Matt pushes off towards Salt Lake City for a flight back to LAX. I roll up sleeves, literally, and begin the task of altering yet another environment to conform to my needs and to optimize my time here. Cleaning is very necessary as I’m the first resident of the year — the center is normally closed from the end of November to the beginning of April. So, raising the level of order with the input of human life-energy and life-time. Scrubbing floors, wiping down shelves, polishing windows, moving furniture, vacuuming and wiping down everything (ceiling vents, floor, blinds, window sills, chairs, tables — everything has a coating of fine dust on it such that touching it leaves the hands dirty — opening all storage areas and inventorying everything, wiping down all devices, drawers, walls, surfaces). This will take days of sporadic effort, but today is completely used up, late into the night. Bringing things in from the truck, looking at the damage to the bike rim and roof rack, figuring out the food situation. Rearranging the kitchen and living spaces. Looking through the library to see what should be looked at more closely. And so on. Settling in for the duration.

The condition of virtuality arises when humans create a situation which attenuates the flows that are impinging on their sensual and embodied presence. When technology is defined as a way to alter the paths of energy flow: virtuality is a subset condition of the altered flows such that the flows that are obviously (or not!) entering the body system are attenuated. The obvious (materialist!) subset of the widest set is that grouping which attenuates the classical sensory-input spectra. These may be ‘scientifically’ framed based on typical wave-based mechanical and electro-magnetic physics: the EM frequency band of visible Light, the pressure-induced electricity of touch, and so on. In a holistic approach to presence, the affectations of flow are continuous, complete, and substantive.

Alluding to yet a further subset is the use of glass as a specific form of energized matter which is placed between the eye and the ‘world out there.’ This is a fundamental form of virtuality, where silicon dioxide is introduced as an attenuating filter of flows between embodied presence and the cosmos. (this is a short intro to a longer text on the history of glass that’s cooking on the back burner.)

There needs to be a repetition of certain concepts at numerous junctures — energy, thermodynamics, flows, order, flux, fields, reminders of the Newtonian language, control, image-based articulations of all key-worded concepts, and precise observations on the structure-of-relation of the (declining) Military-Industrial system. Choosing examples of technological deployment, tracing the affectations of it, across the full distance, simplifying (reducing) the connections. Connecting the altered flows and the ‘original’ flows, along the entire way (using thermodynamics as a foundational guide).

Dialogue, sound, and music are good examples.

Identifying between altered and originary flows is in itself is likely an impossible task. I would suspect that all comprehensible flows are already in a (corrupted!?) state?

Today, mulling the difference between technological determinism (as a self-propagating system on its own immutable trajectory) and the reciprocal idea that human social systems selectively construct the systems of technology they ‘desire’ (subject to all the variability of the particular social system within which the technology is embedded). Then, within that selection process, thinking about the process of development and the general trend towards greater complexity. Do these processes ever trend generally to greater simplicity? Does desire ever, on a wide social scale, ever become directed to less material abundance? Is material security predicated with amassing more-than-sufficient material wealth? Or do society-wide technological systems collapse towards simplicity only in cases of ‘natural’ disaster.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

without framing the precise context, a couple quick notes to Rob, regarding the Internet of Things (IOT) and social pro-activity:

and

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Starting with the immediate body as a field-of-action to release control (versus the control-at-a-distance regime we are immersed within now):

Bushwhacking is a method to relinquish control of the trajectory of the body. By exposing the body to the unknown, one has to respond in real time, in the present. This present invites the presence of be-here-now and within that state of be-ing, the embodied self yields to the edge that divides the controlled from un-controlled. Precisely at that edge is the locus of active transformation and change. Making the next step into the unknown is, literally, an act of trust in the body, in a belief that entering the unknown will present possibility. Whether or not this possibility is merely the chance of the continuance of the species (in a biological framework), the projection of life into the not-now, the future, or whether it is an operative pre-condition for a transcendent state I cannot at this moment comment on. Somehow, this is a question that each individuated being self-wise has to make in each of those moments.

Human-controlled flows — those that are apparently known, defined, located, standardized, measured — are merely thin veneers on an un-controlled cosmos which dwarfs all. Or does it? Are we not energized elements, expressions of that cosmos, as much as any else? Does the scalar really matter when space and time are suspended (along with the artifice of Cartesian models and all other abstracted human frameworks)?

Go to your edge. This phrase comes up in Westernized yogic teachings. It suggests a shaky physical state where muscles struggle to maintain some configuration that they are barely fit to do. Of course, that meaning may deepen as a practice becomes more holistic and not limited to the mere physical (think pilates). Moving further into the image — what would it mean to an animal to go to its edge? The edge would be the dividing line between living and losing control over all body systems (organismic death). A tad over that edge precipitates a very different outcome than a tad under: a basic sensitivity fo initial conditions. Can it be that non-human systems exist at that edge at all times and at all scales — that this is the condition of non-equilibrium states? And that edge is what degenerates into wildly different outcomes (life vs death) as a result of small perturbations — essentially a chaotic system. Or can this be the condition of the cosmos at all scales all the time? But it would seem that human systems exist at this edge as well, except that the human species has abstracted/constructed numerous illusions suggesting that it is not subject to the same razor-edge condition. (The illusion of control of future trajectories.)

And it occurs to me later that our retreat from that edge is in our deep desire for physical body to be maintained, for risk to be lowered, for future to be statistically more attainable. This state-of-being perhaps arose through our stepping away from simple (animal) living, and into the future-tension of linguistically-mediated half-lives.

How to translate this image into a practice? Go to your edge.

(but wait a minute, LIFE is, by definition, a redirecting of the flows of energy in a natural system — a redirecting that is a necessary (but not sufficient) condition of living systems — according to basic non-equilibrium thermodynamics of living systems.)

However, there is a scalar difference between humans and other living entities where some humans attempt this kind of control on wide scales, with others re-directing those same energies to completely different configurations, some only images of what their ‘original’ pattern of flow once were. (it’s a question of degree?)

The juxtaposition: humans re-organizing the ‘natural’ flows around them (as technology), and humans re-organizing the flows which are human — other humans (as society).

These processes are indistinguishable in their application and only express some difference in the materialized extremity of their results. Humans are simply an other expression of the natural system. It is only in the degree or scale of re-organization of flows that they extend that distinguishes them from other expressions of life. One could argue that earlier Archean life on the planet, utilizing the energy available in certain chemical bonds over eons, completely transformed the composition of the atmosphere in a process of dynamic equilibrium — something we humans are apparently doing yet again in a vastly shorter time. Life, via evolutionary developments, integrally tapped into an available energy source/flow with gusto until the source was depleted or another ‘easier’ source was encountered. Life based on photosynthetic processes of energy utilization is a example that has a long and continuing evolutionary history.

Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, explores this process of (the human) redirection of flows as the idea of “fabrication” — as a god-like means to artificially re-create and temporarily reify natural systems. She squarely positions this energy exertion as part of the “external subjectivization of the modern world.” This condition of externalization is a necessary precedent condition for the social and represents the ‘mechanism’ which draws granular and embodied human power from the individual into the social system (for cumulative and disgressionary use by that system). This energy consequently becomes unavailable to the individual, although the pathways that the social system constructs for the expression of its energy may be utilized by the individual, depending on their particular positioning within the system.

(Working at a job for “The Man,” that vaguely persistent image that arose in the times of African-American slavery, frames this dynamic. While most individuals in the middle- and upper-class would consider that their work in the service of someone else is merely a fact of existence and that the convertible and abstracted instrumental returns (money) more than suffice as a reward for the life-time and life-energy expended in this way. It is this collective faith in the abstracted social instrument of money (and other codes) (see Code and Money), expressed as a crucial social adhesive, which gives the social system a form for the expression of the cumulative energy of individual participants.)

Within the life process itself, of which laboring remains an integral part and which it never transcends, it is idle to ask questions that presuppose the category of means and end, such as whether men live and consume in order to have the strength to labor or whether they labor in order to have the means of consumption.

If we consider this loss of the faculty to distinguish clearly between means and end in terms of human behavior, we can say that the free disposition and use of tools for a specific end product is replaced by rhythmic unification of the laboring body with its implement, the movement of laboring itself acting as the unifying force. Labor but not work requires for best result a rhythmically ordered performance and, in so far as many laborers gang together, needs rhythmic co-ordination of all individual movements. In this motion, the tools lose their instrumental character, and the clear distinction between man and his implements, as well as his ends, becomes blurred. What dominates the labor process and all work processes which are performed in the mode of laboring is neither man’s purposeful effort nor the product he may desire, but the motion of the process itself and the rhythm it imposes upon the laborers. Labor implements are drawn into this rhythm until the body and tool swing in the same repetitive movement, that is, until, in the use of machines, which of all implements are best suited to the performance of the animal laborans, it is not longer the body’s movement that determines the implement’s movement but the machine’s movement which enforces the movements of the body. — Hannah Arendt, “The Human Condition”

Further, deeper, wider, (more iconoclastic), what is research? Merely to search again? The broadening of a socially-sanctioned knowledge-base? A connecting-of-threads to historic tradition? A discovery of what’s been before? A following of a pre-existing trajectory (but with more fuel for a higher, further flight)? What about re-sensing instead of re-searching? Immersing senses in a situation again (related to German entgegen ‘opposite’). Sensually immersive: sensing difference again (from another situation), and reflecting on that. Or, better yet, riding the gradient of that difference, and using that potential, that power, that source, to express from.

Re-search — to circle again, more intensively — but to remain detached. Neither academic detachment nor technological objectivity are the way that is needed now. We need immersive, connected, aware, and sensual be-ing. In order to apprehend what the world needs of us. An empathetic engagement with all expressions of life-energy.

Creative action — as a descriptor of the wide field of human endeavor — sets up instances of resonance by configuring energies in novel ways. What does it mean to configure energies in novel ways? Assuming the universe is infinite, there are an infinite number of configurations of energy. Bringing energies in juxtaposition, resulting in the creation of difference: it is at the edge where resonant flows arise, along an expressive energy gradient. This juxtaposition of energy requires the Self to take on, generate, new pathways of flow. But how to initiate, how to self-start this process of potentially resonant expression?

One who speaks is such a path-maker. Gathering embodied energy, using the applied protocols of individual body merged with adopted social forms, we speak. Energy flows from one idiosyncratic body to the next. As energy flows, a gradient arises. From where there was undisturbed silence, an arrhythmic disturbance occurs. Within the modulations of energy applied by the body, within this applied difference and at the point where this intersects the presence of the Other, this is where change originates.

Change and difference? Dropping Cartesian temporal and spatial frameworks, what then is change? Can it be reduced to simple difference? Both can be traced back to the (apparently) anisotropic distribution of energy in the universe. This is a primary condition of life. Creation legends depend on the differentiation of energized matter from that-which-is-not, they depend on the creation of levels of being which exhibit difference. And it is along and within those differences, fundamental boundary conditions, where the creative, the unexpected, arises.

The road-as-pathway is a channel for the flow of energy. It is defined by socially-constructed standards and protocols: a web of socially-applied energies follow the limitations and directedness of those protocols. Roads are a human construct in response to the existence of natural blockages that divert from desired trajectories, that expend communal life-energies and threaten the control of energy resources.

The road is perhaps a synthesized mirror for the human-navigable river, that directed natural space of flow, or the ocean which is the cumulative and spatial confluence-of-all-rivers.

Practically all natural landscapes have some form of blockage as to cause a deviation to even slow and deliberate human passage. So, when there is a lack of free and easy passage, first a foot-path evolves, or is established through troddden effort. This is a trajectory for the body, with the foot leading. Seeking a pathway on foot requires vigilance and concentrated attention in many environments, though this condition is necessarily eliminated from daily life in the developed world — almost completely through the efforts to flatten, level, grade, and pave large swaths of the Terran surface.
(more …)

Morning reading, sparking off Jacques Ellul’s classic, The Technological Society, where he attempts the first comprehensive definition and discussion of technology as something that pervades and underlies social formation(s). He also discusses a distinct relationship between the machine and technology, where the machine is the most important and obvious aspect of technology; where mechanization “transforms everything it touches into a machine;” but where technology is a cumulative way (perhaps expression?) of integration of the machinic into the social fabric, it is represented by a continuous re-formation of the (human) life-form(s) to the techno-social system. Without this impelling force, humans, as simply another evolutionary life-form expression, would not have arrived at where they are in this moment.

The distinction of human and machinic was a product of materialist thinking which detached the human being from the system of applied flows that the machinic imposes on the world. It is thus easier, mentally, for humans to imagine that there was a master/slave relationship between themselves and that ‘other’ world of technology: that they controlled the technology. This is clearly demonstrated to be a fallacious historical and contemporary view of that relation. Instead the relation is immersive, affective, and it is especially distortive of human-to-human relation. By distortive, going back to basic assumptions about technology, I mean that each expression of technology (which can more-or-less easily be seen as separate for the purposes of analysis of this affect), is seen to apply a set of conditioned flows of power (energy) in its genesis, operation, action, existence, and dissolution. These conditioned flows are formative of ‘natural’ energy flows which occur any/everywhere including between humans.

Right off, Ellul attacks the commonly held belief that there is a particular boundary between technology and science which, though historically indistinct and presently contentious is a fabrication. He contends that the domain of science, beyond “hypothesis and theory” cannot exist without technology. This is at least one small step in realizing that human presences and actions should not divided into arbitrary categories, but considered holistically and in concert with all other fields/flows that are present.

Neither science nor technology can exist without an originary research which is the process of experiencing and re-membering the flows that exist around us. That is, science and technology both rely on the basic functions of the human experiencing of the world, the reception of sensual energies that supply a psychical representation of that world. Science looks for the initial repetition of pattern, relying on memory (in some form) to overlay repeated patterns of flow. When there is a correspondence of flow re-membered, this is duly noted in resonant neural energy patterns in mind. Technology relies on this same re-membering of the flows that surround the social species, but, critically, moves one step ahead (affecting fundamental structures to the social): it applies the (collective) memory of those flows to alter those flows in congruence or consequence to those observed patterns. This is a critical difference, and one that easily circumscribes the relationship of the two ‘fields’ which are framed as distinct but inter-related, rendering them as simply two terms distinguishing similar patterns of human activity. Ellul calls them an “ensemble of means.”

This application of alteration and affectation, along with its resultant refined patterns of energy flow, become, as an cumulative expression of the presence of the human, the fabric of sociality itself.

My approach to technology is not about a return to Nature in that romantic or even Luddite sensibility, but instead, it is a wider understanding or impression of first what the cost is of the totality of altered flows that we as a life-form have imposed on the world, and then, more deeply, what does it mean that we, as simply another expression of life on the earth, have come to where we are as that life-form. Consequent decisions may then be made — to participate or not in certain of these defined energy flows. (more on that later!)

Discussion of the technological cannot exist simply in the realm of the technical or scientific, as the applied alterations to flows of energy as well as their affectations on the wider milieu cannot be completely (or accurately) circumscribed through numeracy.

from Kevin Hamilton on the iDC list:

Thanks for sharing this tantalizing bit from your project Chris, I’m sure eager to see more of the outcomes. You rightfully remind us that framing the discussion in terms of ideologies or worldviews, even economically-influenced ones, leaves out the fact that there are bodies moving around (or not moving), generating these stories.

Much of the flow of human resources (beings) as a primary energy source, was facilitated (forced along) by the formative pathways of the Military-Industrial complex (Interstate highway system, for example, the car culture in general, etc, ad nauseum). It was the prescribed protocollary forces of that M-I system that facilitated (required!) mobility of the bodies as a dispensable resource. And that enforced mobility had a cost — the essential alienation of the displaced Self. This displaced Self would have been a major social problem in regards to social stability, but that problem was muted by universal consumerism (chain retailing) which imposed a sameness on most major (Cartesian) points under the domain of the M-I complex. The pathways remain the same, but the strictness of their applied impression on each individual gives rise to a plethora of different stories: variations on a theme.

These energy flows are not arbitrary, but are complex interactions between evolutionary expressions of life on the planet (humans as perhaps a non-unique expression of that life, in principle) and how techno-social systems re-form and impress pathways on those energies…

reflections on neoscenes :: drift

|.[ audio (115.4 mb)

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

blurb for SNO gallery exhibition web site, November 2009, NSW, Australia:

blurb for SNO gallery wall, December 2009, NSW, Australia:

Do humans (life-forms) exert control over environments by modifying flows to help them re-member and stabilize their forms? To form them in a way that resonates within their energized neural storage regime (life-form)? Probably not, as from a bio-thermodynamic point of view, life exerts control (simply) in order to deplete energy gradients (according to the authors of Into the Cool, an exploration of NET (non-equilibrium thermodynamics) and its relation to life/living systems).

Or can this even be considered a control process, this interaction of modifying flows? Or is it merely part of the cumulative (dynamic) process of life as an engagement of the entropic/negentropic fundamentals of the universe?

I realized that in Regime of Amplification I got the terminology a bit wrong — focusing on the anisotropic concentration and rarefaction of energized matter as the fundamental condition (as driven by gravitational forces). When it is the gradient between the two situations which is of primary interest and importance. — a bit similar to seeing only the elemental yin and yang instead of the overarching dynamic unity, the taijitu. So, a rewrite is in order — to look at the transitional state rather than (theoretical and limited) end-states.

the bus, locus of social interaction of various and sundry sorts, going from Millers Point to the office. great for people watching (and interacting with), exhausting when the saturation point of sensory energy input is reached.

Sound can be the energy interface/pathway between these textual explorations / structural formalities and the external, the Other.

If I could have written this DCA thing before, I would have. It is a question of style and form only. As I have already written reams (megabits) of pure (well, relatively pure) text already, megabits, not in Word, but in BBEdit, close to code, pure code; not to mention the reams of paper writing that preceded that. On an old portable manual typewriter. From picnic tables in the Great Sand Dunes on crisp winter mornings, to attic havens in the dark Icelandic winter. Drilling words out out out to the many Others. Printed direct onto papers from flat or slightly curvilinear screens to nine-pin printers. Usually, on the obverse, each sheet of that paper was already a xerographic work in itself, thanks to sometimes free access to photocopy machines in various places. Photocopy art. Nobody knows what that’s about anymore. And the postcards. The thousands of them, all silver-prints. Tight hand-written like the 4000+ pages of journal, with double-ought Rapidograph pen and permanent India inks. Sometimes exploding with the pressure shifts of flying too much. Is a remix in order, of all this life-energized output, a tracing of threads? Correlated with all the memorable human encounters — teaching, exhibitions, studios, happenstance, friends, friends-of-friends, shared meals, and strangers — what can be made from it? And how to proceed.

Big question. The difference between that lived praxis and the reflection on praxis. Or is there a difference, is a difference necessary? Or is the difference a construct itself, an artificial category, a social imprint? A remnant of Whorf’s linguistic framing which, simply stated, says that a language alters the way one thinks. Or, to go a bit further than Whorf, that a language is a particular set of (neural) pathways upon which energized thought follows along, passes through. The pathways form as the language portions of thinking form in ones embodied presence. This suggests that a multi-modality of expression is an attempt or penchant to explore different pathways of (neural) energy flow, each along its accustomed way. Life is multi-modal. And energy is the substrate that the modes are embossed in. Embossed patterns which fill with flow, or over-flow. When energy does not have a predetermined pattern to move within, how will it express? It will leak into other spaces, bleed over into other patterns, or simply build up in some corner of the body until it is expressed in pathology.

… what is is movement. Actually what tends to make it difficult for us to work in terms of this notion is that we usually think of movement in the traditional way as an active relationship of what is and what is not. — David Bohm

This gets to a core condition — all is movement: movement/motion is creative (including our consciousness). It also suggests that a redirection of that movement is not really possible, as redirection itself as a concept is simply the mapping relative to a Cartesian or other reductive framework. That is, unless the redirection is thought of as a (the) outcome of processional (negentropic) attenuation of flows caused by life. Which suggests that life itself is essentially creative, an obvious linguistic tautology. But life, as a general phenomena, affects a wide range of arbitrarily specified flows (flows that can be viewed in a traditionally categorized way as being different). By this I mean that in addition to the base (chemical) energy conversion mechanisms that govern most life forms there are a vast, subtle, and complex array of expressions of these processes which biochemists have been slowly teasing out, but never reaching a finality on at all. Whatever the case, the flows can be said to follow more or less explicit pathways (although our traditional view of these pathways is largely informed by mechanistic understanding and reductive framing. It is also such that it is our implicate consciousness, our full and immediate apprehension of the phenomena that we sense, is part of that originary what is.

Memory is the prime example of the persistence of a pathway of flow. It is precisely the persistence that allows us to move through the world without each successive moment being a surprising cacophony of unpredicted and unrecognizable sensory impressions. While at the same time, memory is itself, as an element of consciousness, implicate to what is being circumscribed.

The process of thought is not, however, merely a representation of the manifest world; rather it makes an important contribution to how we experience this world, for, as we have already pointed out earlier, this experience is a fusion of sensory information with the replay of some of the content of memory (which latter contains thought built into its very form and order). — David Bohm

Presuming the Terran system is a (fully) self-regulating system, then the hypothesis would have to include the entire evolutionary process which produced human beings among other biota under the particular macroscopic and microscopic availing conditions. Self-regulation would then suggest that the system will solve the current problems of human over-population and resource spoilage as it solves all other oscillations of what is a system in thermodynamic disequilibrium. Biospheric self-organization (among a holistic range of other mechanisms that we likely have no clue about in the moment), will do it’s thing. Despite, in spite of, and at the effect of what a specific biotic evolutionary line is doing. There is plenty of data showing wide-scale fluctuations in, for example, atmospheric components related to changing biotic fluxes.

(extracted and edited from The Regime of Amplification)

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

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

I would prefer that this whole thesis stay out of the regime imposed by semiotics — that being the approach to social inquiry as an expression of how the dominant worldview is itself dominated by abstracted elements — rather than focusing on the flows of energy themselves. The abstracted systems do, of course, have a heavy bearing on the regime of flows within the social, and largely govern the pathways along which energy flows. However, in order to understand the dynamics of the flows which underlie the abstractions, one has to clear away the abstraction. I hope to frame the issue of language and protocol only to the degree that makes it possible to subtract it from the picture.

Consider the difference as framed following: when two people are speaking to each other, one can make a fundamental structural observation that breaks down the process into the movement of sonic energy and the presence of language. What is the sonic element? It is the movement of embodied energy, energy arising from the embodied presence of one person, arising from the complex negentropic life-form of one. This energy arises through the precise evolutionary configuration of body which allows for that expression, the lungs, the throat, the voice box, the mouth. It is projected through the ‘medium of substances’ between the two, into the embodied presence of the second. Into the ear canal to energize the neural system that is hearing. This is a fundamental. This phenomena exists independent of the language being used, and regardless whether that language is shared by the two people.

Proxemics then becomes a question of potentialities and possibilities of flow or not-flow as proffered by the arrangement of energized bodies (at all scales!) — not simply a systematic coding of the arrangements and orientations of bodies in a Cartesian space. Hall does include body-heat (thermal code) in his list of proxemic behavior along with other sensory “codes,” but stays away from the actuality and implications of energetics (as illustrated by the previous paragraph. (A System for the Notation of Proxemic Behavior, Edward T. Hall, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 65, No. 5, Selected Papers in Method and Technique (Oct., 1963), pp. 1003-1026)

The presence of language, then, is a formulator of meaning. Language does not carry energy itself. What one says is different than how one says it. The use of language (merely) imposes a modulation (amplitude, frequency, in time) of the energy movement. This modulation is a learned social function. And of that imposed modulation, when examined closely, it loses some of its monumental qualities (semiotics-as-deterministic-abstraction-of-abstraction):

There is no language in itself, nor any universality of language, but a concourse of dialectics, patois, slangs, special languages. There exists no ideal “competent” speaker-hearer of language, any more that there exists a homogeneous linguistic community … there is no mother tongue, but a seizure of power by a dominant tongue within a political multiplicity. — Deleuze and Guattari (Rhizome)

Economic efficiency is not correlated to the material efficiency within a limited system. (as example, the Icelandic Hydrogen Economy scam — where the production of the consumed goods necessary for running the infrastructure is remote: off the island and not at all within local system. None of the materials in the infrastructure are available locally on the island, none, except for the human consumers and the human bodies for local construction labor. That simple fact takes economic advantage of cheaper remote industrial labor, ecological damage, etc, and removes those factors from the costing of the local system. Local politico-economic policies are calculated and framed without considering the material re-sourcing.) This approach could be the biggest factor driving the lack of material efficiency of the global system where the feedback mechanisms are more localized and limited and driven by abstracted profit frameworks (which are locally influenced by taxation/government, shareholders, boards, consumers). And very often there is a complete ignorance of the physical reality of the (remote) resource extractives industries which prop up the whole system. If one travels to the location where large-scale (and generally un-sustainable) resource extraction is occurring, it is inevitable that there are social and environmental issues, it’s just a matter of whether they are discoverable under present knowledge-bases, or whether they are recognized by contemporaneous social milieus. Life is a transitory phenomena at all scales. When available energy sources (concentrations of matter) are exhausted, life cannot proceed.

The concept of memory is related to my own work and practice — as an artist, part of my work does relate to the creation and preservation of my personal archive. Also, memory is a feature of collective Techno-Social Systems as a mapping of embodied participation in that system over time. It is also a concept to consider in the wider perspective of my work which examines human presence, encounter with the Other, collective social systems and their impact on the individual and finally, creative action.

Memory is the trace of energies from the surrounding situation that literally impress (on) the embodied self. Making the radical assumption framed by the words of physicist David Bohm, that

… there is a universal flux that cannot be defined explicitly but which can be known only implicitly, as indicated by the explicitly definable forms and shapes, some stable and some unstable, that can be abstracted from the universal flux.

Phenomenal events and configurations of these energies pass through the body (as simply another manifestation of this flux), leaving altered states of be-ing. These embodied traces persist in time, but as with all life and being, are transitory. They exist as change, and are often experienced as a fundamental awareness of difference — “I originally felt like that, but now I feel like this, having experienced this event.”

External memory storage situations via digital technological mediation are, by nature, material, reductive, and transitory. They are subject to decay and loss as with any other external (and internal) means.

Three significant issues arise in the process of externalized memory storage. The first is in the process of creating the artifact. As with any pre-digital artifact, making a “memory” artifact requires that the Self (or someone) step out of living and mediate their presence in the operation of the device that creates the artifact. This stepping out applies not only to the making of the artifact but also to the (onerous) process of archiving. This process radically changes the experience of a life-trajectory by an individual. And, as suggested by Quantum ideas, the observer affects that which is observed, the act of making memory artifacts actually affects the scenario that is being recorded.

A second major issue occurs when any of these processes are taken over by extensions of the Techno-Social System, they subject the Self to a loss of autonomy. (i.e., cloud computing as one example of a centralized architecture that removes the trace of the digital artifact wholly out of the purview of the individual (creator, participant).) The levels of loss of autonomy exist on a sliding scale — loss occurs whenever the individual is not in control of the mediatory storage (its provenance, creation, organization, archiving, sustenance, distribution, demise, destruction). Any externalization falls under this regime.

The third issue lies in the maintenance of archive. As a fundamentally ordered system (timely retrieval is critical for a functioning archive), the archive requires an essentially constant energy influx to maintain that order. That energy source is, at base, the human being. How much personal energy will humans participating in a Techno-social system be willing to dispense of or provide/support in order to maintain an ever-growing energy burden of either a collective or individual archive? Is this why the Library of Alexandria burned?

Energy has always been the basis of cultural complexity and it always will be. The past clarifies potential paths to the future. One often-discussed path is cultural and economic simplicity and lower energy costs. This could come about through the “crash” that many fear — a genuine collapse over a period of one or two generations, with much violence, starvation, and loss of population. The alternative is the “soft landing” that many people hope for — a voluntary change to solar energy and green fuels, energy-conserving technologies, and less overall consumption. This is a Utopian alternative that, as suggested above, will come about only if severe, prolonged hardship in industrial nations makes it attractive, and if economic growth and consumerism can be removed from the realm of ideology. — Joseph A. Tainter

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Bauwens on the iDC list: I think the important insight that travels from free software to money is this. Power lies in the code and in the invisible structures that enable or dis-enable actions and relationships, what Alexander Galloway calls ‘protocolary power.’ The great insight of the current age is that money has a code as well. But just as we do not have the power to change the code of microsoft, we do not have (yet) the power to change to code of political money, so the alternative world-constructing route is to peer produce our own, differently coded money.

sotto voce: This brings up the thought that code and money are both likewise abstracted representations of Power that have to be actualized through two processes: 1) a participatory social grouping who choose to believe (have faith) in the power of the abstraction to cause material change in their lived existence and 2) a means for the abstracted instrument to interface with a real (material) regime of existence. Power, in the end has to be or has to have available a way to apply itself to life, to an individual life, to be delivered (as that change).

For example, code describes what a device can or should do in theory. It needs the device to make that actually happen. Code without the physical transmission of power (kilo-calories, joules, megawatts, whatever) is a complete abstraction and is of no consequence. The machine or interface that actualizes the code is embedded in a specific field of power flows — i.e., the electrical generation and delivery system, manufacturing systems that depend on transportation networks which depend on hydrocarbon fuel power, etc. This larger techno-social infrastructure that is essentially a field of directed energy flows depends on a whole host of humans believing that the code will ultimately improve their lives on earth. If there arises a doubt that the code will do this, the whole system starts to unravel. If it becomes clear that the code is failing to bring power to the user, they will stop putting their life-energy into propping up that techno-social protocol and the infrastructure it is embedded within.

The code of religious teaching, the code of social behavior, the code of the machine, and the code of economic instrument all have the characteristic that they are completely dependent on being actualized this way, else they have NO power. In the end, the code is merely a socially prescribed pathway along which real energy is forced to flow.

Faith in code(d abstraction) produces a shared or centralized capital of potential power, but there always needs to be a tangible means for translation from code to be-ing. The body is the primary means for code to become lived action or the source of applied and energetic change. That would be the minimum device necessary, all other devices are simply amplifications of the body-as-energy source.

With the demonstration of faith as an applied and directed energy flow through a code comes the often terrifying expression of directed social power. On the other hand, when the individual participant in a social system seeks and finds/makes expression not according to The Code, the dominant collective immediately loses a fraction of its ability to direct energy as it wills.

The diversity of languages is not a diversity of signs and sounds but a diversity of views of the world. — Wilhelm von Humboldt

Then the question of how to deal with all these books at once? Where to read them, how to take notes, how much to read in any one at a time, and such. Reading in the evening before sleeping isn’t very good, although restful. Mid-afternoon is optimal, but carving out several hours from the daily to-do grind makes that difficult. Having a space in the CMAI office is very helpful now, as there are more comfortable chairs. The collective grad offices are too noisy and busy. Dislocating to Bronte or a cafe elsewhere is possible, but not time-effective if only for reading. Ach!, the questions of methodology …

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

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

as an educator, I refuse to make the assumption that any reductive source (text or otherwise) is of greater efficacy in insuring self-preservation and enLightenment of the student than either their own (collective or accumulated) system of belief combined with their sensory (energy-receptive) system or any other particular (re)source. it is under that assumption that I proceed as a teacher — encouraging the student to trust their own judgment while approaching everything with an open and aware presence.

Georgescu-Roegen critiques the mechanistic basis for much economic theory (which predominantly focuses on the movement of goods — a state which, thermodynamically, appears as a reversible process — and one which leads, at least conceptually if not in fact to the infinite cycle from production to consumption). It would appear that our current situation is the result of that infinite cycle occurring in a locally finite system.

This book leads to:

and ends up at this reflection from Borges:

It is useless to answer that reality is also orderly. Perhaps it is, but in accordance with divine laws — I translate: inhuman laws — which we never quite grasp. Tlön is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men.

In the introduction Mirowski inspires as he details his struggle to build a conceptual and actual bridge between physics and economics. Understanding that economics is an important dimensional descriptor of the techno-social system is a nice advance. Although the number of economists who have made this connection are few, and the bulk of the discipline are still mired in juggling abstractions. It’s important to realize that the abstracted metrices of economy are abstracted from something and that something is energized matter. He extends the argument, marking the parallel between the terms value in economics and energy in physics. And later, he develops the concept of energy as one critical to understanding economics, period. This is a good find indeed! And it might end up, by studying the principles of the conservation of energy too much and I will end up a conservative. (No chance of that, as no one ends up as anything but energy anyway…) Actually, bringing thermodynamics into the picture would radically change the nature and theories of market economics both on the right and on the left.

On pages 56-57 there is a symmetric coffee-colored ring, a primitive of a Rorschach test, and on 58-59, some bits of roll-your-own tobacco. The last record of being checked out was 1998. More than a decade ago. Not too much interest in these approaches within the traditional canon.

And later, on to the indeterminacy of human tendencies towards abstracted (but sometimes brilliant) reason, in describing his ideas on electromagnetic fields:

The substance here treated must not be assumed to possess any of the properties of ordinary fluids except those of freedom of movement and resistance to compression. It is not even a hypothetical fluid which is introduced to explain actual phenomena. It is merely a collection of imaginary properties which may be employed for establishing certain theorems in pure mathematics in a way more intelligible for many minds … I wish merely to direct the mind of the reader to mechanical phenomena which will assist him in understanding the electrical ones. All such phrases in the present paper are to be considered as illustrative, not explanatory. In speaking of the Energy of the field, however, I wish to be understood literally. — James Clerk Maxwell

better late than never. postings fall by the wayside in the stead of other text-generation. Shannon invites me along to a late evening live broadcast performance of The Splinter Orchestra on the New Music Up Late program from the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Goossens performance hall/studios across the street from UTS in Ultimo. small intimate event (remixed here), nothing like live-broadcasting to intensify the energy of a performance. it is energy that governs this form of performance, like all other performance situations, but especially when moving somewhat outside the established paradigm for music. restraint drove it. by this I mean that a low-level seeking-to-arrive at a ephemeral flow, a confluence that gathers all available input but is never overwhelmed by any one source. this generates a certain tension which then carries the listener through time with an imminence of potential.

not very satisfied with my image documentation, though. just haven’t been in a documentation/concert mode for such a long time. images get stale at some point. and I never did like to interject the snapping camera into live performances unless there is plenty of ambient noise (think Ted Nugent).

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

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

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

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

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

Responding to Michael Connor on the [NEW-MEDIA-CURATING] list:

In the gallery it presents a kind of ontological mirror reflecting back and stabilizing our own sense of self in its apparent stability and autonomy… By contrast time-based art, interactive art, and all art involving some form of interaction over time tend to do the opposite. Perhaps this may be a partial explanation of the continued resistance to such work in mainstream institutions.

sotto voce:

finding some interesting material from Leslie White, an anthropologist who wrote on cultural evolution and based his views on the idea that cultural systems are ultimately technological systems and that these systems can be ranked by their level of energy use and their capacity to access and utilize adequate energy resources. he had a troubled later life between his wife of 30 years dying and his slide into alcoholism. hmmmm

and then Fred Cottrell, a sociologist writing in his book Energy and Society (1955) about a social systems need for a net energy return. not sure if I can find a copy of this in the Australia uni library system, but hope to.

The evidence for Lotka’s position is not yet sufficient to make it clear that it should be formulated into a law. But the tendency it expresses … fits other evidence that ability to control energy conversion is one factor involved in the persistence of patterns that require energy for their replication. Certainly the patterns of observable human behavior fall into that category. Man cannot escape thermodynamics … his effectiveness in controlling energy conversion so that is serves his needs and satisfies his values is one measure of his probable survival in a habitat. — W. Fred Cottrell

structural organization. weaving this space of inquiry, exposé, or a web of deceit. a fabric of cloaking, or a dust cover for an old arm chair.

Van Leeuwen’s overview (in Multimodal Discourse) of an expressive situation that he labels semiotic production frames first a (situated) discourse which is then subject to design (to shape the delivery mechanism) which is materially formed in the production process followed by distribution (one-to-many propagation). these conceptual and actual stages are closely bound to a semiotics-based view which is rooted in the abstracted space of language and representation. this, despite the fact that the expressive action is indeed a real, tangible movement of energies from the producer to the receiver/consumer — it is not abstract. it is in this space between the models built in the abstracted semiotic space and the real executions that Dialogue, in the extended definition that I propose, occurs. it does not preclude any (most) semiotic models, but is sets the limits of their applicability that arise from the abstraction process that is inherent in language. the Dialogue model looks at these processes, steps in semiotic production as a continua of socially applied protocols which guide (provide a pathway for) energized expression from the Self to the Other — so that semiotic production is clearly not the thing itself, but an abstraction of it. (Van Leeuwen notes this when reflecting on the separation from embodiment that written language imposed on this abstraction process).

he suggests that two mechanisms for the establishment of ‘new’ forms of discourse — that of provenance and experiential meaning potential. the first providing memetic (not mimetic, btw) evolutionary input from other cultural sources, the second an internally generative source arising from lived experience.

multimodality clearly has an affect on the flow of energies (of expression) from the Self to the Other. the existence of socio-cultural value-systems as framed with and by abstracted linguistic (and semiotic) systems and protocols is a key formative element in the energy flow process. but again, it is not the thing itself, it merely forms a pathway for the expressive flow.

His use of terms articulation and interpretation would roughly correspond to transmission/expression and reception/impression.

In a materialistic model, the material is merely the means of semiotically-framed expression. In my model, the energy of expression is carried, in perhaps a poor metaphoric sense, through the pipe of linguistic/semiotic (and therefore social) protocol, but is another essence altogether from the pipe (which, again, is only a abstracted framework). As a social system builds up more and more complex pathways (which, in the end are blockages of open flows), it becomes more and more difficult for individuals operating within that system to find expressive pathways. This is especially apparent in social systems with sufficient or excessive energy resources. energy-poor social systems, those which are consequently, less stable, have more possibilities for less-defined actions, expressions.

It is in the consideration of the energy flow itself that many of the characteristics of formative social systems (ideologies, etc) become obvious, along with equally obvious solutions to the strictures that they apply to individual and collective human existence and consequent expression.

Understanding that my own task, to express an ideology, a weltanschauung, arises in the socio-cultural milieu that encourages certain expressions and discourages others. All social systems do this to one degree or another. And, as one key processural factor, I need for this expression to be idiosyncratic. As much so as is possible within this system. And if not within this system, then simply accept that it has to be done outside this system. eh?

But it is precisely at the edge of what a social system defines as acceptable or not is where transcendental change occurs both individually, and as a direct consequence, socio-culturally. Neither social or cultural systems are static entities which can be held or can hold to a particular standard protocol for expression indefinitely. Change is universal. And change occurs within liminal and undefined situations.

No individual person, no matter how great his stature, how powerful his will, how penetrating his intelligence, can breach the autonomous laws of the human network from which his actions arise and into which they are directed. — Norbert Elias

I stick around for Chris’ 50th as his folks, John and Barbara, also come into town on their way between Iowa and Tucson. nice to catch up with them. Barbara reminds me about her chocolate-chip cookies when she mentions she doesn’t have any with her. this references the care packages she would send to Chris when he and I were room-mates back at 148 Washington in Golden — she would usually include a tin of her fabulous cookies which Chris would share generously. got to snag the recipe someday. or, film her making them.

all this visiting. catching up. exploring territories. hearing stories. mapping out lives. recitations, prognostications on weather and politics and social systems. sampling lives. and seeing time pass forwards inexorably.

keeping up appearances (the cost of social participation), requires energy. energy paid into the system. (was this the lament of the Man?) versus what? appearing as The Self is and allowing for personal idiosyncrasy, proceed with no particular thought as to impact, just to channel what comes in life.

Only on condition of a radical widening of definitions will it be possible for art and activities related to art [to] provide evidence that art is now the only evolutionary-revolutionary power. Only art is capable of dismantling the repressive effects of a senile social system that continues to totter along the deathline: to dismantle in order to build A SOCIAL ORGANISM AS A WORK OF ART … EVERY HUMAN BEING IS AN ARTIST who — from his state of freedom — the position of freedom that he experiences at first-hand — learns to determine the other positions of the TOTAL ART WORK OF THE FUTURE SOCIAL ORDER. — Joseph Beuys

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

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

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

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

month swings into May seeming. no May Day celebrations here. the Red Scare still too enfolded in natal-national psyches. no bonfires like in dark-less high-latitude white nights.

sotto voce: Being fixated on the material aspects and ‘things’ that spin off from our activated and energized presence in this world is probably where you are going wrong in pondering the “art-or-not” question. Experiencing the energies that arise from creative action — they may come ‘packaged’ in a practically infinite range of forms — it’s more a question whether you (as an individual made up of the accumulated life-pathway that you have experienced) have any opening to the energies that are carried by that form. Technology mediates the expression of creative energies (technology is the accumulated set of mediatory pathways for the expression of creative energies). So, it’s ‘merely’ a question of what paths of expression and reception are open between you and some Other with whom you are in creative exchange.

today, after that small amount of moisture in the night, the entire place is vibrating. when standing still, there is a loud and continuous background buzzing that is non-specific in source direction. standing near a particular blossoming plant, there is the sensation of particular bees and other insects doing their thing, but otherwise, there is this background humming that has no point source but rather simply is — like the hissing of blood in ear.

on the way in to Sycamore Spring both times, I note the existence of a lone Cottonwood tree growing up in the middle of a lightly sloping alluvial fan below a sizable un-named mesa. the only possibility for a Cottonwood to be there is water, and plenty of it. a good objective for a bushwhack. after the numerous encounters with slithering and rattling things yesterday, attention to movement and especially foot placement becomes aligned with breathing. of course any movement has to be calculated when in such an environment. miscalculated movement will be punished by some extremely sharp and pointed object intersecting and likely penetrating the body wall. I escape these four days with only two of those painful encounters, both arising in the thin slice of time between a visual scan of upcoming terrain and a glance at some specific object within the field of view. then aiiii-shit! as the pain jolts upwards from compromised shin.

this bushwhack takes me to the cottonwood. it looks to be around a hundred years old, there are a few other water-seeking plants, a tamarisk, rooted in a whitish rock ledge. apparently some near-surface water is available. paradise in the shade under the tree. except for the stench of death which I trace to the desiccating corpse of a cow 20 meters away in the scrub. the shifting wind brings eye-watering wafts on occasion, but otherwise I spend an hour or two soaking up the energy of being under the lush green canopy surrounded by hard-core Sonoran desert. it is a singularity like Sycamore Spring on a smaller scale and with no running surface water.

minuscule F/A-18 fighters are frequently dog-fighting in the airspace above. in the day and night. moving in and out of unaided vision, tightly circling each other, dropping flares, and, with afterburners, roaring in such volume that all ambient sound is swallowed. for our nation’s security. so it goes.

otherwise, commercial flight contrails gradually fill the sky with high-level cirrus clouds that soften the terrain and its re-radiative impact, but this effect distorts its being what it is, along with distorting the things living here. they did not evolve with spent jet fuel clouds hanging overhead to shade them from the burnishing sun. this is a problem. just another problem that the human species have applied through their amplification system — this is the waste product, waste energy, which alters the environment.

the rest of the day is a slow and rambling return to base. run across some small mining digs, one trenched into a pegmatite dike that includes some coarsely crystallized black tourmaline with its classic trigonal (rhombohedral hemimorphic) cross-sections. someone has tramped this land, and in the hunt for extractive wealth, has, literally, left no stone unturned. the West is everywhere scarred by these digs from small two-meter test pits to the massive kilometer-wide open-pit gashes. that mineral bonanza, that natural ‘surplus’ regime drove and still drives the development of the West. straight north of here about 15 kilometers, is the Phelps-Dodge copper/molybdenum open-pit monstrosity. without which, as the old Colorado School of Mines bumper sticker proclaimed Ban Mining, Let the Bastards Freeze in the Dark the developed world could not exist.

An army marches on its stomach. — Napoleon

as if this is enough to justify the concept of energy usage and amplification: it is precisely these fundamentals which directly illustrate the connection between collective energy resource regimes and, in this case, the amplified energy projection potential of militaristic social structures. the balance between the starvation of the general population and the full bellies of soldiers is a core decision of those controlling a nation-state. think North Korea, think Soviet Union, think any state.

start off with hydrocarbon tanking. Woody’s Flying-Vee gas station. I ask the Latina cashier if she knows anything about the architecture of the station, she is completely puzzled by my question. memory of glory days in the West. road trip. this one very short, down from the mountains to the desert 1000 meters below.

back in the Arrastra Mountain Wilderness, this occasion in from the Peoples Canyon access — a very bad jeep trail which I only risk a bit more than one mile of the five possible. after a scout of a section up Cottonwood Canyon and finding several sections that would possibly doom my truck, I retreat (not without several stressful moments where a ten-point turn in deep pea-gravel in the wash almost fails). find a suitable spot back up on a scarp above the canyon to park the truck and aLight. no clock-ticking time passes here, only Light time. a treat, treating, retreating. self energy reflecting against the place. reflecting against imbricate order and connectedness and shimmering stars. air temperatures only in the low 70sF, but sun already hinting at the brutal intensity of summer to come. everything is green. air drone humming with winged insects, prepping or engaged in the initial stages of pollination. only a few cacti flowering yet. many of the wildflowers already peaking. the few cacti blossoms are infinitely small spatters of paint dropped onto the muted greens of the land surface. magenta scarlet purple of the beavertail and the strawberry hedgehog. other buds swelling and ready to burst in the next days. owls, rock doves, red tail, peregrine falcons, circling vultures; evidence of javelina and coyote; lizards and pack-rats, kangaroo rats.

go to bed reading of Qi in Ted J. Kaptchuk’s treatise on Chinese medicine and wake up early from a deep dream where I was working with a group of boisterous and engaged young people who are somehow brought together by the impulse of Barack Obama. my immediate thought upon waking is why does a political figure enter my dreams? social action is important, sure, along with an interest in community dynamics, but a politician (community organizer none-the-less)? somewhat disturbing, though that thought is outweighed by the energy of the scenario. I suppose I am missing teaching. there will be opportunities for that in Oz, although I will keep it highly restricted to workshops rather than term courses. nothing should get in the way of the appointed task.

the Qi discussion illustrates the absolute difficulty in framing a concept in the language — the specific social protocol — within which the concept did not arise. the fundamental problem of translation. and in this case, translation of a term that is so formative to any worldview built on it that if one adopts that specific term, it will map, literally, where one stands in the world. and the ensuing conclusion that the adoption of another social protocol, language, precipitates a shift in worldview. no surprise there.

one global ‘solution’ to this issue especially in regard to fundamentals like Qi or energy (noting that even here I am making no one-to-one correspondence between the two!), when ‘comparing’ fundamentals, is to consider that each human individually is observing the world, and, at the same time, the social collective that they are participating in exerts an impressive synergy on all these points-of-view, and generates a collectively determined world view. this is the dominant social protocol, their language. Both the individual and collective world view are reductive apprehensions of essentially the same phenomena — that of be-ing in the world — seen from the particular point of view of that individual or collective. Of course, there are the instances where the worldview of the collective is impressed on the individual when the individual is forced to sacrifice personal autonomy to the collective — often through violence or threat of violence. it becomes a deep issue of personal autonomy or idiosyncrasy versus the power of the collective and where to set the line.

… the unusual difficulty in making Qi intelligible in modern Western philosophy suggests that the underlying Chinese metaphysical assumption is significantly different from the Cartesian dichotomy between spirit and matter…. (Furthermore) the continuous presence in Chinese philosophy of the idea of Qi as a way of conceptualizing the base structure and function of the cosmos, despite the availability of symbolic resources to make an analytical distinction between spirit and matter, signifies a conscious refusal to abandon a mode of thought that synthesizes spirit and matter as an undifferentiated whole. The loss of analytical clarity is compensated by the reward of imaginative richness. The fruitful ambiguity of Qi allows philosophers to explore realms of being which are inconceivable to people constricted by Cartesian dichotomy …. Qi, in short, seems inadequate to provide a philosophical background for the development of empirical science as understood in a positivistic sense. What it does provide, however, is a metaphorical mode of knowing, an epistemological attempt to address the multidimensional nature of reality by comparison, allusion, and suggestion. — Tu Wei-ming in Confucian Though

furthermore, the adoption of another linguistic naming system or protocol represents the potential of seeing the world anew. at the same time as it represents a separation from the dominant or previous system. this is an essential feature of the process of immigration, this identity shift that comes through a (linguistic) re-naming the world. but it is also inherent in the process of adoption of any protocol or technology that is produced and imposed on the individual.

coming up: turn off, tune out, and chill in the dark…

a long bush-whack up the back side of Granite Mountain via the Mint Wash trail is rewarded by a burbling creek where 95% of the time is a very dry canyon. I stop after three hours to turn back at a dense manzanita grove and fresh mountain lion scat. abiotic, biotic factors. suggesting that more hostile stress-inducing environments drive rapid and broader speciation… (latitudinal diversity gradient…)

Species richness through time may correlate with energy. The species richness – energy relationship posits correlations with evapo-transpiration, temperature, or productivity, and studies of terrestrial and marine ecosystems have shown that these factors may explain as much as 90% of current diversity, although relationships between species diversity and productivity change with spatial scale.

adaptive radiation — the absorption and expression of life-energies in an energy-rich environment energy availability in a usable form (a form developing based on energy availability)…