia, but the high-Light of the weekend was a private tour of Alvar Aalto’s Villa Mairea which Risto’s company was managing, and that was just a five-minute walk away from their apartment. amazing house that my old acquaintance Johanna still uses as a summer retreat on occasion.

the video follows us to Tallinn in Estonia, followed by a brief pizza dinner in Tribeca with a visit to the WTC, then there is a fast forward to 2004 when Loki and I visited Stefan and Ellen in their place in Glen Ridge. We all make a party & campfire visit to Bill and Andrea’s place up in Bedford.

Montgomery Village Junior High School, MVJHS. seventh grade. Miss Burrough’s English class. was carrying a small Sony cassette recording deck. recall recording some of the top-100 pop hits off the radio, when home sick from school one day, and I wanted to play music at school during lunch with my friends. anyway, I covertly recorded part of class, including Miss Burrough’s yelling at us — she probably had very good reason as Gary, myself, Fritz, Bruce, and few others of us were constantly cutting up in class — she found out that I had made a recording, and I ended up in the principle’s office. my first foray into ambient phonography got me into big trouble.

the latest is a simple remix of sounds from Sydney along with a video segment — the Sydney sky line — that is, the tracing of the separation of earth-bound objects and the sky. trouble, what trouble? can you pick out the numerous CCTV’s?

meet Sophea, from ‘podes to antipodes. three continents in less than a year. shaming our carbon footprints and our inst- & dis-abilities.

earlier wandering around the Opera. and making a 15-minute piece skyline of Sydney along with some sonic work. that should end up being quite good — catching the ambient reflective sonic environment and the microscopic skyline with the video cam zoom on full. slowly and unstably tracing the man-made and natural intersection. earth and sky (back to the infinite half-spaces).

over to Randwick, do the coast walk to Bronte, recording some lawn bowling, eating fish&chips. once a decade enough on that score — last time was in London visiting Joanna in 1996. sitting in the park that adjoins Bronte Beach, twiLight falling, the atmosphere cool, reduced, mellow. somebody playing Bob Marley on a decent sound system, a rasta picnic at the beach. hmmm, pretty nice lifestyle.

I am in my mother’s room. It’s I who live there now. I don’t know how I got here. Perhaps in an ambulance, certainly a vehicle of some kind. I was helped. I’d never have got there alone. There’s this man who comes every week. Perhaps I got here thanks to him. He says not. He gives me money and takes away the pages. So many pages, so much money. Yes, I work now, a little like I used to, except that I don’t know how to work any more. That doesn’t matter apparently. What I’d like now is to speak of the things that are left, say my goodbyes, finish dying — Samuel Beckett in Molloy

Ethan sends this nice piece he worked on with Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche up in Halifax. nice meditation.

psychogeography, yet another buzz-word in contemporary media art Worlds. usually applied in the context of the controlled environment of urban human-scapes. a gravel and sand bar at the confluence of the Yampa and Green rivers makes an ideal counterpoint. despite scaring off the wild geese and beaver. where to go? the water’s too cold to ford the river, and the canyon walls too steep to climb. around-about, then.

Alex and Sonya present a short informal piano recital at my request the last evening that I am visiting their house in Boulder.

catch the J.S. Acker Musical Showcase again this year — this time with video camera. one small fragment, the Chancel Chimes Handbell Choir, is ready to clock ur noggin’. more morsels to come. like the violinist in the knick-knack shop.

The most sacred of places is made powerful by the history, stories, songs and prayers it contains. As we see this place, it is an experience of awe and gratitude. It is as if the Holy People are physically comforting us, encouraging us, smiling at us, strengthening us. That Diné Tah (the land of the Navajo people, the Diné) seems an empty, barren place suits us — we are among the most fortunate people in the world because of it. — Luci Tapahonso

a successful trip with Uncle Al to Grand Falls, and with last night’s rain and full moon, the falls were a torrent of mocha-red water.

make the trip to Mechernich — via the regional mass transit system which has gained the attention of local taggers, actually to quite a nice effect — to visit with Peter & Kersten and the kids. we spend part of the afternoon at the Rhenish Open-Air Museum, arriving too late for the special exhibition on German immigrants (Auswanderungs) to America entitled Brave New World: Rhinelanders Conquer America. pity, it sounded interesting. Germans began immigrating to the US early in the 17th Century, with more than 45,000 in “Penn’s Sylvania” alone by 1745. Driven by religious, economic, and environmental factors, many made their way from the old Palatinate region (the present Rheinland Pfalz or Rheinland Palatinate and part of Baden) to England where Queen Anne passed them on to America if they would swear allegiance to the British Crown:

I, —, do solemnly & sincerely promise & declare that I will be true & faithful to King George the Second & do sincerely & truly Profess, Testifie, & Declare that I do from my heart abhor, detest, & renounce as impious & heretical that wicked Doctrine & Position that Princes Excommunicated or deprived by the Pope or any Authority of the See of Rome may be deposed or murthered by their Subjects or any other whatsoever. And I do declare that no Foreign Prince Person Prelate State or Potentate hath or ought to have any Power Jurisdiction Superiority Preeminency or Authority Ecclesiastical or Spiritual within the Realm of Great Britain or Dominions thereunto belonging.

afterwards Jonas makes a short guitar concert for us. then a fine dinner that Kersten puts together.

deciding last night not to tell the students when to arrive for morning start-up for the workshop, so they are up until 0300 or so, keeping me in uneasy slumber, Marcus as well, who ended up staying over in the dorms too. so they are nowhere in sight in the morning. after a hearty oatmeal breakfast which Marcus says is the highLight of his impromptu visit to Beroun so far, we wander out into the landscape to shoot some. ending up on a intrusive gabbro sill, standing high above the railroad station. later, all but two of the students leave for Prague, and later in the afternoon, Milos comes back from Prague, mostly for a meeting with students of the Technical University who are working on some media projects. it is disappointing that this workshop imploded. but I think it is due to the extreme fragmentation and lack of focused attention in the first two days.

later in the afternoon Dr. Cílek, the Director of the Academy of Sciences Institute of Geology pays us a visit and delivers a fascinating talk that wove the human historical, mystical, and mythological elements of the Bohemian Karst region around Beroun with the underlying geology and speleology. we were supposed to go on a day-trip with him tomorrow, but Milos had to cancel it because of a lack of interest of the students. a real shame. it was a stretching excitement to meet someone from a geological pursuit who also shared a profound interest in phenomenal life and be-ing with a clear trans-disciplinary role to re-form traditional thinking models. I would hope for another opportunity to make a tour with him. googling Silurian Devonian Beroun karst trilobite tells much about the potentials! especially the French-Czech paleontologist Joachim Barrande who generated a yet-unparalleled series of comparative studies under the title “The Silurian System of the Center of Bohemia.”

All told, the complete “Systême silurien du centre de la Bohême,” published between the years 1852-1911, consists of eight volumes in 29 tomes in quarto, 8224 pages of text and 1606 lithographic plates. It contains descriptions and figures of 4565 species, with a few exceptions all coming from the Lower Paleozoic marine beds of Bohemia.

dinner later with Milos, Boyana, and Victor at the pizzeria, after visiting a photo exhibition installed in the Lower (Prague) Gate tower of the Beroun city fortifications. a view over what once was a drawbridge. it is too cold for walking around.

workshop ends with the thunderous rabbling-rumble of loud knuckles on desktops. Frieder later remarks on the enthusiasm judged from the volume that reached his office. I tell the participants that I have to record this phenomena sometime as it is … different … a definite culture-specific way of applause-feedback-energy! starting with a mid-morning breakfast, I was surprised that the discussion continues un-abated right up to 1600 on the last day. last year there was an exhausted fizzle after the Thursday happening, so that Friday was a few closing comments and some de-briefing, a collective lunch at one long table in the Mensa, and then departures. matter of fact, I think I took an evening train to Kiel to C & S’s place to catch a plane to Helsinki a day or so later. cycles. orbits, gravity. this year, an equivalent level of energy, different forms. students here desirous of ideas and relevant pathways.

the box proceeds as though it has found a unique energy source in the configuration of the students and the situation. although our stream is lamed by a lack of time for preparing content, the local energy is considerable.

pissing in the night, first the awareness of a full bladder, then the struggle into a wakefulness or forceful sleeping to ignore it all. or checking the air temperature in the stellar darkness. chilling. unzip the bag and squirm out, sandals on, turn around, open the door. skin is less sensitive to the cold with sleep-warmth stored up. intake breath with the brilliance of horizon-to-horizon density of stars. vision is possible. it’s not totally dark. the Orion nebula clearly a nebula. planets almost shedding shadows on dark ground.

up in the morning with the sun cracking the southeast horizon. dense fog filling the entire valley to the south, covering the railroad line and floating the mountains far beyond on a silver sea. have a fast breakfast, load-up, and drive to the Cadiz-Soda Lake road, but there has been so much rain in the last week the road is flooded so instead retrace path to the old Route 66, paralleling the rail line east to Needles. stop at the BLM office and have a chat with Murl, a local with tremendous knowledge of the Mojave area. trade stories and show respective trilobite samples, mine not too bad, considering that I had little memory of the place and that I found outcrops that had not yet been worked over completely. thence on east, into the Arizona (Sonoran) desert with the Saguaro and cholla cactus. each growing in specific and very distinct ranges. The Saguaro limited to south-facing rocky hill- and mountain-sides, never in the flats. the cholla often in north-sloping gravel alluvium. as the local nursery-lady, working in the native flora department said to me — “if it (a particular native plant) isn’t growing somewhere, then it can’t grow there…” without enough help to overcome the negative characteristics of the location, water, soil chemistry, Light, etc — obvious, but profound at the same time…

the desert is green, some areas like a billiard table, wildflowers will be resplendent later in March and April as the rainfall in the last month has already totaled more than the usual annual fall.

clouds race towards the highlands to find the winter storms. still in the lowlands, I trace a prickly pear and a Joshua tree in electron fullness.

so it goes

Brassica oleracea var. acephala — Although more highly developed forms, such as cauliflower, broccoli, and head cabbage, have been produced in the last two thousand years or so, the kales and collards have persisted, although primitive, because of their merits as garden vegetables. These leafy nonheading cabbages bear the Latin name Brassica oleracea variety acephala, the last term meaning “without a head.” They have many names in many languages, as a result of their great antiquity and widespread use. Kale is often called “borecole,” and in America collards are sometimes called “sprouts.” “Kale” is a Scottish word derived from coles or caulis, terms used by the Greeks and Romans in referring to the whole cabbagelike group of plants. The German word Kohl has the same origin. “Collards” is a corruption of coleworts or colewyrts, Anglo-Saxon terms literally meaning “cabbage plants.” — Our Vegetable Travelers

trondheim matchmaking cranks up on Friday morning. presentations begin a bit late. Lassi Tassijarvi talks about the demo scene, promoting his book on the history and philosophy of what is framed as a movement. gintas K. gives an overview of the Lithuanian sound art and experimental scene (as well as later doing a live sonic performance). Letizia Jaccheri talked about the trans-disciplinary IT/humanities program she is a facilitator for at NTNU. Kristin Bergaust talks about the Lofoten locative media project.

sonorous night of outside vodka partyers and raucous snoring. sharing simple spaces with others. back in a situation where 99 words in 100 are incomprehensible. so, the exhausting state of contextualizing everything, with little-to-no results. recalls first visits in Iceland and Finland. where now are comfortable hearing meanings in those places, here is that discomfort. especially in unstable living and logistic situations.

a hike to the highest dune where there is a huge sundial covered in runes, installed in 1991. the top granite pedestal, the solar pointer, is broken off and lies smashed across the circle of granite blocks that forms the face of the dial on the ground — from a storm in 1996. there are pathways everywhere, some adding to the sense of un-natural erosion and human presence. no trees are left to lie in the woods if they fall by storm or disease, so the natural infrastructure, for example, soil development, is a bit hampered, though the whole of the island is technically a National Park. I park myself on a variety of locations to soak up the ambiance, one place, sitting half-way out on a breakwater pier (to record the odd sound of waves skimming the side of the concrete). an elderly gentleman wanders up, looking as much like the images of an old Karl Marx as is possible, with a bit of white-haired Fidel Castro mixed in. he is with his daughter, who stays behind at the shore. they are there for memory, that is clear. bodies mapping old pathways and places from youth. there they were, a younger man with his daughter, a child, playing on this same beach, the trees different, the world hosting a different set of human empires, principalities, and powers. he comes to me, and asks something in Russian to which I reply in English that I don’t speak Russian, he then asks in German if I speak German, so I reply in German him that I am an American artist, he reacts with interested surprise, but speaks no English, so, smiling, walks to the far end of the breakwater to stand for a bit. his daughter finally joins him and together they chat with the lone fisherman who seems to be without much luck. the couple, young and old, walk slowly back to the beach, I tip my hat to him as he approaches, he salutes me, and pats my shoulder as he shuffles past. human connection.

mushrooms are the focus of much of the day. Alvydas has gathered several bags full, so we spend a couple hours cleaning them — peeling the top skin off and making sure there are no decaying parts.

I make a presentation for the students late in the evening that is followed by some difficult questioning provoked by my fragmentary and discontinuous comments about energy and art, and the live remix that I effect as an opening sample of my work on the projector.

this is followed by platefuls of the mushrooms with potatoes that have been carefully boiled and spiced. mmmMMMMmmmmm.

the final day after some power-full sonic / visual performances last night including a nice visual-sonic collaboration between Sara Kolster and Derek Holzer of umatic. discussion starts with a presentation from Armin Medosch who makes an eloquent outline for the future replete with lessons from the past.

but many here have a passionate and singular dedication to the ‘solutions’ offered by technology. this I can only subscribe to a lack of experience in seeing the mapping from hype to reality of other, previous techno-utopias. am I a cynical oldster? there is an overt exhibiting of ‘critical intellectual discourse’ on the face of it, but the proceeding praxis is merely an over-heated implementation of a skewed representations of reality. hmmmm. a reference to the rhetoric of prior situations would be helpful.

another shot at making lentil soup. free-style as usual. garlic, onions, carrots, curry, red Spanish peppers, stock, bit of oil, and the lentils. probably missing something. but it will get me through a week or so of non-bourgeois eating. while shuffle-playing the entire audio contents of the hard drive. samples from the randomsystem gig, from downloads, from quicktime files, and then some. mix. what is it about the remix, smaller and smaller samples. as time progresses. sampling. it is the gradual filling in of the social Wall around idiosyncratic being, at the same time the wall is being eroded by the simple action of entropy.

burning a candle in the sun, just to get rid of it. to be rid of, to consume, to use up, to finish. instead, to synthesize, to accumulate, to acquire, to gather together, sort, label, order. input-process-output. may as well let the days drain down to nothing. dry of time, dusty. sneeze in the sun again, twice always.

boat-spotting. is it the boats, of the phenomena of the boats moving through the water, the huge size disrupting the incompressible fluid, pushing it up, away, but never compressing it. potholes form this way. starting with a small crack, it fills with water, a tire rolls over the crack at high speed, something like a hammer coming down. the water has no place to go, but remains incompressible. it has to go somewhere when pressed down from the top, so there is enormous pressure on the side and bottom of the crack. it slowly expands, or rapidly, depending on the strength of the paving material, the rolling pressure of the tire impact, and the persistence of water. ever done a belly flop or slapped water flat with your hand, hard? like a brick wall. that’s what happens to bridge-jumpers. ouch.

hustle into town yesterday evening for some dance performances, with Aki doing one on the steps of the Atheneum to a composition “Everything but the city” by a young Dutch composer, Rijndert van Woudenberg. two other performances, one accompanied by a Stockhausen composition, the other by Henze, were ‘normal’ modern dance, and although there are probably a multitude of subtleties about the genre that pass the un-tuned eye, this normal dance is about the body and it’s forms and the parameters that body training apply to the possibilities of movement. clearly a difference between that and butoh.

I work with dance as it involves the changing of the senses. If your senses do not change, the dance does not change. The consciousness of the body comes into the picture with the changing of the senses. Generally we believe that in dance no matter what happens in our senses the physicality does not change. But to me, when the senses change, consciousness changes, and the physical body itself changes. In a bigger sense is the larger question: What is matter? So with sense and consciousness working together, the physical body itself does change, matter changes. — Kasai Akira

later, lunch with Sanna at Carousel. time and times. drifts through comfortable, warm places, once occupied, absorbed, diffused, permeated embodied be-ing, present, past, divided.

04 2004′, ’21 1809

logfile

after a brilliant sunny day yesterday, today is wet. (snowing!) good for washing the long winter accumulation of ground-up road and sidewalk gravel dust away. still in bed at 1000, reading, and writing. determined to flog away on thesis things, alternately, each minute, feeling empowered, and feeling lost. strange process. looking for a structural framework that makes sense, and somehow gives cues as to how to limit the scope of the discussion so it doesn’t get totally out of hand.

delve, ponder, organize, shuffle. and run across the field of Light

There is a strict order governing the life of the libertine: every representation must be immediately endowed with life in the living body of desire, every desire must be expressed in the pure Light of a representational discourse. — Michel Foucault

hmmmmm. woulda neva started this thing here, if I had read that nine years ago. or woulda tatooed meself from head to toe and enlisted in the merchant marine. wholly Madre de Dios! nada mas.

okay, ready and set up for the son(net) stream / performance. crossing fingers after setting up in my normal office space, and both ethernet jacks were dead. talk about stress, I ran to the other side of Gallery Augusta, the long low building that NIFCA uses for offices to check to see if the network connection was working in the main offices. weewsh. race back, rip everything down (two dv cams, two powerbooks with the accompanying 400 meters of cabling), drag it over to the office, set up. only 20 minutes before the sound check.

so it goes. performance over. after a testing connection earlier in the week with Josephine via irc, and then later she sends a nice video of the performance.

so. ethernity today. good food, good energy. good fun. good.

a primary movement among the Big Trees. cycle. creating a momentary vortex to dynamically lock self to place.

sharp refrains, movement, movement. nothing but. controlled burns raging in ancient trees. filling vast airs with lung-choking particles. the descent from Moro Rock is memorable. and all perspective is distorted by size.

logfile

expand happens! the culmination of a year of discussions and network-building, at the Meteori Cafe in the Lasipalatsi across the street from Kiasma in central Helsinki. it’s a party!

Hyvää Vappua! Merry May Day. a wander around the town, through the Esplenadi, and Kaivopuisto, full of young people in various stages of abandon. side-stepping pools of urine and vomit.

I am forever a stranger here.

long walk in Kaivopuisto and Eira, to the coast, soaking up brilliant sunshine. but the physical movement is a mask I wear lately to cover the dis-satisfaction with just about everything I have been up to. worked many hours on a short video from Riga, and because not being used to the software (in a daily way), and technical problems with the firewire interface, I end up doing all the editing, and then blow the whole thing, the WHOLE thing, and stop working. made the decision to leave Finland for the summer, if not permanently. seems to lack any drama, or possibilities opening into viable futures.

But when all has been said, I’m not really the kind who is so completely enamored of solitude that he must hide every trace of himself away in the mountains and wilds. It’s just that, troubled by frequent illness and weary of dealing with people, I’ve come to dislike society. Again and again I think of the mistakes I’ve made in my clumsiness over the course of the years. There was a time when I envied those who had government offices or impressive domains, and on another occasion I considered entering the precincts of the Buddha and the teaching rooms of the patriarchs. Instead, I’ve worn out my body in journeys that are as aimless as the winds and clouds, and expended my feelings on flowers and birds. But somehow I’ve been able to make a living this way, and so in the end, unskilled and talent-less as I am, I give myself wholly to this one concern, poetry. — Matsuo Munefusa (Basho)

some condensed observations from the week in Riga.

things build up. stormy weather is over. then, with the slightest movement, a slight rotation, reaching to pick up a bag, not bending at all, a small spring is released, sending a needle into the spine. a buzzing that ricochets around the internal architecture, the Temple of the Soul. and instantly I am crippled! gasp. just like last spring in Amsterdam at the n5m conference. faugh! the ensuing conflagration is crazy. massive shifts in plan, constructing and reconstructing scenarios over and over, shit happens. and what to do about it? no clear solutions except that messages are flying through existence, some I choose to read, some I ignore, some surface through the ignorance and break the ice. in ma’ face.

early morning ’cause I have to make a video. performance. skipper. well, sort of early. disheveled bedroom hair, timing and all that. I use the MUU digital video camera for free because I spend two long afternoons working on things around the laboratory there. the web server is down, and is not to be recovered so easily, ’cause nobody made the back-up’s they should have made … Sanna runs the camera while I perform skipper on Suomenlinna. kiittos, dearie!

Yet more days later. I have finished two new video works (mama, where are you going and memory of three infinite half-spaces), very different works, partly as a result of exploring the possibilities of the AVID digital editing system, and partly from the limited amount of raw material that I brought with me. I am wishing I had brought the collection of dinner tapes this time, as there are plenty of machines to do the heavy editing needed to finish that CD. But, here I am. So far I have learned a tremendous amount being around the others, it is really a luxury to be with other working artists when there is a relatively relaxed atmosphere that is free of agendas … The days blend directly into the nights which blend into the days. A seamless continuation of varying Lighting effects. I like working late into the morning when there is a special quietness that soaks the air.

Today I pick up the WinNT server from the computer department. Another project to get it running! We hope to get a REAL AUDIO server up for some weeks, although I see there is much to be done just to get the NT server up and cruising as I would like. But the real state of mind is rather indeterminate. Digital oscillations are interposed with human movement and various ocular stimuli arising from solar phenomena. Yesterday a huge sun-ring imposed itself across a quarter of the sky. This evening, now onto midnight, swallows are reeling across the sky and between the buildings. Outside the window which is wide open to catch the evening breeze and help dispel the interior new-building pollution, there is a dirt and gravel space and then an elementary school building that workmen have been almost totally gutting over the course of the last week-and-a-half. New windows, new desks, and who knows what else. The first day we were here, there was a dumpster full to overflowing with birch desks which were thankfully carted off by locals before being discarded. The movement across life is full in the summer of this place. Winter is the Other. Activity is vigorous though tempered by the luxurious languor of warmth. The birch trees are filling the air with a sensual tree-essence that one smells to one degree or another all the time, and their trunks are warm from the flow of sap. A week ago they had no leaves, and today they are full and filling vast Cartesian spaces with detailed energies.

At the home of Rikki and Sólrun and their two teenagers Rosa and Kári. I worked with Rikki at the Icelandic Academy of Art for some years, he is an Austrian native (actually from Bolzano which is now in the Italian Dolomite Alps) and is a print-maker. Sólrun teaches in the local school in this small fishing village of around 350 inhabitants. Rikki is still in Reykjavík finishing up teaching at the College. The drive today is long and cold. We finally get out the door around 1030 and head east to Myvatn where we happen to run into the President of Iceland and his wife who are touring the north this week. My back is not doing too well, so I give up driving and lie in the passenger seat for most of the day. We make stops at various places, tourist spots, and locations that I think might be interesting to film. The Hi8 video camera that I have with me is making something of a challenge. I have so long carried my Nikon with a 28mm lens and nothing else, that I am having trouble adjusting my seeing and pacing when using a time-based medium suddenly. One nagging feeling is the dilemma of what I will do with the material once I have gathered a number of hours of raw tape. I rarely have access to decent editing equipment, and even if I did, would I have the time to do the significant editing required to make something interesting out of it. The camera is on loan from my nephew, so I won’t have it on a continuous basis either, which limits the time for experimentation. Of course, I have used video extensively in the past, and audio also, but it remains a challenge to see creatively through this new mediation. I did happen onto an expression of an old idea that I worked with a decade ago in a photographic project with Bill, that of the “infinite half-space” of geophysics and math, where a theoretical space is divided into two half-spaces by an infinitely extensive plane. This is the beginning point of mathematical modeling of the earth and its surface and the various properties of and reactions to changes introduced by external sources. One half of the space is the earth, the other is the atmosphere or space above the surface. Anyway, this idea pops into my head as I am watch the incredibly varied earth-sky interface rolling virtually by outside the silicone-dioxide car window. I make a short video work (to be finished off with titling and all the formalist details in, Finland) called memory of three infinite half-spaces simply by filming with the camera rotated 90 degrees from the horizontal while moving and attempting to maintain the left half of the screen as sky and the right half as earth … a second short video comes from that single day — mama, where are you going? starring Loki with his expansive style. The landscape is bleak and snowy, and there is Light snow falling almost all the day with the exception of an hour spent in Egillstadir at the house of Steinnun where it was warm and sunny.

Stefan is off to work early and I go out to meet Kevin on the L-train platform to check out his studio in Brooklyn. It is always interesting to see his new works, how they evolve … waves, waves, waves … In the afternoon I head to the School of Visual Arts where Adrianne and Antoinette have invited me to do a guest lecture in their MFA photography class on Electronic Media.