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.

day starts with French toast, frisbee a bit later, things that Loki and I share over the history of sporadic presence. cut my hair off last night, making a pile in the middle of the living room floor. clean it up. clean up the kitchen, and other details. so it goes.

make a museum tour as well to the National Museum to see the new Steina Vasulka installation which is monumental and fits the space perfectly. then on to the Kjarval and the Hafnarhusid as I discovered as of February this year they are free to the public. the Martha Schwartz I Hate nature / ‘Aluminati’ installation in the courtyard of the Kjarval is a nice critic of the horrid environmental degradation happening at the hands of Alcoa and corrupt government officials who are selling the landscape to make aluminum smelters and the dams which are necessary to power them.

also wander down to the harbor to take some photos. observing with irony that the whale-watching ships are docked immediately across the pier from the whaling ships — a fact which no doubt escapes most tourists as the signage is not easily interpretable. anyone from Greenpeace would know. (heh, Simmi tells the joke, my favorite meal is whale meat with green peas…)

managed to get over to Seltjarnarnes to visit with Edda, Stefan’s mum, who now has a flat in the same place that Jón and Helga lived some years back.

not much interesting to write about here. haven’t gotten many of the sound files that I have picked up over the couple weeks online yet. as usual, behind the flowing times. months, years behind on all this — picking up, accreting material observations, when to start the reverse process to dis-engage with this acquisition obsession? rhetorical questions. to scatter into a text of frequent error and mis-apprehension.

over for a visit with Sara. and her sister, Cecilia drops by — she was Loki’s art and design teacher last year.

big news here are the armed marines guarding the HMS Exeter docked in the main harbor, here for a conference on the Arctic Convoys (from WWII). police do not carry weapons on a regular basis in Iceland and the country basks in a peaceful idyll interrupted only by the influx of immigrants which are routinely tabbed with a variety of crimes.

through the white Lightness, reminded of Light, suffused with Light. the pressing back of liquid globes, securely maintaining a barrier to all that Light is from entering the soul in extremity of be-ing. what more to say.

see some people, some products arising from the lives of people, tasting some compiled energies. distributed and distant lives come close for a moment of microscopic visioning and, yes, tasting. within all which is living.

Simmi invites Stefan, Loki, and I out for a fast fishing cruise on Kollafjördur on his speedboat. I happen to hook the first cod and pull in a number more. Stefan and I had to stop at ten moderate-sized fish because we only had a little box to put them in. Simmi was bleeding for the whole trip after slicing his thumb open with the fillet knife. we hailed a trawler for some band-aids, turns out he should have had stitches, but it was too late when he finally went to the doctor the next day. the cockpit of the boat looked like a crime scene.

days spin into the weeks. and time begins to come to an end here already. so, trying to get in touch with folks, Palli, Sara, Magnus, and others. too short. and pathways too long. and there is no time to catch everyone. made it to a big opening at Kling og Bang with some former students and saw a whole slew more from the period of time I taught at the Art Academy between 1990-96. very nice to talk to some of them after this long gap. many are still active.

three years since that crippling accident. still walking, still talking, but still realizing that at any moment it could all stop. happy every morning that I can get up and make some tea whilst listening to construction noises in the neighborhood.

just back from Helga’s funeral service at the Seltjarnarnes Church and the reception at Hotel Saga after wards. sad to see the ones who grew up with that old way of living pass away, that long-ago generation. Helga was born in a dirt-floored sod hut in Svarfathardalur near Dalvík on Eyjafjördur just shy of one hundred years ago. she was the matriarch to four generations of descendants who follow her on the pathway.

while I will always be an outsider in this close-knit community deep in the North Atlantic, I will always be bound to the place through the people of this family. bound in the living and the dying, the movements, the step-wise step-fool wanderings along the rugged sphere’s surface, floating in a suffused crystal darkness. where replication and desertion become forces driving Light and spare living. messages arrive from all corners of life. direct in the face, through this and that face rarely seen, age-lines and sagging skin characterizing it all. eyes peering out from under graying crop. young ones dancing around, some so young that the dance has not yet begun in the newness of be-ing. but where eyes wide open take it all in to map pathways across pure soul. they take it all in. and the living move on, the ones who have left are there in memory as the ones who formed us.

drop by for a visit with Val to catch up on her work updating the database of the National Gallery of Iceland. meet for a bit with old friend Posi who is now the director of the museum and Rakel who I worked with way back in 1994 on the first stirrings of network activity in the form of a web presence for the organization. brings back memories. and thoughts.

belly full of travel fithrildi. bland poetic insights into leaving Berlin. not much to say. I’ll be back. is probably the most profound. sooner than later. but profoundly not knowing the future, what’s the point in statements like that, unless they are based on oracular hypersight. or delusion. as delusion is just as likely to fit into dream as any ten-year politburo plan.

out there, outside the door is all this noise. confusing sensory impressions. and arrival in Ice Land is strange, after a four year hiatus. I make my way to Valgerdur’s place in Sund. Loki cycles over later to drop in for a bit. my boy. it’s good to see him.

bummer, George Carlin dies a couple days ago. he made me laugh, and I am clearly not the only one that he had that effect on.

I look at it this way… For centuries now, man has done everything he can to destroy, defile, and interfere with nature: clear-cutting forests, strip-mining mountains, poisoning the atmosphere, over-fishing the oceans, polluting the rivers and lakes, destroying wetlands and aquifers… so when nature strikes back, and smacks him on the head and kicks him in the nuts, I enjoy that. I have absolutely no sympathy for human beings whatsoever. None. And no matter what kind of problem humans are facing, whether it’s natural or man-made, I always hope it gets worse. — George Carlin

and godaddy.com threw me for a serious loop with an email thunking down into my inbox saying I had to remove any non-web-related files on my server within 24 hours. and yes, it does appear that the user agreement says no file storage on the hosting account, so I have to quickly create web pages that contain links to all the audio and video files on storage. pain in the arse. but I shot back saying all the content was part of my accreting web space and that 100% of the audio and image files were my own content, so they relented for 30 days at which time they will check the site again.

Solstice come and gone. joined in the aporee solstice happening down in Kreuzburg last night at 23:59, the official moment of the Solstice. is today’s darkness because of the knowing of the long slide to 21 December? or does it matter? swinging, Light to dark. the performance ritual, reflecting on last year’s foray up Pool Creek Canyon in Dinosaur on that Solstice, does not evoke the energy. and screening the old Solstice videos from Ice Land also do not provide the right resonance. what is the essence of performance. making visible the energies stored up when in stellar regions. or?

the streets are chaotic after Turkey beats Slovakia in the European Cup.

Wolfgang bestows a couple of good Solingen kitchen blades in exchange for computer consulting:

Mini-Yatagan — Windmühlen-Küchen- und Obstmesser “Mini-Yatagan”, konvexe Klinge, nicht rostfrei, aus hochwertigem Kohlenstoffstahl / Carbonstahl, blaugepließtet, Griff aus Kirschbaumholz-Schalen

Klingenlänge: 85 mm

Der Yatagan. Diese Form hat einen langen Weg hinter sich. Dem türkischen Säbel entlehnt, über Frankreich zu uns gekommen, hat dieses praktische Messer immer seinen Platz als Obst-, Gemüse- und Kräutermesser. Mit der Spitze läßt sich beispielsweise ein Apfelkerngehäuse besonders gut herausschneiden und auch die bauchige Schneide und gute Ausgewogenheit erleichtern das Zubereiten von Gemüse, Kräutern und Ähnlichem. Das Windmühlenmesser gehört zur Serie der “blaugepließteten” Messer von Schleifmeister W. Fehrekampf. Das Blaupließten ist das aufwendigste Verfahren der traditionellen Solinger Schleiftechnik.

Man erkennt eine solche Klinge an der Lichtbrechung, die sich in den feinen Schleifschrammen als bläulicher Regenbogenschimmer darstellt.

Nan’s funeral in Charlottenburg. I see a number of people that I have not seen in some time. Kathy Rae is there from Manchester, and Sandro, one of the students who came to Iceland all those years ago.

the funeral is moving, standing room only. in the room with the casket, a video tape interview with Nan running silently, along with a projection of one of her Light-water videos. flowers, candles. friends in black. stories from a few folks.

after the service, Sandro mentions that he has a photograph from the Iceland trip, which he then pulls from an envelope. I am moved when I see that it is one of my postcards that I sent him after the trip. I think I sent each of the students that I had addresses for a copy, if I remember right. I immediately notice that it is on resin-coated paper, ach, but that was a time when I could use nothing else as I had only the college lab which could hardly be called a lab even. I worked with what I had. he said he would send me a high-rez scan of it. it underlines that old idea I had to gather up all the postcards that I have ever sent and put on an exhibition. what fun that would be. especially if each of the people would attend the show.

it is very nice to let memories of Nan float up, especially her work which is essentially about Light. and her presence as a mentor, teacher, friend, her art. generosity. the community she supported.

and memories of her Armani suit and her fondness for good cognac.

Avalon from Roxy Music plays in one interlude. and I make this small tribute — blackbird sings…

(sketch) the seminar ends in two side-steps which confirm the in-sustainability of that particular track of teaching — the holding to a(ny) model. it is an outcome in facilitating the participants to actually mutiny and go off on their own, rejecting authority and (s)lack, and with strong expressions of independence and a desire to find relevant subject areas for inquiry. when will this happen on a larger scale, across larger swaths of so-called learning spaces? there are limits to tolerance, this demonstrates, but can those limits be prescribed and stretched without pretension? or does any pre-tension doom the process from moving into at least an abandoned form of random encounter, instead into mere buffoonery.

well before the end it was already impossible to sustain a track, so that option fell by the way-side. at the same time, dialogues were undertaken with a ferocious concentration. this had the effect of gradually loosening any vestige of authority-in-relation in addition to any privileging of knowledge or know-ing. dramatic developments. and as the (post)authoritarian protocol became internally incoherent, evolving too many possible interpretations, efforts focused on relinquishing traces of control that the protocol demanded and instead the formation of a new protocol exclusive of the facilitator. did not compile the questions, such as they were. relevancy appeared to be attained, but through a desire to move back to traditional models of relation (the text). very interesting development. will have to re-think that framework. of all the thousands of possibly inspiring texts to consume, which will be the right combination? hmmm. cook book might be the best starting point.

a little awkward with the stylized ending, but as a sample in the extreme spectrum of idiosyncratic confabulation, very interesting!, or … not. ! a formative de-briefing is hoped for, but that will have to arise independently in other temporal spaces. perhaps easy to be cynical about the self and the situation, but human encounter arises in all forms, this being one of them. no qualitative judgment possible.

the cycling across town to Charlottenburg is fascinating, memorized now, the transitions, the corners, the sounds, the traffic. the tourists, the police, the Park, the City. the images and sounds are building up to something.

head to Lichtenberg for Barbara and Susanne’s birthday party, in a green garden shaded by an enormous and very healthy apple tree, late into the slightly chilly evening, a fire of large pieces of timber that clearly were formerly from houses. 25×25 cm cross-section, pieces several meters long, with nails in them. rafters from destroyed buildings. war relics. or reliquaries. incredible food. and a Russian accordionist.

I am shocked to hear via Raul that Nan Hoover just passed away. I had just talked to her on the telephone back in April she was just back in town after setting up her show in Salzburg, and we were going to get together after not crossing paths for some years. lung cancer and the ensuing chemo took her away in five weeks.

A condolences site is set up.

we first met through a very bizarre coincidence back in 1991 or so. MB and I were traveling in Germany and were up in Düsseldorf for a day, I don’t recall why. we were in the neighborhood of the Academy, so I thought it would be interesting to see this place where Nam June Paik (was teaching) and Joseph Beuys (had taught) at. the place was empty as we wandered around the halls. at some point I saw a name tag on a door that said Nan Hoover, and I recognized the name as this American video/performance artist. it was the only door with a Light shining out from under, so I knocked. Nan answered the door and I introduced myself mentioning right off that I was from Iceland and was at the Icelandic Academy teaching electronic media. she practically fell over. she and her student assistant, Paschutan Buzari had just at that moment been talking about the trip they were planning to Iceland, and that they didn’t have any direct contacts at the Academy. needless to say, a synchronous event which was a nice start to our connection. I subsequently did much of the ground logistics for the two week trip. the photo above is a group portrait of Nan (with some of her students and Icelandic friends along with MB and Loki (who was at that moment all of 5 days old!)). It was taken on the top of Perlan in Reykjavík. I hosted the student group at the Icelandic Academy where we had a nice collective happening at the end of their visit. and before that some field trips and visions of the Northern Lights among other activities. Nan and the students stayed in a couple flats that the Academy had right behind our house on Holmgardi. I arranged for her to do a screening and public talk at the Nylistasafn in Reykjavík as well. I later went to Düsseldorf a number of times to visit with her classes, as well as meeting her back in Amsterdam a few times.

re-reading the letters I was sending to Nan back then, somewhere packed away in the archive are her letters to me. her work is profoundly energized and a fundamental exploration of Light and change (the video and installation work). I would really like to get to Salzburg to see the show that she is sharing with Bill Viola. I never saw any of her live performance work. time passing. life passing.

geesh, Junkers JU-52′s flying over the city. two weeks ago it was the Douglas C-47′s, now it’s the Junkers. does this have any geopolitical significance? I was feeling a bit funny the first time I saw one of those planes flying over Germany some years back. so that’s what it was like — to see low-level paratroopers pouring out of those things (not sure how often the Wehrmacht did that, but). or just a slew of those plowing across the country skies, bringing troops to the battle.

just back into town, now I recognize when I hear one of these machines. accustomed, but aware.

headed down (south-east) into Brandenburg to Zeesen to visit with Ulrike at the family dacha (well, actually a large and nicely designed home of her parents — the dacha is in the back yard.) she’s up from Zürich for the weekend. the lake is a few meters away. it is delicious. nothing like skinny-dipping in a summertime lake in the German countryside.

she tells about her uncle who lives next door in his beautiful rammed-earth house. I am fascinated to run across this technology existing here in Germany. and there is Sunny, the happy bulldog. conversation drifts along wide paths through language. Saturn setting in alignment with the first-quarter moon, Mars high, Venus rising only in the early morning. nice to sit in the top-floor deck and watch stars, though the sky does not get completely dark any more as the Solstice approaches.

meet Karla briefly at a rather banal art event: Kunstinvasion im Blumengroßmarkt, Berlin-Kreuzberg.

idiosyncratic living is, by nature, an expression of a way of going. art (or the art world), as an accepted social function or framework in the techno-social system, puts specific limits on what protocols are acceptable and what not, it is important that the individual 1) realize this, and 2) that they do not allow those frameworks to dominate their expressive possibilities. a life-pathway is the primary expressive tool. the minute and daily form of life is the most indicative expression of an individuals presence and the possibilities of their expressive engagement.

It is sobering to think that we might be almost totally ignorant of the vast if dispersed sources of free energy which underlie our very existence. We may have more in common than we think with the medieval peasants, who could see the stars whirling in the sky but could not begin to figure out the connection between those stars and the physics of their everyday life. Like them, we may be doomed to essential ignorance in our lifetimes. (Many medieval people tried to imagine connections between the stars and their lives, but the results were quite embarrassing.) But if we develop the mathematical prerequisites and work hard and patiently and boldly to extend our real understanding, then perhaps someday our descendants will be able to attain a level of life that we peasants can hardly imagine. Alternatively, of course, the option of stagnation, fragmentation and extinction is also available to all species in the greater biosphere. — Paul J. Werbos

month(s) end(s), hot Berlin. pushing 90F/33C. summer is here.

Annie points out that the incident team deploys monochrome, a project featuring a wide variety of electronic/network-based projects.

and then there is the blog/audio file from the RCA in London, a talk/discussion on Brazilian Medialogies – Systems of Learning with Carlos Villela, Felipe Fonseca, and Ricardo Ruiz.

fortune cookie:

All the passions make us commit faults — love makes us commit the most ridiculous ones. Lucky Numbers: 4, 6, 15, 19, 22, 46.

and on to meet Udo and head to a couple openings along with another session of dkfrf again to hear Ben, Michael and other’s perform. beforehand, on the way down, a slow cruise through Görlitzer Park, summer expression! afterward, sitting outside at a cafe talking until very late.

a dkfrf (that is, das kleine field-recording festival) gig with Brandon LaBelle and Ben Owen starts with a couple hours setting up and doing sound checks, then a nice tossed pasta dinner at Rinus’ place, then back to the place for the evening of visual and sonic treats.

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.

holiday in Netherlands, Ascension Day. internet goes out. just after figuring things out with the next day’s schedule. meeting tomorrow with Carmin, Rob, Geert and Linda, uff.

several times, friends in Europe have expressed the sentiment that they should be allowed to vote for the next US president. I don’t blame them.

in a cafe. pretending that I am a normal tourist. visiting this place on a week’s break from the job. shaky premise. Chinese tourists, comfortable in their own skins, progressing to world dominance. while Amurika founders in scarce 225 years. street musicians sing “if you’re going to San Francisco, make sure you have some flowers in your hair…” or so. he’s Amurikan, maybe 40 years old. maybe more, maybe less. who knows. age becomes less knowable or even contemplated. as day after day there is yet another blank page let lie, while pretty girls smile and rub their lover’s backs. tattooed arms intertwined. and what of life trajectory, how it goes? year overtaking year. while an older guy sits down at the next table with a baby-fist-sized spherical knob on the top left side of his head. bulbous. the tattooed gal shows the dimple in her lower back to her lover. they kiss. each second of eye contact they have, I age a year. slowly sinking into anonymous senility. nothing to do but stare down the far horizon, if it could be seen at all here in the City, to spot any sign of Death approaching. but there are too many brick buildings framing the space of Rembrandtsplein.

actually the Chinese folks aren’t tourists, but part of a rather effective media machine — making a manifestation in Amsterdam’s main plaza on a Saturday. friendly, fair, peaceful. wow.

and what of encounter? where is the flow and energy of that? of immediate passion and spontaneous connection? what parts of Self are open and which are closed off?

and all the while, an Urban Screen commands the plein. why do they do this? dayLight does not reveal enough. and the colonization of public space from greater and greater distance as applied by the techno-social system continues. if the amplification/feedback loop is more immediate there is better reflection of local conditions. (clearly the feedback system is showing it is not adequate in providing the system with any real degree of sustainability. (how does a feedback system actually function to control — it needs analysis and interpretation of comparative state/conditions.)

so, dynamic equilibrium depends on analysis and awareness and attentive centered-ness. be-ing in the moment (and my own awareness seems so … narrow.) how to widen the scope of awareness? looking for alternative pathways. (got no imagination. to illustrate the issues, that would be necessary.

and the first clouds in two weeks shade the plein for a moment. the sycamore trees stop for a moment to consider how it is that they are here.

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.

make it over to Rod & Lizbet’s place in Maastricht just on time at 1900 for a fine fish dinner. another visit. Magnús is there already. nice to be back. audio forthcoming from the weekend — what more to expect with a bunch of sound artists hanging out! I’ll be helping Tom work on the VEC site which is a platform he constructed to showcase Rod’s work. more on that later as well. always too many things to get done.

in transit. first trip in two months. to Amsterdam. it takes about 6 hours door-to-door from my place to Raul & Truis’s place on Overtoom. May Day. turns out that May Day really isn’t celebrated so seriously in Netherlands, so I’m told. unlike the heavy things that go on in Berlin. nice to catch up with them. I help Raul deal with fridge magnets for an exhibition in Bogota.

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

when describing what I observe in the world, I can choose which pre-existing configurations (of an existing language) to use. this will determine the audience. pictures on a wall. objects in a room. speeches, houses, meals. presence. and absence.

movement, nomadism. the restless need for an alternate point-of-view. could this have erupted in that caged feeling of family? being the hamster in the cage and being poked with sticks through the bars. looking for a safe corner somewhere in the bar-delimited space. but never finding it. never safe from those tortuous energies raging around the enclosed space of relation. no escape. with the ultimate result being to curl up in a ball, fetal, and accept the brutality that life brought along. insecurity, fear, and above all, a deep lack of trust in those Others.

now, to trust? how to trust when the early lessons were all about how never to trust. sad eff-ing state of affairs. broken trust. that was the chief operating principle in the meta-structure of family. a self-fulfilling distortion of human relation. breaking the cycle by re-discovering what it is to trust. recalling the trust expressed by friends through their open welcomes and open doors.

a performance evening at tmp.lab that Marie-Hélène and Jim set up. I do some ambient sound work, but otherwise focus on the remote situation, monitoring the stream and partners in Chile and Canada. the functionality of the ustream.tv platform (Flash- and browser-based) is quite good with controls on stream quality, multi-point collaboration, a built-in chat channel, archiving, and so on. it would have been a dream for past projects! (all this with the caveat that the stream image has the branded logo of ustream.tv on it, and the company is clearly an eventually-for-profit enterprise. that and while the archival and sharing possibilities are very well-developed, so far I have not determined if it is possible to download stand-alone flash media files from the archive. to play, one needs access to the database — all data including the chat texts reside in their server.

Derek comes by. hinting that the Regime text scared off one of the panel for the Sonic Architectures conference in July, so, I won’t be involved in that event. (thanks for trying, Derek!) and on a reciprocal note, Rasa definitely wants to include it in Spectropia. albeit with references (huh? it’s a speculative essay, but they are seeking peer-review status) and at approximately half the finished length (oh, this is really an impossible challenge to cope with). so, not sure if I want to go through the work on major revisions instead of continuing on with the other chapters. it’s a book chapter, I don’t want to re-write it. but having it published in Spectropia would be nice. they always do really beautiful and innovative design work. so…

Mari has her opening here in Berlin and in Helsinki simultaneously — the Field Gallery here and at Maa-tila in Helsinki. it’s about mysterious mega…

Mega is a loophole in the system of political, cultural, functional, social and historical locations. It is a non-place that questions land-owning and borders – and the whole global economical system related to them. — Mari Keski-Korsu

old networker-friend, Paul Rutkovsky (of floridada) and I have some nodes in common in Lithuania of all places. he was just there and here in Berlin as well. he sends this invitation from a recent show of drawings on paper that he had in Vilnius.

suspended ambronesia, the whole week gets screwed up. and what do I have to show for it? nada. started off good at the Institute meeting on Monday, giving a short presentation to students on the block seminar that I’ll be doing in early June Sustainable Creative Presence :: Distributed Be-ing. have a few conversations afterward with some interested students. then a brief faculty meeting that is conducted mostly in English to my astonishment (for my sake).

the opening of Strictly Berlin 008. head cold still. head home early. miss Mari ja Mika. damnation. transportation and opening ambiance trickles onwards in time. Mari calls, but I am too slow to answer the phone. can’t hear. but the microphone does.

migrating realities, day two. people going WAY over time, people reading papers. understandable a bit when they are second language speakers, but I thought at one point, why not have a native speaker reading it for them? (it would be more understandable and wouldn’t require their presence). my hand goes up, I’ll do it! annoying aspect of, again, the meta-structures of the encounter. as do dominate all social encounters. but tend to restrict and form the formal.

situation in Lithuania. empty spots, people leaving. an empty landscape (compared to Central Europe), poor standard of living, life expectancy, wages, employment. not good. but the emptiness is a nice thing. the politics of emigration.

Johannes Deutsch: WDR cultural spectacle, Mahler’s Second Symphony, gala concert … (Ars Electronica, Linz, big-ass spectacle). with live manipulation.

(and with that, I quit taking notes) <>

the last evening was nice. the conference panel in Savannah, which I managed to do from Hubertus’ flat, across the street from GdK, was not so good. my intervention was in poor comparison with the power-point presentations some of the other’s did. but I just couldn’t bring myself to engage with that hyper-limited platform. it is so ubiquitous in the pathway it prescribes on a presentation. clearly, though, Adobe Connect, the collaborative platform, is also so limited and restricted to particular forms of hyper-socialized human encounter. although limits can stimulate creativity if there is a resonance between the two people who are connecting via that pathway. it doesn’t resonate with my be-ing. I don’t use it again. f-2-f resonates. minimizing encounters mediated by cultural spectacle. focus as close to f-2-f as possible.

the performance, as with most performances is fringe, a good concentrated group, but small, the young folks wander off when the Vilnius student crew leaves. some people had come after reading on the site of my connection to Stan Brakhage. interesting conversations afterward. and a nice denouement, wandering back down to Potsdamerplatz and so on home. running on adrenaline.

today ends with a longish wander from Gdk to Pariser Platz in the reception center for the Akademie der Künste, thanks to Hubertus. wow!

finally able to take an evening to catch up with Udo. hoping to get some audio work up onto his brilliant google hack — http://aporee.org/maps/. otherwise back at the desk or occasionally wandering around with M-H.

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.

gusts and streamers of corn snow bounce past the windowsill, bringing the imagined shivering anticipation of heading out to shop for groceries. finally finished with the tin of Turkish Tomurcuk Earl Grey tea. it was good, but a disappointment compared to the long-leaf Ceylonese also available at the Turkish supermarket around the corner from Mindaugas’ place. I bought the tin because is was smaller than the huge kilo boxes of long-leaf. can’t decide now whether to pick up a small quantity of finer tea, or what. last month I picked up a stainless steel tea brewer that holds probably three or four regular cups of water. I’ve been brewing a full container each morning for the pre-noon writing session, drinking by the sip the whole time practically, tea with whole milk. necessary practice just to keep hands warm. otherwise I have to wear half-gloves — the relative lack of finger motion (am I not writing enough?) chills the hands. so, it is an integral part of the writing process that seems to be hapapening here. whether or not it is successful, I cannot say until I spin the text out into the wider spaces of network. that’s about to happen as I am working on the conclusions while refining the precursor parts of the overall text.

and in the time I write this, blue sky arrives. squall weather like in Iceland. ripping through. and vanishing without a trace.

I head out for a trip to the grocery. it is cold, but the trip down is with the wind, and I travel between squalls. I’m in a quandary over which tea to get now. bags are three times the cost of bulk, but they have only large 250 gram bags of bulk, so the total price is steep. and also, since I again focus on Earl Grey, though I wouldn’t mind a custom mix with some Lapsang Souchong or Russian, the bergamot in the Earl Grey is very volatile, so a large bag will lose its flavor unless it is used quickly. hmmm. but the price point drives me these days on as tight a budget that I am. so, big bag of Earl Grey. so it goes. looking forward to the first cup after the end of the Turkish stuff.

yesterday, a touristic walk around the Reichstag and Tiergarten area with M-H. clearly a major holiday, most shops closed except for cafes. and hundreds of people out walking despite the chilly weather. the line was too long to go up into the dome, so we wandered down to the HKW to take in Song Dong’s installation, then back to the Holocaust Memorial via the Brandenberg Gate (past the guy dressed in full buckskins and a faux-Sioux war bonnet playing some kind of generic indigenous flute music with a back-up sound system and generator. just too wierd for me. the Euro-obsession with an imagined and imaginary cowboy-and-indian culture in the mythological West of Hollywood is mostly over the top and with no connection to reality.)

I find myself frequently (at least in mind) making the comparison between Washington, D.C., and Berlin. as Imperial centers (in different phases of dominance).

head to the HKW for another opening, this time an Asian exhibition, Re-Imagining Asia. happen to run into Stephen, and will get together with him later in the month to catch up on things. aside from the numerous online events I’ve jumped into when he was at V2, I haven’t seen him f2f since Tornio in 1999 or so when he and Nina came through with a collection of Canadian experimental films that they screened to an unsuspecting audience at the Polytech. they were on their way further north researching their Aurora project. will have to ask him about what happened to that.

the most intriguing work there not simply how it dominated the entire space, but for the work it was, especially reflecting the previous evening at Alnatura. the work, Wu jin qi young, translated as Waste Not, by artist Song Dong, is a collaboration with his mother:

On 28 February 2008, the Chinese artist Song Dong, from the People’s Republic of China, started erecting his room-filling installation ‘Waste Not’ in the Foyer of the House of World Cultures. It is his parents’ house, which fell victim to urban planning in China and is now being reconstructed together with its entire inventory in the Foyer.

Wu jin qi young describes the philosophy of life of an entire generation of ordinary people in China who have grown up with the experience of war, expulsion, starvation and constant shortages of goods. Song Dong’s mother belongs to this generation. And one can imagine all the things that have accumulated in her house over the decades. When his father died in 2002 and his mother was filled by despair as a result, Song Dong tells us: “Art was my last hope. And by helping me with my art, my mother was gradually able to shake off her sorrows.” The two of them worked together on the concept for “Waste Not.” This not only helped his mother to work through her problems, but also to emancipate herself from a household that was growing out of control. The result is both impressive and depressing, with the seemingly countless toys, items of clothing, buttons, ballpoint pens, cupboards, remnants of materials, bags, pots, tubs, toothpaste tubes, etc. are lined up alongside one another like stock. In the Song Dong’s hands, the entire construction becomes an artifact; he creates multilayer archives full of obsolete Chinese products and manifestations of past living conditions.

we are suspended in a sea of stuff. certainly the Confucian pathway would show some relief, eh? imagine a similar house in the US, that generation is almost gone in the US, the ones who grew up in the Great Depression. but perhaps another will come down the long road of history along which we spend a little time.

that’ll be Brandon.

no time to catch up with this stuff. in to the City to meet Josephine… we catch a show Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea by the performance group 1927 at the PS122 theater/performance space. funky animations, gingerbread men, glittery eyes on stage, piano, singing, the Lodger, and the orange Imagine backpack with peace sign, while the show goes on …

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

so, back to the USA. for a short while. media hyped for Christmas selling. a section of the NY Times titled Circuits, about electronic gadgets as holiday gifts, is aimed to keep the techno-social system plodding forwards. one article starts out:

The Global Positioning System is all about self-reliance and helping people find their own way.

wow, where to start with that small bit of promotional utopianism. I mean, c’mon, self-reliance??? when one is in fact relying on a huge military technology system. I equate the words autonomy and self-reliance. though these are not strictly, from an etymological point-of-view, the same, they infer the same independence from outside influence or outside allocation of resources, for example. how can a battery-driven device, manufactured through an intricate global web of resource-consumption that reads data from military satellites, increase self-reliance? the web of dependencies is both wide and deep. can the consumer repair one of these devices if they malfunction? can the consumer easily determine if there is some systemic failure in accuracy (or in ground-truth for that matter)? or modify it productively to fulfill idiosyncratic individual needs? Garmin can’t answer these questions because, as a company, they are already so deep in the web that the edges of and more importantly, the creator of the web remains all but invisible. there is no base-line measure of human autonomy existing on the horizon. that baseline has long since sunk beyond the limits of the knowable world. beyond the purview of the entire spectrum of techno-fetish seekers and Luddites all together. even from the intoxicating heights that the early adopters seek to attain, nothing is to be seen except the endless techno-social plains littered with the detritus of war, consumption, and excess.

the dependencies are also about substituting direct individual sensory input from the natural environment (i.e., terrain, atmospheric, infrastructural evidences) for inputs from this selective (exclusive, limited, biased) infrastructure/system. a dominant system says that its information is superior to any other. it consequently devalues other observational information and its sources.

how can one be autonomous when the dependencies are so deep? it is a relative issue. clearly anyone existing in a social system becomes more-or-less subject to that system. it is a sliding scale, however, and individuals can choose to which degrees that they participate in the system and to what extent they reject involvement. social pressures to adapt the idiosyncratic self to the (monolithic) system exist in a tremendous range of forms. from covert to overt, from soft to hard, from suggestive to compelling, from punishment to reward. it is a sliding scale, though, so that there is a responsive range of choices that one might make which places the Self in relation to the system.

in the case of GPS, yes, it is true that a paper map is simply another form of social construct likely created by a subset of military technologies. but trace back, for a moment, to the originary situation. this is where the Self engages the Other face-to-face, listening to a verbal report of what’s out there. trust is a determining factor in this relation, knowledge of the Other critical in the measure of reliability and range of interpretation of their observations of the world. sliding back up the technological scale gradually removes the immediacy of this relation and the pathway which trust must follow to be realized. what is it to trust ones life with the output of a thousand anonymous Others. what does autonomy mean when any minute mistake by one of those thousands may create a glitch which kills?

every time I board a plane, do I think of this? nah, the baseline is gone. I place my faith and trust in Boeing. besides, I don’t know where I’m going anyway.

more on this in future rants…

make a Lightning trip to Mechernich to see Peter & Kersten & the kids. on the way through Köln, a race over to the Dom Cathedral between trains to see the controversial Gerhard Richter piece 4900 farbe which forms the main (enormous!) southern transept window. not bad, though I have a loathing for Richter as a painter. this based on an experience back in 1992 maybe, up visiting Chuck and Tina in Copenhagen, we went out to the Louisiana Museum where there was a huge Richter exhibition. feeling blasé about institutionalized art already, wandering through the museum we entered a huge room with 6 gigantic canvases and hundreds of incandescent Lights. the effect was so numbing and overwhelming the rest of the day was shot, and I have avoided museum mega-shows ever since. the energy force of patronized spectacular art is to overwhelm, not to inspire.

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.

Zorka, from way back in the Muthesius times and IFKIK, comes by for brunch.

finally meeting the RAUM crew: Karsten, Matze, Jork, and some others. dinner, some openings, and a party at the Humboldt University. hard to imagine being there after walking through that neighborhood before the wall came down — the party was around the corner from the Pergammon Museum. Berlin. spread out. not so densely populated. 1.5 million people shy of it’s pre-WWII population. rents are low, but everybody complains about a lack of jobs, funding, and money in general.

exhibition by Diana Moro — who says about her paintings: as we move towards a new world order — spread your love like a fever and before that, another opening — pixel paintings by Enda O’Donoghue at Gallery Hunchentoot, not particularly interesting.

a skewed palette, perhaps with the idea to match interior design colors. galleries and art events fight for an audience not for the reason of lack of audience, but for the plethora of events and openings. too much going on and not enough people to actually be the audience.

and this

approaching the solstice, ahead only 3 weeks. too early to be really thinking about it. in a phone call, Deb mentions “since Hector died,” in passing. “what? I knew he had cancer, but when did this happen?” “didn’t you get the email we sent in February?” “no.” sheesh. email is so imperfect, as far as my experience of it is. too many mission-critical failures over the years, and things like this. gees.

Hector was always a bit of an enigma. he’s a friend of Nick’s who I met several times over the years, a nurse at a VA hospital in Denver. he was a Vietnam vet, grizzled and gruff, although that part of his past never surfaced overtly. he knew that I really liked the area around Crestone — and I knew he had started to build a house down there on the Baca land. so, one summer I was there in Colorado visiting, and he was heading down to the house for a week, so he invited me down. the house was sort of done, he had built a small wooden cabin to begin with, then a two-story structure built from rastra-block on a 2-acre lot. it was telling, the upstairs where there were windows on the south wall, but only from chest height up. standing there, it felt like an observation post. with an expansive view of the valley, and Blanca Peak at the south end of the Sangre de Christos mountains. I recall hanging out there several evenings, watching the twiLight settle on the valley, and then the stars coming out until there was a vast blanket of them filling the sky. consumables were consumed. mosquitoes raged outside the screen doors. binocs were used to check out far details before full dark took over. no night-vision goggles, just consumables which makes the darkness clear and palpable as a place of second sight. Nick came down later that week for a few days, and introduced me to some of his friends in the area. we all did some nice hikes in the area — up some of the watersheds leading down from the Sangre highlands just a mile away or so at 14,000 feet. met a young couple who were making a straw-bale place and in the mean time were living in a ragged school bus. another family living in a beautiful self-built octagonal log house with an electrifying view straight up at the Crestone Needles.

rough place. though now, 12 years later, it’s up-scaled to some degree. but those few days at Hector’s place got me hooked on the location, just ten miles as-the-raven-flies from the Center of the Universe. thanks Hector! Vaya con Dios, amigo!

raining on arrival, raining on departure, missed a huge downpour walking to the hotel where I caught the airport shuttle. Amurikan couple on board, from Portland, returning home after a couple months in Oz, revisiting places where they went as elementary teaching recruits in rural Australia in the early 1970′s.

in the airport. Dr. Phil playing on the plasma monitors. a cleaning lady is hypnotized, looking up into the susserating brightness. between the shopping possibilities, the food options, the sonic and atmospheric environment, and the general ambiance, this place would be as close to hell as one would want to be. the consuming heaven of the first world. active shopping mitigates the alienation. passive looking plunges even the most hardcore resister into a receiver. cracks open an interstitial space by invading the social self and occupying that self, pushing aside any non-social responses. and if that isn’t enough, the high-security regime underlines every possible line of action.

and then onto the plane. no comfort, though there is an empty seat in the row. bulkhead. exhausted. night comes unexpectedly quick. gaining a day. arriving four hours earlier than I depart. listening to Vonnegut, Fahrenheit 451. in the air near the Hawaiian Islands. so it goes. I had forgotten that he used this phrase whenever he mentions an individual’s demise.

several projects/groups come up on the radar this week — Woytek sends an announcement about his locating Helsinki blog designed to host psychogeographical activities within the city of Helsinki. Annu sends a note from her residency in Japan about her personal pages which do include some of her image-based art projects. also, the discos invisibles collective in Tijuana, who were part of the remote presence event in Helsinki.

04 2007′, ’23 10927

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) — that is, the tracing of the separation of earth-bound objects and the sky. trouble, what trouble? can you pick out the numerous CCTV’s?

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

hmmm, combinations of local circumstances impede encounters. structural deficiencies route possible crossings into different spaces. turtle-like, looking out onto a complex and unknown landscape and socio-cultural milieu.

find any openings for contact, sussing-out, phishing, checking in, checking out. finding where there is a break in the construct, gaps. small TAZ’s crouched and ready. intervene, connect.

and on another note entirely. sadly, transcendentally. hearing on the underside of the planet. or the reverse top. as shadows point to Antarctica. another giant come to an end in this world. how to expect that another world is? or that there is some way of standing in both for more than a while.

So it goes. — Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

not enough sleep after the dinner at Mokki with the Pixelache folks and the Prix Mobius people. finally caught up with Juhani who was on his way to Manchester today.

up early to meet Tapio at mbar for a short session about future polar/solar plans and dealing with future web-documentation and such.

then over to the gallery at noon to begin the final set-up. remote presence :: streaming life gets underway with preparations for the evening’s happening. all runs smoothly. except for the entire network going down about an hour before opening time. turns out to be one of those crazy glitches around a print job submitted to the wrong printer. it brought down everything for a tense 30 minutes before I could figure out what was happening. otherwise the transformation of the gallery space was completed some hours before the opening, and it looks very nice. did miss the final session of the conference with Lisa and Armin, as well as missing the last event of the Nordic VJ program. too busy.

many folks come to the opening — Antti, Bernice, Owen and his wife, Kaisu, Amos, and on. I was not so able to chat much, monitoring the outgoing streams, but the vibe was good. the sonic stream is an interesting mix, though the video input was sparse and not so electric. we would need another couple days to spruce up that medium & means. the ambient sound in the gallery is warm and party-like.

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)??

I notice a cluster of Amurikans on the platform in AmDam Ceentral Station, and then at Osnabrück, and then Münster. turns out they are 80% of the Grateful-Dead-inspired band, Dark Star Orchestra. on tour. the other 20% lost.

over to STEIM to meet with Taku to catch the scene there. quiet, and possible.

the inaugural KillerTV broadcast from the Pakhuis de Zwijger building with André Gringas goes really well. online participation was the highest ever, and the local scene was fantastic! ookoi does a live/online SL sound performance, Sher and Janine interview André and I. no extant archival stream footage is around yet (ex post facto), but I made some audio samples which are here remixed with other sounds from my visit to Amsterdam.

the accession to thought, and the impulse to create removes us from the flow of present be-ing. outside the Nieuwmarkt is noisy with tourists wandering in search of meaning, the people in the market stalls, selling, café sitters. with beer, coffee, lunch. enjoying a bit of early springtime afternoon sun. inside the tipping flat, where front wall is leaning drunkenly forward over the café tables set up on the brick sidewalk four floors below, inside, there is the atmosphere of closeted dis-knowing. but a dis-knowing in need of gradual release into a form.

no network. so discommunicator. decide to go to Montevideo to see David Garcia’s show of video works, Faith in Exposure — a project in which artists ‘talk back’ to the news media.

The exhibition addresses the central narrative of western democracy, our ‘faith in exposure,’ the unquestioning belief that the circulation of knowledge through the news media (and other means) constrains the powerful and guarantees democracy. In a world where we may know but are still compelled to obey, Faith in Exposure is a platform for artists and researchers to ask whether it is still tenable to believe the central myth of the information age: that knowing the truth shall make us free.

technical difficulties with a couple works. intriguing, some arrive at the tableau of just-more-media — in the process of projection in white cubes. how to disassemble the house of the master with the tools of the master. and find truth…

finally meet Sher. network crossings. dinner (red beet pasta with smoked mozzarella, mmmm! at Mappa), then on to a dance performance by choreographer André Gringas. what to say. networks are alive because of the real energy going into them.

somehow I am surprised that she is American! all this time I was thinking that she was Dutch or something. another cultural refugee — thriving in Europe.