People treat modern communication media as if they were human, so established principles of interpersonal communication also predict human responses to computers and television. The media equation (media = real life) is an unconscious, automatic response that occurs because our slow-to-evolve brains don’t distinguish between mediated and real life experience. — E. M. Griffin

I keep thinking — oh, I should stop at the cafe that is on my way to school to record the ambiance there; oh, I should make portraits of my house mate and his frequent guests; oh, I should get out of town to see some of the hinterlands and make images and audio recordings; oh, I should make portraits around the University; oh, shit, I don’t have the presence to do so. The absence of be-ing that the writing process entails is deeply disturbing. To the point that I believe I will be an Other person when I am done. I note that communicative connections have dropped off precipitously since I began the thesis project here in Oz. It seems unless I push life-energy outwards, initiating communicative events, not much happens — that is, I only receive (very) occasional spontaneous communications from others. Even people known for years. The apparent imbalance in this seems to say that those connections have no value when they require effort on the Other’s part.

It may simply be that immediate life is in everyone’s face(book), brutally or seductively, and all else is secondary.

That and my spine is making ominous crackling sounds all too often. I can’t tell whether this is merely an effect of the intensive swimming (hit 91 km today), or whether something is coming loose. I see a day when it fails. And since the major spinal prosthetic surgery is considered an untouchable pre-existing condition even with the Australian medical system not to mention the US system, I’ll simply be out of luck, or with a whole heap of luck, a paraplegic.

Responding to Felipe’s thread on the bricolabs list:

Obviously, I’m not asking how serious lixoeletronico.org people are, because I’m one of them :P I meant the companies who say they are not using gold, coltan, tungsten etc any more.

finished the rolling-over process from the travelog to this blog. pain in the arse! 2850 entries at this point, now the hard work of adding several thousand images along with much more audio, and other miscellaneous content in the next months. as acquisitions slack off, I can finally catch up.

in the same moment, I realize that personal communications with Others has dropped off precipitiously in the last, say, two years — hmmm, a direct affect of thesis-mongering? or merely life in this instance? unfortunately, few keep up with this blog, otherwise they would have some inkling of what has gone down in the last 24 months or so.

the other thing I realized was that I’ve been making far more images of roadside memorials (Roadside Memorials?) than of live humans. that’s a bit of a shock to the system to consider. when I’ve been encountering quite a number of new people in life. plenty of opportunities. it seems that it’s too intense to drag out the Nikon — it’s too much. either that, or the recent diving into archive has made the further acquisition of images — the continual expansion of the archive — to be a hopelessly perverse exercise. when so much of it has hardly been surfaced to any of the many represented in it. what to be done? there’s only so much time in a rapidly-passing life!

not to mention the greatest down-side of archive is the life-time/life-energy necessary to committed to maintaining it. an archive is all about order, and a carefully constellated archive — one where things may be found! — tends to dis-order the moment that energy ceases to flow into maintenance of that order.

Listening does not mean waiting impatiently, while someone else speaks of things that do not concern you: it means sympathetically identifying yourself with the speaker, his background, his desires, his troubles, understanding them as much as possible, and tactfully suggesting outside points of view, not too alien to his own, which may aid him in whatever problem is being uttered.

Matters of interest only to yourself are never proper subjects of more than passing reference.

Whatever your theme, be good humored. If you can sprinkle wit and humor into your conversation, you disarm almost any ill feeling on the part of others in the group. For laughter, it must be remembered, releases our prejudices. — Lloyd Smith

This advice floats on a surface of socialized presence. Slightly pithy, gendered, with a dated language that suggests quaint and formal relations of the past. Where are we now, in the swirling, mediated, media-saturated present? The opportunity for concentrated face-to-face dialogue seems almost as quaint, though along with the quaintness there is an explicit loss, somewhere behind the fractured and discontinuous surface of modern communications.

Could this explicit loss be the source of a growing and extremely deep angst that underlies wide-spread (and expanding) social insecurity? That the implied dis-connect between a world of hyper-socialization and the world we happen to be within and part of gives rise to …

blah blah blah …

The amplifier/road difference would sound something like this:

I defined the amplifier as a concept which exists at many different scales and in both ‘natural’ and human-dominated systems (though that particular dialectic is a problematic one). It is a system which concentrates (and by default attenuates) energy flows. It is a defined set of pathways for that energy to flow along. (a life-form is an amplifier!)

(As an example, fundamental physical laws, such as the set of principles (gravitational attraction, strong/weak nuclear forces, EM radiation, thermodynamics, etc) that ‘govern’ the process of stellar evolution ‘supply’ the ‘protocols’ for the ‘expression’ of Light energy (radiation) in a highly specific and concentrated form (compared to the availability of that same energy in any random location in the universe).

In essence, humans are ‘merely’ taking advantage of these physical laws to form their own pathways of energy flow. Indeed we can do nothing else, as these laws govern the entire observed and implied universe. So the difference between the amplifier and the protocols that ‘define’ it may only be question of articulation — that is, those physical laws, in human terms, simply exist (for us to discover and articulate over time). The protocols arise as humans initiate articulations of the extant energy flows within which we simply are. So the protocol is, again, merely, a human (socio-linguistic) reduction of observed and extant phenomena. We cannot do anything counter to those phenomena that those laws are ascribed to. However, using these reductive protocols/formula, we set up a wide variety of sub-systems which, cumulatively, are our techno-social systems — complex systems of re-routed energies. As soon as energy is re-routed, you have an amplifier situation because you consequently have a concentration/attenuation of flows. An amplifier is perhaps merely the condition of the existence of a concentration of energies. (this does get into the question of the role of, for example, gravity as a ‘protocol’ which drives the coalescing of energized matter in the universe — or is gravity actually increasing the entropy of that matter?)

Because protocol is a reductive articulation (the map is not the territory) of a ‘real’ phenomena, it is not whole, it is imperfect, and it is not 100% effective. Human systems are a constant struggle against inefficiency and the raw effects of entropy.

Human systems accumulate layer after layer of detailed protocols based on accumulated observant life-experience. However, all these detailed systems of protocol are completely dependent on more basic principles (i.e., as articulated by the laws of thermodynamics).

A road is no exception. In its design and construction it is intended to resist the inevitable entropic processes, while facilitating easier passage of certain ‘types’ of energy. Approaching the road as a protocol-defined pathway, we may look within our own social understandings to circumscribe its actual functions to see how energies are concentrated along that right-of-way. Visualize the differences between crossing the road, driving along the road, or driving ‘off road.’ The end of the road. Middle of the road. One-way street. One’s orientation to the prescribed flow of the road is critical to how life unfolds. (these are obvious, but when looking at the extended concept, protocol, upon which the road is predicated on, these maxims become mapped across all facets of life.) A glancing blow. indirect, roundabout, circuitous, wandering, meandering, serpentine, winding, tortuous, zigzag.

We may observe that the road is an essential element of an amplification system. It is embedded in a wider system of flows, and one might ‘zoom back’ as far as one likes to see this essential embeddedness of the flows — immediate physical, local geographic, nation-state, geologic, cosmological — they are by nature continuous, pervasive, and the essence of reality.

Protocol defines a temporary edge — a fine transition zone — between one energy state and another. When a particular energy state becomes necessary to the continuance of life, a protocol must be applied to the ambient flows in order that they become suitable to that necessary purpose. For example, when a State would change its allegiance from one confederation to another, it will likely have to change some (many!) protocols in order to ‘fit’ into the new league. This might include, in the instance of contemporary war, changing ammunition standards and communications protocol systems — to thus synchronize its energy expressions with that of the confederation. The application of these new protocols will shift the defined limits of energy flow from one case to an other. This shifting of protocollary ‘edges’ and the ‘locus’ of the existing flows requires energy input. Switching protocols repeatedly is a process which depletes and redirects energy flows.

Directed energy flows have inertia. Undirected, ‘random’ flows have a zero-sum inertia (as in a system at equilibrium). Techno-social systems — comprised of a plethora of specifically directed flows — face a considerable challenge to change because of this inertial imperative. The more forceful the expressive output of the TSS, the more difficult it is to change the ‘culture’ of the system. (think – a military junta transforming into a democracy).

I join the panel Social Energy with Zita Joyce, Caro McCaw, and Sally McIntyre along with a Skype from Eric (Kluitenberg) from late nite NL, half-way around the globe. It’s funny to cross paths with him here, but appropriate in the sense of the networking practice.

There was one point in his presentation that I had a serious disagreement with — when he posited that the remote half of a connection (in this case, a tele-presence ‘wall’ in a working environment), was ‘fantasy’ in the sense that it wasn’t ‘real.’ If I understood this correctly, I would totally disagree. It is rather a situation of sensory attenuation — the ‘presence’ of the remote Other is real, but attenuated (by the communications protocols between here and there). And it is in this attenuation where the loss and alienation from remoteness (and ultimately the frequent dysfunction of online events like ElectroSmog) arises. We didn’t get into it too far as there were other issues to talk about in the panel, but this one really was problematic. When assigning a ‘fantastical’ label to a real techno-social deployment we remove any (human) agency from it and push it into a phenomenal realm where it does not rightly fit. What is implemented is an expression of a human techno-social system — manifestations of this system are never fantasy.

Many good presentations, especially the comments from Mike Poa, the founder of the One River project with the waka on the Whanganui River. It’s hard to hear of yet another river suffering from the typical exploitation/development which ends up wasting the life of the entire watershed and its people. But then the efforts to revive the river culture seem to be pretty successful. The Maori are by no means quitters, and their cultural strength is significant. A couple days ago I spent part of an afternoon talking with a group of Maori women who were reviving/continuing the tradition of weaving baskets, they said that there was a very positive engagement from the young people.

It’s over, so, cleaning up the space and trucking everything back to the Green Bench or the house at the end of the afternoon.

The day closes with another delicious barbie at Don and Ana’s place, with the slow and mild twiLight falling.

Can’t wait to get another dose of NZ!

Finally depart, making last-minute passes across all the place. Ship-shape, single-wide shape. Good enough for the next artist coming through. Head out by around noon, tired of waiting on the road to Echo Park to open after these repeated waves of late spring storms rolling through. Head south to follow the southern boundary of the Dugway site, through Gold Hill, in that frontier mode, rough, and the mountains have all been dug up, mined out. Some tough looking abodes, apparently there are a few people who live there year-round, it’s gotta be tough. Join the Pony Express Route at Callao, head east to the Wildlife area, windy more or less, mostly more. Callao is really a frontier outpost. About 8-10 ranch families. No store, no gas, no nuthin,’ just the ranches clustered around some arable land at the foot of the spectacular Deep Creek Mountains (which are higher than the Wasatch in Eastern Utah! The Pony Express Route is an even more strange communications artifact, but one that resonated long in the US imagination, though it lasted only a couple years in actuality — made obsolete by the telegraph cable. But the idea of riding across this landscape in 12-mile spurts (a healthy horse has to stop after that distance when running full-tilt), well, it’s something.

Over night at the Dugway Geode Mines, pick around a bit in the gathering twiLight, but am pretty tired after the drive. Quiet night, though there are threatening clouds rolling through from time-to-time. It’s always tough to pick a place out there to camp at there are no accessible trees, nor even vegetation above the knees, hardly the ankles! Always have the feeling of being exposed.

(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)

The second example — though it is a much more complex combination of pathways in its geo-political and material deployments and in its interaction with the overall continuum of relation — is foundational to the TSS and is also a prototypical expression of amplification. It is even more a prototype than radio. Radio is merely one sub-system of what is ultimately a military organization.

A military system incorporates all the requisite patterns of an amplification system: input signal (the human population and other concentrated energy sources available to the TSS); amplification process (provisioning and equipping of the select grouping of people through the collective life-energies of the greater population of the TSS); the feedback system (communications, command, and control systems); and the output signal (the expression of amplified energy flow as a campaign to secure the viability of the TSS either by offense or defense).
(more …)

Latour’s network(s) of relations (in ANT) are complexifying descriptors for a multiplicity of flows where each actor in the network are the origin and recipient of various flows. Or, they are merely the nodal locales of concentrated flow (as conscripted by the social structures). Again, back to the observation that the structure of the social is the prescription that forces flows into rarefied and concentrated zones or pathways. Each attenuation (measured in relief to a ‘natural’ background flow) becomes an actor in full, constant, and distributed relation to at least some other points in the field. The theory, the image of a multiplicity of flows, taken to a near-infinite limit, a beyond-multiplicity, an infinity of nodes would then approximate “reality.” If the network is functioning properly — that is, constructing a plausible account of real social systems — the network will be “an expression to check how much energy, movement and specificity our own reports are able to capture.” (Latour) Those reports, though, are always reductive and incomplete. A map locating the nodes and noting the flows across each one is not the lived territory in time, nor does it accurately express the character of the flows, which in the end are more important than the nodal points.

Is this blog a report? If so, the question becomes how it might more accurately invoke the territory of inquiry. [indeterminacy, trans-disciplinary (discipline being "mortification by scourging oneself", yikes!), without genesis or terminus, and sampling as many strands of lived-impression (not just screen-mediated living) as possible.]

If network is an accurate description of a situation then a consideration of the order that the network imposes on the situation is called for. Network and order, (including Latour’s actor-network) is about the application of a decodable order applied to a diversity of actors within the object of study. It implies reduction, though hints at an ever-expanding point-of-view. It is couched in language (report, correspondance, academic paper, speech, communications) which is problematic, but this limit is applied to practically anything social. Order is rooted in the negentropic tendencies of life in opposition to the entropic character of all non-life. (Depends — is an accretionary disk of stellar matter, through gravity, rising as anisotropic presence of order as the star forms negentropic, or not — is there any fundamental (ordered) difference between varying (relative and Cartesian) densities of energized matter?) The biggest problem with most current usages of network is that very often the nodes are well-defined (to a fault), as are the geometries of connection, but not so much the qualities of the flows between. I’ll have to pay attention to that lack as I troll the literature. There is the (network) engineering efficiency approach which examines the issues around signal transmission and reception including power usage and signal/noise ratios — which are inextricably linked to amplification issues.. But the efficiency is determined after the fact of the signal being strictly defined by existing protocols.

ack! my usage plunges into a cesspool. the Jekyll and Hyde of free-style and efficient. faggeddabouddit!

What of the experience of an opening, an open, dialogue? Re-creating that experience of presenting the Self to a random collection of Others. Or to a single Other. I keep thinking of identifying, finding an Other who would be willing to have a series of dialogues that would be re-produced for the purpose of mapping out the initial space wherein the model (as script) is to be constructed. The script being a primary resource for a 60-80 hour workshop (which would never be used because the workshops are open systems and have to leave a script behind soon after starting). It would merely point in the direction for certain issues (resourcing them), giving a framework that is an optional (inspirational) component for the process. As a multi-modal hypertextual object within a social networking space, it would imitate/mimic the knowledge-flow features of a more traditional teacher (and little or nothing else — memesis of a teacher being a fundamentally antithetical concept regarding outcomes of learning!). Fundamentally, the workshops are about attentive presence, that crucial realized, actualized, and embodied facilitation process. You had to be there. (So, back to the conundrum of being and not-being when documenting, re-producing life.)

Memory — especially the memory of human encounter — is the tangible, real resonance between the Self and Other, arising through the movement of energies. Memory is a re-configuration of the energy-field that is called body; it is a dynamically persistent re-configuration of the Self. This re-configuration requires the movement of energy between the Self and the Other. I’ve been thinking about you a lot. That is the minimum requirement, and, perhaps is the only requirement, as it is the essence of the process of encounter. It is the encounter, and the flows that are the event of encounter (the Light coming from the body of the Other, the sounds emanating from them, their cumulative presence) which precipitate change in the Self. The only further commentary might come from a qualitative exploration of the flows, and the possible blocks to flow that are ever-present in relation. This view of communications does not fall easily into the traditional phenomenological tradition of communication theory. And indeed, most theories of communication that I have run across are tightly focused on language and meaning rather than any acknowledgment of a real and tangible exchange of energies that occurs in any human encounter (even when subject to the relative intensities of mediation which, in fact, are simply the presences of different forms of energy pathways imposed by cultural conditions (both internal and external to the encounter)). [burbling parenthetic expression, uff]

Hunting in the communications area of social research, doing a basic review of various theories of communications to focus in on what might be a useful jumping-off point. I’ll need one that is anchored, but also with some degrees of freedom to map the important new characteristics of my broader definition of dialogue. Craig and Muller’s survey of the field of communication theories (seven by their count) is a helpful text, allowing me to zoom into the phenomenological area of inquiry (anchored by Buber and people influenced by his committed I-Thou dialogical approach). More on that shortly. I’ve got 15 books out from the library already, and have made more than 200 entries in Zotero… yikes, how to cope with all that material! Still generating a internal process methodology that brings at least some impression of progress on a daily basis.

It’s a pity that I didn’t previously know this book and that the editors were at CU-Boulder in the Communications Department. That would have been a nice coincidence, and perhaps if I get up there sometime in the long-term, I’ll drop them a line.

The most daunting challenge is the difficulty of mind-mapping all the disparate sources. I’m thinking a big wall with sticky notes might be good, and translate that over to hyper-linking within this WordPress armature. The sticky-notes technique has served me well in workshops situations. Howard has been using Adam Somlai-Fisher’s prezi mind-map software (think Minority Report data-space interface), but I find it too clunky. In theory that would be an excellent way to map and interface with the substantial data-cloud that will eventually accrete. But on this old G4 PB running Firefox, the Java scripting seems to dog the whole machine, consuming the CPU and rendering the machine worth-less. One would be better off with a huge wall-sized touch-screen to play with. So, sticky-notes are fine.

This year I didn’t manage to jump into the fray with a live stream, but many other folks did — the party has already started in some places, you can browse the schedule of events here… and at ORF Kunstradio

“Art’s Birthday” is an annual event first proposed in 1963 by French artist Robert Filliou.

He suggested that 1,000,000 years ago, there was no art. But one day, on the 17th of January to be precise, Art was born. According to Filliou, it happened when someone dropped a dry sponge into a bucket of water. Modest beginnings, but look at us now.

Filliou proposed a public holiday to celebrate the presence of art in our lives. In recent years, the idea has been taken up by a loose network of artists and friends around the world. Each year the Eternal Network evolves to include new partners – working with the ideas of exchange and telecommunications-art.

After Filliou’s death in 1987, some artists began to celebrate Art’s Birthday with mail art, fax and slow scan TV events in the spirit of his concept of “The Eternal Network” or “La Fête permanente”. The birthday parties took place in different cities across the world and artists were asked to bring birthday presents for Art — works that could be shared over the network.

Art’s Birthday Party has never been a formal event, but was always organized on an ad hoc basis through the network. Every participating location (and they are different every year) organizes its own party — from a few friends in a private studio to a performance evening in a museum or gallery. Filliou’s invention of Art’s Birthday is wonderfully absurd and humorous in the typical Fluxus tradition of serious fun. So the global birthday party for art has always tried to be fun while paying homage to Robert Filliou’s dream of The Eternal Network. — Robert Adrian

PROPOSAL :: Networked: a (networked_book) about (networked_art)

(a) Name, address, URL, email and one page CV of author.

John Hopkins

http://neoscenes.net/

John Hopkins is a networker, artist, and educator occupied across a wide swath of techno-social systems with an extensive global network presence. He is active in numerous global creative networks beginning with the Cassette Underground and the Mail Art networks in the 1980′s and merging seamlessly into the propagating telecommunications networks of the present. He has engaged in many individual and collective dialogues concerning the facilitation of collaborative creative situations, and has facilitated or participated in numerous distributed projects.

http://neoscenes.net/info/cv/

(b) A 1000 word proposal that should be accompanied by an abstract of no more than 250 words and a list of keywords to indicate the subject area of the chapter. [Each of the commissioned chapters will contain text, images, videos, and/or audio.]

ABSTRACT (more …)

Background for Research

While individual human presence in this world has fundamental repercussions on be-ing, it is the ever-present and synergistic exchange between humans — forming what I call a “continuum of relation” — that governs much of life. This energetic field of human relation is sometimes fraught with difficulties and complications in spite of the rich and necessary dynamic it brings to life. Technology, as a ubiquitous factor in mediating human relation, often dominates while presented as providing the only opportunity for mediated connection and interaction between humans.

Presence, as apprehended by the Other, circumscribes a range of sensory inputs that require energy (from the Self) to stimulate and drive. The efficacy and sustainability of human connection builds on the very real and tangible transmissions and receptions of energy between the Self and the Other. An interconnected plurality of dialectic human relation may be described as a network. These networks, made up of a web of Self-Other connections form the base fabric of the continuum of relation. Technology appears in these networks as the mediating pathway that is the carrier of energy from node to node, person to person. Technological systems also appear to apply absolute restraints on and attenuation of the idiosyncratic flows inherent in that continuum of relation. The discrete objects that populate the (technological) landscape of the continuum of relation and that modulate the character of communications are literally artifacts of a materialist point of view. A primary assumption in my research is that a materialist or mechanistic view of the world no longer suffices to adequately circumscribe the phenomena occurring within the continuum of relation. (more …)

Concerning Particular Methodologies

Dialogues, Networks, and Collaboration — Much of my creative practice, research, and indeed, presence is built on the activation of robust and sustained dialogues with a wide range of Others both remote and local. These dialogues form a network. The most powerful situation I can imagine for creative research and production is an open human network. I am keen to engage on the ground with the Australian, Sydney-based, and UTS creative community. I am familiar with the milieu, having been in Sydney for six weeks in 2006 as a visiting artist at COFA, and I very much look forward to being there again. I have an extensive personal/professional network of Antipodal creatives which dates back to the early 1990s that I will be pleased to activate on a more face-to-face basis.

Distributed Performance — My own applied international research in distributed performance and tactical media over the last fifteen years is centered around synchronous live network-based social activities. Engaging a wide range of technical solutions, my work is a direct utilization of amplified digital networks as the locus for creative action. These areas of research experience include a variety of performance-based activities in theater, dance, sonic, and other expressive arts occurring in or augmented by collaborative networked situations. As a self-proclaimed networker, an area of core awareness in my research is the concept of presence — and how that human presence is directly and indirectly affected by any/all technologies that filter and attenuate that presence: how human expression across a network system is precisely formed and informed by the impression of the technologies used.
(more …)

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

starting with the UdK-Berlin block seminar tomorrow. 36 hours over two weekends. usually these are challenging and dynamic. good!

back to the brico list discussions:

flying in: back in Lithuania. immediately the impression of the system not having changed much. not like the transformations happening in Berlin. aside from the few tourist drags, the town is like it was four years ago. and the system still resonates a deep conservative polarity with an inertia still flowing in resistance to … anything new.

lunch with Mindaugas with the first of several very mediocre meals. and meet Viktorija and Agle, the enthusiastic and hard-working student union officers who are organizing the whole workshop. I am impressed immediately with their determination to make a difference. sadly it is exactly these kinds of spirits who are the ones who leave Lithuania because a realization that things are not changing.

got to tour the Academy, with all it’s meter-thick walls and pre-Gothic arched ceilings. no wonder the wi-fi (communications) network doesn’t work so well. the place is naturally shielded from anything, it is part of some older church construction. a convent chapel or so. along with a 1970′s-era structure which is quite intense. in the center of the complex are two major churches, St. Francis’ and the Bernardine. there were the big changes from the East-West polarization collapsing, but since then there are few if any shifts in the faculty, and worse, the mentality. departments are rigidly defined by materialist agendas and territories of control. students are given only cursory freedom to innovate. huh? how do they survive. stoic, a little like Icelanders, but dreaming of more, with Europe at the doorstep. thank god for the Erasmus exchange program which allows the most adventurous to escape to better things.

Alvydas, head of the Media Department, the most open situation in the Academy, mentions again the idea of inviting me back as guest faculty, but I have reservations. on one hand any place is tolerable for a year, but it would be a serious challenge to cope with the conservative vectors in the social system.

we stay in rooms reserved at the academy hostel, in the guest’s wing, with windows opening on a small street that is so loud, it’s hard to carry on a conversation with the window even cracked open. the garbage truck rattles the windows and so does each car blasting up the street. stone walls, narrow streets, no speed limits, bad roads — equals intense noise levels.

Lesson #1
A living social system is a self-generating network of communications. The aliveness of an organization resides in its informal networks, or communities of practice. Bringing life into human organizations means empowering their communities of practice.

Lesson #2
You can never direct a social system; you can only disturb it. A living network chooses which disturbances to notice and how to respond. A message will get through to people in a community of practice when it is meaningful to them.

Lesson #3
The creativity and adaptability of life expresses itself through the spontaneous emergence of novelty at critical points of instability. Every human organization contains both designed and emergent structures. The challenge is to find the right balance between the creativity of emergence and the stability of design.

Lesson #4
In addition to holding a clear vision, leadership involves facilitating the emergence of novelty by building and nurturing networks of communications; creating a learning culture in which questioning is encouraged and innovation is rewarded; creating a climate of trust and mutual support; and recognizing viable novelty when it emerges, while allowing the freedom to make mistakes.
– Fritjof Capra

in response to this question posed by Annick Bureaud on the [new media curating] list (in a discussion about access to digital information:

The question might be : how much do you (really) pay to get access to a document, how much the people who have worked to provide the access to this document are paid, who (ultimately) pays for this service?

waiting for Deutsche Telekom is not unlike waiting for Godot. there is a tacit sense of inevitable loss and failure. of lack and dis-communications. or a return just at the singular moment when one has to run to the toilet, to the post, or just to the garden house to fetch a tool or to bring a case of empties onto the terrace. the T-Kom guy is waiting down the block with a pair of binoculars and a high-sensitivity microphone to catch these moments, whereupon he runs to the door, knocks Lightly, and runs back to his truck, driving off in a fury of absence, already composing in mind the scenario to type into his PDA. nobody home, case closed. ISDN? DSL? T-Online? Festnetz? upload? download? surfen? HotSpot Standorten? fahgettit. case closed. wait until next week. or so.

yeah, it’s frustrating, participating in this techno-social system when it doesn’t work. when it does, the frustration in sublimated by the satisfaction of social functioning.

a trip to the T-Com office in Kiel ends up not really helping, the pretty girl behind the counter only knows the scripts that she is taught and how to keep her shirt slightly unbuttoned so that her lacy black bra shows. so, no real problem-solving can be accomplished — on the contrary, she adds another layer of problems by issuing a modem which is incompatible with the data speeds of the service that Christian has ordered. crazy. and the way the corporation makes the usual stupid move of constructing a proprietary face/interface on the network. to cover the complexity with a non-functional layer of bullshit. more than annoying. and the worst is the propaganda of the advertising showing ubiquitously grinning models who clearly are not real people.

what else is new? another book Noise Media Language about (fluxus) (sound) (artist) Yasunao Tone put out by errant bodies — looks real interesting.

so it goes. pedagogic extravagances, personal liberties, dialogue, Light, revolution, action. and so on…

questions arising from the second round of dialogue pairs yesterday:

Why are you looking for a unified theory?

What is the significance of your octagonal earring (assuming it’s not just an accessory)?

How can the energy affect the technical model — for example, social networks in the internet?

Will we try to bring the course to a technical level in the meaning of morality or communications?

How can the energy in a field influence all points in it simultaneously — wouldn’t there be a problem with time?

How do expectations influence ourselves / our lives / our encounters with other human beings?

What if everyone shared John’s worldview, would that solve all (any?) of our problems?

If death is a catastrophe, is birth also?

Was this a day of crisis because there were different points of view in the room, or has that been a step forward?

Who can or should alter the permissions for one system to drain the energy of an other one to get stronger — without giving it back — in an unfair way: The elements of the system being drained or the elements of the unfair system?

Is there a lack of energy (flow) between the Self & the Other through digital communications?

Since we try to create a balance between “flow” and “block” in order to reach a good level, could we integrate “chaos” in this dialogue? What would the influence of chaos be?

body morphology. body symmetry. of course, beauty is (scientifically) proven to be related to facial and body symmetry among other parameters of length, size, girth, curves, color, and other transitory features that lay upon us in the quick passing ether to being to ether. and there is dysmorphophobia, the fear of body shape being somehow wrong. imperfect. hmm.

spend the evening trashing a 3-inch high pile of class evaluations from my CU teaching days. noting both positive and negative comments in all the dross and three-decimal-place statistical analysis of the results. but feeling quite good about the quite good ratings overall. scanning selected records. uff! why carry it around: why not conflagurate? makes a nice fire to heat the house at least. along with those evaluations, papers a bit more problematic to dispose of — the daily role sheets — aka, Question of the Day (as a .pdf page). a literal project in network facilitation. a form where one student is chosen at random every day to pose the question of the day at the top of the page, and the rest of the class has to write in their name, and along with that, in a box, an answer to the question of the day. these played a very interesting role in the class — they would generally circulate during the entire 3-hour studio class period, between filling out the questions, and subsequent interest in the answers. sometimes they got quite elaborate (What was your most recent and vivid dream?), sometimes basic (what’s your favorite breakfast food?). they were always filled out religiously with an attention to detail and careful thought on everyone’s part — interesting fallout from such a basic exercise. and they served that boring function to keep attendance records. ugh. I often thought that I should somehow make this an interactive web project — for someone to transcribe the answers into a large grid that would be a record of the grouping of the class, but there never seemed to be the time to do it. so, a transitory, functional communications tool which broke down the barriers between peers. and a snapshot of the attentions of young college students in Amurika at the dawn of the millennium. so I heat the room for a couple hours.

I don’t normally post long passages of other writers, but Alan (Sondheim) posted this to nettime today: it penetrated the fog of hypo-texts that floods a typical day in front of screen-life.

The power grid provides 60 Hz here at approximately 115-117 volts; this is maintained by dynamos driven by steam or coal or oil or hydro held together in a malleable grid. The grid enters the city, where electricity is parceled out through substations to cables continuously maintained and repaired. Here, the cables are below ground. They drive my Japanese Zaurus PDA which utilizes an entire linux operating system on it. The Zaurus connects to the Internet through a wireless card that most often connects to my Linksys router, which is connected both to the power grid and the DSL modem by a cat cable. The DSL is operated by Verizon with its own grid at least nation-wide and continuously-maintained. The DSL of course connects more or less directly to the Internet, which is dependent upon an enormous number of protocol suites for its operation, the most prominent probably TCP/IP. The addresses of the Internet, through which I reach my goal of NOAA weather radar, are maintained by ICANN and other organizations. These organization are run by any number of people, who employ the Net, fax, telephone, and standard mail, to communicate world-wide. (more …)

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks)

1.0 Statement of Problem

1.1 Introductory note

Beginning with a series of broad general statements that converge to frame the trans-disciplinary space of my inquiry, I will move to proposals that are more specific. This approach is an important feature of the research itself — where the applicability and efficacy of a model is best challenged when looking from absolute specific cases to increasingly general situations and vice versa. In framing this essentially divergent research, I would suggest that the proposal first be considered as a whole — as I understand that the depth of my knowledge-base varies across some of the disciplinary spaces. (more …)

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

a field trip starting early, meeting Jonas with a crew of 25 11-year-olds from a workshop at the science museum. we meet on the frosty lawn of the main administration building for NTNU, and after a short exercise to sit for two minutes and list all the sounds they could hear, we proceed to break into small groups and visit the anechoic and echo chambers in the Department for Electronics and Telecommunications. nothing like kids in an echo chamber testing the loudness of their screaming with a Db-meter!

smartmoblogsociallocativefictiongpsteredmedia creatures feeding one on the other, in a frenzy of “what’s next that’s cool” and built for speed. (which ultimately will move ‘it’ on to the next “Next Big Thing.”) seems like another wave of meme-hype reverberating around the extraordinarily limited space of global telecom networks (in collaboration with military satellites). is the price to be paid so removed and hard to comprehend? seems so. I have run across exactly zero critical words about this phenom. instead a flood of vacuous phrases and spin terms that are kept afloat in a social sea by the flatulent buoyancy of affluence, global capital, and ex-military industry. STILL. “radical decentralization” for autonomous consumption of text, image, audio and video — the re-presented and ultimately consumable world. autonomy for re-presentation and re-production of reality — one that fills the belly with gas and the head with language peddled by those same tired techno-utopian spin-doctors. technology always looks its ubiquitous best in the eyes of the über-class. as I click through the verbiage at locative.net (no longer extant) it feels like RedHerring from 1999 or so — so much interlocking terminology leading in a head-rich circle of hype-logic. headmap drops phrases like “everything in the world, animate and inanimate, abstract and concrete, has thoughts attached,” “every place has emotional attachments you can open and save,” and “life flows into inanimate objects.” and behind these words (more and more of them) there is no awareness of or anticipation that there was/is an essence that is a substrate for knowledge and abstracted/systematized human apprehension. that something comes before knowing. and the vitality-draining construction of a Babylonish Tower is an ongoing exercise that society never quite purged from its mind. the path that re-creation bumbles along is not the same one as creation. not even in the same forest.

When people consider the dangers of the chaos of a free intensely networked spatially augmented augmented world, they should also consider that like all technological advances it offers tools to both sides of any argument. ‘ends appropriate means’ may seem ominous but the ends can just as well be social advancement. Even in a critical situation, disaster response and recovery in a world of spontaneous peer to peer mesh networks, running evolved social software, seems like a sane option for coordination of local efforts to recover and help from outside. The homeland security initiative raised the point that a citizen owned spatially aware communications network could be invaluable in a crisis. — headmap.org ideolog

what kind of crisis? when shopping is compromised? what can be meant by the terms ‘crisis’ and ‘homeland security’ being used in the same context? and, invaluable to whom? a threat to the status quo? or is there a radical suggestion that the masters tools be used to displace the master? funny, though, the effect of wielding a tool is perhaps the same, regardless of the wielder. that is, on the wielder, not on the hapless victim!

and what if, just what if these technological deployments are subsequently used for command-and-control, will everyone be surprised and taken aback? gee, we never imagined…

and the other core issue — whether you believe that all things are connected by a relatively un-knowable (or un-circumscribable) substratum or whether you consider that phenomenal existence is populated by discrete and completely independent objects, actions, and beings. that driving an SUV in Chicago rush hour has absolutely no connection to the presence of an M1 Abrams tank parked on a bridge outside of Falluja. that typing these words on this keyboard into this device has no connection with degradation of ground water in the Kwale region of Kenya from titanium mining.

pixelache finally finishes up with Tuomas’ and Mukul’s analog vs digital dual in the Kiasma Theater. enjoying a quiet morning without a particular agenda except for catching up with communications, especially answering Frieder’s pro-vocative recent email that is inspiring me to think and write toward my doctoral studies. heavy work, but ultimately feeling quite good to commit to paper (well, hard-drive) a concise framework for the explorations that may ultimately become the thesis. even if not, the exercise is extremely valuable.

ambienttv also performed their work TRiPTyCHoN, a complicated work-in-progress that is rooted in mapping human experience across a physical space. in this case, messages sent in from participants who were invited to make a walk between the Parliament steps and the steps of the cathedral, about a kilometer. along the walk, using a gps unit connected to a gprs-enabled palm with a custom interface, they were to write text messages. these messages were then sent to a server which recorded the location and the text into a database. I did a walk on Friday afternoon, slowly making my way, avoiding satellite shadows, and drifting through a space of emotional history. spontaneity was somewhat inhibited by the Lightweight but cumbersome physical interface. cold fingers. despite, I ended up drifting through parts of the history that was mapped across this very neighborhood through relationship. cafes, clubs, theaters, bars, corners, bus-stops, trams, shops all had a tangible memory overlay. poignant, as memory can often be about what has been lost. direct, as the triggers of place are very much real. silent, internal. Mukul called me after I had returned the device to Antony in the Kiasma Cafe, saying that it was a nice performance, the best one they got. He and David were on the island, actually neighbors in one of the nifca residency flats, they were monitoring reception of the ‘wander’ in real-time.

interesting experience. it was a measure of my ability to push through a technological interface, enabling some kind of flow-through. drawing focus, projecting energy, emotive force.

Dad passes this evening. after this long struggle, and a long life. code blue, Janet calls, racing into the hospital. Nancy and Mom there, holding his hands. his heart couldn’t bear more time here. I am just home from school, exhausted. stop what I am doing, and concentrate on a slender thread of consciousness. Light some incense. crumble some sage harvested for just this purpose from the depths of Sand Canyon off the Yampa, press it deep into the palms, smelling the released sweetness. burn some, the smoke mixing with the incense. an intuitive impulse says “write the time now.” on a 3×5 card, I write the time, 6:52. a call comes ten minutes later, he has passed. as birth is the surfacing, death is the submerging of soul back into its own, its transitory place. time shivers, small waves move outward, and the bardo of passing opens. unmeasured intuition and connection. still small voices, suspension of the material presence.
(more …)

Iceland Day. when the Icelanders brave cold wet weather and mingle on the streets.

Sogpal Rimpoche reminds and reminds and reminds. leaving nothing unclear. language suggesting practice. the hints are everywhere, and always elusive. rabbits in the 20×40 foot grass yard, they are starving for the drought. and, at the same time, an expert reminds Westerners that the word drought is not applicable to a place technically defined as a desert. it’s always dry here, and to have a lawn is an alien fragment of bourgeoisie command-and-control of an environment that will win out eventually. the rabbits, gophers, deer, the occasional javelina all love to feast on green garden delicacies, imported gently from New England and Old. while young hopeless and having no future Palestinians rip self and others apart. shreds. what is the statistic? in 5 years there will be 600 million young Islamic males between 18-25? don’t quote me on that. think that’s what passed the eyes. somewhere in the fragmented media flow partaken of.

meanwhile, thumbing seven years of travelog nose at the new wave of bloggers. they seem to think that personal logs of life-notes are somehow a distinct innovation. telling stories from the road, from life, in networked spaces. at the same time, lamenting my own inability to innovate my own network space quicker. often speaking about network presence with students, but aside from the anomalous remote communications regime operating for the last 20-odd years, what is there?

sunrise. brain seems most lively now, working on the syllabi of the upcoming courses.

stone upon stone
I enter The Thing
mouth yawning
complete absence abides
within. from this void a Light appears
the Light penetrates The Thing
throughout, almost completely
except immediately beneath the surface
where liquid eye
does not go
I see this
in a Dream, eyes open.
and want to cry.

so it goes. morning. waiting for. the sun. and for a new computer. ten years on, having had three laptops, waiting for the fourth, a Titanium PowerBook. have probably spent USD 12,000 total on them, cumulatively. and on other digital equipment, well, another USD 3,000 or so. telecommunications costs, post box rent. in aid of remote presence.

the raw suspicion that stability is a straw dog. (a term that Anthony first raised into my consciousness). in that conversation in a bar-restaurant somewhere on the Delaware River a long time ago. wondering what happened to him, no words from him in many, 18 moons ago. while now in the moment, the Leonids rain down from the sky. he was supposed to be going to Flagstaff, the wanderer that he is.

the last morning of the Media Lab workshop, I have something of a microscopic revelation in the number six tram. understanding that I am talking deeply about the power of presence as a creative strategy and practice, traveling around Europe preaching this, and all the while, at the same time, leaving my little boy behind. a little boy who is not so little anymore. everything seems impossible for this family. relationships are crushed and fragmented, distorted and removed, applied over distance and imbalanced. hmmmmmm.

another thread that came from the workshop this week were characterizations about the externalization of memory and the problem of re-presentation. with memory removed from the embodied self, there is an erosion of personal autonomy (the external localized memory is the technological network — which is not a network after all, but a lateral hierarchy). the act of placing memory externally reifies what would be an internally dynamic condition of evolutionary presence. and contributes to an ethical or even moral slide. (assuming that a static condition of memory is problematic — haven’t meditated on that one so much.)

here in Jyväskylä, dinner with Niina, finding out about the local situation (email never provides enough communications spectrum), in a hotel on campus by the lake. seminar tomorrow. a late call, like those many others, of the sadness I have caused to an Other. by not respecting innocence. and not providing the right dreams.

back to Kiel via Hamburg, on the train once again. having also once again not done much there at all except meet intensively with a small group of other humans and speaking, exchanging energies with them. ideas like forms of deep-praxis, life-changing practices, and ways of communicating my ideas in more visceral ways come up. and logistics, and that flow, analog and continuous, of life, forward, and the sensual information that feeds into that.

the music that I encoded at Wolfgang’s is quite electric/eclectic. like listening to KCRW radio. in Santa Monica. where eyes opened to other forms of thinking and being. about as experimental as you can get.

like having the students choose an energy source, and give weekly reports on it to the others. or, as arose in Kiel as well, that image of the two cans with a string between them. communications-at-a-distance.

hearing last night the depth of living under the weight of manifest fears in Bogota. how that goes deeply into re-arranging the body’s energy state. we may stand, consciously apart from the body, but eventually it comes back to connect with that removed consciousness. with a vengeance if it has been ignored too long. saying, DOn’t IGNORE THE LIMITATIONS OF SENSUAL PRESENCE, yep.

passing a massive antenna installation a bit the the north of the rail line. military, and probably extreme long wavelength array for submarine or global communications. a relic of the past? like the landstrasse lined with the Linden trees. and the fallow, wild fields. a higher level of wildness and disorder. than in the former West, still. nice.

I should not be here, I should be elsewhere, by measure of PLANS. but plans shift and slide, along with the whim of the body presence. missed my flight this morning at 0700 to Prague via Helsinki and Stockholm. first time I have ever missed a flight. anywhere. cost me some bucks, and now I miss the whole cafe9.net meeting in Prague. along with a lecture at the Academy in Brno. and the ensuing reconstruction of schedules and flights makes my head ache. doing too many things, and not enough. nothing and everything. Loki is extremely happy that I am staying another week at least. but I see no solution. Iceland does not work for me. there is no way for me to live here, unless I was fluent with the language. unlike other places where there is enough room in the culture for a foreigner to exist in first language, here not. and I have too many things going on elsewhere anyway. cafe9.net. I hardly mention the internal mechanics of this project. no details, no revelations. though I have never been criticized about revealing anything in these pages, except by Sanna, but that is passé at this point. cafe9.net rumbles on. despite. but lately, since October or so, maybe even last summer, whenever the slip in communications began to happen, the dislocation of immediate being and remote presence, a gap, a slippage, opened up, a dissatisfaction has been growing with THE MEDIUM — the net, and the role, the effect it has had on my situation. in contact with so many people that I can hardly think. several days ago, before the rigidity of my lower back lead to this degraded condition, there was a subterranean urge to meditation, an urge that I did not quite fulfill. each time a discontinuity explodes on linear and insulated life, psyche measures itself against virtual standards. hints of higher being play across media-saturated energy configurations. untouchable. inaccessible. over there. other life-styles seem to creep further away. “what if?” becomes “because that’s the way it is.” damnation. peaceful damnation. mistakes. paying for past errors in judgment, SINS, whatever that means. if a sin is the transgression of the mind against the combined being of the soul and the body. the apokalyptic dream. reflects. what it is to be here and now. like speaking with a mouth full of small round pebbles, black basalt, worn smooth. easy to swallow. hard to talk. and then there is.

massive busy-ness over the weekend with the ~/Connected conference at the Lasipalatsi. Tapio had asked me earlier if I could help out with activities on the ground, and although I was pretty busy anyway, I was around to help, then ended up being quite involved in the discussions, and even made a short public presentation at the end in Bio Rex, dealing with best-practice scenarios for education/learning situations. Polar Circuit was held up as that model in learning situations, along with the idea of open-platform, socially balanced situations.

/~Connected press releases for local and translocal use

Cultural industries and independent media cultural production are of primary importance for Finnish policy development, as a new program, “Content Finland” is being drafted during next year. In each European country, goals of both national and transnational media culture have been met with different strategies. Through /~Connected knowledge and shared experience, it is possible to form models of best practice – and principles for both national and European policy.

The driving force behind this event and series of other meetings prior to it is the ECB, European Cultural Backbone (http://ecb.t0.or.at/, http://www.e-c-b.net/). It is a network of media cultural organizations, centers, and active individuals throughout Europe, not only European Union member countries. To quote Dr. Peter Wittmann, Austrian State Secretary for the Arts, “The European Cultural Backbone is the logical extension of this ongoing dialog between cultural practitioners and policy makers regarding strategies of “practice to policy” on both national and European levels.”

The Main organizer of /~Connected, the Lasipalatsi Media Center, also seeks to discuss how European media centers could increasingly collaborate. How to best connect venues of presenting media culture and sites that produce it? Support of networks, bandwidth, mobility, distribution and production are key factors for policy discussion.

Traditionally, in a European democracy, public space has been defined through access to public institutions, freedom to move in city spaces and through the existence of certain democratic instruments such as public libraries and publicly supported broadcast media. New media, Internet in particular, has made it possible to more actively shift content production to smaller units or groups. Creation of public space can mean support for content production and communication that does not focus on a single mass audience, but particular communities (or consumers) and layers within the larger society and the networked world. Major issue for debate is thus to consider, how to best connect various models of best practice and policy that enable cultural production in a networked, changing Europe.

The seminar takes place in the very center of Helsinki, in Lasipalatsi Media Center (http://www.lasipalatsi.fi). Meals during the conference program are provided for by the organizers and there is no attendance fee. We are providing air fare and accommodation for a group of participants that comes from smaller media centers and organizations. We are happy to assist your travel arrangements by providing information on accommodation and flights.

/~CONNECTED brings together practitioners, producers and policy makers within contemporary media culture in Europe. Its attempts to create exchanges of experience and information between organizations and individuals from different fields: media cultural organizations, media centers, policy makers on a local, national and European level, media art organizations, corporate research labs and university researchers.

Following events such as P2P conference in Netherlands and Networking Centers of Innovation in Austria, it explores the ways in which local experiences can be compared, exchanged and rewritten to form models of best practice.

The event will officially launch the ECB, European Cultural Backbone, a network based on trust and a shared interest to promote a rich media cultural practice, which already flourishes in Europe. The network proposes that an Internet Backbone or a set wide bandwidth would be subsidized by the EU in order to enable transnational media production, broadcast transmission of events and inexpensive communications. The ECB acts as an advisory body for the policy makers nationally and within the EU.

/~CONNECTED is very much about the goals of the ECB:

1) Bandwidth for media culture
2) Support for models of best practice
3) Active investigation of what European media culture consists of
4) Enhanced networking between media cultural organizations, individual hubs” and policy makers.

/~CONNECTED refers to the ways in which media cultural local practices and organizations create collaboration, projects, discourse and policy across and partly independent of national borders. Emerging networks, projects and content are no longer international, but translocal by nature, already connected.

day after the Temp Lab presentation on Balkania. again, I don’t make so many notes about anything these days, so full of busy-ness everything is. but last night somebody made the statement, something like “art after artifact, art as communications.” which somehow, despite its obviousness to me, jolted a resonant cord (spinal or astral) inside that had not been directly stimulated before. the conflict between the two areas (matter vs [energy] flow) is apparent but is not surfaced much in the space of discourse that I circulate through. but so little discourse occurs anyway in the Academy, it could happen that by spending too much time in that ideological space, internal sources are bled away completely. and awarenesses diminish to the normative social pre-tension.

barely time to. most of the day in my Lasipalatsi office working online. remote communications and tele-presence. late dinner, no, another hamburger. uff.

breakfast, moving around the town to catch the atmosphere. another breakfast, then meeting the Bologna2000 people, and so on. the meeting will go on. and on. and the energies will cross linguistic boundaries and so on. simultaneous translation. on into the day and then night. finding levels and places of communications. seeing sights (an Apple sticker on the front windscreen of a motorbike, later a World Wildlife Federation sticker on another windscreen). many shops have succumbed to the chain invasion, but not as many as in Scandinavia. There seem to be many more independent product lines. a magnificent cheese shop around the corner from the hotel. I could buy a whole wheel of Parmesano or Romano if I had the possibility to carry it back (to where?). these are the things (even global capitalism cannot crush — the crystalline atomic interstices — but that is not a good metaphoric image from the energized view of the world — interstices cannot be in a continuum of energy — perhaps a model of flow pathways fits better, a sense of small, granular paths where flow takes radical liberty). Maximum packing densities for global capital is being reached, and still there are large interstitial gaps, spaces, based on the limited ionic structures of capital distribution. the larger the molecule chains, the greater the possibility of impurities. so on. cafe9.net, the official name of this pan-European networking project. now that I have been involved in this project for almost 1.5 years, opti-pessimist. imagining that already at least 150000 Euro have been spent on it so far — on culture-sector subsidies. maybe 50% of it going to the various airlines, 25% to hotels, and 25% to food and other meeting costs. meetings and how that goes. the cultural industry sector of the European economic system is probably the most heavily subsidized sector — not in absolute numeric terms, but if one compares the monies that are available in the private/public sector, and the total public expenditures. artists who complain here become objects of derision, or at least quiet scorn — that things don’t get better, anywhere in the world! and yet, people complain.

into the NextFiveMinutes conference. I have been burned out for much of the time for some reason, almost catching a cold yesterday evening, then this morning, spraining my back with the most minimal movement zipping up my suitcase, I wasn’t even bending over. scared the shit outta me. my panel presence (Tactical Education/Media Competence) was shortly after, and that went quite well, but by mid-afternoon I hobble back the the hotel, barely able to walk because of the sciatic pain. missed an appointment with Nan which I was quite looking forward to, not to mention several dialogues with new contacts. really don’t believe it, that I have done something serious. been stretching all afternoon and evening between bouts resting in bed. nothing else to do! Faugh! miss a dinner with an interesting artist. following are notes for the Tactical Education presentation (on the neoscenes occupation project):

slow start to the day, but then things accelerate in such a positive way that I can hardly understand it, meeting Riita at NIFCA, speaking about many things, Sonja, Anders, making phone calls to Lily, Philip, Ari, Marjanna, and Samu, ending up at MUU to do some work, email has piled up, but all interesting communications that pull me back into my beliefs, things that I believe in con gusto, that when Sanna calls into the evening, I can hardly stop, but do for the sheer pleasantness of another enjoyable conversation and presence. a Guinness I reward myself with, at the same time, making movies in our heads. it is the next day — 0030 when I catch the ferry home. it is winter, beautiful winter. and the cold does not bother me. it is nice. and I can’t believe I am saying/thinking this.

Helgi is visiting from Akureyri, so we have lunch, and otherwise I am working on this site and dealing out communications about the avalanche of activities in the next three months. faxes, email. remote presence. what about being here now? well, the here and now is insistent. later, bumbling around, trying to get to Jeremy’s place for dinner with Helgi. finally taxi it after mis-reading the map that Jeremy gave me. I never confirmed the location of north, and instead made a wrong assumption about the geometry of things.

all things unravel. and I am in planes, buses, and taxis. south to north. plus or minus. no messages on the phone as I leave range for word to come. hauntings. futures compress, pasts well up, present reifies into words that fall like rocks to the floor, gouging everything living, and scratching everything dead. that’s it. ending so quickly, so pointlessly. absolutely no reason for ultimatums about hurt and pain and. so on. fictions churn out. where readers bring wholesale chunks of being into print, neither lost nor found. but set to float in a inner harbor glazed with rainbow oil slicks, half-empty coke cans, and spent condoms. left a pot of black-bean chili cooling on the stove: when it is cool, then there will be nothing more. bags of hot chili powder and basil, corn meal in the cupboard. birch-smoked salmon in the fridge, and everybody is starving for what they don’t want or can’t get. it’ll end up in the garbage. maybe there will be a general cleaning that will take into account the Indonesian Liberation tee-shirt that I threw on the floor in the rush to get out to the taxi to the rail station to store the two bags that I simply couldn’t carry all the way to Trondheim. rolling thoughts of what to do next time in Helsinki. flight back is in two weeks. fourteen days to arrange something. Imatra probably after that. re-arrange Eindhoven. fill out plans for Tornio. give in to the fear. icy fear. or keep going? head south? head west? US for the summer? what’s best for Loki? Iceland, maybe not. the initiative to be mobile to better keep contact with him seems to be receding in the need to get grounded again. the time in Iceland served to point out the serious crisis in the production curve. how things are made, why things are made. and the role of the powerful ego. how did it get so strong, and how does this compare to others’? don’t matter, comparison — that is actually a function of feeding for the ego — that consumptive looking-at-the-Other. that can’t be written out of this script. but most of time previous, I have identified the ego-center of other people’s work, and ignored the spiritual component — made easy and quick judgments based on a limited and possibly fallacious criteria. realizing that pursuit of material interaction (that is, using the material world to “make art,”) along with my developing sense of dematerialization, I must not reject physical manifestations. to do that would reject a certain class of communications that are attenuated by time, space, and possibility. in Oslo at the moment, hoping to get online this evening for a jolt of email to deal with. and to ponder what to begin tomorrow. Trondheim. the first road sign I see is to Hell. if I am correct, hell means bright? or…

the neoscenes occupation project for Ars Electronica (which approaches in days) begins to take some form, at least as an idea:

so it goes. now to make it happen!

logfile

no sleep again. the full moon, the arriving solstice, and the stresses of movement. last night was a curious experience. in an arena where energies were so mis-spent, mis-directed, and un-perceived. experienced, but un-commented upon, imposed and not resisted, and on into the morning. missed train connection, so I will arrived later in Budapest than scheduled which will impinge on my abilities to prepare for tonight’s lecture at the Center for Creative Communications. I am so tired in the morning that I actually get on the wrong train, and head for Salzburg rather than Vienna. this shocks me a lot, and is totally unlike me, it reflects the state I am in. fortunately I am able to get off the train in Wels, only fifteen minutes from Linz, and board another train heading for Vienna. which should happen with considerable more grace than last night. there would have been… is the beginning of a retrospective on the event. or there could have been… energy and power was simply lost in the space that was NOT created. no intertwinedness happening. talk about the oppressive power of language. but it doesn’t really matter, what each individual experienced is simply that. an experience that they walk away with. no gleaming successes, but just a quiet continuation of the voice that is hard to hear in the crowd. no phantasm of world domination follows me.

Sleep comes slowly, my right neck and shoulder are contorted by muscular contraction, internal stress mapping. From traveling, although the travel yesterday went totally smooth. And the situation here in Kiel seems to be absolutely optimal. And even the weather is pleasant. Where to take this text (raw self-consciousness is a worn-out policy). No skills available like Henry Miller had, no raucous sex and rampant depravity to denote. Appreciable way of going, and writing, yes, but as something to emulate, I ain’t got the writing skills. Exactly what are skills in writing? Organizing thoughts, ordered presentation of information, logical arguments, reasonable dialogues, uh, accurate pictures inscribed by words, (mind-states precisely mediated by language), descriptive flashes of brilliance, insight, comic diversion, poetry, what the hell is poetry? Can’t remember the last time I wrote a funny story, although I do tell such things frequently. Oh shit, orbiting egos and oscillating senses. Too much mind energy spent in communications with individuals. I need forays into mass communications. To grind down the specificity at which (where is the body?), well, weariness sets in. Boredom. As a state of bodily function.

I send a proposal to Christa for the Ars work coming up:
word-dialogue-Light-revolution-action: breaking the glass

The history of mediation is also the history of humans seeking to lessen the impact of raw nature and human aggression on their physical being. Language may be thought of as a primal mediating technology, and in that sense, the further mediations imposed on communications between humans — those mediations that are more commonly referred to as technology, are merely additional obstructions to understanding that overlie language. None-the-less, in this moment, it is still possible to speak, and to listen. At the very same moment that mediation stresses our attempts of attentive presence with the Other, it becomes more imperative to engage in Dialogue and in the creation of spaces in which Dialogue might flourish. Dialogue stimulates genesis, transformation, and revelation in life — it is a revolutionary art itself when in critical juxtaposition to silence. Dialogue, as pure expression of heart and soul, is the core of all meaningful activism.

This talk will explore the be-ing of Dialogue, the stresses of mediation, and our presence in the noumenal world.

My workshop at MUU MediaBase began this morning. It has the title Dialogue and Technology and will be addressing issues where the power of individual dialogue intersect the mediating forces of technology. My own introduction runs something like: