dropping into eyebeam to meet Amanda, then back to KidsConnect, then to see Francisco Lopez, Stephan Moore, and Todd Merrell at the issue project room with Sophea.

Sharmin will hopefully augment this shot of Sonya with some of her ample photographic records of the long weekend’s adventures. later in the evening…

turns out that the Search By Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) project — is a globally-deployed effort by an extraterrestrial intelligence to keep tabs on the human race…

long conversation with Chris and Scharmin. well, Scharmin dozes off in front of the fire part of the time. the cabin is such a comfortable space for hanging out with friends. Sonya and Alex have stored up magic memories of the place, the surroundings, and the magnificent physical environment it is nestled into. I wish Loki was here with us. somehow I am not completely convinced that his absence from the US this summer is simply due to the need for teenage companionship. but that cannot be substantiated.

no chance to use the telescope productively. there is enough overcast so that the sun cannot be seen well enough to make it worth it, and it is cloudy all three nights. not to mention too cold to be hanging out of doors for long periods when there is a warm bed to fill later after the stiff margarita to sip!

en route from Grand Central to Bedford Hills. lunch with Anthony at the Empire Diner, we walk down there from meeting at Penn Station in the morning. an eatery where I used to go on occasion when working in Chelsea. long time passed. groups of tourists stop on the corner and take photos of the diner. it’s a land mark. marking the land which can’t actually be seen — it’s all paved over and dug up. so, the city as one big land mark, and nothing else. no land left to mark. we mark time with dialogue. conversations which are continuous registrations, trajectories from the past. launching into an immediate and present future. stopping at way-points to register the locus, then rocketing onward. upward. bouncing through some Beckett. ah, Beckett — when the privilege of having a conversation about Beckett? rare. to explore the textures of a literate vision of such elemental power, circumscribing the moment, being, and the perfect intertwining of both to create life. hmmmm, been in the country too long. though the sight of stars is nothing to feel inferior about. they leave different traces in the self than the traces of known and historied voicefull lives.

while the infrastructure labors along. trains slow and imprecise. although arriving in the same places from day to day, the time of arriving changes the place to another, given the slowness. barely able to stay on the track.

through Harlem with hardly a look into the structures of the past years, the rennaisance, onward, northward. up the Hudson, on the Hudson River Line. I’m inna New York state of mind-full-ness. greasy face from lunch of fried veggie lintelburger.

back to thinking about Kevin. what to say on Wednesday, the memorial. thinking how that maxim of avoiding any pre-tension. that is to be remarked. as well, the power of being to invoke collective presence.

since Mars is taking bright place in the heavens these weeks, no need to imagine the canals when one can go to the Themis site and see broken levees at 17-meter resolution. meanwhile in a conversation with Master Zega, the prognostications of a certain Frenchman come up:

Obscenity begins when there is no more spectacle, no more stage, no more theatre, no more illusions, when everything becomes immediately transparent, visible exposed in the raw and inexorable light of information and communication. We no longer partake of the drama of alienation, but are in the ecstasy of communication. — Jean Baudrillard

Starting off the month with reading more from and about David Bohm, the quantum physicist and researcher into the nature of human relation (in the form of his defined term, dialogue). He maintained a suspicion about language, that it formed a mechanism which reified that-which-was-being-talked-about as it was (being) manifest in language. The idea that thought tends to impress a static order on the world outside. (And meanwhile, accepting the premise that all reality is a dynamic procession, thought included.) However, there is an inexorable process — as thought creates knowledge from reality (experience) — that seeks to lock in a fragmentary (incomplete) view excised from reality. This is one general characteristic of linguistic representation of dynamic reality. In a similar vein, Walter Ong (2002) maintained that the transition from aural to written to printed language defined deep shifts in the relation of the Self to the Other and to reality. He compiled a set of characteristics of expressed/expressive thought (=spoken word) that supports the necessary salience of aurally transmitted information (as there were no other ways to catch / statify information in aural cultures):

expression is additive rather than subordinate;
it is aggregate rather than analytic;
it tends to be redundant or “copious;”
the process tends to be conservative;
out of necessity, thought is conceptualized and then expressed with relatively close references to lived reality;
expression is agonistically toned;
it is empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced;
it is homeostatic;
it is situational rather than abstract

The key to most of these characteristics is that they directly relate to embodied presence versus the absence (and abstractedness!) of a (printed) text. So that here, in this blog, there is a long sequence of absences, separations — which together accumulate as disembodied virtuality. Ong elsewhere hints about the cumulative effect of this movement from embodied connection with language to the abstractions of mediation introduced by printed texts. And on into the further mediation in telephony (all ‘tele’ or attenuated/virtual realities I would suggest). Socialization is that process of abstraction and reification of what were once active and dynamic processes happening at a granular level of human-to-human. The process moving from dialogue to incontrovertible law (protocol) is a mapping of the ‘advance’ of a social system. Yet, social order is dependent on that dynamic of that granular ground state of the system — at least if a society wishes to retain a vital edge on evolutionary survival. It is precisely this reification process that spells the doom of a social system — though often not before that system has attained a temporary advantage over other systems (by being more efficient in a materialist way), and caused great suffering and alienation.

back to the thesis application preparation. the following is, in a way, a Utopian case that forgets the holistic and distributed system that communication and its impulses arises in:

We have thus established the basis in man for the simplest element in his communication: namely, the communication of man with man by the immediate use of language, when two men are face to face with one another… this capacity is not intrinsically restricted to the immediate presence of the individual, for we have many means to carry this tool of communication to the ends of the earth. — Norbert Weiner

while the premise is intrinsically true, Weiner neglects (for example) the reality of the infrastructure assembly process to undertake the real movement of language across those vast distances. those infrastructures do not materialize themselves. they are specific and real social constructs. assemblages that social systems expend liberally on to assemble and maintain: they are the fabric of the social system — the techno-social system. therefore, while the mediation of abstracted language can be shuffled around, the human participating in the system of shuffling does, somehow use some real energy in order to participate. while this energy, considered on a limited scale may seem minor or non-existent — i.e., someone hands me a phone to make a trans-continental call, which I undertake with an expenditure of a marginal amount of embodied energy — someone, somewhere, as part of the larger social system, collected vast amounts of energy from the distributed individuals that make up the system and assembled the entire electrical/physical infrastructure of the telecom system.

Friday the thirteenth. six hounds do a four part panting harmony: I’ll DO ANYTHING FOR A COOKIE! the day passes with nothing remarkable happening. reading more books than I can adsorb effectively. doctoral considerations take precedence, though. all networks that are deployed within social systems rest on a platform of electromagnetic phenomena. from the electric power system that underlies the entire social structure of the developed world, to the simple apprehension of visual cues in a conversation.

Parts are seen to be in immediate connection, in which their dynamical relationships depend, in an irreducible way, on the state of the whole system (and, indeed, on that of broader systems in which they are contained, extending ultimately and in principle to the entire universe). Thus, one is lead to a new notion of unbroken wholeness which denies the classical idea of analyzability of the world into separately and independently existent parts … — David Bohm

dinner with Joanna, Jo, and Pete. Joanna makes/brings a sumptuous dessert of fresh fruit, ice cream, raspberry sauce, and meringue dollops for six-to-twelve that the four of us finish off.

daylong conversations range from Northern Soul to Arts Council politics to management theory to Chelsea’s UEFA cup aspirations to cooking dahl and curried eggs to locative media and media art.

take a long walk with Marcus around the city. talking film, he lent me a tape of some of his experimental film work, excellent. Brakhage has been a frequent topic of conversation in the whole week here. snowing, windy, bitter cold. then later meet with Milos and Dana for chai. snowy walk across the Charles Bridge. still tourists wandering about. despite any dislike for tourism, there is the platitude that the city is beautiful. from my penthouse in the Lazansky Palais, I make some nice ambient shots of the rooftops and the snow. that along with abstract tele shots of two people doing tai chi in a blizzard on the island park in the river. it’s a good address.

no record… :-(

time slips. many direct impressions, people, dialogues. and that directly keeps time away from the keyboard of this machine. for some measure of being that shifts away from mediation to the contingencies of momentary presence. as usual, when visiting Volker, we spend much time meeting and visiting with local artists and connections he has in the Köln area. the evening with Thomas was interesting, jumping into the Catholic church where there is an exhibition opening for Rune Mields. the work is about her research into the numerous convents that were once scattered around the center of Köln, and the process of secularization initiated by Napoleon that destroyed them. Thomas has had MS for more than 25 years but remains upbeat about his situation and intense about his artistic ambitions: brilliant!

Kevin is here, Ellen and Stefan away in the City for work, the kids at school. so we catch up in a wide ranging flow of words. jump over to Whole Foods to get all the makings for dahl which I prepare for dinner. red lentils, ginger, curry, coconut milk, bullion, cumin, coriander, masala, carrots, potato, olive oil. different every time. I’ve never been very confident of my cooking, as when making food for myself, I don’t dig into the process as deeply as I could. and with all the nomadic scene, I don’t often get to host people for food in a place where I can confidently gather the ingredients for something that I know how to cook to begin with…

back on routes, a grueling week from Iceland to Denmark, to New York to Maryland to San Francisco. all in seven days. after the early morning departure from Ice Land in a chill dark snowy wind. nothing else but. so it goes. leave-taking, the usual heart pain.

dash away for a lunch and meeting with Søren in the Digital Aesthetics Research Center at the Åarhus UNiversity. then a brief stop at the Art Academy of Jutland, home of splab, to meet Tanja and take a tour of the place to satisfy my always-keen curiosity to see schools and organizations on the ground. run into mr. noisejihad himself, Mikko, who participated in both di-fusion events and was a co-curator of the Overgaden festival as well. connections, connected, but the total brevity of the visit makes it almost useless. feeling antsy about getting somewhere, and the in between sensation gets overpowering when stops are too short. needing like a week to chill and engage anymore. and I didn’t even visit folks in Iceland hardly. nomad leaves for the steppes where stars are hard and cold, and many. check out. rocketing through the night by train, in the hvileplads car (the quite-place). phones and talking are banned. I lucked out getting a seat in this car, the train seems pretty full. yeah, just noticed that I haven’t heard anyone speak except for the conductor going through asking for tickets. even the guy selling food didn’t really say anything, but is suddenly smiling in my face.

(no)music arena started in the night and goes all day today. got a small streaming situation set up at the Academy and was testing and irc-ing with some of the other participants — Jerome, Steve, laboite, and others. I’ll do a set mid-day. then matchmaking cranks into gear in the evening. meanwhile meet with Per Erik, another workshop participant for a focused dialogue on an even-morphing range of subjects.

since the workshop unraveled in this strange dynamic at the Academy, I spent the whole afternoon with Professor Jaccheri — one of the two workshop participants — from the IT department of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. trading ideas about university existence and the facilitation trans-disciplinary art:science studies. late in the evening, the walk home over the — bridge, and to the north, faintly, the Aurora Borealis shimmers.

some analysis of the way things went at ram6. as is common with some collective social events, the awareness of the meta-relations and the actual human dynamic was subjugated to the necessities of the material/technological infrastructure and the particularities of the social matrix it was embedded in. allowing for technical/mediative contingencies to proceed from the human needs seems to be extremely difficult because of the depth of our material conditioning. the general vibe of the event overall is positive, progressive, and dynamic. the material situation, the technological infrastructure, was satisfactory. it would have been nice to have a bit more group interaction to set up a vibe that would resonate through the disparate pathways, to be re-measured by another group interaction at the end (the campfire was probably it, but a bunch of us old folks split before that happened ’cause the food arrived too late to the forest happening.

meet Mindaugas at Cafe Intro where he was in the process of taking down a show that Roman had curated. his sister is there along with a friend. nice to meet her, having known mi_ga so long. later at Cafe Intro there is a sonic evening that Derek and Sara organized. it formed something of an ending for ram6 although some people had already left, but a good moment to have those closing dialogues before the remaining folks re-distribute to remote locations.

and then some. conversations on the ferry, swimming, then a meeting at the Sibelius Academy with Shinji about the new AccessGrid portal he’s starting to set up. one of the programmers of the Marcel Project was up from Wimbleton to do the rather complex install of the system on a souped-up Pentium machine.

Sweet Echo, sweetest nymph, that liv’st unseen
Within thy airy shell
By slow Meander’s margent green,
And in the violet-embroidered vale
Where the lovelorn nightingale
Nightly to thee her sad song mourneth well:
Canst thou not tell me of a gentle pair
That likest thy Narcissus are?
– John Milton

spent much of yesterday online, remote. talking with the http://archive.reboot.fm crew during their collaborative re-streaming project from Berlin. Thomax from the old orang.orang radiostadt project was there as irc host, and many net-amigos dropped in during the course of the 12-hour stream. by day’s end. though, I was wondering about the effect of a full day online, again. ‘the price you pay’s a very general and deep issue regarding technological implementations, technological consumptions, technological deployments anywhere, anytime, anyhow. the cost that is extracted from the individual and collective psyche is always there, this is a principle. as soon as one begins to make a re-configuring of the natural conditions of flow, that re-configuration itself, because at least part of it is contrary to the flow, costs in that the self has to expend internal energies, or, to get Others to do the same. huge discussion to try to launch into here, now. part of that greater schema that I have been promoting on a granular lever in teaching.

it may be that the schema never gets to a formal representational package beyond the actuality of a stand-up/taught lecture/discussion. the process of re-presenting it at a higher level of social order may require too much energy, more than I have. though Frieder is really inspiring me with his questions and reflections on the new thesis proposal, it is incredibly difficult to get much done about it.
‘
now have to run to catch a boat. not the ferry to town, but I am making a new short video work, another simple ambient work called action at a distance which is a single shot somewhere in the vicinity of the bridge on the island over a smallish inlet. when the large cruise ships go by about 100 meters away, through the very narrow channel that guards the main harbor, there is an intense though subtle oscillation of the water levels that slowly moves the remaining chunks of rotting ice back and forth. an example that human perturbations in the world are not only felt in the immediate vicinity. but that they reverberate and extend themselves in subtle forms, perhaps infinitely. and that is the question. is it possible to devise a work that tests/illustrates the idea of simultaneity. where quantum suggests that any change in the universal energy continuum anywhere is simultaneously ‘experienced by all points in the continuum. seems only an accession to Buddha-hood would contain the ‘ proof.’ and just this morning before I started writing, I had this strange impression that my need to ‘prove’ my model is a total caving-in to the scientific method, that dominant driving model. sheesh. how to avoid that and remain socially viable? might not be possible.

in conversation with Sophea last night, I realized that, yup, I do have a streak of anti-sociability. it does not affect individual relationships, per se, but it affects abilities to interface with the socially mandated pathways of institutions, and the positions that individuals carve out for themselves as a result of participating in such structures. hmmmm.

still on the verge of rolling things over to another server. isea2004 press conference this morning. there’s the Helsinki crew. the expense places the event off the map for me coming from the US. looks like I’ll just be going to Iceland in the fall, on the Akureyri residency, not back to Finland. so. now begin the logistics of the alternative plan.

after an intense conversation break with Sophea at Corona, dinner at Atabar with Tapio, Minna, Sophea, and a couple Brits who are deploying a “locative media” project for isea.

dinner last night with Sophea, Andrew and Jodi, impromptu gathering. on the island. finally got to the pool in the morning, doing 2500 meters in meditative solitude.

stay on the island today, another dinner here tomorrow.

As for the radio’s object, I don’t think it can consist simply in prettifying public life. Nor is radio in my view an adequate means of bringing back coziness to the home and making family life bearable again. But quite apart from the dubiousness of its functions, radio is one-sided when it should be two-. It is purely an apparatus for distribution, for mere sharing out. So here is a positive suggestion: change this apparatus over from distribution to communication. The radio would be the finest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes. That is to say, it would be if it knew how to receive as well as to transmit, how to let the listener speak as well as hear, how to bring him into a relationship instead of isolating him. On this principle the radio should step out of the supply business and organize its listeners as suppliers. Any attempt by the radio to give a truly public character to public occasions is a step in the right direction. — Bertold Brecht, The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication

reconnecting with dreams. perhaps that’s what this residency is about. after a drift this morning that starts in a graying Light of 0500. a drift through family images and the cares of Light future. the whining Light hum of Boreal summer has not arisen from the earth yet, but will soon. dreams, Light, and a contemplation of the past, present and future at the same time as being in the moment.

reading the introduction to Saussure’s “Course in General Linguistics,” a few pages into the text helps me realize that the energized worldview I hold is a valuable point from which to view the world, and, more significant, it is worthy of re-creating for others in the form of a text. this is a realization of self-worth. nothing more, nothing less.

days alternate: hiding on the island, and going to meet folks. wandering to the ferry through the ice-fog. while meeting Sanna in Café Succés on Korkeavourenkatu, Visa sees me and drops in. on my first visit to Finland, in 1994, and then in early 1995, when I did a gig at Media Lab, I stayed in what was his printing studio, around the corner from the café. to save money on the Nordplus teaching exchange, I had a tea and wienari (a cinnamon and glazed pseudo-spiral of pastry dough with a berry jam center) for breakfast. earl gray. bergamot. it was enough to carry me until the institutional lunch at the university which packed belly with the standard fare. pea soup with ham on Thursdays. all across the country. anyway, it’s my favorite café in Helsinki, they have the largest and best wienari in town, made on the premises fresh daily. there is a constant level of coming and going, intimate meetings, where old lovers can have tea and conversation that drifts through all the subjects that once were whispered with entwined and humid breath in nights of late spring, no longer dark in these latitudes. tulips on the table are chosen with a color to match the only dressy shirt available, and time is mapped in eyes and souls. nothing changed, and only the future is left. the past is past. dialogue after dialogue. one, another, another, yet another. life spent in this vocal dance. and occasionally in the Lighter dance of embodied soul, where centers of gravity press close and don’t need calculus to predict a forceful trajectory.

if only. on the edge of the seat, looking onto the eyes. averting when the intensity of that looking is too much. trying to see heart behind glassy lens. but, after awhile, nothing to do. effort for this is neither rewarded nor punished, only just tolerated. better to stay in the moment, forget past and future. be an oracle for the self.

the issue is, on this residency, what exactly to do? or not to do??

leaving Bremen after one of the most energizing workshops ever. so good to be back on a roll. inspiring conversations and interactions. crowded train, standing at the exit door for an hour, ipodding, staring out the window until it’s so dark I only see myself, change trains at Hamburg Dammtor and catch up with Christian on the way home from work. exhausted. but energized. the weekend is slow and relaxation-full. Chris takes a shot of Steffi and I before I head to Finland.

Sven asks me to write something about the radiostadt1 stream from last fall. so, I generate the following brief spin on that special living-room-to-live performance venue that I enjoyed while hanging in Colorado:

Thanks to the fat-pipe running from the University of Colorado research grid to the neoscenes living room in Boulder, Colorado, USA, along with access to a Helix server that the university hardly ever used for live streaming, neoscenes made about 10 major live audio/video streaming performances wearing only underwear and socks while drinking a cup of tea. (sorry, no photo’s ;-) “Bring it on home!”

It’s a bit strange, sitting on an office chair rescued from the dumpster parked on horrible-cheap 1980′s shag carpeting, pumping out an acoustic signal to a situated live urban-drinking audience halfway around the world. How to get the groove on? The inspiration of the moment has to be local and global at the same time. The senses of the body have to pick up every shred of remote input to judge the reaction, and with only those minuscule bits of evidence plow ahead with faith in connection. “I’m thinking about you!” Concentration, attention, focus are all keywords in the process of throwing embodied energies from here to there, across a network that is defined by thin wires snaking across thousands of kilometers. Connection is where the Self and the Other actually make energized contact, whether it is bridging 2 meters or 20,000 kilometers. neoscenes gets up early (GMT-7), studies the possibilities, brews some tea, maps out a course of action, and dives into the work-play.

First, gather stores of internal energy, then facilitate a material infrastructure, and then, with care-full intensity, send that energy out into the network.

The gathering process is critical. It starts with listening and looking while moving through life, an awareness of the surrounding fields of flow. Keeping the “be here now” above the need to re-produce history. Over time and space neoscenes accumulates a deep archive from this lived process of looking and listening, be-ing. These fragments are a very real energy bank of electromagnetic impulses waiting for the proper moment to be re-configured and revealed. It is from this archive that the remix arises. Serendipitous elements are facilitated in every performance — unstable real-time inputs that reflect the energy of the moment. With the proper concentration, these are combined with a flow from the archive, and whatever remote vibe is coming from the receivers at the other end. It is impossible to guess the result. Except in the deep space of psycho-spiritual anticipation.

Configuring the technological infrastructure is a time-intensive and energy consumptive process — and it’s important not to run out of energy doing that, else the actual performance suffers. Fighting the technology is an old story, not a very nice one, but it comes with this kind of work, it comes with any work involving technology (which raises the question, what exactly IS technology? Well, maybe it’s whatever means any human uses to reconfigure their internal energy in order to pass that energy along to an Other.) A balance between twiddling with tools and the ensuing energy loss must be precisely found. Simple = saving energy for the communicative act itself, not worshipping the binary coders. Creativity happens in unstable autonomous zones.

Finally, the performance. The flow, transmission. Point-to-point. Real time. Is the receiver open to the right frequency? Is the transmission to narrow? Where is the groove, especially when the sonic space is outside rhythm and rhyme. When it is full of Ghosts of the past. Speaking tongues gone by. From ether to ether to ether. And while passing through bodies again and again.

You had to be there. Revolution is a live praxis. But you can still be here now, in which case, you can pick up the vibe still ringing from radiostadt 1, through the trans-temporal ether.

weekend ending. reflecting in the office. swimming two days. more swimming pool commentary. wide 50-meter pool that is hardly ever open, and when it is, it is full of the breast-strokers. no pull-buoys to be had, at least the Russian attendant gives a good looking around, but the useful objects are locked away for the special-interest groups. so, some 50- and 100-meter sprints, just up to a kilometer is all I can force myself to do. no measure of relaxing and meditating. but at least some upper-body work-out.

conversations with Frieder are long and intense. and traverse new territories in mind. would it be possible to finish my doctorate here? hmmmm. it would seem to be an ideal place, though after the Media Lab experience in Helsinki, I am skeptical. there is the common phrase “ahead of his time” that does seem to apply to the general trend of my situations. where I attempt to do something that is against the flow of the situation. the digital media thing at the Icelandic Academy: where I had to struggle, on a salary scale that rivaled Eastern Europe, to get people to believe that the Internet was something to pay attention to, getting the school up on the web — the first Icelandic school to have a regular website. but then retreating (as I was leaving Iceland anyway), tired of trying to pull others into that vision. then the school eventually privatizes, salaries quadruple, the technical infrastructure blossoms, and a former student of mine is hired to do network-based teaching… or, applying for digital media jobs in the US, using a portfolio on a floppy disk back in 1995 or so. argh!

arrive the night before Valentine’s Day in Kiel following the first European workshop of the Second Nomadic Phase. if things proceed like this all the time, there is no going back to the core of Empire, in retro vision, it is too corrupt. is this too simplistic a diagnosis? maybe, but the energy flow patterns in that set of structures is … oh hell, can’t describe it, it’s just a bunch of abstracted words.

anyway, Christian brings Steffi flowers last night. Valentine’s Day. I bring some Lübecker marzipan.

yeah, reflecting back on the two weeks, I had forgotten how powerful dialogues can be when there are engaged individuals at both ends. the system in Boulder exerts such a high degree of psychic pressure on the students (and faculty) that the conditions for humane dialogue are almost impossible to achieve. they need some breathing space of chaos — or some a root ground that feeds any contingency of flow. if the degree of insistent social flow-framework is too rigid, then there is no possibility of inspiring breath. and there is suffocation. embedded in the situation at ISNM is, for now, a degree of chaos that is not particularly uncomfortable, but it is at least available.

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances; if there is any reaction, both are transformed. — Karl Jung, hanging in Frieder and Susi’s kitchen

space, time and again the accuracy of a model to circumscribe the actual experience is a measure of the model’s validity. as the individual dialogues proceed here at ISNM, their intensity and energized proceeding illustrate the ideas.

tracking a bunch of tunes from Erik’s old punk band, The Hated, that was cool, intertwined with dialogue on the topics that have been a sparking presence in our conversations before. swimming, lifting, bumping tapes to rid the archive of huge and ancient U-matic tapes.

my entry for the exhibition womanifesto Procreation/Postcreation in Bangkok that Varsha asked me to join — turns out that she uses the simple entry as a main element of the exhibition poster, invites, and publication (it’s the spiral line of text)!

____________________________________________

procreation:

creativity is energy-in-motion

the essence of motion, movement, is energy

the quickening of the spirit

a look around to apprehend the Other

a dialogue begins

small flows of energy between two

fundamental creation, life

one plus one equals three

primal phenomenon

__________________________________________________

my primary work when one calls it that, is the work in fundamental critique of the (meta)structure(s) that we are embedded in, in this sensual reality. it is not about the exigencies of work. It is mounted not in opposition, but in simple meeting-along-the-road. confronting that which manifests in the daily movement of life in life.

and I am astonished to discover that some of my students can’t read basic texts without simply quitting and saying “that was a terrible paper, I couldn’t understand it.”

I was WAY TOO EASY on the students I had this term. just not wanting to push them too hard. and that seems a big mistake. that they do not positively thrive on taking reign of their own progress, education, and enLightenment. not near rigorous enough. no toughness. but do they really need it? is this a condition? is it related to the social structure in which they are immersed? one where many of the human relations are mapped into incredibly convoluted and warped pathways. being graded. a scientific method, and a supreme lack of genuine dialogues. balanced flows. but is it worth it to try to change those flows? there are the hints of value. bright value, value that will float above knowledge, be a Lightness in life, perhaps. but the risk and inertia to overcome seems irresistible.

I mean, who IS the prophet in this time? Lennon has passed, Coltrane, Davis, Marley, and a hundred others, from all places and ways. but all on the same pathway. is it inside of time or outside? if not inside, then it is everywhere perhaps, or concentrated in one place. concentrations raw enough for the human to sense. and delve into. that we are not able to see the scale of all.

make assignments — for example, journal entries, no less than 40 entries with no spelling errors during the semester. ouch. but they need the discipline side. in Master Printing, I had the manifest tools, process available. with the computer, and the network, more difficult to pinpoint the tool and the process. but the practice, the living praxis, is the core/key.

for example — present the Apple iTunes screen “visual” algorithm. what is the politic of that? who made it? is that person an artist? basic questions to get things started. but on to harder ones. yeah, like pick an inspiring web space and describe why, in 500 words, it moves you. as a journal entry. with no spelling errors.

choosing pathways. a teachers way is a constant risk of sketching a path of collective character. Greg said something about herding cats in another context. seems appropriate, kinda. nah, teaching is much too serious to joke about. any human contact must be considered attentively.

but I am nervous internally about the execution of the learning situations here. they are socially much less robust than the previous teaching. a complex array of students. all coming on complex pathways. and the time does seem like simmering crisis perhaps.

tomorrow’s teaching will explore some terms, that the exchange of possibilities are not limited, and I express the meta position (explaining the phenomena of creating a protocol, a shared means for connecting). how that works. looking deeply at a practice of dialogue.

gazing at the Flatirons out the window from Dona’s house. the first two days of class are over, Wednesdays are exhausting. three back-to-back 2.5 hour sessions. all covering more-or-less some of the same territory. the milieu of CU, Boulder, Colorado, the US seems to have shifted the deeper I enter the organizations and institutions. and enter into dialogue with the people. old and new friends. but no chance of identifying just what is going on. as I have changed as well.

bah, it’s all a fiction. re-presentation of the self here in hopeless form of stilted and hyper-conscious verbalization. no cutting edge. just a sharp knife (I do have that habit of sharpening knives in the various homes I am a guest in). to be on the cutting edge is to be sliced asunder. is this more of the sacrificial artist regimen? there is no need for that. it is possible to have fun, enjoy, and engage, swim in the waves of energy that push their way into tidal heaps, lenticular phantasms, and starry figures. finding the Self in the meantime.

moments. wind rattling windows. a monotone voice forms opinions and reveals information on nature. but is the language natural? back to burnished sleepy skin. as the Finnish chapter rapidly comes to a close. sleeping and waking up, and the connected-disconnectedness. after jazz.

this week’s workshop in Media Lab, in the fourth day, seems to bring different energies into play, following in the steps of the explosive catalysis of last week, where students are now taking their education into their own hands, resisting the command-and-control structures and rules of the school in Tampere. last week’s workshop was the most difficult I have ever done, and, in a way, the most successful, traveling through conflict arising from the polar clash of distributed structures and hierarchical structures: resolution and dialogue brings an incredible energy source streaming.

opening seminar today goes well, and there are many ensuing dialogues. brilliant statements and observations will carry things.

meet Atle in the afternoon, walk through the Høstutstilling, have a beer in the cafe there, letting the conversation travel through the space of shared experience. and the town is full of football fans from the two teams fighting for the national championship. in this cafe I have met Janine, Hilde, Kristin, Kenneth, and now Atle. strange how it is still such a cultural attractor for the Norwegians. obviously a profound and central expression of the cultural life of a nation-state. later I wander into a game shop and watch as a Dane instructs a passel of your Norwegians in the finer points of the LOTR battle game.

no keys in the pocket. open road. starts a period of movement that will be as intense as ever. seminars all over the place. on and on. with winter at the window. end the workshop here on a kahvio ja pulla session. a very pleasant group of students.

words are spun and spun. how to re-present the dialogue.

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away.
and the trees stand. I think I have known
autumn too long
– e.e. Cummings

suddenly, on the flight from Helsinki to Copenhagen, an intense conversation began. the woman sitting next to me. middle-aged. I noticed she was served a vegetarian lunch. she spoke to me first. (I say a bit ashamedly, knowing that I have the tendency, when in the travel mode to wrap myself tightly with a cloak of silence, or isolation. in a way, not being anti-social, but just focused on arriving rather than allowing too much extra awareness of the movement.) a silent seat-partner. but anyway, she made a small leap. and we begin to cover extraordinary territory. she is headed to a small town near Stuttgart to take a refresher course in Rudolf-Steiner-based massage. she is a massage therapist at a Steiner clinic for traumatized/handicapped children in Helsinki.

hang down your head Tom Dooley! Kingston Trio. vintage. Prescott is a desert for water and radio — public or otherwise.

and pondering this PNEK project in Norway, to see what it can be. will there be culture producers swarming and so tough, well. or will it be a complicated cross-cultural event (where I have been, in the minority for the last 12 years). gees. and trying to juggle Colorado into this equation. for the spring. a carapace to put on. but it could also be a lot of fun. working with a crew of hypersensitive networkers. why not!

dialogue and the re-presentation of being. contemplating my practice. how rooted it is in various levels of presence.

Kati says that the Olympic pool is open. cool. sun and swim. no better combination. a slow day, talking, intertwined in one way or another. some old-fashioned art. pigment on surface. colors, forms. echoes of sound in galleries smelling of moldy wood. and assorted memories and expectations, other smells. slipping, slipping, slipping. last day of class, officially, papers to finish, sort and pack, tickets gotten. travel imminent.

microscopic living. nothing happening, but time flowing. inexorable. with no possibility of slowing or stopping. damnation. loving and leaving / life. not just using language as a way of saying, but as a tool to mark the space as been there, gone now.

no place here to write anything of consequence. only reduced drivel again. thinking about the different stages of linguistic expression that are available. a diary, private, revelatory; dream journal, internalized and open to interpretation; personal letters, intimate, exploring the shared terrain; email, snatches of conversation, surfaces; the blog, stilted, pseudo; talking at a conference, formal; in a dialogue without interruption, depth; social conversation, again, surfaces, meta-subjects, sports, weather; sermons, monologues.

I have lied about dialogues. somehow have positioned them as a savior of the world, as the crux, the core of being. but it is not so, as I cannot explain why it is so. no demonstration, no confirmation, no experimental results, nothing left over, only the act itself, naked, stripped down, no wallowing in the rich linguistic mud that bring surficial healthy glows and Lights. there is absolutely no thing, no word, only the act. and nothing is really important, no thing, but only the way, the pathway of the Tao.

again, one of those instances where too much life is wrapped up in the package of dark-to-dark, or Light-to-Light to make any notations. some notebook scratchings do construct a meta-system of understandings, ink on paper, India Ink, like the old times of wandering around Europe, with only a notebook and a box of postcard photographs to sketch on and send outward. This time, there are so many dialogues that recording anything except 5 hours of video tape and fragments of thoughts during the meetings is impossible. so mostly an extracted visual record remains. rich, but not even a distillation, more like just a thin line tracing, a ray-trace, a vector, redline laser aiming somewhere in the middle of the forehead, ready to obliterate the mass of neural networks that together bundle to be brain.

Run out of words to express, to exhale what is in me head. Time passed into histories and time again, but no words form that reflect the interior dia/monologues. Only noise. The only measure over time has been to listen to the Other to see if there is something understandable. I have seen many messages from inside Others, messages that I recognize, and can find rooted presence in my own being. But where is MY voice? Not talking about effect, affect on the immediate environment, but more the reverberations. If I believe my own statements: that all things are inter-connected, then there is no doubt of affect, but what is the measure of it and in which way is it manifest in the Other. Too look for it in the Other, that whole pattern of how one looks at the Other is built up from childhood, how one reflects on the being of the Other. Patterns of reaction, response, actual ways of seeing, viewpoints, impressed into psyche until they become the reified structure of the ego. Living life by the ego. Hmmmm.

Impinging signals are too quickly attenuated by these learned (imposed) filtering mechanisms. Filtering (as a model for the action) seems to be a direct function of what psychologists (and Buddhists) call the Ego. How to avoid, deactivate, or otherwise re-route sensual information around that system? (If systems analysis even offers a potential model for approaching the situation). But this is the primary problem. Finding that language, that system for attacking/dealing with incoming and outgoing energies in a way that follows the nature of the energies themselves.

so it goes. and in the end there is so little left to say. belly growling, biting cheeks to get that little bit of self-generated protein to feed fingers to wriggle across keyboards and tired eyes to gaze the CRT gaze. nothing undone, all dialogues ending in the space of pregnant genesis.

who’s pregnant? the world? the flow? where is the possibility to become, neither seen nor unseen to any receptor, stripped of all style, all context, becoming the matrix itself.

nice dialogue with Geidre about networks and hierarchies. this topic is rising again and again, more and more intensively in the sense that it does appear that society is becoming more and more unstable. it seems clear to many (of us) buried in the crap of the developed world that things cannot go on this way much longer. but are these some kind of educated delusions of apocalypse?

and a pikajoulu (a Finnish excuse to get drunk before the holidays actually begin) with some of the research staff at the lab…

morning breakfast and discussion with Howard Rheingold, Mika, and a few students. finally finish up with the “net to art” article. it is a bear to execute. and I know I will get plenty of flak for it. can’t help it.

two weeks left here in this year. another one gettin’ gone. the Linnunlaulu house full of Amurikan and German folks involved in the Large Hot Pipe Organ performance in a week. party house. I take the whole day off. wander through several exhibitions in town. what is the name of the situation where an artist does not produce art objects? only widely dispersed dialogues which fade into the night and into skin transitions. do I have the skill to weave the dialogues into a coherent and meaning-full whole?

the experiment to stay in Helsinki has not worked out. looks like the spring will be filled with coming and going as well, and not enough support from the Media Lab to make it worth it (possible even) to stay. next step?

workshop done. ending on an energized and high note last evening at the Podewil where the TransMediale was taking place. the class attended two lectures there, but were disappointed by both of them, based on the format and styles of presentation. as is common with art/cultural conferences, the standard of presentation was low and lacking much professionalism. believing that when one has an audience of several hundred people, one should respect their time and abilities. preparing materials to be clear and engaging and present. it was clear, again, that the format of conference/festival does not work except at such a surficial level of information-transfer that it is hardly worth it. only dialogue generates enough internal heat within all participants for things to get cooking. as an artist’s work is screened or otherwise shown, in a collective situation, the canon of history is written again and again, based not on the internal potential energy of a work, for the most part, but on the social visibility of the protagonist. Wolfgang tells stories from here and there during the last days. and I wonder that he doesn’t write a book about his life. fascinating abilities of observation. Theresa arrives from Kiel in the afternoon. we are talking when Jimmie Durham calls, they are working on an exhibition with him. I recall being a little astonished during a graduate critique in Boulder when he was there as a visiting artist. he had a bottle of vodka or tequila, I forget which, and drank shot after shot during the session. one installation I see in a recent catalog of his is a refrigerator, an old model, surrounded with cobblestones on the ground in a park. the cobblestones had been thrown with force at the fridge, leaving dents and paint chips.

later, Theresa and I talk a walk around the neighborhood in the chill and damp.

here staying at Frieder’s flat in the center of Bremen. hectic pace scanning different activities around the University where he is Professor in the Department of Informatiks (as Computer Science is termed in German). long intense day of speaking with many people. they are in the process of building up a Digital Media program that will be a trans-disciplinary Master’s program incorporating Media Studies, Design, Art, and Computer Sciences.

It is not possible that this unity of knowledge, feeling, and choice which you call your own should have sprung into being from nothingness at a given moment not so long ago; rather this knowledge, feeling and choice are essentially eternal and unchangeable and numerically one in all men, nay in all sensitive beings. The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten, and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the lying light on the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? — Erwin Schroedinger

got an email from the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. at least interest to have an interview with me at some point in the future. the prospect of actually getting a position in Colorado brings up all kinds of scenarios in my head. Boris Müller, a graduating student from the Art Academy of Bremen meets me and takes me to the Academy for the afternoon to see some of his work and the COINN facility. it is raining hard for much of the afternoon. the sea is near. I can feel it.

glistening water, cold rains, bodies always wet when coming together. fluids mixing. bells ringing outside the window, wandering from place to place. at a café. wandering lost, until meeting in the plaza. separated, together, which is it? the former of no lasting consequence, the latter filled with warm energies.

well, on the eve of heading to Dessau and Prague. after a full 24 hours in Helsinki, coming from a snowy Lapland yesterday evening with Juhani. saw everybody from the Baltic initiative at TempLab, pizza with the Balkan crew, Tapio hosted a party at Meteori last night, and then a good meeting today at MUU Media Base to map out some future plans. Kjell, Mindaugas, Minna, Riikka and many others … Rasa and Raitis head to Tornio on Sunday to take over the networking class. drama again in the field of relationship. passion and loss. what else is new?

drone of trucks coming from and going to Russia on the highway near the house. combined with a very high-pitched almost-but-not-quite continuous whine of the hot water pipes makes for a very bizarre environment in the flat/room. I can work with the whine, although it is quite loud, sleeping I do not even try, just start with ear-plugs. sensitive hearing and loudness. noise. how is it that I can trace, identify, and enjoy the well-flowing energies/works of others, yet cannot make such works myself? I have an instinct for Others whose energies flow less turbulently (more laminar flows, cogent, read-able, absorb-able?) than mine (I think!?), meeting them, speaking with them, enjoying their presences and their products. and engaging in energizing dialogues.

so Mom calls with the news that Janet is in the hospital. since Monday. remoteness increases when the vulnerability of life is revealed through small events. FINALLY getting around to exploring the TAZ (Tactical Autonomous Zone) of Hakim Bey. and I am astonished to find it a textual mapping of many of my natural procedures, tactics, and ways of going. somehow I am stung by the fact the textual encoding of such ways is held to such a higher degree of regard than the praxis itself — this is some characteristic of the hierarchy of language and the priesthood. (why REAL music is inevitably dangerous to READERS). should I be stung? nah, don’t give a … fine that he is able to poeticize about life that way, taking energy from that way of living and inject into language, that is a special talent. but his concept of psychic nomadism outlines a path that is more than familiar.

Vital in shaping TAZ reality is the concept of psychic nomadism (or as we jokingly call it, “rootless cosmopolitanism”). Aspects of this phenomenon have been discussed by Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology and the War Machine, by Lyotard in Driftworks and by various authors in the “Oasis” issue of Semiotext(e). We use the term “psychic nomadism” here rather than “urban nomadism,” “nomadology,” “driftwork,” etc., simply in order to garner all these concepts into a single loose complex, to be studied in light of the coming-into-being of the TAZ. “The death of God,” in some ways a de-centering of the entire “European” project, opened a multi-perspectived post-ideological worldview able to move “rootlessly” from philosophy to tribal myth, from natural science to Taoism– able to see for the first time through eyes like some golden insect’s, each facet giving a view of an entirely other world.

But this vision was attained at the expense of inhabiting an epoch where speed and “commodity fetishism” have created a tyrannical false unity which tends to blur all cultural diversity and individuality, so that “one place is as good as another.” This paradox creates “gypsies,” psychic travellers driven by desire or curiosity, wanderers with shallow loyalties (in fact disloyal to the “European Project” which has lost all its charm and vitality), not tied down to any particular time and place, in search of diversity and adventure… This description covers not only the X-class artists and intellectuals but also migrant laborers, refugees, the “homeless,” tourists, the RV and mobile-home culture — also people who “travel” via the Net, but may never leave their own rooms (or those like Thoreau who “have traveled much — in Concord”); and finally it includes “everybody,” all of us, living through our automobiles, our vacations, our TVs, books, movies, telephones, changing jobs, changing “lifestyles,” religions, diets, etc., etc.

Psychic nomadism as a tactic, what Deleuze & Guattari metaphorically call “the war machine,” shifts the paradox from a passive to an active and perhaps even “violent” mode. “God”‘s last throes and deathbed rattles have been going on for such a long time–in the form of Capitalism, Fascism, and Communism, for example–that there’s still a lot of “creative destruction” to be carried out by post-Bakuninist post-Nietzschean commandos or apaches (literally “enemies”) of the old Consensus. These nomads practice the razzia, they are corsairs, they are viruses; they have both need and desire for TAZs, camps of black tents under the desert stars, interzones, hidden fortified oases along secret caravan routes, “liberated” bits of jungle and bad-land, no-go areas, black markets, and underground bazaars.

These nomads chart their courses by strange stars, which might be luminous clusters of data in cyberspace, or perhaps hallucinations. Lay down a map of the land; over that, set a map of political change; over that, a map of the Net, especially the counter-Net with its emphasis on clandestine information-flow and logistics–and finally, over all, the 1:1 map of the creative imagination, aesthetics, values. The resultant grid comes to life, animated by unexpected eddies and surges of energy, coagulations of light, secret tunnels, surprises. — Hakim Bey

it IS my praxis. maybe I have missed the expressive techniques of radicalization, but the other side says that radicalization is not needed when the act is revolutionary. the weight of dialogue tips any scale set to compare the volumetric ratio of act to act. what can you compare it to anyway? murder, mayhem, rape, pillage, what violent act of person against human or human-made agent of the oppressive state compares in psychic strength to the dialogue. wars end this way, wars begin this way. Bey misses this somehow, despite his penetrating search of self and brain-stem reflexes. his categories of interaction miss the personal and direct — almost always he is caught up with the imaginary collective both as the object of critique and the object of ultimate continuous transformation. the self and the Other is a conglomerate, a mass, a class of things. hmmmm. finish up with the Doctoral application to Media Lab. Timo comes by last night to the office to look over the application and research proposal with me, and seems to be pleased with it. crossing paths with perceived strong intellect, I at once have a small defensiveness rise in gut, but realize this is worth nothing, and open-ness is worth everything, disperse this and return to living and see that there are significant parallel pathways of thinking. the Dhao speaks loud. straw dogs run away. and, as Anthony said once, it ain’t the Dhao Jones Industrial we are talking about …