For revolutionary educators, knowledge exceeds its semiotic end products; it travels intertextually within demarcated systems of intelligibility. Critical knowledge is understood as persistently open, disclosive, incomplete, and open-ended. In this way it remains cautious in the presence of reified social relations and epistemological distortions that occlude the social ontology of knowledge and its processual journey from fact to value. In other words, critical epistemological practice examines not only the content of knowledge, but also its method of production. It seeks to understand how ideological constructions are encoded and administered, how metonymic and synecdochical gestures are performed so as to obscure relations of domination and oppression, how the interpretive and interpellative frameworks by which we organize our sentiments construct ruling stereotypes, and how the governing categories of our everyday discourse render invisible and obscure real social relations of exploitation. — (McLaren, P., 2001. Che Guevara, Paulo Freire, and the Politics of Hope: Reclaiming Critical Pedagogy. Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies.)

Aside from the monumental use of academic blah-blah-blah here, the idea behind the obscurity is valid. That is, a radical approach to the facilitation of transformative learning requires a deep awareness of more than just a subject. It demands an awareness of how an embodied knowledge of that subject is founded or generated or discovered. This “how” is in many cases far more important than the “what” of knowledge. I describe this “how” as the meta-structures under which the learning is undertaken. It can be a material issue — bricks-and-mortar, the architectural setting — but also, consequent to an energy-based worldview, it is also a critical question of the entire set of flows within which the encounter is taking place. This is far, far more than opening a classroom window for fresh air, or sitting under a tree with a group of students, although the change in the energy ‘content’ of the situation can be quite profoundly altered by small actions on or reactions to the locale. An energy perception drives much deeper into the meta-structures than that, although any awareness is a good starting point. Because the energy content of the situation is most profoundly affected by the presence of the Self and the Others, the entire energy dynamic among participants must also receive this attention and care. This dynamic is more fundamental than ‘merely’ the social — it is expressed in my concept of continuum-of-relation, defined as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. A holistic awareness of this continuum is necessary to optimize the facilitation.

No revolution is possible among people using language as per McLaren!

a long conversation with Anthony this evening. always stimulating coverage of the non-typical meta-structures of social and individual existence.

the thought comes up, in teaching — most recently the “Multi-platform Story-telling” course that I was involved with this past semester at La Trobe — how seldom the holistic social meta-structure of the grouping of students (and teachers!) is considered in the facilitation of a learning trajectory. this includes the cumulative totality of all relations (power and otherwise!) that occur within the grouping. I call this space the continuum-of-relation and define it as the total accumulated network of relations, expressed as activated exchanges of energy, as Dialogues, that have occurred, are occurring, and will occur between members of the species. Based on the assumption that we are in a holistic and continuous universe, it is possible to extend the definition to include the set of energy relations that humans have with the detailed and greater cosmos around them, and indeed, this is an important aspect to consider, but it is easier to limit the scope to a specific subset comprising relations between all humans. There are infinite sub-sets of relation that may be delineated, one set being those which arise in the process of learning facilitation. much attention is paid to syllabi, curricula, classroom technologies, and wide-scaled social ‘relevance’ of education systems while very little is paid to the immediate and long-term embodied needs for a recognition of presence of all the humans involved in the actual learning process. and especially the needs for deep human encounter and connection. is it such that this university, as with most others, is merely reflecting a wider scale of civil social decay when those crucial relations and their attendant qualities are simply ignored in the stead of assessment protocols, schedules, cash-for-services, and the general corporatization of education. (more …)

jump into the Multi-Platform Story-Telling course to join Jan in the first day of audio work. the students seem quite activated as they continue on the projects that they started in video, moving to four-minute audio pieces, then on to some photographic work, and finally I’m supposed to tie it all together on the ABC Pool site. the intent of the course is to aim at social networking concepts, although I find that the Pool site is a rather generic top-down implementation of contemporary social media. it doesn’t look sustainable except by a back-end maintenance infrastructure (funding infusion), and activities imposed by related institutions (universities) (attention infusion). if there’s time, I’ll make some inquiries on stats, although I doubt that those will be publicly available. most organizations don’t understand that substituting grass-roots impulses with centrally planned deployments simply doesn’t work. we’ll see. I feel like the course is 15 years too late.

by happenstance, walking back from lunch with Jan, note that the Islamic prayer space (split into two sides, one for men and one for women), is open for visitors. the LTU Islamic Students group is holding an Islamic Awareness Week: Islam: The Solution. we go in, and I end up staying for a couple hours, first listening to the general discussion, then jumping in to talk with some of the students. hard to gauge the affect of being an Amurikan in such a situation. there is one other Anglo fellow there, and the rest are from all parts of the Islamic world. interesting field of dialogue follows.

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 …

Workshop day begins: first the waka time on the river. Morning cycle down the river to the Putiki boat ramp, get there a little early, and feel the nerves as to what is possible with the workshop. There have been numerous anticipatory conversations in the last days about what I will be doing. I take a small paper with thought-notes and put it in my life-jacket pocket.

I am fighting with the impression that there is a superfluity of input for the participants — some have not been on a river or so. My dilemma becomes a question of when to jump in and alter the flow of events and protocols which accompany the waka and the enveloping and powerful Maori cultural scenario. It makes no sense to do anything other than participate. Where full participation is a position, an approach to an eventuality of contingent life-flow. I am observing the processes and vibes that are coalescing, seeing if there is a auspicious moment to intervene, but I see none. Back to participating. Enjoying it all. The newness, but also the familiarity and comfort which the Maori protocol applies to that (community-facing) unknown, and The River. (more …)

check out the town farmer’s market before noon, it has a good assortment of food and such. Julian picks up a remote-control-helicopter for the girls (well, ostensibly for them!). back at the house everyone gets a chance to fly it until it dies an unceremonious death. an afternoon swim in the Quaker compound pool is refreshing.

barbecue in the evening, more great food, energized dialogues, tough queries: What are you going to do at this workshop? Ahh, ummm, it’s a long story… got a few minutes?

New Zealand is very fine. The dialogues with Julian and others range all over the place. Hanging around with the rest of the family, along with friend’s of Sophie’s who are on an extended sabbatical from Denmark is stimulating with a healthy dose of good humor. And, with plenty of kids around, well, that keeps the proceedings well-grounded.

Abstract

The DCA project “The Road” is a psycho-geographic perambulation through a web of personal, social, and universal trajectories which form a new knowledge-base on the cosmos as an entropic system of energy flows. Within this worldview the project explores human presence, encounter, and interaction including a close look at the effects of techno-socially prescribed protocols on those indeterminate flows of energy. As a multi-modal online data-space, the project offers a variety of navigational strategies connecting a rich variety of audio, video, text, and image sources from the candidate’s extensive personal archive of creative material.

Introduction

The armature for this DCA as originally proposed was the concept of the amplifier. An amplifier is essentially a device that takes an incoming flow of energy (signal), and through an influx of power, generates a defined outflow of energy with a greater (directed) intensity. The amplification process needs an independent energy source to increase the signal strength. It also requires a set of protocols that guide the flow of energy from input through output: a coherent signal is a controlled energy flow as defined by applied protocols.

The road, as an expression of a techno-social system (TSS), exemplifies, or, more precisely, is one of these protocol-defined pathways. It was this realization during the last year of research which shifted my focus from the amplifier to the road as both a real and metaphoric concept that opens a rich space for inquiry. The road allows the TSS to express amplified energy flows along its protocol-defined pathway. It is not difficult to conceptually extend the idea of the road as any pathway for the directed and concentrated expression of energy of a TSS. (more …)

over to Serial Space to meet Ian and see a screening of early works of his — tape-to-tape media collage works which work remarkably well, especially given their age. very interesting conversation ensues afterward with folks. a good sign of pro-vocative work.

The psychical framing of intention within the making/creating of a reductive tracing of the phenomenal world would seem to be critical. What is the intention of an image, for example? Is it as fundamental as the intention of God in the creation of the world? Or can it be explained away as merely an artifactual process of the techno-social system that one happens to be embedded within? Clearly one intention is to use the artifact to say “Look what I saw!” And, so, the process should never be undertaken when there are others around, as they are already experiencing the phenomenal world, albeit from another point of view. Although this suggests that the artifact is used in the presentation and validation of one point of view with an other. (This presentation process and its outcome may also fast-forward root into the resonances arising from the juxtaposition of those two differing POV’s). Is this the sole, core reason? Or is there something else? Is there more to it? This juxtaposition (though more complex and intertwined than that word suggests) is a form of dialogue in that extended sense of the energized interaction of the Self and the Other. hmmm.

Arrive at CLUI mid-afternoon, after a slow and cold morning with a walk among the juniper and the outcrops of limestone there in the Goshute Mountains, looking for something, not sure what. The final 100 miles is on an empty road, northbound with the dominant paleo-shoreline of the ancient Lake Bonneville appearing (everywhere) tracing an almost-human-alteration-looking bench line at the elevation of 1,555 m (5,100 ft.) feet above sea level — Wendover is at 1,308 m (4,291 ft.), that is, deeply submerged in a conceptual Lake Bonneville. More on that later. I will have to walk portions of the shoreline at some point. Matt is there at the residency compound so we immediately launch into a conversation that is broad, but specific in its range of subjects. There is the organization of CLUI itself, I am tremendously curious about it as a social entity and how it survives (and thrives) in the relatively hostile (to culture-orgs) environment of the US. Then there is the location here, as Matt takes me on a two hour driving tour of the facility and the town, I am really amazed at the depth and richness of the relationship he (and the organization) has fostered with this place.

We end up at a great Mexican restaurant, The Salt Flats Cafe, at the Blair exit (#4) off I-80. Have to go there again, the chili rellenos were quite good.

Mills, using the key word, power, sketches out the relation between the individual and small groupings of people and their often problematic relation to those exercising power within The State. It is the terms abuse of power and exercising power which are most intriguing. What do they actually mean? I believe they are derived not from abstracted political relationships, but rather actualized movements of energy — deflected through socially-constructed pathways of relation — that may be read as the substance of the social system itself.

Power is yielded to some and stripped from others in a social system. It is apparently concentrated in the hands of some, and depleted from the reach of others. The State is one operational field or framework for the circulation or movement of power: the social system actually is the cumulative expression of re-configured energy flows. The State can only be the sum of energy expressed by the individual participants in it. When the participant in a social system is measured, the next reasonable step is that the results of that applied metric are used to place that individual within a scalar array of productive potential within the equation of state. All of this is predicated on the actual framework of what a social system is — a way of establishing a set of relations of power between individuals. (Back to the architecture of the continuum of relation — where the minimum granular unit, the individual, is in array with a certain number of other individuals in immediate relation. These minimum units of relations are replete with complex flows of individual life-time/life-energy: body energy expressed to maintain viability, needs filled by necessity.) Abuse of power is the routine deflection of flows of those energies in the service of maintaining some minimum order beneficial to a subset of individuals in a social system and conversely detrimental to the viability of others.

A democratic state should not be about anything else but the active facilitation of the viability of all participants, without exception. All concentrations of power should be directed in the service of this ideal, and great effort should be made to minimize the degree of concentrations of power with subsets of individuals of the system. That is, individuals must not surrender their autonomy to wider-scale State-sponsored reorganizations of power flows. [hehe, this sounds like an anarchists credo or at least a libertarian view of State -- with the qualification that it should be undertaken with deep thought and consequent action in the field of human obligations as opposed to human rights.]

All of this is not to say that there is a simplistic mathematical formula by which the State might be circumscribed, although this is often done. As with any abstracted model of complex systems, the State can be re-presented to varying degrees of accuracy. (The current obsession with The Market, as a hyper-simplistic model of the abstracted relations going on between nine billion people globally is a good example of the usefulness and the uselessness of such models — how well does this model circumscribe what is actually going on between peoples in the world? The unquestioned belief that the activities of the Market accurately indicate the status of relation and suggest ways to alter the character of those relations is both true but also very, very false.)

The ‘people’ who exercise the power, are not always the same people with those over whom it is exercised, and the ‘self-government’ spoken of, is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest. The will of the people, moreover, practically means, the will of the most numerous or the most active part of the people; the majority, or those who succeed in making themselves accepted as the majority; the people, consequently, may desire to oppress a part of their number; and precautions are as much needed against this, as against any other abuse of power.

… the practical question, where to place the limit — how to make the fitting adjustment between individual independence and social control — is a subject on which nearly everything remains to be done. All that makes existence valuable to any one, depends on the enforcement of restraints upon the actions of other people. Some rules of conduct, therefore, must be imposed, by law in the first place, and by opinion on many things which are not fit subjects for the operation of law. What these rules should be, is the principal question in human affairs; but if we except a few of the most obvious cases, it is one of those which least progress has been made in resolving. No two ages, and scarcely any two countries, have decided it alike; and the decision of one age or country is a wonder to another. Yet the people of any given age and country no more suspect any difficulty in it, than if it were a subject on which mankind had always been agreed. The rules which obtain among themselves appear to them self-evident and self-justifying. This all but universal illusion is one of the examples of the magical influence of custom, which is not only, as the proverb says a second nature, but is continually mistaken for the first. The effect of custom, in preventing any misgiving respecting the rules of conduct which mankind impose on one another, is all the more complete because the subject is one on which it is not generally considered necessary that reasons should be given, either by one person to others, or by each to himself. — John Mills, “On Liberty”

The confusion of the two nature’s and the consequent operation of the social system based on the results of this confusion is probably a chief factor in the inhumanity displayed within and at the edges (of power) of social systems predicated on such mistaken conceptions.

Mills does not examine the actualizations of energy that are the instruments or carriers of inter-personal exchanges of power. In order for his ideas (the liberties of thought) to be properly mapped back onto reality, they need to be connected to or mapped across the activated and dynamic matrix of flow, imho. This, combined with an exploration of the dynamic of human expressive activities where collective discourse and exchange takes place and where one becomes “capable of rectifying his mistakes by discussion and experience.” This process of change arrives “not by experience alone. There must be discussion, to show how experience is to be interpreted.” Enter the widened definition of dialogue, where the sharing of life-energies/life-times becomes the matrix for change.

where to start. what to write about (if there ever is time to write here). impressions, expressions, observations, actions. food shopping: Woolworths, Coles, and the thousand-and-one small Asian food shops, and Paddy’s Market, 7-11s for expensive junk food, Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, Malaysian, Japanese fast-food. vomit stains smeared on black cut-basalt (rhyolite?) sidewalk paving. up-scale-chain consumer fashion depots line George Street, my commuter trajectory. old Ruger, Winchester signs over one empty shop-front, across the street from the Greek guy selling swords, Swat boots, and GI dog tags. the rest of the neighborhood Chinese-owned shops. restaurants with open fronts, tables spilling out onto the sidewalk, with one Lebanese place with hookahs. and the pubs, packed from Thursday through Saturday nights. late. girls with impossibly high-heels limp along tugging down impossibly short skirts that hike up and show pantied crotches at every tottering step. blokes, the NRL blokes, with bulging tee-shirts and vaguely Maori tattoos on biceps. and the suits. the business class. busy, very busy, very very busy. Japanese manga girls or so, adorned, liberally with things and things with accessories and feathered black hair and pale milky skin. Anglos, red patchy skin, (it’s the latitude), sometimes Tilley hats (I can’t bear to wear my new one at risk of appearing like one of these). baseball cap will have to do along with plenty of sunscreen on my UV-challenged nose.

the now-famous dust storm of ’09 I mostly missed except for the ubiquitous aftermath — a red layer of material as fine as chalk dust, such that, when wet, turns immediately into a dense pigmented wash impossible to really remove without numerous passes with a clean rag or sponge. the red morning I slept through, though I was aware of something irritating my nose and pressing on my lungs. the smell of ancient land laid bare through the efforts of hydrocarbon-dependent mono-culture farming. dust-bowl.

lunch with Morgan who just got into town a few days ago to work for CuriousWorks doing some workshops in WA (West Australia) starting on Sunday — six weeks in the Out Back helping kids tell their stories — Shakthi, CEO of CuriousWorks joins us. interesting organization facilitating creative learning solutions for under-privileged kids in under-served areas of the country.

alternating between productive dialogues, confluences, paths-crossing, and total wasted moments, with a feeling that the wasted ones are gone completely, life’s energy diffused into the cosmos. not to raise the state of being one iota. dark energy, dark matters. the moments understood are the opposite, streaked with Light and Lightness.

Rather than distribute a message to recipients who are outside the process of creation and invented to give meaning to a work of art belatedly, the artist now attempts to construct an environment, a system of communication and production, a collective event that implies its recipients, transforms interpreters into actors, enables interpretation to enter the loop with collective action. — Pierre Lévy

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.

so, what about now? the then, constructed from fragments of fleshy and amorphous silica memory remains. it stands in each accretionary flow of now as a splinter of … glass … that distracts with an acute and heart-shimmering intrusion deep into souls that only somewhere wish to be there, then. speaking to a screen, there is a deep form of silence that no intensity of dialogue might remove. it is not a meditative silence but rather a reverberatory one … in a glass house.

Karen is back home after her first trip to China, so she and Ron pick me up at Greg’s for an over-night at the cabin south of Florissant. beautiful place! a great dinner that Ron concocts. and fine company, neighbors. and the wet weather continues in one form or another. Pikes Peak gets plenty more snow above tree line.

gray, damp, cold. on the drive north to the Ditch Witch dealer in Moberly to meet Deb’s mom and drop off the kids so that Nick, Deb, and I can get to the full schedule of films at the True/False Documentary Film Festival. they got two passes, but there are numerous situations where the films overlap and such, so I end up getting to see a number of screenings in between long conversations catching up with the six years that have passed since we last had the chance to break bread (and other things). cataclysmic, catalytic, cathartic? where to start?

well, breakfast at Cafe Berlin seems an auspicious point.

following a day en route. Prescott, Phoenix, Denver, Kansas City, Columbia. Arizona, Colorado, Missouri. meet Deb in Denver, then in Kansas City. driving from there eastbound, on that strip of hydrocarbon excreta, Interstate-70. eye-seventy. recalling the towns reeling backwards from that usual west-bound drive from Clarksburg, Maryland to Golden, Colorado, all those years ago. the 32-hour road trips. arrive at the house. Nick doing laundry, the kids in bed. dialogue continues. sleep in. and continue the dialogue that started yesterday with Deb. mirrors of situations reflect, catalyze, frame possible practices, pathways, ways to go.

The faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment, character, and will. No one is compos sui if he have it not. An education which should improve this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it easier to define this ideal that to give practical instructions for bringing it about. — William James, Principles of Psychology

Migrating Régime begins in Berlin. (a photo from Edwina of a group interpretation of the dialogue assignment, hmmm?) I run a seminar/performance/facilitation on Monday, and will be randomly intervening during the week. not as fun as embodied presence, but hey, what can be done. so, from Boulder to Berlin. the next best thing to being there… so, about presence:

The expression of presence is an essential characteristic of the self-organized body-system. Presence is the announcement of be-ing and viability and requires first an inflow and then an outflow of energies from the body system through the conversion of energies from one form to another. This conversion process alters the entire fabric of local existence. Migration of the embodied and energized organism changes everything around it. What do you change around you? What is changed by those around you?

Shared presence is a dialogue of transformation and change. It is the crux of be-ing.

Berlin, Kiel, Berlin, New York. place frames time. more-or-less. and what of it? multiplicity of options and possibilities frames the next phase of movement. and it is only a matter of survival.

Miga makes a plate of pancakes. with jam from his parents garden in rural Lithuania. nice!

creative production slows to small fragments of text, some images, and some sounds. no mental space to work on the numerous proposals which hang over the head. not interested in the green consumer revolution which is leading the media art world around, tugging on gold-ringed nostrils to keep the plod in acceptable directions. as with so many times before the engagement of science by art is naive and un-productive even in the simple critical sense of raising real issues and stimulating real dialogues. disappointing.

but conversation with Udo last night around aporee maps and some ideas come up along with possible information/collaboration sources that I already have in place from older networks.

in Berlin for a day.

busy evening — Carmin emails me (phone out), from Eindhoven. a few emails back and forth, and she comes into AmDam where we meet after I drop by the Rietveld to see Matjaz earlier in the afternoon. Carmin and I catch up on the decade since we last crossed paths in the Boston Airport. once. all this time, and we’ve been connected remotely. weird. but great to see her. we sit in a cafe for a couple hours before meeting Rob for a Thai dinner and some serious conversation. then on to the cafe with the best evening Light in Amsterdam to eventually meet Geert. then get Carmin to the Metro and head back to Nieuwmarkt to finish packing. a short conversation with Mustafa before crashing. away tomorrow early.

meet Josephine and Florian at Boekie Woekie for a sort-of opening for an Icelandic artists, or so the announcement said. then to the Kunstvlaai the alternative to for the afternoon of openings and then dinner at Josephine’s place. great to meet them both. Florian and I have many friends in common as he’s an old mail-art networker.

in the last few weeks, I have on a number of occasions been labeled a theorist in the course of reductive and brief introductions. hmmmm. makes me think back to an opening in Aachen when Hans Werner was introducing me for a gallery talk and he used the German word Pazifist for reasons I didn’t at the time quite understand, so I stopped him and said I was an activist, people smiled. but to fall under the label theorist seems way off, but probably comes directly from the lack of production of objects. so, it requires a long conversation about the traditional nature of art. and about the materialist framework for judging value.

Rod and Magnús is visiting Rod because they want to rehearse two parts of a three-voice spoken-word performance in Berlin in September. I hadn’t seen Magnuús since some performances he choreographed at the HafnarHusid in Reykjavík in 2000 or so. got filled in on the Maastricht, Iceland, and Jan van Eyck Akademie mafia histories. interesting! (audio also to come some day!)

the weather is splendid. outrageously nice for this time of year. not a cloud in the sky since leaving Berlin.

head down to have dinner with Udo and some of his neighbors last night, there is a heavy police presence all along Petersburger Strasse, Mercedes van after Mercedes van line the street each with a contingent of traditional green, or the new dark blue, or the black-clad Polizei (colors in order of the increasing necessity to avoid confrontation with, I believe). Straßensperre durch die Polizei. dinner is wonderful in his space, though I feel a little guilty that English is donned on my account. I learn more about May Day in Berlin, though, where there are usually confrontations with little historical relevance, mostly just fun between cops and kids rioting. also learned about a small town where on May day eve, boys in the town would bring birch trees to lean against the windows of the girls that they fancied.

Experiments, that they become always more necessary the more one is advanced in knowledge; for, at the commencement, it is better to make use only of what is spontaneously presented to our senses. — Descartes

finding the wall. on a stroll with Jim and MH for a splendid afternoon, cloudless sky, 20C in the shade. not bad, well, to be honest, pretty damn nice weather after all the cold crap in the preceding weeks. find the wall, The Wall, wandering through Friedhof der Sophiengemeinde, and there it is, a preserved section, along with a pile of grave markers, and a row of stacked pieces of The Wall, crumbling away slowly, rebar showing. head home after dinner. tired in the relative heat.

Dialogic relations have a specific nature: they can be reduced neither to the purely logical (even if dialectical) nor to the purely linguistic (compositional – syntactic). They are possible only between complete utterances of various speaking subjects … Where there is no word and no language, there can be no dialogic relations; they cannot exist among objects or logical quantities (concepts, judgments, and so forth). Dialogic relations presuppose a language, but they do not reside within the system of language. They are impossible among elements of a language. — Mikhail Bakhtin

begin this morning sketching out the chapter Dialogue and the Other :: Protocols of Intimacy (that’s a provisional title, I came up with the protocols of intimacy phrase a few days ago, and liked it). it has a chapter-title-resonance like the Regime of Amplification :: A Primer.

this is the chapter where the core teachings lie. or where many foundational assumptions that hold up the broader teachings will be framed. it is the easiest and most difficult chapter. simple and complex. powerful and simple.

and a question pops into mind — when thinking about how I need to provide as many examples of situations to students to re-inforce the efficacy of the worldview — how is it that the teaching of ones own worldview is so different than teaching the worldviews of others. how is it that so much education is simply the mass inculcation of a canon of Others by individuals who are somehow lesser than those represented by the canon and to a grouping of individuals who have no value to the social system until they are fully inculcated. was it such that only those in the canon were truly great Teachers, and all who come after them merely lesser disciples? Or does the social system have the tendency to self-reify at the price of eliminating successors of equal or greater inspiring power? isn’t it such that any individual has some lesson to teach any Other? where is this lesson taught? it should be enshrined in a bill of human obligations (versus human rights), that any human may learn something from any other human.

April enters warmly. with loss. I lose one of my Saranac cross-training half-gloves. I use them all the time for cycling. although I’m not doing any weight-lifting in the moment, I’ll have to find a replacement.

meet Peter for a beer at Hackischer Markt, we wander over to Alexanderplatz where it’s warm enough to sit outside. he tells stories of his father who dies an alcoholic after fighting in the army on several fronts in the war.

hope to get to Mechernich later to see the rest of the crew later in June or so, though any travel will be contingent on whether or not I can find someone to sublet the flat for June and/or July. can’t afford to travel and rent at the same time.

this was a night of the full moon, and the eclipse which takes place here in the early morning, well before sunrise, deeply affects the character of sleep. noting the next total lunar eclipse to be seen in North America is on the winter solstice 2010. I’m there!

and, I still haven’t found a vessel to pour milk from for my tea. I bought a small tea thermos a couple weeks ago in Kreutzberg, one that holds four cups or so. I take this to the desk with a small clear glass to drink from. but as I have to have my tea with milk, I need a small vessel of milk. so far, I’ve tried every option available in the flat. everything spills or dribbles! I may have to buy some small milk decanter. maybe a special antique if it leaps across my path. this reminds me of a previous long-term search a decade or more ago for a decent letter-opener. I had a nice hand-carved wooden one from Ghana, but it split, and I was never able to find another which fit my demands — good design, sharp, safe, efficient, nice material.

I just want to drink my tea while writing in concentrated peace and not leave blobs of drying milk on the desk.

anyway, the writing process. uff. this morning I have yet another stupid realization about my own process (doh!). the writing can be a script, a prescription to action, a narrative about possible action. and my narrow thoughts around a substantive text as a necessity for personal viability in the social system is a phantasm. actions based in the ideas that are danced around in the text can generate that viability as well. actions are often promoters of ‘better’ viability. (what is viability anyway? survival, thriving, materially, spiritually?) I always imagined myself as a person of action, but there is at least some tendency to talk and to words. what is done as action is often in the passive mode (observing, recording). actions that grow from that process are of ambient character — that is, they take the form of atmospheric presences, not active stances, positions, opinions. opinion was not accepted as a child. yes, interesting. so now, the last word is important. teaching allows for last words, although I consciously ask, in a classroom, for someone else to make the last word(s).

so, one conclusion is that, yes, the creation of a performance/exhibition situation that illustrates the idea (the script) is just as good as writing a text about it. the only difference is the social scale of audience.

of course, the dialogue, the one-to-one, as I define and act upon it, is a powerful (socially?) transformative process. but the relation of that action to social viability is highly … disconnected? I mean, there is the direct connection between the vital process of creating and sustaining a human community around ones-Self, or of embedding ones-Self in an extended community and ones survival, but this definition of survival seems to be somehow oblique to that of larger scale social viability. am I missing something obvious?

but it’s not true. where does nomadism arise? in the pure madness of the shakuhachi tones, played by an itinerant Zen komuso? nah. it appears that I do have a limited audience for my work. for networking, all connections seem intense. but the potential for greater intensity. focus and power seem there. need balancing with the rest of life which is that constant interweaving of souls. not daring to miss one in the process. and so:

the evening is a pilgrimage in to the City to Phill Niblock‘s annual Solstice performance — on Katharine’s invite a couple weeks ago at reboot. Phill has been doing this for years and I felt like it completes the year in a significant way (having had a nice two-hour experience with Wes and August watching Phill’s incredible dvd work back in January on the Other coast). but, yeah, what better way to spend a Solstice — immersed in the work (and at the home!) of a significant visual-sonic artist. the performance was an extension of the work Phill has pursued for some years — incredible 16mm material shot around the globe of people engaged in physical (hand) labor. this visual mixed with his signature massive and precise microtonal environments. nice opportunity. a sonic remix is up-coming(finished!) including the sounds from the kitchen and the downstairs radiator on the way out in a state of heightened awareness!

Phill has hosted the Experimental Intermedia performance series for 34 years. if you are ever in NYC, check out the schedule of a bewildering array of international artists, it’s great! this year is the 39th anniversary of the founding of E.I.

got to talk to Katharine, Keiko, and Elsa again, and met some other local folks.

feeling pretty lousy with this hanging-on cold, but a chilly and wet trip by bus in to reboot is rewarded with some very nice crossings-of-paths — Keiko (talking share tokyo plans), Elsa (talking Lisboa and roguewaves plans), Anton, Dan; from share.montreal, Jim (is a polar/solar bear, surprise, surprise, yes, indeed, very nice to discover this!) and Marie-Hélène; as was Katherine (another polar bear! great!). head home somewhat early with Dan and Emily to their place in Brooklyn for the night, then back to Jersey the next afternoon.

Emily’s got a nice collection of conscious education books from her studies at Columbia’s Teacher’s College, I take some time to dig into a few of them for some good jolts. she fills me in on her work developing kids’ social networking platforms for the non-profit takingitglobal.org.

see at a distance an undesirable person;
see close at hand a desirable person;
come closer to the undesirable person;
move away from the desirable person;
coming closer and moving apart,
how interesting life is.
– Gensho Ogura

conversations with Volker and others range across vast spaces of cultural, spiritual, personal, and social thought and practice. as per usual. great!

I’ve been checking brainstorms more than usual lately, jumping into discussions with Howard, Bryan, Andee and many others on the topic of academia, education, learning, teaching, students, and what a struggle it is to be involved with this sector of the techno-social system.

meet Wolfgang at the Pergamon and on to an exhibition at the Mitte Museum am Festungensgraben that some of his students participated on. Sensing the streets.

Farben, Töne, Gerüche – viele Sinneseindrücke, Stimmungen und Empfindungen werden beim Gang durch eine Strasse ausgelöst. Um diese sinnliche Wahrnehmung städtischer Räume geht es in der Ausstellung “Sensing the Street. Eine Strasse in Berlin”. Sie ist Ergebnis eines gemeinsamen Forschungs- und Ausstellungsprojekts des Instituts für Europäische Ethnologie an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin sowie dem UNI.K –UdK. Studio für Klangkunst und Klangforschung und dem Institut für Kunst im Kontext an der Universität der Künste Berlin. Am Beispiel von drei repräsentativ ausgewählten Strassen – Acker-, Adalbert- und Karl-Marx-Strasse – wird der Strassenraum multisensorisch, d.h. visuell, auditiv, olfaktorisch und taktil erfahrbar gemacht.

I meet and talk to Friederike, one of the students involved at some length, mainly encouraging her with the project — they have, indeed, made a very nice manifestation of research. and this is only the first of three absolutely different exhibitions in different venues entirely in the next two weeks. I would wish to be around for the other two. it was an opening, so that it was crowded and hot, but we got there earlier than the crowds and got to check out the especially provocative audio and video works.

Art is the image of a human being, This means that when a person is confronted with art, then they are in fact confronted with their own self, and so open their own eyes. And so it is the creative person who is addressed, their creativity, their freedom, their autonomy. And this is only possible using the concept of art, however, this concept must be made more comprehensive. You cannot and should not deal with this concept traditionally and say: that is what artists do, and that is what engineers do?. but you can get beyond the concept. And the only escape route is a more comprehensive concept of art that is anthropological and that is taken seriously: that everyone is an artists, and that every person has a creative core. — Joseph Beuys

Wolfgang and I continue our conversation a bit later at a cafe (after I meet Barbara, an old friend of Volker’s!), then I race back over to the Pergamon for a longer walk-through, then it’s back home to get some packing done. Roman is there and asks for some help editing a copy of the manifesto that he and Alexei are working on for Transmediale. then I crash for the early wake-up.

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?

A fine afternoon hike in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area with a small group of folks that Howard assembled. Fantastic weather, occasional views of the City shimmering south across the Bay, groves of (relatively) small second-growth coastal redwoods, some huge manzanitas (this is their optimal zone) and good conversation.

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

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

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

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

day two. Elénore catches her plane from Strasbourg, but gets tangled in security at Charles de Gaulle, missing her Helsinki flight and so I am left with a two-hour morning conference panel to anchor solo at the Goethe institute. presenting the context of the workshop and the paper that I contributed to the Pixelache publication. it goes well. although there are skeptics in the back row. not vocal, but disturbing the atmosphere by talking during much of the talk/discussion. they make no direct critique of the propositions nor contribute to the lively discussion. boring people who do that.

at another point, a bit later, someone who was to show up at placard in Kiasma isn’t able to come, so, with a little chunk of open time in my schedule I jump into the corner hot-seat and do a one-hour impromptu mix for a handful of headphone-donning folks. the sun streaming in the window, I have a good view of the Parliament building as a source of rock-solid and cubic inspiration.

Erik (aka Mr. Placard) runs the multichannel headphone mixers, the stream, and keeps an eye on the irc channel.

then, there’s Manu & Mukul along with Indigo, their young boy. hanging around waiting for the screening of their film Faceless in the Kiasma Theater.

whoa, way behind. but the email inbox gets more and more full, a tidal wave, or at least a tidal surge, about to cover nose with a sludge of glimmering words. back in Helsinki. having to take the extra time to type the word Helsinki slowly, otherwise it gets typed wrong.

workshop migrates into the second day. dialogues generate, pathways open up, words, energies are exchanged.

meet Tapio at mbar in the Lasipalatsi, where my old cafe9.net office was. the center of town, different now since the huge Kamppi underground bus terminal complex is finished. that complex is behind the Lasipalatsi, and looms like a mini-Tian’anmen (Gate of Accepting Heavenly Mandate), though the Finnish translation must be something like Gate of Accepting Earthly Commerce (Portille hyväksyä maallisen kaupankäyntiä)??

bad night’s sleep again, not sure where that is coming from. feng shui of hotel rooms. don’t like hotels. open window too noisy to sleep; closed, nose imitates room and stuffs. maybe caffeine. some small cups of coffee during meetings, not just to be polite, but it smells so good. so, wake up before alarm, force the obligatory liter of water down, gradually clear head. body drags along behind. pack, and hobble down to breakfast and wifi access to at least consume croissants and Eudora. and some Firefox. though belly is fat and getting fatter. can’t wait for a swim, cycle, something aerobic. but Dirk has made a tight schedule of luxurious 2-3 hour meetings with such an interesting variety of people. and so, this morning, he comes to breakfast a bit after Thomas Laureyssens comes tentatively to my table.

excellent generation of ideas, intuitive connections, and pathways, dynamically evolving possibility. Thomas is working on a social networking project which aims to create a functional gateway for Belgian new media initiatives.

Brussels as the background. some good food, some short visions, hardly any time to catch the tourist scene, and no photographs made. nothing missed on that account. previous visits, the most recent was in 2000 for the closing cafe9.net meeting which ended up in the scandalous shouting match among participants at a Chinese restaurant. so much for European solidarity.

Dirk and Thomas head off after Angelo Vermeulen arrives for a short meeting before I have to catch the train to Maastricht.

Angelo illustrates my dialogue-based worldview with several direct anecdotes which counterpoint his prodigious and stimulating formal creative output. and reminds me a bit painfully the lack of a PhD is a deterrent to social viability. that or a book. so that story haunts again in the background. text trumps lived praxis, title trumps actual presence. sheesh.

we have lunch at the brasserie Falstaff with a nice interior where “you can admire the transition from Art Nouveau to Art Deco,” and the staff looking like they should be in a Paris bistro. and the pay toilets governed by a wrinkled old lady. just the way it used to be. mais oui! typically touristic, with a complete backwards look to the future. tourists would never distinguish that this is not real. maybe tourists are so conditioned by looking at the world via tele-vision, that when confronted by the real thing, they cannot tell when it is a simulation of something else authentic. like Disneyland. seems like a great place to actualize physical presence in the ‘world’ when compared to prime-time teevee. uff!

over to Maastricht, train to bus to Rod and Lizbet’s place. nine years since last time. catching up on years of remote art, music, books, Iceland gossip. talk about getting more of Rod’s work online aside from the wiki page that a friend has done — he’s a networker, and a singular one of that breed, a networker’s networker. no time to worry about publicity, the market, promotion. the work and the network are all that counts, matters, all that provides life reason. his output into that network is prodigious, profound, and humane. his archive is priceless, marvelous!

spend the day with Pete, catching up on two years of activities. the most notable, his three-month sojourn in Madagascar. and his filmic contribution to the choreography of Shobana Jeyasingh in two new works — Faultlines and Exit No Exit. we rendezvous at the Tate Modern, and take a sonic and visual wander around there, then back to his place to look at some of his new work.

finally meet Marc and Ruth of Furtherfield at the home of the HTTP gallery in northeast London. plenty of good gossip about the UK scene, some histories, making connections between events, names, and faces, and so on.

back up a familiar wash in the Marble Mountains, close to another Wilderness-designated area. arriving at dusk after an intermittent drive across the Sonoran desert from Prescott. conversations range over media, culture, education, social systems, software, teaching, art, and, uh, what else? weather, geology.

full-moon hiking up the wash into a zone of chaotic conglomerates, alluvium, diorites, granites, limestones.