Again in a situation with a friend, helping purge and order an overwhelming abundance of stuff. The developed world is drowning in its own excess accumulation of stuff. Between direct body consumption as manifest in the wide-spread epidemic of obesity and the external accumulation of stuff, there is little room for living. A moment spent managing stuff is a moment of life lost forever.

To maintain a system of stuff takes energy. Else disorder of all that vibrating stuff become a field of chaos for the embodied human to simply sink into the midst of. Life becomes dominated by either the life-time required to maintain the order of the stuff, or the increased disorder that becomes a distorting filter enveloping the once-clear senses.

Purge some and apply order to the remaining stuff. Mostly purge — duplicate stuff, triplicate stuff, quadruplicate stuff — less stuff is more life. Stuff impedes our full experience of life, it drags us down into lackluster, overwhelmed, and subordinate be-ing (or even less to mere consumer). Finding a balance is tough when immersed in the (absolutely pathological) ‘normative’ behavior of the developed world.
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A techno-social system is predicated and constructed on a system of control exerted on the flows of energy which are antithetical to its existence or that simply exist ‘out there.’ Within a techno-social system, at all scales, levels, and between all actors, there exists a constant, dynamic re-balancing of these energies (energy flows). With an input of external energy as the source, the overall techno-social system will exert varying levels of control over different spatio-temporal regions. Control is essentially the existence of prescribed pathways of flow which insure the desired persistence of stasis in a sea of chaotic flows. The degree that a techno-social system can proscribe controlled pathways is the degree of coherence that techno-social system will have. (more …)

Arendt‘s tripartite approach to the sociopolitical — Work, Labor, Action — in “The Human Condition” suggests the expenditure or the flow of energy. All three are intertwined within the do-ing, the be-ing of life, and in the sense that they are all embodied expressions of life-energy, they are equal, divided only by the particularities of the pathways of expression of those energies. She begins, I believe correctly, with viva activa as her source: the active, activated life. However, she does not explicitly posit a connection between viva activa and the source of the possibility for an active life, ones life-energy (sourced in the energized thermodynamic flows of life itself).  These impulses towards the social structures of collective life must have a source, an activated well-spring that drives the cumulative social (and life) dynamic.  The question of the source is perhaps more important than the ultimate expression of the source.

It is in the interpretation of work, labor, and action as mappings of social relation where she initially frames difference as emerging from an expression of material “durability.” She frames the “durability of the world” from this materialistic sense, a durability that “gives the things in the world their relative independence from men who produce and use them.” I think this is precisely where she makes a mistake: a core flaw in Western thinking lies in the fundamental disconnect of that which is ‘out there’ to that which is ourselves. Although those externals of ‘what man hath wrought’ appear to have the “function of stabilizing human life,” it is this precise separation which, while offering an objective relationship with “the environment of nature,” conceptually and perceptually separates us from nature.

Durability is a metric which is immersed in time and related to the structural/material characteristics of an energy configuration. It also relates to complexity and the thermodynamic qualities of the human-constructed configuration. To be durable is must be able to persist in time: to resist change, in Latin durus means “hard.” Change, as the enemy of durability, can only be resisted or counteracted by an influx of the ‘correct’ or reinforcing form of energy. By correct I mean an energy that promotes the persistence of a particular configuration versus the dissolution of the configuration. Energy may cause either or both to occur.

For example, with prototypical techno-social persistence in mind, think of an object, a building, fashioned from stone. The energy necessary to re-configure raw, in situ stone into a building is significant. The intermediate (human) source is embodied energy, or a wide techno-social infrastructure supporting machinic augmentation of the body. It is no coincidence that stone structures are often co-located with the central hubs of significant techno-social civilizations. The high initial pay-out is rewarded by a longer-term persistence compared to, say, wood which requires a smaller initial pay-out of energy. Clearly there is a direct correlation between the durability of human configured situations and the initial and continuing availability of energy input into various configurations of expression.

A ‘separated’ approach to activated life denies what is quantum ‘fact.’ The ‘material’ substance of whatever constitutes the self is completely connected, embedded, not as reified and ordered crystal in a matrix, but as merely another expression of a continuous field of energy. It is perhaps correct to imagine that one of the only things that distinguish ‘us’ from ‘out there’ is the difference in thermodynamic state (negentropic) and state of complexity. Of course, somewhere within that complexity is an intentional consciousness which seems to demand “subjective control over our physical circumstances” (King, 2006), but subjectivity needs to be thought of differently. Or just not thought of at all.

Why?

Instead of hunting for subjective patterns in the flux of energy that is the substrate of everything, maybe it’s better just to experience the flow: to work, to labor, to act.

Ach, so much to read, so much to understand. Fifteen months into the process, and the prospect of applying a metric to progress: just to see, feel, is it doable? Is it worth it? Is this stressful immersion into the removed praxis of paying life-time-attention to the sometimes resonant remains of prior lives a good thing? Can immersion in the past be a good thing? Wallowing, submerged in the resonant archive of other times and places, people.

Have an incredibly erotic dream with Jennifer D., back from the Culture Capitals 2000 project in Prague. Will have to email her. Otherwise watery squint-eyed watching of rotating the stellar field.

This morning, a raptor circles a hundred meters away with its mate hidden in the trees along Pool Creek, making a creeeewing sound. It’s the same noise it made when I wandered over to the creek earlier in the morning. All the birds are noisy — it makes a multi-dimensional flow which lies on the ear with pleasing insistence. No need to move the head, as the sources are in motion and occasionally in sight.
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Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.

[Complexity and simplicity are used here as general indicators of the depth and breadth of the techno-social system's process of provision and production that leads to services, situations, or products deemed necessary for participants. Metrics of complexity would include geographic proximity, ease of access, energy density, and the number of substantive steps required to produce a product or create a desired energy flow. The relative necessity of a product is highly subjective and varies widely between different systems. Necessity is a cultural construct (complementing, say, Maslow's needful ranking). Complexity may be indicated by the number of discrete steps that can be described that a process passes through -- steps/degrees of flow alteration.]

When examining a production system, the primary question would have to be, “does this process end with a net gain of energy that can be subsequently utilized for the evolutionary advantage of the social system?” This question itself would suggest the inevitable rise of an elite subgroup when the wider population reaches certain environmental carrying thresholds — where that (evolutionarily optimal) subgroup is carried by the energy-providing activities of a wider group. But this is another issue to look at later.

The existence of (the) ‘natural disaster’ suggests that the state of a particular techno-social system may be seen essentially as the (ordered) organization of flows to keep back natural chaotic forces or to push those natural forces along certain (technologically-defined) pathways. Does this make the system merely at the affect of natural laws, and thus binding it into a materially deterministic framework? Nah, that ignores quantum, with its statistically indeterminate outcomes. Although obviously, any techno-social system is bound to thermodynamics and all other prescribed or yet unknown ‘natural laws.’

System collapse to simplicity is obviously a result of the ‘natural’ disaster precipitated by war (as an extension of human survival mechanisms?). War is the impingement of one techno-socially organized and directed expression of ordered energy onto another — with one set of system pathways disrupted to greater simplicity. Loss could be defined by the destruction of the internal structure for the directing of cumulative energy of participants in that social system. Winning is essentially acquiring access to the total (or partial) energy sources of the losing social system. This includes individuals, and all the pathways of energy flow that they have constructed — these are then directed, incorporated, into the winning system.

The whole deterministic model seems to focus on material interpretations — that is, metrics of ‘advance’ that will happen along an apparently calculable technological trajectory. Rather, as outlined here, there are conditions of technological advance and retreat that are framed by other factors which make the prediction of a trajectory highly inaccurate. The first being the level of complexity of the techno-social systems, the second, the efficiency of that system, and the third, the stability. All of these factors fluctuate over time and are deeply embedded in a milieu of human and, indeed, cosmological factors. The general trend, however, looking at the broad arc of the history of technology is to increasing complexity, variable-yet-generally-increasing control by social systems of a wider range of ‘natural’ energy flows. Is it deterministic to say that there will be an increase in complexity of any techno-social system unless interrupted by natural disaster? [Clearly, the complexity of a (the!) techno-social system is limited, as the energy basis for the system is not infinite: what does that imply?]

What motivates this evolution to increasing complexity? The short answer could be the drive to reproductive advantage — evolutionary motivations for life to not just continue, but continue with advantage over the competition. It is easy to see that the affect of this drive could be interpreted as having its own character and endless source of ‘forward’ motivation. But clearly the ultimate source for that is, again, the impelling force of life-systems to simply continue and continue with ever-greater complexity (creating an ever-widening ring of increasing entropy). So, the ‘explanation’ for technological change, as a social phenomena, ultimately rests, as do all social systems, on the fundamentals of living systems.

Vastly complex systems obscure the actual and perceived level of reproductive advantage — for example, while modern Western medical advances have increased overall abilities for successful propagation of the species, the wider technological system on which that (medical)sub-system depends generates substances (and situations) toxic to reproductive viability and life in general. One would then have to argue that the reproductive viability increase is for a limited number of the total population. Those remaining after the cull benefit from technologically augmented survival, while the biologically and energetically compromised remainder are ‘used up’ in supporting the few. The increase of complexity may be directly correlated to the larger absolute number of people, combined with the drive to absolutely optimize reproductive capabilities of those in the positions of power at the same time as the elimination of all actual or potential competing life-forces.

The latch handles on both the driver- and passenger-side door are broken. There is a certain geometry on the plastic lever-arm which, over time of repeated lifting motions, fails. So I have to replace them. The truck is relatively old, compared to the average age of vehicles on the road. I call the Toyota dealer nearby, and they want almost USD100 for each replacement handle. This is called an OEM part — Original Equipment Manufactured — a part which carries some of the branded weight of the maker and its record of quality along with a premium price (including a substantial markup to underwrite the existence of the dealer distribution system). Too much! I knew this would be the case before I called, but I wanted to set a ceiling price before looking elsewhere, online. This particular vehicle model was globally a widely-distributed frame, body, and engine combination and so there turns out to be a substantial non-OEM parts market. The only question is one of quality. Non-OEM parts online appear to be both Mainland Chinese- and Taiwanese-made with what seems to be a substantial US distribution presence in the form of highly discounted warehouses designed for online mail-order sales (with Ebay, Amazon, and their own web sales presence). I find the parts, in several styles (chromed plastic and black) for a small fraction of the OEM cost, USD 20 with free shipping.

Next, before ordering, I have to ascertain whether or not there are ‘issues’ that will prevent me from replacing the units myself. This might mean lacking special tools, or some unusual glitch of construction geometry that will nullify my amateur (but extensive) mechanical skills. I pick up a copy of a non-OEM repair manual for the vehicle at the public library and review the procedures before assembling the tools that I will likely need for the task. On a warm and sunny day I do a test strip-down of the door — memories of helping my father repair his cars on bitter-cold winter days still haunts my fingers. It looks like it is possible, and perhaps even easy to do the job (keeping in mind Murphy’s Law). It takes about 45 minutes with some fine-tuning of process, location and selection of appropriate tools, and such. In the process, I am dismayed to discover that a previous owner has made a modification in the form of two slices in the interior door-frame steel, creating a tab which was apparently bent out to access something, though I don’t see what or why this has been done. And to do that, they cut through the sheet plastic dust liner leaving no direct weather seal between the exterior of the door and the interior. This handiwork I read as a brute-force repair methodology. I don’t approve, one reason is that in the process of cutting the steel, the jerk has exposed edges which are a serious threat to my body wall: hands will require constant attention to avoid a potentially bloody intersection. The other reason is that the two cuts likely affect the structural integrity of the door frame itself, although not under normal use, rather in an impact situation. That and it just isn’t elegant. ach!

I go back online to hunt for the range of prices and to see if I can ascertain the relative qualities of the non-OEM parts. There are photos, but they are not large enough to see the difference between, for example, cast and stamped metal fittings, a big indicator of potential life-time of the parts. I decide to order one for the driver’s side door first to see what I get. The drivers-side handle hasn’t completely failed yet, but if it does, I would be in trouble — the door could not be opened from the outside! The replacement arrives a few days later. The distributor is in California which makes sense in proximity to the supplier in Asia and the market in that vehicle-rich state.

I compare the original (failed) part with the new replacement. It appears that they are of roughly comparable quality — given that both originals have failed. Apparently there is a convergence of a design flaw in the injection-molded lift-handle which then fails under repeat stressing (lifting of the handle to release the door-latch and opening the door). I doubt that I will still have the vehicle when or if the new unit fails. It is possible to learn other details by closely examining the entire mechanism — I can see that there is no objective gain to the functioning of the handle unit if I pull hard on it or if I pull out rather than up. This is a critical observation — cranking hard on the handle will not improve the operation or improve the potential functioning of a proper outcome, that is, opening the door. Noting this, I can see that too much force has likely been used, over time, to lift the handle, and finally stressing the plastic to failure. This is retrospective evidence of a user not being aware of the optimal or correct operation of the tool (the handle being a device for opening the door, as well as perhaps the entire vehicle as a tool to move oneself around).

It takes about an hour of twiddling and futzing for the installation, including some dropped bolts, and contortions required for the hard-to-handle geometries of parts-plus-fasteners-plus-limited-access. This is where experience becomes a desired quality. Each repair process may be optimized through repetition and experimentation.

For example, when almost completely done, ready to attach the inner door release handle only to find that I have not made sure the release arm is accessible in the handle hole in the door panel. Instead, it has dropped down while I was fastening the door panel snaps, so I have to remove the whole door panel again to set the release arm in a place rendering it accessible later. Many lesser and greater details make up points for optimization along the process. Usually the third or fourth time one undertakes such a task, it is quite refined compared to the tentative first round — nothing like the lesson of barked-knuckles on a cold day — embodied memory!

Lost fasteners are a familiar bane, though this time, with a specific twist. I am always careful where I place any removed nut, bolt, c-ring, shim, washer, whatever, and before I get to that point, I look carefully to see their configuration in situ for potential places where they might fall and be lost or inaccessible.

The instructions for removing the c-rings on the window cranks include a novel technique which I immediately wonder if it is a designed solution — another words, whether the original designers anticipated the removal concept and incorporated it into the precise construction technique — or is it an after-thought, arrived at by some clever mechanic who had done the process so many times that s/he stumbled on a quick solution. The instructions call for a shop rag to be slid between the window crank handle and the door panel and worked side to side to unsnap the c-ring holding the handle over the knurled crank-post. It works. But in my in-experience with the technique, I am not holding the rag completely correct. I put too much tension into it, and when I am disassembling the door panel the second time (to retrieve the release arm!), the rag snaps from my fingers and the c-ring flies off into some leaves on the ground. I hear it land, but cannot place the sound very accurately. Small, metal, somewhere in a circle perhaps 2.5-meters in diameter of messy vegetation. Forget it. Gone. I make a cursory look around, but it’s hopeless.

Otherwise, the process seems doable and, at a fraction of the cost of having the dealership do it, why not? It is satisfying and enjoyable through a combination of saving money and decent weather. Now, if it had been an electric door lock? The cost would have been minimum an order of magnitude greater, and probably would have taken five times longer to do by the complexity of the task. Basic user-fixable technology on cars is rare these days, and that evolution is a clear example of a loss of autonomy as tasks are surrendered to more and more highly trained technician/mechanics and digital diagnostic devices.

Gotta change the spark plugs and cables next. A thought which immediately jogs memory of stripping the plug threads by over-torquing a plug on my old 1966 VW engine, requiring a major dis-assembly of the engine block for putting replacement threaded inserts in. uff.

In the contemporary framework of human encounter — dominated by instances of hyper-commerce and of tele-mediated presence — life changes to fit the mediation (it does not evolve in the same sense that Darwin’s idea of the process; instead it simply fits the technology), and the character of encounter with(in) life alters for each shift in the techno-social milieu that collectively generates the allowed pathways of exchange. Freedom is not a question in this situation. Nor is autonomy. Those are absolutes of the abstract: virginal conceptions not directly related to the contingencies of be-ing in and of the world. Absolutes and abstractions do not prepare the Self for the shifting potentialities of collective human encounter which proceed by degree and layered complexity. And indeed, when abstractions govern encounter, the full field of possibility of human encounter is quickly limited to a much-less-than-finite set of conditions, processes, and outcomes. There arises the alienation of emotive loss in this limitation, but that is another issue to raise elsewhere. Or perhaps this alienation is the reciprocal experience of the (unfulfilled) possibilities of creative encounter.

Or is all this just about losing or gaining procreative (evolutionary) advantage for the species (via technological augmentation), and nothing more?

The fact that the strongest, most beautiful, most intelligent are, overall, given social reward when compared to the least. (Recognizing this, the revolutionary community organizer, Jesus, said (as interpolated by Mathew) “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth,” to invert the perception of this evolutionary order, and the alternative fact that following his lead will actually alter the order. Was this a miraculous strike at limited potentialities? Or mere agitprop for political expediency?

I was telling someone the other day that I am a good participant. I know how to jump into a situation and contribute in a way that is sensitive to the ambient flows that are happening at the same time as clearly manifesting a unique set of contributing flows. Perhaps a bit too conservative in respecting the paths of those ambient flows, but it’s probably better to be slightly more conservative than liberal. Uhh, such loaded terms. Useless words after they are so distorted by socio-politics of certain cultural configurations. Although it is ironic to note that here in Australia their political meaning is in (antipodal) opposition. Which simply emphasizes the idiocy of politics (as Peter Tosh observed once: Politics, “poli” means people, “ticks” are parasites, politics, parasites on the people). Words, language, always tends to go through this reification process. Followed by a morphing process when the reified language becomes overwhelmed when attempting to explicate new situations or when circumscribing known situations with a different point-of-view. The reified structures will be bolstered and protected until usage simply makes them redundant.
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(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).
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Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a Utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. — Joseph A. Tainter

There is much to explore in the ideas around organizational complexity/simplicity correlated with high/low energy requirements for a system — essentially basic thermodynamics (it always comes down to this). If the wider (widest) scale of human systems could scale social complexity down, the energy requirements would experience a correlative drop. But this is a very substantial IF. And it would mean that the energy reach of the average individual would consequently contract. And human natures seem to preclude any sacrifice of control that is a crucial part of the existing order. China fancies itself victorious, clambering over other nations to arrive soon at the top of the influential complexity heap, but it will soon discover that the price for this status is, literally, high. And it too, as a complex system, will gradually implode again. Though likely not after extracting, demanding, a high flow, or tribute, as the US is now doing, from the global system. That flow comprising the over-consumption and thus concentration of widely distributed materials which now, in their post-use state leave the globe energetically worse off. In the end this is not an issue of nation-state guilt, it is simply the evolutionary state of the tool-wielding bipedal mammalian species. The (over-consuming) developed world crosses many demographic and geographic borders, while likewise the under-consumers are widely distributed.

The human species may be seen as having evolved in the service of entropy, and it cannot be expected to outlast the dense accumulations of energy that have helped define its niche. Human beings like to believe they are in control of their destiny, but when the history of life on Earth is seen in perspective, the evolution of Homo sapiens is merely a transient episode that acts to redress the planet’s energy balance. — David Price

A few minor references to energy and socio-cultural systems.

This view is simple, but outlines the fundamental situation. Research in thermodynamics (Prigogine, etc) has looked at the actual counter-intuitive problem of living systems countering general thermodynamic principles. It may come back to the mystical views of Simone Weil:

Two forces rule the universe, light and gravity. — Simone Weil

With gravity driving the coalescing of matter, the concentration of energy, or fluctuating densities (or simply fluctuation) of the cosmos. The anisotropic distribution of matter in the universe is not an insignificant evolving or existing condition. And Light, well, what may or may not be said about Light?

Excellent resource which will allow me to trace both forwards and backwards in time on this particular worldview which, although the definition of energy is strictly based on contemporary physics and thermodynamics (of that time), it provides a valid and detailed approach to the issue.

(Not to mention that the copy I got from Newcastle University was “donated by the Newcastle District Committee of the Amalgamated Engineering Union.” Would for the survival of humanity that engineers take in the consequences of thermodynamics at all scales!)

Cottrell maps out in some detail the inter-relationships of technological (energy-usage) and the consequent/subsequent social change/evolution that occurs.

He does perhaps miss a point where he attaches the energy advantage of a rising mercantile-class in Europe in the 16-1700′s to the energy of sail. I would suggest that it was not the energy of sail, but the potential energy brought about by the technologies necessary to take advantage of this naturally-available store of energy (flows). That is, the social structure (organization of individuals) necessary to construct boats, the availability of the resources necessary for their proper construction — tall trees, steel tools (not merely iron) for working the wood, enough to build numerous boats to maintain a sufficient flow of trade (read: energy). And finally, of course, the existence of suitable natural resource reservoir, ultimately driven by the sun, wind.

He introduces the term high-energy technology which is essentially a set of technologies that have a high rate-of-return relative to the input (read: hydrocarbons, nuclear, large-scale hydro). In contrast with low-energy converters which would include plants and animals (as a food/energy converter for human consumption).

Prof. Fred Henderson III of Mount Princeton Geothermal, LLC, meets us in the late morning (thank goodness!) for a briefing on the geothermal development that he is overseeing in the area. the ultimate goal is a heat-exchange/re-injection power plant based on several high-flow wells into the hot spot that drives the hot springs. he then takes us on a two-hour tour of the area mapping out the geological regime and sharing some of the development info for the geothermal prospect. the major problem in the valley (of Chalk Creek) is the complexity of property ownership and the density of residential development. this entire area is carved up in relatively small lots with homes and is a very desirable location, so people will fight any drilling, piping, whatever is necessary for the plant, this, knowing it is an alternative energy source which will offset some of the coal-fired electricity production that the West is so dependent on. the coal plant that supplies them with electricity is out of sight, though, and there are sure to be a minority who will resist anything remotely industrial in appearance while the mountains fade into the growing coal haze.

the last stop is at a recently completed well that officially has the highest recorded heat gradient in the state of Colorado. I do a portrait of Frank and his wife there, it’s on her property.

(noting that the Chalk Cliffs for which the canyon is named are not actually chalk but rather hydrothermally altered Precambrian granite which in places will crumble in the hand, while those unaltered are hard as … rock!)

after the tour, a last slow soak with those rust-e folks still left, then reluctantly descending from the mountains, in conversation.

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 …)

Trans-disciplinarity is a popular expression for the need for thinking (and expressing!) outside the cubic space defined by any limited social system or sub-system. Innovative solutions are often found by combining many possible strands of thought from disparate disciplines and points of view. Critical engagement of a plurality of voices is essential when moving in trans-disciplinary spaces, and this will constantly be kept in mind to the degree possible. The use of language in a trans-disciplinary space is a particular challenge which, to a significant degree, determines the successful outcome of the attempt to bridge disciplinary spaces. Indeed, disciplinarity is often defined by the cumulative social use of a specific linguistic system that is exclusive to the discipline. As a former engineer, and now as an educator and artist for the past two decades, I have significant experience in coherently bridging the somewhat isolated linguistic spaces that define those different ‘worlds.’

It is clear that there is a solid need for this kind of inquiry in the trans-disciplinary space of techno-social systems given the intensity of technological development and the complexity of globalized human presence. It is my desire to contribute to the search for sustainable principles and systems that honor first the need for a healthy continuum of human relation instead of placing technological solutions at the forefront. This, at the same time as acknowledging the fundamentally symbiotic inter-relationship of the two concepts.

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:

responding to Roger Malina on metrics on the New-Media-Curating list:

back in a classroom. talking about data – information – knowledge – intelligence – wisdom. signal-to-noise ratios. adaptability, chain-of-command, defined functions, trend analysis, long tail, lexis-nexus, The WELL, protocols and standards, Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, social infrastructures, complexity, hierarchy, networks, order and disorder, economy of attention, business models, power, money, socially-defined exchange, globalization of culture, and so on. I am a teacher, I am only human.

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.

taking Frieder’s thought-provoking commentary on my proposal draft and grinding through a thought process that in a infinitesimal way is becoming more precise and confident in dealing with the subject material of the thesis. this evening I synthesize the phrase continuum of relation to describe the continuous field of action and dynamic that constitutes our presence in the world. it is the continuum where technology is implemented (apparently) to increase the probability that understanding can be propagated across multiple human subjects, when, at the same time this altruistic goal is promoted, that exact technology injects uncertainty, a degree of attenuation, and a general increase in the complexity of the communicative act! uff! what to do? but I like the phrase continuum of relation — Google it, there are only 26 entries, and none of them in any way overlap in meaning at all. I find that comforting to be obscure. and, perusing the nettime archive, in a discussion with Felix and Geert, I read a 1999 Howard Rheingold article On Innovation and the Amateur Spirit where he quotes the daddy of the WWW:

The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was online, we could then use computers to help us analyze it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together. — Tim Berners-Lee

lines of the hand, with the skin thinning, turning to trapezoidal textures that shimmer differently than they used to do. cool tonight, here at altitude, in the dry west, when the sun goes, warmth goes as well. remembering the nights in the desert, so many times. no matter the heat of the day, the night gives the heat back to the darkness of the sky. only in deep summer, is there more heat delivered than can be reflected away, so that only at the null hour, a time before dawn, does the air loosen itself of the burden of heat. but as soon as fall comes, with a couple days of cloud cover, the night air is an empty chill.

time: money: energy. what about this triad? the conversion between the first two concerns a number of roles and activities that one undertakes. probably the first thing to notice is that time as a phenomena exists outside the framework of the social system. at the same time as recognizing this, a primary task of an evolving social system is the construction of a regulated mechanism for quantifying time. this is a feature of even technologically ‘underdeveloped’ cultures — where the importance of the cyclic variations in the seasons was carefully framed and marked by religious holidays to remind citizens of their places in the (agriculturally) productive life of the society.

time as a raw phenomena is an intangible, of similar import to gravitation and Light. however, the development of devices which would demarcate apparently consistent segments of time has been and is important to any social system. one metric of the advancement of a society can be tied to the accuracy and extent of standardization of temporal measurement devices. framing of time is a key element to any set of basic standardization metrics. and, to the extent possible, these metrics are rigidly applied to all parts of the social system — you know, those kind of people who don’t wear a watch? a little revolt against the microscopic reach of hegemony in the social structure. try meeting someone without depending on some kind of shared standardization of time. at sunset? at high noon? at the first moon after the vernal equinox?

what is “spending time”? it is a commitment to share a portion of the lived expenditure of life-energy on some activity. life-time, and the co-committed life-energy that is ‘used’ in a unit of (standardized) time cannot be retrieved. time is a uni-directional flow that often appears to change speed, irrespective and independent of the standardization applied by the social system. cosmology suggests that perhaps there are regions of the universe where this flow is distorted significantly, though not reversed or stopped. it is a given that the existence of our local system of complexity that life-time flows in one direction. therefore, ‘spending time’ has a significance equal in importance to any other fundamental choice facing a sentient being. along the flow of time, biologic entities, at least considered as discrete material objects, display the uniform characteristic of increasing entropy according to the Second Law of Thermodynamics. there is a clear relation between the limited amount of energy an entity can obtain, generate, use in an apparently materialistically limited existence and passing time.

then there is the issue of money. money is not the thing itself. money represents something, being only printed paper, it shares a parallel history to the development of the printed word, and before that, the abstraction of written language. but since the social system designates a set of equivalencies — sometimes of limited number, sometimes in near-infinite variety — to actual configurations of matter, or actions undertaken by other sentient beings. (to be continued) …

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

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

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

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

A proposal by John Hopkins for Doctoral Thesis research at the University of Bremen, Department of Computer Science (Informatiks) [editor's note: this initial proposal never was submitted following the accident of 04 July 2005 which set life on another trajectory.]

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 …)

Genes provide for one brain component with precise structure, and for another component in which the precise structure is to be determined. But the to-be-determined structure can be achieved only under the influence of three elements: (1) the precise structure; (2) individual activity and circumstances (in which the final say comes from the human and physical environment as well as from chance); and (3) self-organizing pressures arising from the sheer complexity of the system. The unpredictable profile of experiences of each individual does have a say in the circuit design, both directly and indirectly, via the reaction it sets off in the innate circuitries, and the consequences that such reactions have in the overall process of circuit shaping. — Antonio Damasio

many inputs. but need to get back out into the wild-ness for a time. there is a new moon, though, and by the time I get out, it will be well on the way to full, which though it is magical to be in the silver brilliance of nights, I prefer the full darkness and moving about by starLight alone.

considering the next step on the doctoral front. to begin assigning topics and assembling chapters.

illustration of a Julia Set by Scott Hotton. Dynamical Systems Theory (a branch of mathematics used to describe the behavior of complex systems by employing differential and difference equations) is another limited framework for modeling complex systems. more accurate than linear and non-linear models, but none-the-less reductionist. (well, talk about restating the obvious when it comes to anything mathematical, as the concept itself is a reduced language for expressing natural phenomena — I don’t subscribe to the early Greek concept where mathematics does not represent but is a universal and perfect thing unto itself). while human-generated system solutions (say, engineering problems such as placing satellites into orbit) are solved through classic computational modeling with linear systems, natural systems like the brain need something more.

chaotic systems are especially sensitive to initial conditions. initial conditions are necessary for any reductive system analysis because in the abstraction process of reduction, the system is extracted and disconnected from the continuum of life. good for mathematical (computational) modeling. but when defining a real-world problem, how feasible is it to define initial conditions at all? Is there a way to not define initial conditions?

A chaotic system is defined as one that shows sensitivity to initial conditions. That is, any uncertainty in the initial state of the given system, no matter how small, will lead to rapidly growing errors in any effort to predict the future behavior. In other words, the system is chaotic. Its behavior can be predicted only if the initial conditions are known to an infinite degree of accuracy, which is impossible. — Gollub and Solomon

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding… — William Gibson

back in this place again, camping up against the wall that looms over the campground. maybe sleeping out tonight. remembered yesterday that I had sent one of the tent poles to North Face to be replaced before we went to Florida. it had not returned yet, and they didn’t have a record of its arrival. tent is useless without it. a short walk along the wall, seeing the marks of complexity, flows, reconfigurations, conformations, transformations. rock to sand to rock to sand to rock. illustrated, no, manifest. fundamental richness of source to press inwards on eyeballs until seen. I have no words for this place, or for life anymore. so, commentary, that gradual or catastrophic removal from presence, is in contradiction to lived experience. the experience of birds singing no longer calls up the multi-fold apprehension of that momentary, transitory now-ness that can no more be duplicated in the flux of life.

waking up is slow. able to get up to help get Loki on to school, but when that activity is over, I succumb to total drowse and go back to warm bed to await sunrise around 1000. it’s been this way since I returned to the north, jet-lag a good excuse for the first several days, but the sluggishness remains too long now, combined with deep rich dreams in small bits and wakefulness for much of the nights. unusual for me. some melatonin only seems to deepen the complexity of the dreaming, while echinacea seems to make the general neural activity wilder. can it be?

a stroll to the embassy to pick up my passport which was in want of extra pages for stamps. should have gotten a 48-pager when I had it issues back in 1997, but I didn’t realize that I would be getting quite so many stamps. it’s a ten-year pass, so the extra 24 pages might run out, if so, I’ll have to get a totally new one issued. the photos of Bill and Hillary were gone, the guards said they went Monday morning. on the way over, I happened to pass through the city hall and there was a large exhibition detailing the sufferings of Jehovah’s Witnesses in Nazi concentration camps.

and so on. the week already almost over. dinner with Lode and Robert. speaking about the issues at hand. politics of education, politics of learning. and all the time I puzzle on how to best present the subject material, this fundamental concept of a communicative environment within which students might pursue their research and creative activity. it seems to be so new and novel for people. the skin or overlay of technical complexity is also a challenge. one week is really not enough at all.

logging into the past. first I drop Loki off at school for a greatly shortened day that seems to be only a special pageant for the entire student body. 90 minutes. I go back home to read several weeks of nettime email. which gets me to this stage of needing to write here. photometry. grammetics. and new media is nothing more than more of the same. networked things – smeckworked things. learning in cyberspace, doing in cyberspace, personal technology begins/continues the inexorable involuted backfire on itself. but only personal technology. something to shoot back with. Corpo-tech, or mili-tech won’t cease. because selling and killing will have a greater field of action in the future. the mistake of all the applied technology hype is that it forgets the original interface — soul/body. where the ether jacks into the meat. all mediated things root in and then fly from this electro-colloidal fertilization-zone. all reason and form and metaphor and absolute can be searched, can be hunted in this zone. can then be copied, pasted into relevant organic categories. that’s it, the Confucian Analects that sends us through a process of searching the perimeter of the soul/body interface.

The men of old, wanting to clarify and diffuse throughout the empire that Light which comes from looking straight into the heart and then acting, first set up good government in their own states; wanting good government in their states, they first established order in their own families; wanting order in the home, they first disciplined themselves; desiring self-discipline, they rectified their own hearts; and wanting to rectify their hearts, they sought precise verbal definitions of their inarticulate thoughts (the tones given off by the heart) ; wishing to attain precise verbal definitions, they set to extend their knowledge to the utmost.

This completion of knowledge is rooted in sorting things into organic categories
– Confucius, from The Great Digest or The Unwobbling Pivot, translated by Ezra Pound

it is possible to consider all things to be simple. complexity is a result of over-thought. over-processing of even the most simple data-set creates sampling artifacts, noise, and confusion. borders fabricate, delta-functions shoot to zero or infinity (the paralysis of alienated polarization), surfaces distort. convolution with questionable concepts creates complete areas of synthetic fabrication replete with discontinuities and false event horizons. forget metaphors, jam poetry, and all cultural production machinery paradigms, swallow language, stop writing. stop beating flesh against time and space barriers that make it hurt. no sex for entertainment: no time-slot filler, no wet commerce. body looks soft for a reason. that reason is coddling. ways of going that treat body/soul interface as a bother, not the crux (what is crux — old ancient forgotten word — is there a new word to fill the spot where this was forgotten and once lodged? maybe the word that fills it is catalytic converter or simm or talk-show). there are so many substitution fonts that language can be forgotten anyway. because people are knowing less and less exactly or even generally what each other is saying. no hearing, no talking. only dumb silence while fingernails grow to stab palms. while genetic receptors are mapped (where’s life?). and while questions are asked that raise a cryogenic boiling fog that dissipates to nothing after awhile. hip. cool. and ripped-off.