A new page of recent portraits done in the last year of travel in the US and Europe. And I cleaned up the links page, adding a number of sites here and there. I also have posted a small unofficial site for the Icelandic College of Art and Crafts until the Official Site is unveiled sometime in 1996(?).

A new basic list of links to personal Web sites that I know of…

While I have been in Iceland during the past two months, I helped arrange a InterNet Project with colleagues Jim Johnson (CU-Boulder), Steve Bradley (UMBC), and Paul Rutkovsky (FSU). We involved students that we were teaching at the three schools and also from the College of Art here in a week long project.

You will also notice the “DAY WITHOUT ART” image staring you in the face on the Welcome page. This is a linking project for AIDS awareness and remembrance of those who have been taken by this disease. Check it out. December 1st 1995 will be the seventh annual Day Without Art.

I removed the body of work “Partners” from the site and finally got the film developed and scanned in with the shot of Jon and Ed (of OTiS/SiTO fame) in Montreal at the ISEA 95 gig. We were on our way to lunch and got there too early to be served. So we sat in the bar for an hour before realizing they were letting folks in through the back door to eat without us knowing… Then it poured rain on the way back to hotel. Needless to say, the next lecture was STEAMY!

I also added a page of links about Iceland, for your information.

To augment your experience at the Center of the Universe, I have prepared the first of a series of short excursions into the Place (and its resonating counter-Places) starting with oracle of bones, a subset of the center.

I just got back from a stimulating few days in Helsinki at the Nordic-Baltic Conference on Art and Information Technology which took place at the Nordic Center for Contemporary Arts on the old island-fortress of Suomenlinna, a twenty-minute ferry ride from downtown Helsinki. There were a lot of interesting contacts and dialogues which began. Some of the basic ideas of networking that were discussed have been brought into action through many new additions to the links page and through a comprehensive database established during the conference by MUU organizer Tapio Mäkela.

I cleaned up and added thumbnails to the Apotek Portraits page, and the Portraits from Iceland page and the Light on Water page. I think this makes it easier to choose images to look at closely… I will be doing similar work in the next weeks as well as extending the range of those and other pages both in terms of images and text for your surfing pleasure…

ISEA 96 will be held in Rotterdam and promises to be an interesting get-together, returning to the Dutch roots as it were.

Lots of new things after ISEA 95 in Montréal!

Bonnie Mitchell ran the ChainReaction project out of the CyberPort of the symposium…

It was good seeing Ed Stasny and Jon Van Oast of OTiS fame. We had some meals together, caught some of the exhibitions surrounding the symposium, and habituated the CyberPort. It was great finding out more about the inside of OTiS and all the work the our beloved Ed does (OTiSians all know this anyway), and some interesting stuff about Jon’s Web work. I admire these guys immensely. They hacked away all week at the newest OTiS project MONGOCOSM… Check it out! And they are implementing an enormous globe-encompassing plan to totally revamp OTiS via EGADS (Electronic Global Art Databasing System). WOW! Can’t wait to see that dOOds! Yeah, it was a good opportunity to ask all kinds of questions about the higher levels of coding/hacking work that both of them are adept at — I learned a lot. Soon I will develop and post a picture of the two of them at the site of a major crack in the earth’s surface right there in the middle of Montreal…

At the close of this century we are witnessing a major change in how value is determined. The value of material wealth is giving way to the value of information. In this time of transition, these apparently incongruous value systems mix and form hybrid systems for determining value. Unique, precious material objects still hold their value; some actually increase in value in a relatively short time. Information that is useful but scarce is also valuable. Scarcity, even in an era marked by an abundance of information, is still a key factor in determining value. Those who hold valuable information may still wish to maintain exclusive, proprietary control – to increase the life of the information. Information is subject to decay or aging. Information is not inexhaustible. It may revert to data, the raw material from which it is formed. How and when information is maintained and released is determined by those in control; those who initially recognize its value, manage it and operate with it accordingly.
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A couple media articles, one on ISEA 94, and the other about developing an Electronic Media program at the Icelandic Academy of Art. Also, an essay for an exhibition TOTEM: ný verk that I had in Reykjavík in 1991 at Galleri Einn Einn. I have made links back to the Welcome page at the bottom of each page for your browsing convenience as well as correcting and extending some texts. I also experimented with a single audio file from an archive of sound bites of my son Loki.

I had wanted to add some kind of documentary section to my Web Space detailing my current three-month travel in the US, but access to the Internet has been spotty, and right now I have just gotten dial-up access through Internet Express, a small service that has around 5000 clients and serves Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona.

I added a few new postcards on the postcard page.

I made a page that lists some current networking projects (no longer extant).

Dinner conversations, digital fragments from an ongoing audio project of dinner recordings will be featured here as soon as I have the chance to get some converted from analog cassette tapes to digital files…

There are faraway words from Köln. Dull anger is revived. High rates. Loki tells me a few things. But much is lost to the phone and the emptiness of mediated communications. And there is great sadness. I fall asleep in this jungle heat. on the couch. Broken once again.

Waiting for Alyssa to pick me up to go swimming at N&R’s place on the lake. I increase my discomfort while enjoying her presence: alternately filled with hope and the despair of gaining and losing. And losing and gaining. Forgetting. And memories all but gone to mute darkness. Crows raise some noise in the back yard.

To doubt an Other is to doubt one’s Self. Give and Take.

Foreign words. Letters unwritten. Reports from Amerika. What am I seeing?

Not much. Thoughts play across the plenitude of vision (the results of vision. as it were). As the material of vision plays out, thoughts move simultaneously, not in comprehensile reaction, but in concert with the fluid seeing. The in-pressing of vision makes a structure on which to hang thought. (a form). Thought comes into concrete being and through the intervention of continuing the formal advances. Vision and Thought. Form and Thought. (the ‘normal’ expression (formal expression) of thought in language and the saying of language:

So What?

Later, we ended up swimming all the way across the lake and back together. Norm doesn’t allow it without someone in a boat going along, but since we are both strong swimmers, and Norm isn’t around… The water is deLightful, back-stroking in an infinite half-space of coolish liquid with summer sky draped over us. later, back at the hexagonal house, amidst warm entanglement, the rumbling solitude of summer storms pass by outside. Heavy rain. With wine deep on a mid-summer night, seeing Lightning and flashes of proximity.

There’s Kevin, trying to stay cool on a 95°F+ on St. Mark’s Place

and there is very cool, calm, and collected (and sweet!) Alyssa looking quite serious.

or this diptych which is how it really looked!

this particular (versioning) log has become a reality for better or worse.

several hundred students from the print-making, textile, ceramics, graphic design, mixed-media, painting, and sculpture areas!

no record… :-(

man talk

talk(1) User Commands talk(1)

NAME
talk – talk to another user

SYNOPSIS
talk address [ terminal ]

AVAILABILITY
SUNWcsu

DESCRIPTION
The talk utility is a two-way, screen-oriented communication
program.

When first invoked, talk sends a message similar to:

Message from TalkDaemon@ her_machine at time …
talk: connection requested by your_address
talk: respond with: talk your_address
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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.
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